Weather

by Jenny Offill

“What are you afraid of?” he asks me, and the answer, of course, is dentistry, humiliation, scarcity; then he says, “What are your most useful skills?” “People think I’m funny, I know how to tell a story in a brisk, winning way. I try not to go on much about my discarded ambitions or how I hate hippies and the rich.” “But in terms of skills,” he says, and I tell him I know a few poems by heart, I recently learned how to make a long-burning candle out of a can of tuna (oil packed, not water), I’ve learned how to recognize a black walnut tree and that you can live on the inner bark of a birch tree if need be, I know it is important to carry chewing gum at all times for post-collapse morale and also because it suppresses the appetite and you can supposedly fish with it, but only if it is a bright color and has sugar—only then will a fish investigate and somehow get hooked to the end of the fishing pole I have fashioned with a sharpened paper clip and a string and a stick. If you need to, you can use wet tobacco as a poultice over a wound. Red ants can be eaten (they have a lemony taste); the Mormons ate lily bulbs, a famine food; Malcolm X said his mom would make soup out of dandelions when there wasn’t enough to eat. If you don’t have enough water, don’t eat, keep your mouth closed, conserve your energy. You can last three hours without shelter, three days without water, three weeks without food, three months without hope, but don’t drink your own urine—that is a myth—and do...