The sign was small, like most of the signs along the Pacific Coast Highway. Unlike the majority, it wasn’t advertising fresh artichokes or local honey, or endorsing some political candidate no one who didn’t live in the area had ever heard of.
FOR SALE, it read, in polite, handwritten letters. HARMONY, CA.
“Look at that,” said Nan, pointing. “Someone’s trying to sell inner peace.”
“Someone probably has a spa and a lot of wind chimes.” Miriam kept her hands on the wheel and her eyes on the road. One of them had to. “Incense that smells like a truck-stop bathroom. She thinks it helps her commune with the spirits.”
“What makes you think it’s a she?” asked Nan. “Most of the gurus around here are weird dudes who wear socks with their sandals and like to explain how their penises can cure all known human disease.”
“Maybe they can. Maybe you have asthma because you haven’t imbibed deeply enough of the holy dick.”
Nan rolled her eyes. “I have imbibed plenty of dick in my day. If that shit had curative properties, I assure you, I would know. Still would prefer not to, but it’d be cheaper than seeing the doctor, so why the fuck not?”
Miriam laughed so hard she took her foot off the gas. If not for the fact that they were in the literal middle of nowhere, without another car in sight in either direction, they would probably have gotten into an accident. As it was, they were able to make it to the shoulder before coming to a complete, if inelegant, stop.
“What?” demanded Nan.
“I’m just—can you imagine the marketing?”
Miriam folded forward in another fit of hysterical laughter. This time, Nan joined her. They had been driving for days, making their slow way up the line of the coast. They would cut inland after they reached Oregon, heading for the dubious delights of scenic Beaverton, where nothing happened that hadn’t been approved six times over by the local homeowners’ association.
It was a nice place to raise a family. That was what all the advertising said. Move to Beaverton and start that happy little nuclear unit you’d been dreaming of since you broke off from the one that bore you. Find a husband, find a wife, find one of each, find someone who was neither but who nonetheless wanted to raise children by your side, file the forms and settle down, content in the knowledge that you’d be giving those little tykes exactly the kind of warm, nurturing family environment they needed to thrive.
What none of the advertisements mentioned was how difficult it was to get the licenses to start that family or how the straight couples seemed to find their applications approved in half the time it took anyone else. (At least the licensing department acknowledged that bisexual people existed: Nan’s friend Alex had marked down bisexual when he and his wife applied for parenthood, and while they were both cisgendered and in a classical man-woman relationship, that little ticky box had been enough to delay their application by almost six months, while multiple straight families had been able to jump ahead of them in the queue.)
What none of the friendly interviews with present and aspiring residents mentioned was the way the city shut down at nine o’clock, leaving single people with nowhere to go and people in relationships with few, if any, dating options. It hadn’t been until Miriam stumbled across a locked Facebook group describing nearby restaurants and entertainment options that she’d realized how much was being intentionally hidden from them.
Court cases and successful bills and a hundred small victories had come together to usher in a world where hate was no longer acceptable, where sexual orientation wasn’t enough to deny a person the right to live their life as they saw fit, where identity was up to the individual and not a government agency. But none of those things could change the nature of the human heart, and it was the nature of humans to be cruel to things they didn’t understand, or approve of, or believe in.
Miriam and Nan had been ecstatic when their application to buy a house in Beaverton had been approved and even happier, two years later, when the perfect little Cape Cod–style bungalow had become available. They had moved with eyes full of stars and heads full of nothing but the future, only to find that the future had a few more fences than they’d been expecting.
This vacation—this ten days of heaven, away from everything they used to think they wanted—had been the only way to escape when their latest application for parenthood had been turned down. Reason? Family has never maintained a pet. Questionable attachment abilities. It had been suggested that they get a dog to prepare themselves for parenthood. A dog. As if that were the same thing.
Ten days. It hadn’t been enough. Nan looked at Miriam, laughing so hard over something so small, and wondered whether it ever could be enough.
“Do you want to go see the guru?” she asked. “If it’s a man, I promise to keep a straight face while he talks about vibrating in harmony with the universe.”
“And if it’s a woman, I’ll buy you a milkshake the next time we stop in a town with a real diner,” said Miriam. “Let’s go.”
She started the car back up, and they rolled on down the road, looking for harmony.
There was no guru, male, female, or other. There was no spa. There was a wind chime, crafted from recycled forks, hanging sadly in front of the closed post office. Occasionally, it would jangle in the wind.
