Year One

Year One is the beginning Ish and Em assign to a new era after the disaster, turning the passage of time into a deliberate act of renewal. Em proposes that the past year might as well be called Year One; Ish embraces the idea as a break with the old chronology and later cuts the numeral into rock. Their first year thus acquires two complementary records: a number that can be continued and a name rooted in the life of their family.

Naming a New Beginning

The idea emerges while Ish and Em consider how to keep track of dates. Ish initially imagines recording each new year by chiseling its date onto a suitable rock, preserving a continuous historical sequence. Em questions the usefulness of starting with a four-digit date. For her, the year just passed can instead be Year One. Her suggestion does not deny that the past exists; it changes the point from which the survivors will count their future.

Ish accepts the proposal and privately describes the transition as Moment Zero, a boundary between two eras. The language marks a shift in his sense of what lies ahead. Until then, his attention has been dominated by the drama of a world emptied of people and by his own effort to adapt to it. With a new society now imaginable, he sees himself not only as a solitary observer but as someone able to contribute knowledge to its reconstruction. Year One gives that change in outlook a temporal form: the survivors are not merely living on after the old world but beginning a history of their own.

From Intention to Inscription

The year’s meaning is reinforced by the expected child. Ish recognizes that the prospect of the child has altered his despair into hope and looks forward to marking the end of Year One with Em and, potentially, their growing family. That future ceremony makes the calendar more than an abstract scheme. It ties the first completed year to continued life and to the possibility that the work of keeping time will pass beyond the couple themselves.

After the seasons have turned, Ish and Em climb to a rocky hillside near their house on San Lupo Drive. A baby is with them, and Em is pregnant again. Princess starts along the trail but runs off after a rabbit. At the rock, Em sits in the sun with the baby while Ish uses his hammer and a cold chisel to cut the year’s single numeral into the surface. He first makes an upright line, then adds a serif at its base and a small hook at the top, shaping it into the familiar printed figure 1. The design brings an old convention of writing into a setting where survival now depends on making records by hand.

The site itself carries traces of a much older human past. The smooth rock lies in what had once been a small public park, near a cave formed by leaning rocks; holes in its surface remain from people who had pounded acorns there in still earlier times. Ish’s new mark therefore occupies a place already bearing evidence of human use. The inscription does not restore the former civilization, but it places the survivors’ act of recording time within a longer human presence at the site.

The Year of the Baby

Once the numeral is finished, Ish calls the completed year Year One. Em answers that she expects to remember it as the Year of the Baby, because names are easier to remember than numbers. Her alternative does not displace the number: it gives the same stretch of time a personal and memorable identity. Ish’s inscription preserves sequence; Em’s name preserves what made this particular year matter to them.

The difference between the two forms of remembrance becomes the basis of a shared practice. The community’s years will not be identified only by their numbers; they will often be given names drawn from events that occurred in them. The custom makes the calendar both chronological and narrative. A carved figure establishes where a year falls in the sequence, while its name gives people a human-scale cue for recalling what happened. Em’s proposal therefore helps shape not only the first date but the way later years can be remembered.

Significance

Year One links private hope to the beginnings of collective history. Its starting point is chosen rather than inherited intact from the world before the disaster, and its first marker is made with simple tools on a rock. Yet the act is not merely practical: Ish treats the completion of the circuit from south to south as worthy of ceremony, and the family gathers at the inscription. The future is made tangible through the repeated prospect of returning to the rock and adding another mark.

The name also expresses a tension between systems and lived experience. Ish values an unbroken record and the ordered continuation of dates; Em sees that a memorable event may carry time more vividly than a number. Their two approaches survive together in the custom that begins here. Year One is at once a reset, a promise that history will continue, and the first entry in a calendar whose names can preserve the stories numbers alone cannot tell.