The World Burned
Chapter 1: Meet Abe
The world burned. There was nothing we could do about it. Pure ‘Darwinism’ took place and I’m just a lucky bastard that falls in the plus or minus tolerance. But the world burned. Even in the last few desperate decades of human existence and ‘western civilization’ and ‘eastern civilization’ and ‘Christianity’ and ‘god’, we tried to please them – I’m as guilty as anyone. We lowered carbon emissions and cut the cord of our dependence on the oil industry. We did everything we could, and still the world burned.
First the ocean rose and states in the U.S., provinces and countries that lay next to an ocean got swallowed up. The United States proposed a World Tragedy Task Force (W.T.F.) to the U.N. and it was approved unanimously. The U.S. of A. officially controlled the world. Of course, the world was shrinking.
That was in the early days. The days when WTF ‘peace officers’ – a joke we all got, but no one laughed – walked the streets with machine guns and body armor and visors that hid the eyes. I never could trust a man that hid his eyes.
All conflict became ‘domestic’ all money became the same. A man – woman’s – face didn’t grace these ‘dollars’. The last thing the ‘people’ voted on: who should be on the dollar bill. The vote was a joke, and I say that nicely. Armed squads of the WTF posted up outside polls and controlled the voting habits one county at a time, one person at a time. No one knew the name of the hideous bust that graced the front currency now.
The world burned anyway. Despite the gangs and the votes and the blind faith and the religions (and the grotesque ‘face’ that graced all currency), the world burned. No one knew much anymore. But there were remnants.
Mostly glass stuff, because glass didn’t burn that well. Neither did bodies, even though the Nazi’s figured it out way back when, bodies didn’t go the way civilization went. They didn’t fall to pieces and fade from the few memories that remained, the bodies stayed. I don’t mean they littered the streets or were heaped up in massive piles on the outskirts of towns – back when there were towns.
I didn’t talk to anyone when there were still people around and about to talk to, but I listened. Most people thought the WTF was loading up the bodies and taking them somewhere. I watched and I didn’t believe, sure the WTF ‘storm troopers’ did a lot of terrible things in those days, but I never saw large trucks or stretchers or anything that looked like body removal operations. Hell, the troops kept their distance, crossing streets or turning on heel when they came upon a body in their way.
I didn’t talk to anyone, but I listened. Disease was the first headline in the collective conscience. Some ‘wrath of god’ thing was popular in America – originated with the AIDS epidemic, now come to fruition. “AIDS was a test,” they’d say. Now god was using fire instead of the flood he’d used back in Noah’s time.
Funny how what used to be trends: hairstyles, brand names, cell phones; traded places with something so drastic: why the world was falling apart. After the ‘wrath of god’ theory faded, people started whispering about other countries, like China or Iran, having a ‘secret weapon’. The tragedy that had befallen the world belonged not to our own lives and actions but those of others. That’s when things got really heated.
Even peaceful countries and nations couldn’t hold back their contempt for ‘those responsible’. Militias popped up all over the world but the WTF was ever stronger, ever bigger. Always in control. At least that’s what they thought. They crumbled, too, along with everything else.
Except this sickly yellow sky and the dark thunderheads in the west that never moved any nearer. I was sitting looking out at this beautiful burned out world, sifting through some things I had collected over the last few days. Trying not to look west, those thunderheads scared me. A man can come to accept many things. The world falling apart – burning out – would be the hardest, you’d think. But those thunderheads, they were worse. They scared me.
“I’m Eve,” a voice sounded behind me and I jumped. You don’t hear many voices now, not many people left.
I turned and looked into a face of pure innocence. The look of a newborn’s first sight of the world, void of all prejudice and judgment, met my look of skepticism and guarded thought. Such blue eyes, so beautiful, in this little girl, I almost wept – but my guard was still up, you can never be too careful.
“As in,” I started to reply in my cracked and broken voice.
She put her finger to her lips, shhhh, “Don’t say his name. Please.”
Chapter 2
“What name?” I asked, and when she turned those blue eyes down, away from mine, I have to admit that a moment of sorrow came over me. I didn’t know this girl, Eve, from anyone. More than once I’ve run into groups of people that think nothing of using a child as bate. Knives were the most common things now. So I kept my back straight and my eyes on the sidelines whenever I met anyone, anyone.
