As Ash of Man

Ash layers high stone walls and snags on the spikes of twisted chain-link. It clings to the skeletons of blackened factories and stripped warehouses and Nissen huts whose corrugated iron skin; peeled from its body long ago by scavengers, wanderers, and the strong polluted winds that murder steadily west. Car engines still rumble in sooty streets, voices static in the speakers that spill from their shattered windows. And then there are the bodies, the shadows of this once industrial land, long forgotten and mummified by ash, stiff and faded like material ghosts, never moving nor speaking but always watching.

The Pastor tilted his head to the horizon were past the hills of rock and the towering heaps of slag, crooked arms of abandoned machinery reached from the poisoned dirt like the crooked fingers of long-dead giants, was a city, a vast kingdom of the long lost and of the blackened dead. Beyond this, towers of crumbling concrete and twisting rebar thumbed themselves into the moribund sky like vast reaching necropolises of ancient civilization where the hopes and dreams of billions now lay decaying beneath drapes of plastic curtain and slats of rusting window blinds. Photographs of molding sepia on wilting tin desks fade like the memories of those whom they once captured and of whom were once more so loved.

The Pastor looked longingly into this fraying seam of history and thought of not the dinosaurs nor the ice age that followed for these were uncontrollable catastrophes and not of man’s ignorant pact with destruction. But he thought of the silos of Kentucky and of Alabama and of his little church there and the congregation of whom were now but blast shadows upon its flash-whitened walls. In his hands, he yet still clutched the bible to which had yet lasted longer than the hair on his sagging head and the nails on his toes and thought perhaps that as his eyes turned pale and white that perhaps the despair would lesson for he would no longer have to witness the end of all things and to feel the ever-growing gap between him and the god of man. Yet as the radiation took from him what God had given, he believed it perhaps better to lay down and become a stone amongst the darkened graveyard than to wander it further, amongst the ash of man.

Yet, everywhere he went he found the stories of all those of whom had perished and he saw there an idyllic if not moribund beauty to be had amongst the offerings left like pieces of unfinished portraiture. Many were toys or fading photographs. Others were offerings now molding and decaying or carried away by dogs. Some were on the mantlepieces of forgotten, blast-blown homes and others were found on street corners surrounded by burned-down candles. These were the stories of hope that shone amongst the dying light and yet now he thought of where all these people had gone.

Perhaps it was a curse as to why he had lived when everyone else had died. Indeed, when offered some comparison between himself and the others who had been equally plagued with survival, it would seem apparently so. Yet those who lingered ghostlily and plagued such as he were no more human's than those lifeless husks who turned to dust in the cabins of trucks and the seats of school busses and family cars. These fellow survivors were what he indeed feared most; aberrations of the devil who ate the flesh of others and danced and sang in satanic toungues round abouts dumpster fires.

He long wondered whether it would be these evil creatures of whom would take him first or whether it would be the radiation and the molecular fire of which he had heard so much about in the waning days of sciences final chaotic triumphs. Yet he had always struggled to separate science from faith, the free-thinkers from the church, those who thought they could make fire without thanking God for gifting it to them.

Oh, how he hated them for what they had done to the world, yet he still found it a purgatory perhaps also handed to the world by God, for if God did truly exist, and thus why he continued to survive, why would he punish the whole of mankind with such infernal fire and also he, who had been a most faithful follower of the church since his own divined inception. But then he refused to let go of his faith for if there was any sense to be made from the grey, still hell of which he now survived, then it had to be made from the will of God for if it had not, then by whose morose will, had it become?