The day all the supermarkets close, all hell will break loose. The day all the supermarkets close, people will climb over each other in the streets and wreak havoc on the quaint town square. The day all the supermarkets close, Monty will be ready. He’s been preparing for that day for many years now. Sure, his wife left him the day he insisted the chicken coop should be kept in the bedroom. Sure, his daughter, Annie, stopped parading around the yard with Monty’s deluxe Swedish shovels after she discovered teenage angst.
Sure, the neighbors complain about the cow feces and the relentless inhabitants of the beehive. None of this mattered much to him at all. Monty’s tiny backyard was his pride and joy. Tomatoes scattered the yard like ruby pebbles and overripe peaches stained the stepping stones a sticky brown.
Cows, sheep, goats, camels, and buffaloes stepped over one another in a menagerie of dairy production. Every inch of free soil was packed with vines and bushes and roots. Fruit trees towered over it all, leaning over to one side as peaches, oranges, apples, and lemons ripened and weighed down the branches. Stray pieces of honeycomb littered the ground and stuck to Monty’s knees and hands as he crawled on all fours, searching for taro root and trinidad scorpion peppers in the bushels of leaves and stalks that protruded from the ground.
It would have been a lovely yard if there were more space and it were kept in better condition—and if Monty didn’t fall onto the floor in despair every time a leaf wilted, or a carrot came out thinner than a needle—or if it was, well, a more tidy operation. No matter how much Monty cared, one man’s maintenance of a complete urban backyard farm was bound to have its limitations. Even he understood that. Maybe if fear wasn’t mixed in the fertilizer, it would have been a wonderful yard for a small family. Instead, frantic hands overplanted, and the mumbling man was so inattentive—so overwrought with anxiety—that he wasn’t able to see just how much his life had changed ever since he started the project.
The thing is, Monty still went to the grocery store. As long as it stayed open, he didn’t see why not. Thus, Monty didn’t consume anything he grew or collected. He harvested in bunches, assembling remarkable baskets of produce that overflowed the kitchen counters. He lined up bottles of milk in neat rows. He stacked fresh eggs like dominoes. Then he would sit at the kitchen table and admire his work. The abundance of it all. The excellent badge of preparedness that had taken over his kitchen.
After one wretched half-hour of teary-eyed self-admiration, Monty would bring the baskets out to the neighborhood and mark his territory. He stuck carrots into front lawns. He arranged green beans along the street markers. He threw ostrich eggs onto the whiny neighbors’ car windshields. He poured buffalo milk onto his front yard. After all, he cared about it far less than the back one.
▲