I’d been single for too long. Conventional dating means weren’t quite working and I was getting desperate. So I started looking into woo-woo stuff—and even had lousy luck with that. The Wyoming swamp priestess foresaw I was due for something ugly, the mechanical genie kept grinding asleep mid-prediction, and the glass-eyed binch kept binching about my sass and wouldn’t fess to a thing. But the Love Prophets subforum had one more for me: a psychic matchmaker in weird Wags County, Idaho. 

I hated Wags County. Its woo-woo was bad. 

Whacked-up Panhandle boys, these clairvoyant teens, roamed the countryside with rifles, snatching victims and confirming their most intimate fears with straight bunk before beating the fudge out of them. And ever since the early aughts, African wild dogs had been spotted in the nearby hills.

Still, the chance for future love lurched me an hour across state lines one night in my Volvo, from Wyoming to Idaho, to the matchmaker’s mobile parlor, a shrunken house on wheels in an empty lot. I wouldn’t touch anything in Wags without gloves, which I didn’t have, so I knocked with my boots and waited. I read her name was Marla, she was open all hours, and could fix me quick with a gunnie, a gay hunnie. I, Elise, would also have taken a pixie, a sweetie, or just a plain old smoocher. I’d even settle for a dude. My dry spell had me fluctuating between a crippling glumnitude and heat-seeking rage.

With the door locked, I snuck a look into the glass: drawn blinds, but a light peeked through. I tapped with a shirt-covered fingernail and yelled, “Guess who’s lonely!”

Then I sat on her front stairs and slowly followed the big lot with my eyes until it ended at the trashed woods. I sat some more, felt defeated. Pissy too. When no one came, I got up and shot me and the Volvo back onto the interstate.

—

Peak lonesomeness meant me face down on the carpet chewing a Midwestern gum, a nice flavor. I was wasting away in my command post, an aboveground bunker, where I typed in hotkeys that made drones spray manmade clouds, cooling clouds, over Bogie Draw. No heartbreaking heat, rain aplenty, no dry times. Municipal weather duties. I peeled my face off the ground to salute the broken ceiling fan, and then I told the monitor what to tell the drones to do instead of telling them myself.

“Two inches for the rest of the week,” I said from below. 

“Here’s looking at you, kid?” said the monitor in the voice of Humphrey Bogart.

“And keep everything below 80ish.”

“That’s a respectable deal?”

“Woof,” I said.

My boss, Major Daly, had jumped command once the government shutdown arrived, and with me alone in the bunker and still obliged to keep hotkeying, I downloaded Old Hollywood voice assistants on the monitor so I wouldn’t have to put finger to key as much. Knotts, Stewart, Kelly, and Gable all proved inadequate—I always had to go back in and tweak things—but it was worth it. Actual hotkeying brought back memories of my ex-gunnie, Daphne, telling me, back in the sweet subalpine-smelling and coyote-gazing days of our steamed up beginnings, that my hotkeying was so fast it was gorgeous. 

To be sought by your gunnie at one point, to no longer be sought by your gunnie later. It spoils your everything.

After scrolling the Ghost subforum to make me feel less dead inside, I gathered enough muster to stop shirking and glanced at the monitor’s forecast. 

“Humphrey, this is all bunched wrong.”

“I always give a wonderful try?” it said.

—

A strangeness was seeping into my home life since the Wags visit. I was back in my bedroom, watching a wholesome Turner Classic flick I’d seen many times before (The Douglas Family Makes the World Go Round), but it wasn’t right. Rock Hudson always glowed while talking with his doll of a daughter, Huxby, in this kitchen scene, but now he was haggard, and Huxby was getting herself banned from the neighborhood by coating her face in grime, shuffling through strangers’ windows at night, and hiding sewage in other kids’ beds as tokens of affection. She’d then find a way to crawl into their walls and ogle them silently, while they slept, through holes dug with her fingers. She dead-eyed Rock and said, “I’m gonna be loved.” 

A cockroach was caked enough into her forehead that only its legs poked through the dirt, one of which was still twitching. 

