Love is Long and Deathly

The kid crested the hillside at night with the fires of the city flickering over his shoulder and the screams of people fading in the distance. He sifted through the darkness with his hands outstretched. It was a void he could not be birthed from. Branches grazed his face and neck and entangled his tattered clothes. He became so lost and without hope that there were times he would sit on his knees and place his head in his hands. Often tears came. He felt above his eye and found something sticky between his fingers. He brought it to his lips and tasted his blood. He wiped his sleeve across the cut and moved about in the darkness.

He saw the forest glow in the distance. He thought it hallucination and swatted as if it were a firefly. It remained. Slowly, at a crawl, he began towards it. Then to his feet. Then running.

The woods shone as though a lantern were tipped there and the forest itself carried the fire. It burned out bright and cast the shadows of the trees into the darkness where they disappeared from whence they came. He crouched at the light’s edge and watched.

An old man sat about the fire. He perched on the worn bark of a downed tree and held his hands to the warmth, the flames almost licking his fingers. His hair crowned his head and his bald center bore a range of red spots in a pattern of magnified blood cells. His hooded eyes held a faint glaucoma. A single length of cloth adorned him. It was mud stained and carried traces of leaves like decorations. A conjurer ruminating on the magic of his flames. An ancient wizard alive in the world.

He turned his nose up to the night and it cast a shadow upon the trees like the face of a rock. He squinted in the dark.

You might as well come out. I heard you a ways off. You can kill me or eat me but I don’t have anything worth stealing.

The kid stepped out of the night and bathed in the layers of fire light. I’m not here to hurt you. Just to rest a while.

The old hermit looked in his direction. Hurt? Son, does it look like I can be hurt anymore? There’s hardly anything left.

He moved closer and sat on a rock facing the fire. Soon his feet burned and he shuffled them around to evenly disperse the heat.

The hermit spoke. You come from the city?

Yeah. Took me a week to get out of there. Been hiking for two days.

They run me off long ago. Said I was just taking up space. I slept under a bridge. Did my own gardening. Kept harassing me. Took some tomatoes I had grown. Said they was city property. I told em I poisoned em just for spite and they made me watch while they threw em in the river. So ripe they floated.

He studied the hermit’s face. A road map of wrinkles headed in different paths before adjoining again. Scars were hidden in the creases. An earlobe missing. His beard hung low and thick like attached wool. Bugs roamed freely within.

The kid pulled something from his pocket and studied it in the light. It was a simple trinket, a heart shaped locket held closed by a clasp. He unfurled the connected chain and it swayed in the light like a hypnotic censer.

The old man took notice.

What you got there?

He concealed it in his palm.

I ain’t blind. Not all the way. One eye makes out pretty good. The other’s a little milky. He pointed a finger to his bad eye, a bony appendage hovering there like a satellite orbiting a dead planet.

Sorry. I didn’t know.

Don’t matter. What was that?

Just a symbol.

Belong to you?

I’m more of a courier. It belongs to someone special. She just doesn’t know.

That where you’re headed?

Yeah. She’s across the state line. Up at the university.

That’s a long walk. Last I heard cars still aren’t working. Roads are dangerous. Could take you weeks to get up there.

Then I guess it will.

The old man let out a coughing cackle that mingled with the crackling flames. He reached under his robe and produced a flask. He shook it mischievously. Care for a sip? He tipped it in a quick motion and retracted it as suddenly. His face puckered and he spit some into the flames. He extended it in offering.

The kid took the container and weighed it in his hand. He undid the cap and began to run his nose over the rim.

They Lord God don’t smell it. You smell it and you’ll never drink it.

He tilted the flask and his eyes to the sky and in a moment everything in his vision soured. The stars went dull and displaced. Trees leaned inward as if to crush him. The fire escaped into the forest.

He coughed hoarsely and held his tongue in the night air to take from it this tainted taste.

Ain’t it a kick?

How are you still alive?

That there’s the reason for it.

They laughed and he passed it back to him like a pox he was eager to rid. The hermit tucked it away in some hidden compartment.

They’ll have to scrounge my body to find that. So is this girl special?

Used to be. We were talking on the phone just before everything happened. I was going to see her so we could discuss things. See where we stood.

I’ll tell you son, there ain’t nothing in the world better than the love of a good woman. But there ain’t nothing in the world worse than a bad one. You find you some real love you hold onto it. Were you always good to her?