Miriam and Nan leaned against the hood of their car, looking contemplatively at the sign. HARMONY, CA, it read. Under that, someone had taped a piece of poster board with two additional words.
FOR SALE.
“The town’s for sale,” said Miriam.
“I can see that,” said Nan.
“Who has the spare cash to buy a town? New shoes, sure. A fancy necklace from one of the seaside tourist traps, okay. But a town? And how are you supposed to get it home? This won’t fit in the back of the car.”
“Sure,” said Nan. She was already moving toward the sign, and past it, onto the porch with the sad wind chime, to peer through the grimed-over, soaped-over window of the old post office. “There’s still a rack of greeting cards in there. The counter and the P.O. boxes, too. You could dust the place off and reopen it tomorrow and no one would be the wiser.”
“Literally no one, including the United States Postal Service. I’m pretty sure getting them to resume pickups takes a little more than some Windex.”
Nan glanced over her shoulder at her wife, grimaced, and walked the length of the porch to where it curved around the building. She turned and disappeared from sight.
For one terrible moment, Miriam was gripped by the absolute conviction that she’d just failed some kind of test, the kind you only found in folktales and Stephen King stories. Nan was gone forever. If she went looking, she’d find bones, or nothing, or maybe her wedding ring.
“Honey, come see!”
The moment passed. Nan sounded genuinely excited by whatever she’d found.
“Coming,” shouted Miriam, and pushed away from the car.
Behind the post office was a pond, strangely enough, with four grimy white boxes about the size of chest freezers connected to it by long hoses. Nan was peering inside a hatch on the side of the nearest one. She looked up and beamed.
“Local weather control,” she said. “We’d never be able to whip up a snowstorm, but they can extract enough water from the air to let us generate local rain, and they’ll keep the town from needing to depend on groundwater or imports. We’d just need a few gallons of purified water to get the whole system working again. These are some of the original box models, too. They can take a direct lightning strike and still keep functioning.”
“Huh,” said Miriam.
“There are at least eight houses, and I’m pretty sure some of the shops have housing above them.”
“I say again, huh.” Miriam studied her carefully. “What are you getting at? A town is a little large for a souvenir.”
“We could at least call and find out how much they want for the place.” Nan dimpled. “Wouldn’t you like to own your own town?”
“Would that make me mayor?”
Nan’s dimples deepened as she smiled. “Why, yes. I do believe it would. I always wanted to kiss a mayor.”
“Good,” said Miriam, walking toward her. “Let me tell you about my political platform.”
Harmony, California—former population thirty-five, current population zero—was for sale for eleven million dollars. The price was justified by the amount of undeveloped land considered to be “within city limits” and the fact that the utilities, post office, and weather machines were all part of the deal. There were no valuable minerals or other assets on the land that anyone had been able to find; it was simply a ghost town that had bloomed and died several times already along the road to Oregon.
Miriam looked at the figure, looked at Nan wilting on their couch like a flower ripped out of its native soil, and looked out the window. Some of their perfectly curated neighbors were walking their perfectly acceptable dogs, some new designer breed that never barked, not even when it was in pain or danger. Two of those dogs had been killed since their development officially started accepting residents, unable to make a sound when they’d been hit by cars, unable to help their people find them.
It was clean, sterile, modern. Perfect. Everything about it had been curated and customized to perfection, even down to the percentages of people—so many singles, so many couples, so many triads. So many families with children and so many without. They lived in the very model of a planned community, and while it had seemed like the perfect antidote to the years spent being told that “queer” was another way of saying “unwanted,” now it just felt like another kind of prison.
Miriam hesitated. Then, slowly, she began to type.
When she and Nan had applied for homeownership, several of their friends had told them that they’d never be happy in a place like that, surrounded by people like that. That they’d still be marginalized, just along another axis—and, more, that the very existence of licensing for things like parenthood and getting a dog would be used as a way to make sure that only the “right” people got licenses. The straight people, the white people, the Christian people, the able-bodied, neurotypical, didn’t-check-any-boxes people.
And, yeah, Miriam had noticed how some identities were just “assumed” by the applications, how male and female were each check marks but other was a whole sub-warren of menus—including would rather not say, as if a desire for privacy were somehow an identity. And, yeah, she had known when she signed the mortgage papers that she was agreeing to a certain degree of surveillance in exchange for finally living what she’d been raised to consider the American Dream.