Bad woo-woo. Should’ve worn gloves, I thought, shimmying further into my waste of a double-king-size bed. I heard my hotkeyed rain outside. A flowing wheat field faded in on the screen at an old movie pace, and a text msg slid over it.

Hi, it said. 

This was from a real character who’d post colorful and excited comments on the Love Prophets subforum. I’d given them my number four, five days before.

Their name was Yonnie.

Right soon we were sending off our own little histories to each other. I said I was a Michigander who’d been booted west as a little runt, leaving out my bunker duties, since I’d recently read all the Mountain State drones were bonking the jet stream and worsening India’s fires. They, Yonnie, had moved from the coast and its quakes to work on their aunt’s farmstead.

O Elise, fresh and gooey piglet romps, s’mores bigger than your hands, and digging into this Bogie d i r t . . . for yet ANOTHER barnhouse build. I’m gonna burst from fun, Yonnie sent.

Just rub it in, I sent back. When’s my invite?

You’re a cutey.

I’m a quick whip and you’re dodgy. Sunday? 

O! We’re moving the baby goats to the old shed Sunday. But s o o n.

It went like this until Yonnie invited me to meet them way out in a Wags cave where they’d look for rare salty rocks that sold like gold on the backwoods-web. A small but growing number of users online found the things to be serious good-luck charms, which tends to happen when you’re one of a kind and rare: prismatic bubbles layered their outsides, and newly rapid erosion had whittled away the Southwest cache, so this cave was the only spot left in North America known to still have them.  

Again I was shuddering as me and the Volvo crossed the green of Bogie Draw and Wyoming and into brown Idahoan land, land left to broil by the shutdown and recession. Ten years back, clever Idahoan fellies whipped up a fancy retardant to snuff their whopper Idahoan forest fires for good, but when you’ve got no drones or manmade clouds, ergo no rain, calamity comes and brings Panhandle boys thumping around with it. They were the children of Wags mystics, their powers handed down through genes, who were kicked from their homes for their violent and conspiratorial inclinations and militia build ups. They were destitute and bitter and scramble-brained, ready to spread their warped mindsets and fists. 

Yonnie got right down to business with play-stern instructions and an adorable lisp. Within seconds, I knew they were just as much a charmer in real life as in their msgs. They headlamped me, guided my legs to share the same extra-large waders with them, me in the back with my long rubber gloves, them in the front, me smelling cave water while sniffing their mane of frizzy hair, the two of us clumsy and fruitlessly feeling for salty treasure in this shallow black creek.

We flopped onto a flattened stalagmite and started getting so hot in those big waders that our eyes rolled back into our skulls. I was close to finishing when I heard, deeper in the cavern, little hands clapping, little things sniffling. I blocked it out and was close again when Yonnie, while grinding on top, told me that what we heard back there were the dead, their misery trapped and watching us, how anyone who’s broken enough can get stuck, by no fault of their own, and stay stuck until the whole planet’s gone and maybe still after.

“Ah,” I said.

“I’m gonna cum,” Yonnie said.

And then they ripped off my rubber gloves with their teeth and howled.

I left the cave that night with a fat heart.

—

The following weeks it was flowering in my insides. For our second date we gussied ourselves cute and went to the Arcade, finding a Colonial Big Buck Hunter to play. Man-eating air vents below its screen blasted 1700s winds at us while I reared to fell elk, bear, and moose with a plastic musket, but the winter woodland was empty and the soundtrack broken on mute. Yonnie called me a sharpshooter as I nailed pixelated cedars. After, we made out by the bar. 

We planned camping trips, talked ghosts and fir trees. We’d play a game where they’d go limp and I’d brush their gapped teeth on the double-king, pour mouthwash down them, and then rock their head back and forth before tipping them over so they could splosh it out into a metal pot. When it was my turn, I’d go slack myself, and they’d do the same to me. We talked every night for a month. We talked until they told me they still had feelings for the ex-dude, that they’d (Yonnie + ex-dude) fostered such a strong union with each other that they still spoke through a subtle telepathy, despite him being a selfish and complicated ass.

