During his nighttime excursions out and about on Manassas Island, Artemus had overheard rumblings about degradation and death in the big city. The great horned owl—a truth-seeker and natural skeptic—determined he had to see it for himself. Anything less was mere rumor. He prepared himself for flight, thoroughly preening his feathers and expelling a pellet of fur, bones, and teeth, remnants of the rodent or small rabbit that had been his last meal. He set off at dusk on a field trip into Portland, charting a direct course above the Columbia River Highway, past the tidy but unremarkable burg of Linnton and the Northwest Industrial District, where railroad tracks, storage tanks, and warehouses dominated the skyline.
The elderly cock was careful to fly low, with as few wing-beats as possible, to preserve his energy. He took a westerly hop over the copper-colored bridge connecting the suburbs to the island, then headed due southeast. Smoke from the city’s northeast industrial section choked him and further slowed his journey. He exhaled relief when the tree line above the largest, most popular park appeared in the distance. Though the annual fall leaf display was past its peak, he marveled at the fading oranges, reds, and yellows. It was his favorite time of year. The chill morning air. The best hunting. And winter nesting season was nigh.
He soared beneath the small group of black helicopters hovering above him, ready to zigzag if one of them started to drop. Their rotors moved in time with his wing-flaps. The copters might’ve been feds, possibly homeland security. The raids had picked up steam. There were reports that masked agents had shown up at Kramer’s farm and taken an entire family of seasonal workers away. That much was in the local paper, the Manassas Island Bugle.
Spying the Salmon Street Springs fountain, Artemus felt he was close to the point of engagement. His exceptional hearing, ears that picked up sounds from up to ten miles away, would stand him in good stead. He settled on a high branch in a Gingko tree off Naito Parkway. A perfect perch for discovery. What he witnessed while keeping vigil above the waterfront, more than anything else he’d encountered in his twenty-five years as a rural forest-dweller, stunned and staggered him.
A kyphotic man—black skin, thick salt-and-pepper hair—fell to his knees on the sidewalk, bending over a rectangular plastic bag. It had a zipper on the side with a “Jane Doe” tag attached. Artemus could make that out. The bag’s top was open, revealing a dried-up face. He could hear the man keening. “My wife! My Nelle!” he cried, repeatedly, in a high-pitched wail that seemed to come from the very deepest place inside him. The man’s stooped shoulders shook.
The owl turned his head right, then left. There were hundreds of body bags lined up on downtown streets, functional pouches containing the leftovers of old people who had lost their homes, their health insurance, their dignity, and—at long last—their very right to exist.
These unfortunates had died in poverty, without reasonable end-of-life care or even, it appeared, a second thought. No federal disaster relief personnel had been dispatched. A cadre of fired former employees showed up to fill bags, catalog and tag who they could, and notify families when information was available, preparing the corpses for loading onto refrigerated trucks and, later, gargantuan transoms for disposal.
Downriver, to no one knew where.
Cleanup people in hazmat suits that protected them from cadaver-borne diseases collected the bags. Their company van had a “Where Trash Becomes Treasure” logo on its side.
“Irony is doing some heavy lifting there,” one volunteer was heard to say. She scratched her dreadlocked head and kept on attending to grisly tasks.
Zip. Tie. Tag. Lift.
Flies buzzed around in the mid-autumn air, lighting on this bag and that, looking for a way in. Folks with money, on their way to brunch and business appointments, stepped over the unfortunates laid out on Northeast Hawthorne and Southeast Grand and Northwest Burnside, their Jimmy Choo slingbacks and Cole Haan oxfords making dust marks on the bags’ plastic edges.
The Portland Spirit steamed up the Willamette River, its fancy passengers drinking Italian champagne at midday, oblivious to the carnage.
All the while, Artemus watched and listened. The owl trained his asymmetrical ears on conversations between paramedics and police officers drifting up from the grid below. Not even one spoke honestly or directly about what had happened—they didn’t dare!—but the bald truth was this: across America, from east to west, scores of people died from new and more virulent strain of influenza that hit like a tsunami, the frail elderly left vulnerable and helpless after a cadre of toadies gutted the government’s social welfare programs and immunizations went the way of the dinosaur.