She had simply never considered that one day she might prefer waking up.
One by one, she emailed friends, old contacts, people she’d gone to college with, smoked weed with, dreamed big dreams with. Dreams that were, in their way, bigger than any American Dream, because they’d been hers, something she wanted for herself and not because she’d been told to want them. One by one, she told them her idea. It was big. It was wild. It was probably bad. But it was, again, hers.
When the replies started coming in, she stood and walked to the couch, sitting next to her wife and taking the other woman’s hand in hers. It was warm. Nan always ran warm. Moving to Oregon had been a terrible idea. How had she ever expected a desert girl to be happy in the fog?
“How much do you think we could get for our house?” she asked. “Ballpark figure? I know the waiting lists are still ungodly long, and I can’t remember the last time somebody sold a place in one of the established neighborhoods. We’re allowed, in case you’re worried about that. I made absolutely sure of that before I signed the mortgage paperwork. We can’t paint the place and we can’t plant any trees that aren’t on the approved list and we can’t get a dog unless our application is approved, but we can sell and move anytime we like.”
Nan slowly turned to her, a small V of confusion appearing between her eyebrows as she frowned. “What are you talking about? Why would you want to sell the house?”
“Last time we applied for a mortgage it was to buy this place. Two million dollars of house on the hoof. When I look at it now, it seems like an awful lot for not all that much. We’ve paid off, what, half that? If we sold tomorrow, we’d come away with a million in liquid capital—and that assumes property values haven’t gone up. I assure you, our taxes tell me that they’ve gone up plenty. We could come out with two, even three million.”
Nan looked at her suspiciously. “And what? Go to Disney World for six years? That isn’t going to give us a place to keep our things.”
“Maybe not, but I think a whole town would be big enough. Especially if we wanted to annex the storeroom at the post office. I can’t imagine we’re going to be getting that much mail for the first few years.”
Nan’s breath caught in her throat. “Don’t tease.”
“I’m not teasing.” Miriam leaned over to take her other hand. “I emailed a bunch of our friends, some of the folks I work with—they’re interested. If we incorporate so that we have enough capital to gain some negotiating room on the purchase price, and we sell this place, I think we can swing eleven million for the town, plus however much the place winds up costing to fix up. How do you even get an entire town inspected? There’s probably going to be more dry rot than there is healthy wood. Really, we should—”
Nan lunged forward and kissed her, hard. Miriam stopped talking.
In that moment, there were far more interesting things to do.
Selling their house was, as it turned out, completely legal under the town charter: For all that it virtually never happened, it was apparently encouraged. If everyone who didn’t feel like they fit in simply moved away, why, there would be no need for anything to change.
“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” said Miriam grimly. “Translate it into Latin and it could be the municipality motto.”
Nan didn’t answer. She was busy emailing three people and chatting with six more, windows popping up on her laptop screen like mushrooms after a rain. Miriam sighed fondly, watching her. Then she returned to the far less enjoyable task of explaining to their lawyer what they were trying to do.
Buying a town was not, it developed, exactly easy. It also wasn’t as terrible an idea as she had initially feared. Harmony represented a decent chunk of California real estate, once the town borders were taken into account, and a surprising amount of it was farmable land, made undesirable only by its current isolation from local residents. Bring Harmony back to life and it might be possible to entice farmers to move onto that land, making it profitable again.
Build it and they will come might well be the only form of trickle-down economics with a scrap of truth behind it. If they built it—or rebuilt it, more properly—they’d have a chance at making something lasting. Making something that was real would encourage more real things to appear around it, until there was no further use for falsehood.
The consortium that was selling Harmony was happy to explain why they were willing to part with such a prime piece of real estate. As Nan and Miriam had joked on their way into town, the former owners had been gurus, mystics, New Age believers looking for a chance to create a community of their own, a sort of West Coast Lily Dale. But the traffic on the road hadn’t been enough to sustain them, and bit by bit the money and the idealism had run out, leaving them stuck with a white elephant of a town and the shattered vestiges of a dream.
One of them even asked, in a carefully neutral tone, what the young people who were looking to buy the town were intending to do with it and seemed relieved when told that all the people who were currently considering relocation to Harmony were computer professionals who wouldn’t be changing jobs. As long as there was reliable internet, they would have reliable employment.