It’s only a few words a day, but I can’t shake that synch, Yonnie sent me.

Well I’m still in love w Daphne and get words from her too. But I was a liar. I’d never synched that well, not with Daphne, not with anyone. I wanted that and I wanted it from Yonnie.

So what, this nixes love stuff? I sent. 

Probably, Yonnie sent back. I’m so sorry, Elise. My life’s just taking care of these fuzzy miracles right now.

Great, I sent back.

My life felt like a preordained gag, always yanking me back to misery and isolation, no matter how hard I tried to avoid it.

It was the absolute pits.

—

The sunset had dipped. I boxed Marla the matchmaker’s locked door with my elbows. Since my failed visit, there were new reviews of Marla’s marvel online: more newfound gunnies, more and more matched hunnies, with a hit-rate that was eerie good. 

“Guess who’s still lonely!” I shouted. The same light was on inside.

I went around back, drew my ear close to the parlor’s outside, and heard nothing. Right as I gave the wood a kick, there was a kaboom in the woods, scaring wild dogs into the lot and into another patch of browned trees. Panhandle boys. I knew they had recently looted abandoned museums, thieved older centuries’ red coats and cannons, Vietnam rifles and bombs. 

Irritable and wary, I hopped into the Volvo and loaded back onto the interstate.

—

I was face-first on the bunker floor, out of gum, barking at the monitor to make sure the soon-to-be gruesome heatwave kept below 90 degrees—or else there’d be an unplugging. Sometimes you’re so downcast you don’t think straight, you think in circles, and each and every circle-thought leads back to you and your mistakes and your flailery, and because of this, everything beyond your pitiful self gets neglected, which means you’ll neglect even the most vital of things, like confirming whether or not your monitor yet again flubbed your commands, which I neglected to do.  Then I quit the command post for a week, turned and tossed on the double-king daily before clocking out no later than 8:00 PM. Before I’d fall asleep, I’d feel phantom-limbed in the dark. Nevadan city smoke had snuffed moonlight several years ago. Cowboys sang ballads about it, missing the moon and such. I hadn’t seen stars since I waddled the Upper Peninsula. 

My clunker AC stayed cranked throughout. 

When I wasn’t groggy, I gave Turner Classic a flip, saw a brown gooze with sunken chairs and pans in it. The sax in the background was choppy and played in reverse. I flipped the channel and ditto, only now there were floating and quivering limbs desperately trying to touch each other. Every channel was worse than the one before—the gooze blacker, the sax wilder, the limbs sprouting wailing bodies. At my lowest point, the TV was at its most horrific. Whatever followed me back from Wags was broadcasting the rot amassing in my chest. 

As if I needed to see that garbage. I turned it off. 

I thought of Daphne and our outdoorsy misadventures and outdoor camper and outdoor living, which I missed. I thought of Yonnie, their s’mores, their animals, their teeth, their charm. I felt more than alone. 

At week’s end, my AC bled out and died while I slept. I awoke soon as daylight shot my eye and I knew I messed up. The heat. 

Son of a binch, I thought. 

I stumbled outside and the asphalt’s hot rising waves had the trees wiggling.

As sirens blared throughout the streets and downtown choking in smoke, I put on gardener gloves for my melting steering wheel and headed bunker-bound swearing my head off. 

At the post I stripped off my camo, went nude, and hotkeyed a cool deluge to start stat. 

“I smell a court-martial coming,” I said.

“Sounds like a bag of tricks?” said the monitor in the voice of Peter Lorre. 

“You’re dead to me,” I said and unplugged its speakers. 

I thought it wise to send a mass msg to the whole Western branch. It read, System failure. Not my fault.

The auto reply was, Due to the shutdown, there may be a delay in official response time.

I checked the past week’s temps and they were grisly. Peter had botched it bad.

I sat there quiet until the rain came and beat the shit out of the roof. 

