Challenge #03007-H084: How to Fix a Broken World

Normally she was a very quiet young woman. She spent her time repairing antique spinning wheels, cleaning up antique wood-fire stoves and helping install them in friends' homes, teaching people how to make looms, weave cloth, and turn that cloth to clothing. When she got older and had kids of her own, she, and her spouse, taught them to garden, to hunt, to raise and harvest their animals and preserve food, how to cut and store wood, how to repair and use the antiques, and live a quiet life. But then trouble came, their world rocked to the core. Yet in this quaint, out-of-the-way place, there were a few homes that did not seem to notice the modern world had slipped away, as they sat quietly at their spinning wheels, until people from the cities came looking, for food, for supplies, for a new life. -- Fighting Fit

[AN: There are peoples who choose to live without sufficiently advanced technology. The Amish are the best known, but I'm certain there are others]

They had lived that way for a hundred years. They might yet live that way for a hundred more. When business broke the world, they didn't even notice. Sure, there was some distant gunfire from over the horizon, but this was a nation in love with firearms. There was distant gunfire every day. Eve didn't really notice until long after it stopped.

Adam made note of it on the day. "Must be a gun-free holiday," he said, and they laughed. They got on with their stews and preserves for the evening and thought nothing more of it that night. Except... the next day was silent too. The entire week was silent. Then the week after it. That was when it occurred to them that something might be wrong in the absence.

No sirens. No gunfire. No distant choppers thudding echoes in the canyon. No poinpoint jets roaring across the sky. Neither of them had had much time for civilisation, but they did have some concerns. Something, they reasoned, had to have gone wrong. They were just about to load up the cart and harness old Hoss when the first desperate soul arrived.

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