by Monica Woelfel
When the gnomon’s shadow falls across the front step, the cryptographer unlocks the door with a skeleton key. On her shoulders rests the strap of a small knapsack with her wine for the day inside, cheese, her notebook, her pencils and one handheld sharpener. The office, really more of a garden shed, has windows nearly obscured by the fleece of spider webs coated with fine dust. Humble, she thinks, but it’s all that is available under the circumstances, and it’s well hidden beneath the ivy and bramble.
As always, the cryptographer first dusts with viricide: the tabletop, her chair, the knob on the small oil lamp. She is not the only one to survive but one of a few; she attributes it to this: the seclusion of her job, the viricide, and-she glimpses her reflection in a rusted mirror–the bird mask. Once she believed the power of the mask lay in its magic but now she understands its protection to be more material. It acts as a filter; it’s that simple.
The cryptographer arranges her tools on the desktop. She removes the mask that has roached up her short hair into an arc like a wave frozen mid-break. She allows herself this small vanity. She leans into the mirror, shifting her head from one side to the other. She knows she is astoundingly beautiful – “Easy on the eyes,” as her long-gone poppa used to say – and she knows it is of less than no consequence now. She stoops to gather the loose curls of ticker tape off the floor, the machine steadily spitting out more even as she does so, to catch up on all that has been transmitted over night. She sits at the desk and begins her work.
She can decipher all. From it, she knows who remains on the battlefield and who has been killed, where they are, and sometimes where they plan to go next. The cryptographer at the other end, hundreds of miles away, tells it all and sends it out. This cryptographer knows there are others of her ilk. She is not sure how many. She thinks of them as a motley, dispersed tribe of shy, highly skilled individuals. She thinks of them, in a way, as a family.
Someday soon the armies will kill each other off entirely, fighting as they do over the trickles of potable water, the islands of arable land, the caves to shelter from the storms. When word comes to her that the armies are done – all their foolish, short-sighted bickering and cruelty – she will gather a large pack of food and drink from her stores. She will journey the route spelled out in the code on the ticker tape. She will hike until she finds her fellow cryptographers. The small band of them have already agreed. They know that sharing is the only way to go forward, sharing among themselves as well as with the natural world. Each of them was born with this particular innate combination of humility, the talent for listening carefully, and the ability to fit seemingly random pieces into a coherent whole. With these invaluable tools, they will begin again – together.
Monica Woelfel (she/her) has published a few pieces in literary magazines over the years, including Seattle Review, North American Review, and The Sun. Her novel manuscript Innocence is a finalist for this year’s Pacific Northwest Writers Association literary contest. An M.F.A. graduate from University of British Columbia, Monica lives in Bellingham where she works as a hospice nurse.