—

The heat had dropped to habitable, but the days after the storm were lightweight mist, and I’d slammed in hotkeys that should’ve brought heavy blows. Since the fixit expert was furloughed, all I could guess was a groundwater jinx, the drones fueling with dust before beaming to the sky. This was a sign of calamity.

Survive the heatwave? I sent Yonnie. We hadn’t talked in weeks.

The next day they sent, We lost all our animals, most of our crops, and our house caught fire. I’m out of rocks and those Panhandle kids are camped in the cave. My aunt’s not eating. I can’t stop crying, Elise.

O, I thought, and sat on that for a minute, chewed my Canadian gum, maple flavor. Whoops. 

Not good. 

But then I had another thought: if I could weasel past dirty Panhandle boys and get my hands on some salty rocks, I could buy Yonnie a new farmstead, animals, anything, easy. Those suckers could do it. Yonnie would see me as a sweetie, no telepathy, maybe, but heart. If I aced this, there was a chance we’d get back at it again, a restart.  

I got to it.

—

The next day I walked to the Arcade at a bare-bones hour and, to blend in, played more Colonial Big Buck Hunter. The game was less rendered than before, mostly a directionless black void, with the last remaining cedars glitching and untethering themselves from what used to be the snowy ground. The cold winds made my eyes water, the screen blur. I was motion sick.

With my stiff fingers I took out cable cutters from my backpack and snipped the musket off its cord, hid it under my jacket, and exited the Arcade and into a fog. I stopped and yakked on the sidewalk. 

That night I bought yellow contacts and a Continental Army getup from a Halloweenville and hightailed it to the Wags cave in uniform. I rolled myself into mud to muddy it up and then smeared my face nicely. I could barely see, but as I slunk to the cave’s opening with my musket painted to shine, I was betting on looking wild.

I dropped a few small speakers spaced well before the grotto’s mouth, where a tiny light was twitching. I crept closer and saw the shallow creek me and Yonnie had waded in was dry, turned into a dirty trench. Two Panhandle boys, dressed in their own tattered regalia, sat in it by the entrance. They were both hairless, eyebrows gone, eating black licorice without their hands. They had poured oil on the mud in front of them and lit it on fire. 

I sauntered musket-first and got shaky, which they seemed to like. There was a hunting rifle slung next to them.

“Lady be nimble,” said the one to my right. 

“Hah,” said the one to my left. “Nimbler quick.”

“The Wyoming Army sent me,” I said. “Go and get your boys. We’re gonna fight.”

“‘Wyoming Army,’ says the lady.” The one to my right slurped his long licorice like pasta. He spasmed for a moment. “Jack?”

“Miserable lady,” said the one to my left, getting up, putting his hands behind his back, leaning his head toward me and biting the air, frowning, and smiling, and biting and frowning again.

“Wuck wuck wuck. We won’t love you, lonely lady,” said the one to my right, petting the rifle, the flashlight taped to the barrel’s end. “No one will. Right, Jack?” 

“Right, Jack.”

“Not ever.”

“Except the monitor.”

“Movie voices,” said the one to my left in a frog voice. “Lady’s bad luck. See it, Jack?”

These sick fucks, I thought while I lowered my arm, just for a sec, and pressed the remote in my pocket. “My fellies are waiting outside,” I said. 

“Shh,” said the one to my right, holding his rifle backward. He socked me in the stomach with the stock, stomped my foot, kneed me down. “Won’t hurt you more, crazy lady,” he said. “Jack? Help bad luck?’’ 

He then cocked his gun and pointed it at me. 

Hushed military commands and murmurs played in the dark from my speakers. The Panhandle boys froze, looked sideways. It sounded like there were dozens of soldiers close.

They considered each other, considered me on the ground, my musket, ready to go, if it weren’t plastic.

“Quicker still?” 

“Jack?”

“Hah.”

“More Jacks.”

With the left one already gone, the other turned his rifle light on, killed the fire with his foot, and dipped. Shitheads, I thought, and worked quickly with a little flashlight between my teeth, stabbing my hands into the trench, licking each dredged rock for salt. The cave’s black tunnel then began to loudly hum.

