I am calling them The Refuse People.

Not Refuse as in refused, but Refuse as in trash, waste, something thrown away.

Maximillian was ten years old when the end came about. He spent a decade in the dust, lost his doppleganger brother, and gained the troupe as his newfound family.

His greatest loss was the absence of music. When the trouple performed he was often the dimly lit figure smashing remnants of concrete into crushes of glass.

He'd fill cargo sacks with the pixie crush and stomp it beneath his steel toes/black and blues.

"Anthem," he'd say, "Pledge Allegiance to My Noise."

She'd smile with the crooked teeth of mediocrity.In a past life she'd been rounder,. They all had.

Maximillians body was a webwork of veins and sinewy muscles. He held the stature of a fawn. Ten years before he'd had an inverted chest and freckles. Now he hacked at welts of hair with dulll knives and wore a crown of dreadlocks across a short mound of scalp. His lust for goggles often kept his mud eyes shy. He was a pretty boy, and more often than not wreckless.

Anthem watched him with the brooding, broad faced eyes of the Virgin Mother. She kept a sort of silent vigil over the troupe, loving each and every one of them as children, as lovers, as much needed limbs.

And then there was the day that Maxie struck oil.

"What the fuck do we do with Gasoline when we haven’t got WATER?"

Persephone, always the pessimist. Her glass, not so much half empty, as bone dry, and she felt the ache for satiation in the bottom of her gut. Some place dark, and scary. Only Anthem kept it tame, and Anthem, with her hands inside the dear girls braids, her soft words smooth against the girls apple cheeks. "This is a great discovery for us. Perhaps we can barter with the next company we meet. Perhaps Maxie will collect enough parts to salvage those occasional lonely automobiles. Think of how much land we could cover then."

"And where would we go? And who would we meet? It’s only us, It’s only been us for weeks and weeks! What if we’re the only ones left. Dear god, Anthem, I do not want to be the fucking cockroaches scavenging after the bomb drops. Anthem, I can’t do this–" and her face in the dusty cargo clad chest of Anthem.

Always the dramatist. Pessimist Persephone.

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Once upon a time she made cakes. Various things, of all shapes and sizes. She’d slave to the grind in the early morning, and by sunrise the first trays of sweets would be lifted from the oven.

This is where Anthem gained her first following.

They were at the door before she flipped the Open sign.

6am every day, and each one wanted something different.

It was lemon tea cakes for the man with the walker. His wife liked them, and she was too ill to leave home.

Rosemary cookies for the ladies of the church, who always entered in red velvet hats, and wore purple dress suits.

Tiramisu and Espresso for the sleepy-eyed college professors, who worked across the street.

Yes, she had an Espresso machine. And she was one hell of a Barista.

She wore sun dresses, and mary jane shoes. In the winter she wore sweaters that fell to her knees. Her hair was perpetually knotted in a handkerchief, and once a man marked that she was as sweet and reliable as Aunt Jemima. Which was quite true, though she refused to wear an apron and was absolute negative in regards to the colour of her skin.

Anthem was infact as white and soft as her flour dough.

She was a quiet little thing, with no real lust for outside life. She lived in a stone house with a small porch, and an even smaller kitchen. She had three cats and each one was named after great men of her life. Kennedy, Mau, Louis IV. They were in fact female, because they were calico, and those precious patchwork things only come one way.

She liked the organized chaos within their coats, and it reminded her of herself.

More often than not, if she wasn’t cooking, she was reading on the porch, or in the bedroom molesting her violin. She wasn’t very good with it, and this embarassed her to such an extent that she felt confined to the furthest room in the house.

Little did she know the small one, Marcus O’ Reilly, who lived in the house behind her, could hear the strangled sounds she coaxed from gut strings.

Marcus lay in bed each evening, 7:30 sharp his parents put him down, and there was something in the bang and clatter, the wail of the wind between the belly of the instrument, that put him to sleep. Despite the setting sun, or the angry crickets, he could close his tiny eyes and slip into dreams.

.