It’d been a long time since I saw anyone, though. I had to leave the cities when things started getting really bad. The WTF officers, more often than not, became roaming death squads for all intents and purposes. My apartment building got raided once and I fled.
I didn’t know where to go. It wasn’t that long ago that I had a job and a life. I went to church on Sundays. I’d been looking for a wife so I got an apartment in town, close to the bars and the action. And then the cities fell, they were the first to go, and I had no place to go. I wandered for a while and at first, it was January when I left, I remember that. But the weather kept changing. Year after year, drought hit the world over and the pollution from the cities painted the sky a sick yellow color. A warming blanket, the world was burning up. I headed east and south for the most part.
A wooded hill reached for the sky on the side of this valley. This valley, the one I called home. The crevice and cave I called home, more precisely. About halfway up the hillside, I made sure the entrance was well covered; you could never be too sure now.
Now, the wooded hill was a barren slope of rock. Sometimes I wondered how I could survive in place where all the damn plants died. But I did, and for the time being, enough game survived to keep me out of starving’s greedy fingers. I survived, and now – some years later – I stood in the place I called home, feeling the most intense emotion I’d felt since Ruthie died; shortly before I moved down here.
By the time Ruthie died, the entire process from moment of death became business of the WTF. No funerals, no viewings, nothing. When you died, you disappeared. No one knew what they did with the dead, the dead just went away, and so did Ruthie. Thinking of her now still brings a tightness to my chest.
I wandered and I landed here. I lived a decent life, by comparison to what I’ve seen. And now this girl, Eve, turned her eyes down, away from mine. The world ended, completely and totally. By comparison to what I’ve seen, those of us that still lived, lived as kings. The dead were treated as gently as a worn out red couch.
“It’s okay,” she said, and it was.
Not even Ruthie had the sway over me. The power that Eve’s blue eyes held. I could see how alone she was. The desperation in her eyes, the time contained in that ocean of blue called to me.
A man once told me that you couldn’t experience life to it’s fullest unless you had the raising of a child. Ruthie and I never had kids. Time hadn’t run out, Ruthie had complications that provided us no children. I didn’t love her any less, and I don’t know, but when I met Eve I understood what that wise, wise man told me once upon a time. Eve needed a protector, the world was cruel before, and now she was all alone. Things weren’t getting any better and now I had a companion. Someone to share this sick landscape with.
She stood before me in all white, her skin so much so that I could see the blue of her veins in her wrists and neck. The white gown she wore held not a speck of dirt. Eve stood before me, immaculate. “What to tell you something,” she said.
Her small white hands reached up towards me and rested lightly on the sides of my temples. Her blue eyes came closer. Blue eyes that held infinity, forever, the whole of everything, the kind you could fall into. And I did, I fell straight into those eyes has her face neared mine.
Her hands around the sides of my head, our noses touched now. The terror that seized me inside that blue made me want to run as far and as fast as I could. But with soft fingers that barely touched my skin and hair, she held me. We knelt together on the hard floor of my home (cave). She took a deep breath and closed her eyes. But I was in those eyes; they closed around me as well.
I wish I had the words to tell you – who ever you are that finds this – exactly what happened. All I can is I’ve never felt anything like what happened in my home that day, kneeling on the hard floor. My body felt rocked and thrown – we never moved, I’m sure of that – and my senses were assaulted: bright flashes, images, pain.
Pain so unbearable I believe I screamed out. Perhaps, I screamed because the blue went away. Blue faded darker and darker. The only light, now, came in flashes and found I could look around. Blue had faded dark, dark like the thunderheads, always in the distance. The only compass now that the skies were sick with yellow all the time. The dark thunderheads lay to the West, always.
The roiling black sky above me let out violent bursts of light and the ground shook – or maybe it was my soul shaking. The dark landscape in front and above me shook more and more. I lost my footing and fell on my back, staring up at the darkness that never stopped moving. Always changing, and I remember seeing things in the darkness.