It was the dead, wanting me.

I thought of a Panhandle boy blasting my head across the walls, me stuck forever. Then I saw a shimmer on the ground: a baby rock. I plucked it and tasted a winner with my tongue. But that was my only find, and there were no fewer than twenty lights bobbing down the hill, coming for me. I slipped in a panic and jabbed my shin. But I got up with the rock in hand and hobbled onto the lightless interstate faster than fast.

—

The baby rock sold for shit bounty, making a new farmstead and a fireside Yonnie reunion look flimsy. I was face down on my hardwood, avoiding the screen and my giant bed, chewing an Upstate flavor, loganberry. Shame I can’t sell a cursed TV, I thought. 

But then I thought, Wait a minute. 

In the morning I posted a modern and made-up Wild West history of my house, one of knife fights and clobberings and a heartbreak gruel that ground a family into abandoning their damned members. I said their pain had soaked into the TV screen and shared clips: beloved children’s cartoons gone demented, lonely wanderers crying themselves into flies, and floating Shoshones, under the dirt, in search of their lost lovers. It started a bidding war on the Ghost subforum, with the victor being a small and gaunt man named Doughty, whose jangle from the spurs of his boots bounced through the walls of my home like shrring. He came by jonesing to throw down dollars on the penny.

“Just the screen’s haunted?” he asked, flipping through the rotten imagery.

“The bed’s haunted,” I said. “Everything’s haunted.”

“The house for sale?”

Seeing I wasn’t the landlady, I blew a loganberry bubble, weighing what was best to say. “In a few years,” I said. “Now it’s for rent.”

“When can I move in?” he asked, still locked on the channels. “If you’ll have me.”

“Hm,” I said, knowing I didn’t have anywhere to move. I blew another delayed bubble. When it popped, I had a bold and overdue idea.

—

Whatever the hotkey, the clouds were still thinning. I ditched the bunker early, parked the Volvo, and spied on Marla’s mobile parlor from afar. That day Wags smelled like burning tires and felt like it too. By next summer, unless a federal miracle swept in, Bogie Draw would be the same: hot, rainless, and crawling with Panhandle boys.

I strolled to the parlor, its locked door, its drawn blinds, and saw the light was off inside. I rattled the window by headbutting it. The gloves hadn’t worked anyway. Then I backed the Volvo’s hitch into the parlor’s hitch and sawed off her wimp of a lock. There went another boom in the trashed woods.

I drove away with the parlor in tow.

—

I sent Doughty’s deposit and then some to Yonnie with my name and no note. Weeks passed. They’d post a few short comments about their rebuilt farmstead on the subforum, but I didn’t hear from them. Once Doughty moved in, I hotkeyed a year’s worth of the coldest temps I could, stole the command post monitor, and scooted myself into the parlor, which I’d moved to the beautiful (but goner) woods. Every night I’d throw a different piece of Marla’s furniture into the campfire, and when it got toasty, I’d bring out my snug single-size bed, make as many s’mores as I could snack, and play a kind of solitaire with her tarot cards while listening to classic radio dramas from the monitor's speakers. I’d drilled them to the outside of my new abode. 

The wild dogs had crossed beyond Wags and into Wyoming, and a pack of them would poke out their painted snouts from the dark to sniff my site out. Slowly they’d get close enough, and I’d throw them treats, earning their yips. When fall came they settled on lounging beside me and the flames. 

And then one night a msg finally showed on the monitor.

Hey booger lump, Yonnie said. What’re ya doing Tuesday?

I decided I’d msg back the next day to not come across as over eager, so I went outside to the campfire and sat with the dogs. The voice of Greta Garbo called out from the speakers, asking me what kind of radio drama I was in the mood for.

I usually picked romance or adventure. This time I said to play something with both. The dusty intro began with crackled trumpets and slow drums, and I thought of me and Yonnie someday soon in love, beating back Panhandle boys under a mean and lawless sun.