Things started to happen very quickly after that.
Miriam and Nan listed their house, to a resounding lack of objection from both their neighbors and the city planners, who were supposed to get involved for anything more extreme than a new floor mat. Apparently, losing the only lesbians in the neighborhood—as they had reliably been called, no matter how many times they tried to explain that Nan was still bisexual even while married to a woman—was less worrisome than someone choosing a clashing pattern for their curtains. Maybe it was even a relief. While no one actually said, Think about the children, several people did comment on how nice it would be for the new occupants—whoever they happened to be—to be so close to the school.
Tolerance could be legislated, could be demanded, but it couldn’t be guaranteed. Even as people followed the rules, they were still capable of harboring an astonishing amount of hate in their hearts. Miriam had plenty of time to dwell on that as she watched their neighbors, who had always been perfectly pleasant to their faces, all but throw a party to celebrate them finally leaving.
“Perfect on paper,” she murmured, standing in the doorway of what was soon to be someone else’s dream home, someone else’s doorway to the perfect future, and watching as the movers carried their things out to the waiting truck.
Nan stepped up behind her, sliding her arms around Miriam’s waist. “What?”
“Just remembering how excited we were to have our application for homeownership accepted. And now here we are, leaving. I can’t decide whether this is victory or defeat. It feels like a little bit of both. It feels like giving up.”
“It feels like finally deciding what our future’s going to be,” said Nan, and pressed a kiss against the side of Miriam’s neck. “We’re not following anyone else’s blueprint. We’re following ourselves. And we just bought ourselves a town. How many of these boring assholes can say that?”
“Technically, we bought ourselves the controlling interest in a corporation that happens to hold, as its sole asset, a town.”
Nan laughed and kissed Miriam again. “Details. We’re going home. Nothing matters as much as that. Nothing’s ever going to.”
Three months to the day after the first time they’d seen the sign, Miriam and Nan followed the moving truck containing their belongings down the road to Harmony. They weren’t the first ones there: That honor belonged to the construction crews and contractors who were already hard at work replacing rotted support beams, nailing down loose boards, and redoing the shingles on roofs that should probably have been repaired several years before. What seemed like a fleet of gardeners and landscapers was moving through the town, trimming trees, planting gardens of native flowers, and removing unwanted weeds, cacti, and other invaders.
Miriam stopped the car in front of the post office, watching as the truck turned the corner, heading for the address she had given to the driver.
Nan shot her a curious look. “What’s wrong?” she asked.
“I just thought it might be nice to walk the rest of the way.” Miriam turned off the engine, smiling a little. “I’m pretty sure the owners of the post office won’t have us towed.”
“Probably not,” agreed Nan.
They got out of the car together. The air was dry and sweet with the smell of sawdust and distant corn. Hand in hand, they walked down the road, turned the corner, and looked at the house they had chosen as their own. The rest of the collective had given them first pick, because they’d been the ones to find the town and because it was well known that they wanted to have children eventually, which meant that extra space would hopefully become necessary. It was small by the standards of the place where they’d been living, just three bedrooms, a kitchen, and a sitting room barely big enough to qualify for the name. There was no dining room. They’d eat on the back porch, or on the couch in front of the television, or in the common room behind the post office. It would make a good social center.
The children of Harmony—the ones whose parents were uprooting them and carrying them to the middle of nowhere, and the ones who had yet to be conceived, much less born—would grow up in the pockets of their neighbors, running up one side of the town and down the other. They would grow up safe and wild and surrounded by love.
In that moment, neither Miriam nor Nan could have thought of anything better.
The moving truck was already parked in front of their house, the men carting boxes and pieces of furniture inside. Everything was marked and labeled as clearly as possible; while there would definitely be errors, all they could do by getting involved at this stage would make things worse. So Miriam and Nan stood where they were and watched the future getting started, until Miriam’s phone buzzed with an incoming text.
She pulled it out and glanced at the screen. “Dave and Nathan just hit town. They’re heading for their place, but their moving truck isn’t going to arrive until tomorrow. Do we want to have dinner?”
“No one has a working kitchen yet.”
“In anticipation of exactly that situation, Dave packed four coolers into the backseat before they left Fresno. He promises a feast.”
Dave was a French chef whose grilled cheese sandwiches were better than most people’s attempts at gourmet cooking. Nan bumped her shoulder against Miriam’s and grinned.
