I.

I wash dishes. That's what I do. Six in the morning until two in the afternoon, I stand at the sink and I wash dishes. Plates, cups, silverware, pots, pans—the same cycle, over and over, grease and soap and hot water and scraping leftover food into the garbage.

The restaurant is on Main Street in a town that used to be something. Hartwell's Place, it's called. Hartwell's Home, but Home is just part of the name now. Mrs. Hartwell runs it. She's fifty-something, divorced, two kids who drink too much, and she works fourteen hours a day with wrinkles like rivers on her face.

Behind the restaurant, past the kitchen door, there's a patch of ground. It used to be a garden. Now it's grey. Not dead-grey. Not dry-grey. Grey like ash. The wind blows and the grey stuff floats up and gets on the windows and Mrs. Hartwell makes me close the windows behind it because "it gets on the plates and it's a pain to wash off."

The fields outside town used to be green. Now they're grey too. Big Consumer bought all the land three years ago and planted something called SpeedCrop Three. It grows fast—three days to harvest. But the soil dies fast too—three days to grey. I've seen it happen. I've watched the green turn grey while I was driving to work.

II.

Big Consumer has a warehouse on the edge of town. They call it a processing center. Trucks come and go twenty-four hours a day, tires crushing the edges of the road. The townspeople are leaving—first to Kansas City, then to Denver, then anywhere that has work. Mrs. Hartwell's restaurant has fewer customers every week.

I notice things. I'm small and skinny and nobody notices me, which means I see everything. Big Consumer's bags in the trash heap say "Accelerated Soil Activator—Formula Confidential." I opened one once. Black powder, just like the fields. I smelled it. No smell. I put it back.

Larry comes to the restaurant sometimes. He works at the farm outside town, the one Big Consumer owns. He's big—six-foot-five, two hundred pounds, skin like leather, hands like iron vises. He eats silently and leaves immediately after. Nobody knows his real name. We call him Big Larry, though he says Larry is fine. He lives in a trailer behind the farm.

Sometimes Larry stands behind the restaurant and looks at the highway. He doesn't speak. He just watches. I've seen him do this for months. What is he looking at? I don't know. I'm just the kitchen help. I don't ask questions.

Last week I saw Larry talking to a man in a suit from Big Consumer. The man in the suit had a clipboard and a smile that didn't reach his eyes. Larry didn't say anything. He just stood there, big and silent, while the man talked. When the man left, Larry walked back to his trailer and didn't come out for two days.

III.

Mrs. Hartwell closed the restaurant on a Tuesday. The last customer left at seven, and she made me turn off the lights. "You don't need to come tomorrow," she said, her voice calm, as though she were telling me the weather instead of the fact that her life's work was ending.

I packed my things—a backpack with a few clothes and a pair of sneakers—and walked outside to the parking lot. Larry was waiting by his pickup truck.

"You leaving?" I asked.

He shook his head. "Staying."

"I want to stay too."

He looked at me for a long time. "Stay for what? The land is dead. Nothing grows."

I said I wanted to see.

He went to his trailer and came back with a canvas bag—old, torn in places. He opened it. Inside were seeds and soil. "This is what I brought from the reservation before it disappeared," he said. "I was hoping to find land that could still grow something."

We walked to the patch of ground behind the restaurant. The soil was grey, like ash. Larry knelt and grabbed a handful—grey dust flowing through his fingers like water. "No food," he said. "Grass can live if there's food in the soil. There's no food."

I knelt beside him and picked up a handful of grey dust. It was warm. It felt like nothing. It was just dust.

"Your people had land once?" I asked.

He nodded. "A reservation. In New Mexico. One day it was there. The next day it was grey. The whole thing. Gone. Like it never existed."

"What happened?"

He looked at me with dark eyes. "The same thing that's happening here. The same thing that's happening everywhere."

He took a handful of seeds from the bag and scattered them on the grey ground. The seeds disappeared into the grey. They didn't land on top. They vanished, as though the ground were swallowing them.

"Seeds need food," Larry said. "The soil has no food. Nothing will grow."

IV.

I stayed in the empty restaurant. I cleaned the kitchen every day. I wiped the tables. I emptied the garbage. Outside the window, the grey plain stretched to the horizon. Wind blew dust against the glass.

Larry came sometimes—brought water, canned food. We didn't talk much. Sometimes he stood in the doorway and looked at the horizon.

One day Larry didn't come. The next day he didn't come either.

I went outside to the patch of ground behind the restaurant. In the grey dust, something green. A weed. Small, fragile, growing out of the grey. I knelt and looked at it. It swayed in the wind. It was alive.

I stayed kneeling for a long time. The weed kept swaying. The wind kept blowing. The grey kept stretching.

Then I stood up and went back to the kitchen and kept wiping the table.

====================================================================== OBJECTIVE TENSOR CODE (OTMES v2.0) ====================================================================== Code: OTMES-v2-8C34E4-023-M0-180-6R500-075-0AAD Title: The Bottom Feeder TI (Tragedy Index): 35.0 E_total (Literary Potential): 7.58 Dominant Mode: M0 (Dominance Ratio: 0.79) Direction Angle: 180.0° Tensor Rank: 10 Irreversibility: 0.6

M Vector (10D): [6.0, 0.5, 1.5, 1.5, 2.5, 1.5, 1.0, 1.0, 1.5, 2.0] N Vector (Active/Passive): [0.25, 0.75] K Vector (Sensitive/Rational): [0.8, 0.2]

MDTEM Parameters: V (Destroyed Value): 0.7 I (Irreversibility): 0.6 C (Innocent Suffering): 0.8 S (Scope): 0.5 R (Redemption): 0.2 ======================================================================