The Antidote

On Harp’s sixth birthday, he is forced to help his father and the other townsmen kill a herd of wild rabbits. They have trapped the rabbits, which have been destroying the wheat crop, but Harp wants nothing to do with the act of clubbing the rabbits to death.

A prairie witch known as the Antidote is chained to a bed in the Uz jail. The town of Uz, Nebraska, is suffering a drought. The Antidote is what is known as a “Vault”: She has the ability to take other people’s unwanted memories and store them inside herself, as if she were a bank. This causes the depositor to forget the memory entirely until he or she withdraws it from the Antidote. But, as she awakens this morning, the Antidote feels suddenly bankrupt, knowing that she has, for the first time, lost all of the memories she has been storing. She recalls giving birth to a son at the Home for Unwed Mothers in Milford, Nebraska, when she was 15. After the baby was born, she briefly nursed him but then was told that he had died. The Antidote believes this is a lie and assumes her son is alive somewhere.