by Grace Krilanovich

     There was the hibernation option.  Anti-consumerist, neo-Stalin types had recently devised a hibernation stance as the best strategy for sticking it to God and man alike.  Going to sleep for the winter would not only fuck with the local economy but it would also derail the food conspiracy.  A secret combination of over-the-counter flu medications and wild native herbs was developed to send the “Brown Bear” into a blissful state of anti-consciousness for anywhere from three weeks to two months.  During this time other “Raccoons” would be on hand to turn and tend to the slumbering BB’s, basting them in disinfectant every five days and adjusting the canvas swaddling as the swelling came and went.  Whole networks of abandoned office trailers and rural outbuildings were converted into hibernation storage facilities, including the long standing, notorious “Motel Hell” in Truckee at the top of a hill overlooking Donner Pass.  The compound was guarded by vigilante armies of medicine skaters, armed with crossbows stationed in bunkers surrounding the hill.  The main building housed an indoor spray paint-crusted swimming pool, and was once a spa complex that had gone to seed long before any of this current nonsense came about. 
    Some would call you crazy for thinking that you could end the war just by going to sleep, by living self-consciously off the grid.  Who would have thought you could turn your back on your town and everything else, turn off the lights, rip the mailbox out of the ground and hunker down under the sweaty swollen posture of hibernation?  It was an option so few were willing to ever conceive.  No food no walking no thoughts of escape.  None of it necessary.  They were a few of the undead who had decided to stop moving and just sleep it out—not to die for real, but to try to live in the lands resting on the other side of their quiet minds. They’d forged their own key out of a visionary narcissism and magically it fit the lock; their lungs sopped up the air that languished and strained at tight dozing skin.  So many other solutions had been attempted and yet they had failed.  No one ever got it right.  The dream was over; so they retreated from the highways and streets of their regions, rooted around in the scrap heap for shavings and supplies and fell into a deep winter sleep that has lasted these many, many months.