Health care for the poor? Such a joke. Medicare ended in 2030, replaced with personal savings accounts that barely covered aspirin. Pay-to-play rich folks got their stem cell infusions for wonky knees—not to mention brow lifts and Botox—while the have-nots suffered and perished.
“To the victor …” one white-suited do-gooder began, no need to finish. His comrades knew the rest of that story.
Flu deaths were just the tip of the iceberg. Who among the elderly could afford care at the tail end of their journey? Even a middling nursing home room cost upward of ten grand a month. The 250-year plan to abolish democracy made sure of that.
Demeaned, dismissed, and consigned as collateral damage, America’s old folks paid the ultimate price. Spotty access to vaccines meant no protection. No health care meant little opportunity for life, liberty, or the pursuit of happiness. Programs that had kept citizens healthy, fed, clothed, and housed over the generations—imperfectly, but also with intentional care and appropriate empathy—were history.
“The least of these,” Jimmy Carter had called them, biblically so. After a hundred years of living, he hung up his hammer at just the right moment, December 2024, so at least some flags flew at half-staff on the morning of the orange one’s second swearing-in, a tawdry festival of self-congratulatory backslapping.
Artemus’ panoramic view showed him who the people were, the ones who merited saving the most as forests and whole towns in southern California burned because of climate change; books were banned and libraries were defunded; trans people were terrorized; immigrants were rounded up without due process and deported to countries they knew nothing about; journalists were investigated, harassed, and jailed for telling the truth; and women were made to carry unwanted pregnancies to term or die trying to get reproductive health services in certain politically unrepentant red states.
It had been a dark time of dispiritedness and despair. A season out of which could only come redemption, if anything better at all was to rise from the ashes of a country in retreat from itself, from what it had allowed itself to become.
Such unnecessary suffering. Up from Artemus’ throat came an involuntary whistling noise as he hovered over the sad avenues and boulevards and thoroughfares, mourning for humanity. There were fewer red and blue police car flashes. The authorities had dispersed. Dusk was coming. Tonight, the veil would be thin. He left his temporary roost and started back toward his beloved island. The flight home would take less time without daytime distractions.
On his silent approach, the flickering yellow lights of farm workers’ ofrendas came into view, intricate altars memorializing their ancestors, beckoning them back from the next realm, if only for a few hours. Artemus saw them, but the migrants in their homes didn’t see him. Nothing could give him away in the hours of deepest night, not even the bright pink band the animal rehabilitators fastened to his talon after his fierce fight with that big bald eagle. He might have lost his life that day if not for humans with good intentions. If not for the timely phone call and the rush of the ambulance. The skillful folks at Cascades Owl Rescue cared for him in his time of need, nursing him back to health before releasing him back into the wild. Eight weeks of confinement.
Like hundreds of fireflies glowing at once, the ofrendas illuminated the darkness. Artemus breathed in their magic, their mourning, as he descended, He landed without a sound and stumbled around for a safe spot to rest.
It was Día de los Muertos, the day of the dead.
In the morning, at first light, he would go and find Carson McClintock, an ordinary man with an extraordinary dream to save everyone he could from an atrocious end they did not deserve. McClintock, who was meeting the present moment with everything he had to give.
From the author: I'm an essayist and novelist living on a floating home west of Portland, Oregon. This submission is an excerpt from my second novel, CARSON McCLINTOCK IS NOT DEAD YET, an exploration of what could happen to the impoverished elderly at the end of their lives in a near-future America.
My debut novel SUNSHINE GIRL, a lived-experience journalist story, was published by Heliotrope Books of New York in 2025. My writing has also appeared in Newsweek, Hippocampus, The Big Smoke, Nailed magazine, the Timberline Review, Elephant Journal, Mountain Bluebird Magazine, and several anthologies.