The shape of a knife formed in the thick clouds above me. I thought maybe I saw the likeness of the face that graced the last dollar bills that floated around in the WTF’s pockets, in the axis of the vertical handle and blade and the horizontal cross member. But, in my fright and pain, I was distracted by the blade, this blade flared out at the bottom, – almost like a spoon - and my terror increased. I tried to close my eyes, my pride is not too big to say that I did try to close my eyes and block all of this out, but I couldn’t.
The odd knife turned into colorless wisps that were taken back into the violent black clouds. And then, a picture of a young girl, dressed in all white. It was Eve, I knew that.
Eve stood all alone next to a sign that pointed somewhere. I couldn’t read the sign, or I can’t remember what it said, but I do remember the way her right hand clutched the post holding the sign up. They were lonely hands. I believe I cried out again, on my knees on the hard floor of my home. I could feel the tears making clean trenches down my cheeks. And then I noticed her left hand, raised in the air, slightly lower than the hand gripping the sign post.
Her empty hand hung there in the empty air, somehow lonelier than the fingers wrapped around the post. And suddenly the picture in front of my eyes, right in front of them, was the palm of Eve’s left hand.
‘ABE’ marked her palm, I saw that clearly – perhaps more clearly than anything else. I knew what needed to be done now.
Since my Ruthie died I never had a purpose. Unless, of course, you count the ‘will to survive’ instinct; but now, in my new, hard, rock home I had a purpose. That purpose was
Eve.
Eve needed me, ‘ABE’, to protect her and get her west. West to the darkness, west to the signpost. And I suppose, I, in turn, needed her. Eve gave me purpose. Eve gave me hope. Without hope we’re just waiting to die.
I raised my head from her gentle embrace and looked back into the depthless blue. Through all the thoughts and questions – and fear, and pain – I looked into those eyes. “So it’s west then,” I said and in spite of myself I chuckled. She smiled back at me.
At that point I knew my future was set. Eve hadn’t said a word, and the darkness in the West hadn’t moved at all. We had a long way to go.
Chapter 3
I had no idea what time it was. No way to tell, no shadows anymore. My legs shook as I stood, the ground still just as hard as always on my feet. I looked around for Eve, it was always dark in my home (cave) and at first, fright seized me. She was so vulnerable and alone, if she was gone it was my fault. For whatever reason I laid down, it was a poor one. Time had no meaning in this moment, but there she was.
Almost feel silly now, being so scared for her. Many things brought fear into my heart since I left my home; since my Ruthie had gone from me, so long ago. I’d run into a myriad of thugs and even before, when the WTF were herding us along chain link fences topped with razor wire, I’d been face to face with a masked man in full body armor holding an assault rifle. But I was more afraid in those waking moments than I had ever, ever, been.
Automatically I walked over to my pack. An old olive drab duffel bag that sat in the corner never bothered anyone. My brain circuitry had been rewired so that upon waking and before going to sleep I checked my pack. You could never be too careful now.
My heavy clothes, light clothes, and under clothes lay folded and clean on the left side of the pack. The right side housed all the utensils that could fit. The big pot I’d come across some time ago sat on its base by the fire pit. I reached down the center of the pack, my fingers spider-crawling down below the crude clay plate. There it was, my little wooden cigar box. The one with the red lining, the one I’d never burn – no matter how cold and desperate I got.
‘A. & R. K.’ so well engraved in the dark oak that all the years and all the wandering couldn’t wear it away. It had been a wedding present, one we both cherished and one I still do. Unnecessary weight some might say, the box was rather thick, sturdy. But to me this box was the lightness in my step, the thoughts that ignored my back pain. Our wedding rings were in there, our marriage certificate, the deed to our property, the baby book we never got to fill.
A letter rested against the unfinished bottom of the box. A letter I only read once. I was thinking about the way the paper envelope had wrinkles in it, a marker of time passed. And then I was undoing the blue ribbon with frayed ends, the one held my Ruthie’s hair back right there at the end. The glue didn’t hold anymore and when the ribbon was untied the old wrinkled paper opened like a flower.
At the sight of her beautiful penmanship I almost put the blooming envelope back in its place. I closed my eyes, took a deep breath and gingerly picked up the letter.
To my beloved Abe,
From this bed we’ve shared for the better part of thirty years I can see the picture of our wedding night. I can remember every sincere ‘I do’ to come from your lips on that day. I’ve been your bride everyday since, never your wife, always your bride.