Not always.

Was she always good to you?

No, not always.

Sounds like you were a couple to me. Probably a good one. My wife liked to drove me crazy. And I did many a wrong to her. Some things she don’t know about. He looked about him and whispered again. Some things she don’t know about. But I loved her with everything I had. Still do. I like to think she’s waiting for me whenever I die.

He pulled from a pile of branches and stacked them in the flames overlapping and interlocking. A foundation for fire.

Got something I was saving. I’d hate for it to spoil. He reached in a sack and recovered a puny pelt. Caught this rabbit last night. Reckon it’ll cook?

It’s not much but I can’t remember the last time I ate.

The rabbit’s head hung off to one side broken and cocked as if dreaming. He placed a blade surgically against the belly. The skin broke and peeled back. Something pink crawled into the night. He pulled great strands from the bowels, more than it seemed could exist in something so small. They clung to his hands and he began to fling them into the woods, his arms flailing as though he were caught in the midst of some fit. Entrails crossed the fire and lay burning, drawn up and shriveled. The skin tore and popped and the body fell out like a stillborn child. In a solemn moment its dead eye turned in the light and connected with the hermits until both shared some distant vision of flames. He laid the skin on the ground and the body next to it in such a way that the rabbit might see itself and see back its inner workings; a creation mourning its own demise.

He plucked chunks of muscle from the rabbits puzzled tapestry and piked them on sticks. He held them over the fire, the blue flesh burning to pink and on to white and whiter still until it sizzled.

They ate the small morsels, their jaws turning like cylinders.

I think we ought to have passed on this. The taste might give me nightmares. The hermit spat a bulge of fat into the fire.

You cooked it fine. Can’t do much with a tough animal.

Can’t do much with a tough anything.

Doesn’t stop you from trying though, does it?

Son, some things won’t never come around. Even with oblivion their alternative.

He nodded in agreement and looked into the rising flames as though they might hold some greater truth among the ash and embers.

The hermit noted his indifference. The hour grew late. You wouldn’t hate a feller for getting some sleep would you?

No. I could use some myself. You leave the fire burning?

Always leave it burning.

They laid around the fire and listened to the insects of the night and watched for any stars to move. None did. He rummaged through his pocket for the necklace. He pried the hinge open to free her picture. Her mineral eyes stared at him from behind the glass with such vacancy. He placed it back in his pocket and cradled it as if his hands were lock and key.

The hermit’s snores rang guttural. They echoed in the forest and created brethren. In the waning night the old conjurer coughed heavily in his dreaming and harkened out to a darker calling but if there was reply it went unheard. After a while he drifted to sleep.

When the old man woke his visitor was gone. There was little sign he had ever been there save a light indention in the dust where he slept. He gathered what few belongings he had and headed down the road. He walked for a long time and in his wake the seasons did change.

Months later in the dead of winter a group of scavengers sift through wreckage long buried. They move with precision like old hands at their work. They burn diseased bodies in piles until such ashen mounds drift with the unhindered winds. Away from the party the old man is digging through the drifting snow. He searches for further means of survival. Anything from the old world that might be sold or used. His fingernails are hardened by ice. They dig with malice as though he would cast out what God has put in the ground. In a place forgotten by man where buildings have waned and sagged back into the earth from which they were erected he excavates a moment in time.

Two figures lay frozen together until only one shape exists. Their faces touch as though they had died seeking warmth. What little skin remains is blue and hardened. Their eyes long ago taken by what creatures would eat such things. Despite this appearance they appear loved. Between them in clasped hands rests a heart. The old man marvels and his eyes fill with tears that freeze and crack.

You found her.

He looks around at the other scavengers making their way from pile to pile.

Son, if I don’t take it one of them will.

He places his hand over the locket and finds that despite the weather and conditions it passes to him with ease as though these lovers would will it to him. He hides it under his robe and places their hands closer together. Behind him an old crone of a woman appears. She surveys the find and paws at them. Her search heralds nothing. Their clothes are rotted. There is no jewelry to be found. She murmurs words in a dying tongue.

What kind of lovers carry no jewel? False I’d say. No evidence of commitment in their act.

He looks cross at her as she walks away. A horn sounds in the distance. The scavengers begin to disperse. They will never see this land again. They depart east. They have no dreams of a better place. He looks lastly at the lovers. He buries their faces. He moves along.