Meme acquired from the Interwebs (location of the grove is Virginia)
Sherri slid the glass door open, stepping onto the cement slab that acted as her patio to enjoy the autumn morning. After sliding it closed behind her, she started the morning ritual her on-line therapist recommended.
“Embrace a delusion. Meditate and take yourself away, back in time, whatever makes the tension leave your body.”
Her backyard used to be her refuge back when she bought her house with the money she made as a programmer in Alexandria. She had worked all the hours in the nineties and double-oughts and saved every drop: giving up dating for the most part, splitting rent with four other women. She had deprived herself long and hard until her dream house came on the market and bought it with cash on the table. Backing up against protected land where they had reintroduced the American Chestnut, the new development was filled with escapees of the grind. She left most of her land natural to support the wildlife with an extra acre of range and several of her neighbors did likewise.
Sure the commute was longer, but she was older and didn’t work hundred hour weeks anymore and they were okay with her remoting in one day a week. The home had been even cozier during COVID and remote work became the rule instead of the exception.
Then AI came.
At sixty, she became redundant. AI could program itself. (Poorly, oh so poorly, but the bottom line didn’t care.) Sherri understood the writing on the wall and took the golden parachute four months before the company did the full cleaning of the house. Her 401k wouldn’t be available for another two years, but at least with the parachute, she had health insurance until she qualified for Medicare.
Her body had collapsed without the constant push to the next delivery. Anxiety, long suppressed, ripped out her foundation like an earthquake and bubbled to the surface like boiling mud.
“Calm,” the therapist said.
Drop into your delusion.
She breathed in the fumes of the last of her pumpkin spice coffee in her mug to set herself in place. Closing her eyes, she worked on rewriting her world before she went back inside to job hunt in a field that wouldn’t touch a sixty-three year old. The hopelessness of that thought tried to reach into her depths to pull up anxiety to join her depression, but her iron will sliced out, a sharp-edged sword she still wielded, to cut the links apart.
The noise crashing against her ears. That was…songbirds? Singing in the morning sun. No, the sound was too persistent. Maybe crickets and frogs, no, that was nightfall. Cicadas. That would work, a constant noise rumbling, maybe a little bit of a brook burbling. Sherri yanked her memories of the sounds to the forefront of her headspace and overwrote the mechanical noise to what she had enjoyed for the twenty years before the new “neighbor” came.
The final sip of her coffee overrode the taste of diesel fumes with nutmeg and cinnamon. It’s fall. It tastes like fall. She imagined the smell of leaf mold being pulled over her tounge, and maybe a hint of frost waiting around the corner for November to show up.
If only she could move. She squashed that thought hard. And it popped out to the top of her mind like a grease pig squealing its escape from its pen. Four more years until she qualified for social security, now that they moved it to no earlier than sixty-seven, seventy being the primary date instead of sixty-five, and people were being encouraged to hold out until seventy-five in order to “save the social entitlement program.” By then her house would be even more worthless than it was now.
And where would she move? Her parents were dead, and completely unmourned on her part, although her two brothers which they had favored her entire life as they could pass on Richard’s last name (like “Marshall” was a gift bestowed from heavens) had shed plenty of tears at their funeral all the way to the bank. When the ‘rents got sick, they had asked for her help, not their precious boys, since she wasn’t married and didn’t have children to consider, of course she would drop everything for them.
She hadn’t. Her lips twitched at their shock and cutting her out of the will. Like they ever did anything for her since she turned fifteen; she just returned their energy back to them. Her life was her own start to finish now.
Opening her eyes, Sherri forced her delusion to the front again. Beautiful autumn morning.
Just look at the fog drifting through the trees. No, it is not smog. Ignore the slight burn it is leaving through the holes of her house clogs and around her ankles.
And the blackened grass as it drifts around the walls the AI center downhill to her housing development. The data center which had bulldozed the protected American Chestnuts during the special technology dispensation given out so freely by the Trump administration. The walls they said they built to suppress the noise for the residents nearby; the ones they built after the fourth protest complaining about the diesel generators running twenty-four-seven, violating both the noise and the pollution ordinances as they sucked up all the water from the stream that used to run through her extended backyard.
Delusion. She needed her delusion to survive. She really should break out her sweaters now that it is the last week of October. Never mind it would push ninety today; autumn is chilly.
The cup needed washing and the job applications wouldn’t fill themselves, even if only AIs would be reading them.
The cicadas were sure noisy this morning, she thought as she returned indoors. Hopefully, she could focus on the computer work.
Listening to the AC kick in at eight in the morning, she winced thinking about her electric bill, again squashing the thought that the data center had another four years of electrical discounts based on the original contract signed by the township committee and then-mayor that everyone else was covering since the expense was still there.
It’s a beautiful autumn day.
Behind her, the bare dead tree branches scratched the blackened sky, trying to draw autumn colors of red and yellow in the morning dawn.
(words 1,056; first published 10/29/2026)