The World Next Door (A Short Story)

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Jess told me today his sugar beet crop seems to be doing pretty well.

Time was when nobody could get anything at all to grow, much less something as tricky as sugar beets, so Jess deserves a lot of credit… and it’ll be awful nice to have real table sugar again, the white, grainy stuff you could buy at the store. (What was it called? Dominoes? Something like that.) We’re all sick of maple sugar, and the women say you can’t cook with it, except for ham — and we don’t have any pigs around here anymore. It surprised me a little last spring, when the town decided it wanted real sugar so bad, it allowed Jess to turn two acres over to it. Jess raises some of the best corn in the county, and we need all we can get — the eating kind and the drinking kind, both. But sugar is calories, too.

More dreams last night, the crazy kind a lot of people around here have been having. Didn’t sleep all that well myself. Doc says it’s more wish-fulfillment stuff than anything else, like right after the war. I don’t know; these seem different. I remember them better, for one thing. I hardly ever remember dreams at all; now I can remember whole bits of them — colors and smells, too. In fact, in last night’s dream I was watching color television, but I forget what was on.

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