“All you had to say was Dave packed. We’re in. Unless you wanted to start unpacking already?”
“We can’t have sex until we put the bed together, and I don’t want to do that with strangers in the house. So this is the best option for saying hello to our new town. Think you can find the box with the wine?”
“I’m on it,” said Nan, and trotted toward the house. Miriam watched her go.
Over the next few days, she knew, more and more cars would be arriving, accompanied by more and more moving trucks. The town’s single diner would be brought online, and Dave—as one of the few residents not employed by a large company that liked remote workers—would start getting it into shape. Nathan made more than enough to support them both, but everyone had committed to buying groceries for the diner and helping to pay for its upkeep. They were leaving behind wide worlds of takeout food and gourmet cuisine. Paying for their own private chef seemed like the best available compromise.
Over the next few days, the world would change. Right now it was time to celebrate the transformation.
Nathan and Dave had laid claim to the house connected to the diner, which only made sense. All the windows had been replaced prior to their arrival, and the only work left to do was painting and some repair on the porch. The four of them sat in front of the diner, eating their picnic off paper plates and drinking their wine out of delicate stemware—because, Nathan said, “all good things should be toasted, and so should all terrible ideas, and this could go either way.”
That night, Miriam and Nan lay curled in the center of their own bed, in their own home, in their own town, and everything was perfect, and everything was terrifying. Nan kissed the corner of Miriam’s mouth, tasting the blend of minty toothpaste and sweet white wine.
“Is this it?” she asked softly. “Is this the right thing?”
“A little late for that, don’t you think? We bought it. Pretty sure the people we bought it from aren’t going to take it back.”
Nan kissed her again. “I mean is it the right thing for us to run away to the middle of nowhere instead of staying where we were and fighting to make people understand and accept us. I feel like we’re retreating.”
“It’s not retreating to go where people will treat you like you matter.” Miriam pushed herself up onto one elbow. “It’s not retreating to let yourself be happy. We’re not cutting ourselves off from the world. We’re still working, still traveling, still going to stay involved with politics and making things better. Hell, the fact that we’re here is going to bring life to the local economy—it’s creating a local economy—and drop a big blue spot in the middle of an even bigger red splash. We’re not under any obligation to stand around and let people kick us for not being exactly like them. And if someone shows up who isn’t exactly like us but wants a place to go, we’ll let them in. We’ll welcome them home.”
“Really?” asked Nan.
“Really,” said Miriam, and kissed her, and conversation stopped, at least for a little while.
A week later, two-thirds of the houses in town were occupied. The diner was open; the general store was preparing to open; the post office was undergoing final inspections. The solar arrays were busily converting sunlight into power and power into weather that kept away the worst ravages of the local climate. The ethics of weather manipulation aside, without it, global climate change would have long since dried them all out and blown them all away.
Two weeks later, everything was running as smoothly as it could. There were glitches, of course—some of the plumbing didn’t work, the internet was spotty until the weather machines were recalibrated, the general store kept running out of milk, and no one wanted to do the shelving unless they absolutely had to—but the town was alive, the town was real, the town was thriving. They had taken their ball and gone all the way home, home to a place where no one cared, or judged, or pretended not to mind the way they lived and the way they loved while quietly whispering behind their hands.
Nan was sweeping the post-office porch, one eye on the clouds, when a green station wagon pulled up in front and people began spilling out. Four adults, all told, two men and two women, each wearing a doubled wedding ring, all of them looking nervously around. They walked to the front of the car, standing in a rough diamond form that made it clear they were a unit.
One of the women stepped forward. “Um, hi. Is there someone we could…talk to? We heard there might be some houses here available to rent.”
Sometimes the best part of taking your ball and going home is having the opportunity to define what home really means. Nan smiled and leaned her broom up against the wall.
“You can talk to me,” she said. “Welcome to Harmony. And, hopefully, welcome home.”
SEANAN MCGUIRE is the author of dozens of novels, hundreds of short stories, and multiple essays about the relevance of the X-Men to the modern world. She lives and works in the Pacific Northwest, where she shares her home with an ever-shifting array of unusual pets, enormous cats, creepy dolls, and books. So many books. When not writing, McGuire enjoys watching horror movies, talking about horror movies, making her friends take her to horror movies, and trying to convince people that horror movies are “the romantic comedy of the summer.” McGuire doesn’t sleep much.