I’m so very sorry we never got to see a child of ours grow. I know how you wanted that, so did I.
I’ve come to accept my fate and I won’t bother you with my fears that bubble up from time to time. What will be, will be.
What really scares me is the world I’m leaving you to. Everything really went caput, huh? You’re the strongest, most loving man I’ve ever met. You’re the one I wanted to die with, and I am, here in our bed. That makes me happy, Abe. Know that.
I’m getting sleepy and you’re downstairs fixing some medicine or something for me. So I’ll leave you with this:
I love you, and when my body dies my love for you will continue on, as I know yours for will.
Yours, in health and in sickness, ‘till death parts us,
‘Your’ Ruthie Kastel
p.s. when you find her let the love we have be for her. I’m sleepy and it’s getting dark here. I love you. R.K.
Chapter 4
I looked up from the letter at a touch, her touch. My eyes cleared and I saw a few more smudges added to the ones made by the tears in the same way years ago – the only other time I’ve read that letter.
Eve touched my shoulder with the same tenderness she carried with her in all ways. Her other hand came up and wiped the tear from my cheek – producing a clean spot that looked out of place. The last tear that fell, she wiped away all the tears. There’ve been days I spent sobbing like a babe at just the sight of the wooden box. But Eve wiped away all the tears in that one gesture of kindness.
I sniffed my nose and I think I blushed. Sitting up straight, I methodically put the letter back in the old envelope. I picked up the blue ribbon, the one that held my Ruthie’s hair back off her face in the end there. Right up to the end, she wore that ribbon in her hair. I sniffed my nose back again and Eve inclined her head. Automatically, I tied that ribbon with the frayed ends around her baby fine blonde hair, just as I had my Ruthie’s a hundred times – no, a thousand – times before.
“Well,” I let the deep breath I’d been holding out and Eve lowered her hand from my shoulder. “We better get ready,” I said. My feet shuffled, “Did, uh, did you get enough sleep?”
She shook her head slowly up then down. I looked down to finish putting the letter away and… it was gone. I panicked, probably only for a half second, yet it was there, the moment everything inside you seizes up. Before the whole second was done I spotted the corner of one of the folds from the old envelope sticking up out of the wooden box.
Though the journey ahead of us, the one we must make, was daunting for sure, I felt at peace. All of my belongings were back where they should be and the pack seemed lighter still. I did have to leave the big pot I used for stew, that thing (useful as it was) just added too much weight.
The pack hefted on my shoulder I turned to look out at the plagued sky. Eve stood in front of me with a hand on my bag. Her head shook and when I just stood there looking back at her she said, “Not all of it.”
I had to lean forward, her mouth next to my good ear, the right one.
“Not all of it,” she said again. Her voice so gentle I had to strain to hear.
But I did hear what she said and I knew. Her hand came off my pack as it slipped off my shoulder. I opened the bag the entire length of the zipper and started removing things from inside. Clothes were the first to go and then the crude utensils and tools.
I remember it now and I wonder where the hesitation was in my actions. The second thought never occurred to me. What I was doing, needed doing. And then the last two remaining items, I looked to my right, directly into Eve’s blue eyes, my hands on the things in the bag.
In my periphery, I saw that Eve smiled. A big smile that lifted her cheeks, showed her teeth and covered her face. And I knew they were okay, the last two things: my good belt – instead of the hank of rope around my waist, and the box. The box I wouldn’t give up, and Eve was smiling and I knew.
I smiled down at my things, then up at Eve. I looped the belt around the box crossways to hold it closed. I cinched the belt tight around the box and stood. When I looked back towards the opening of my home – no, the cave that used to be home – Eve had her back turned. I put my free arm around her shoulders and we stood there looking out at the desolate expanse. We looked out, not at the valley before us, at the entire sight. We looked all the way to the horizon.
We looked all the way to where the diseased yellow met the charred, roiling thunderheads.
Chapter 5
After the first few days, the hard packed earth with its stony outcroppings – good places to look for edibles – turned into a thin scrim of grass with the silhouettes of trees in the distance. I was getting a little worried. I hadn’t counted the cost of another mouth to feed, or the cost on the soul of a man looking at a girl like Eve and not being able to satisfy the desperation in those eyes.
I did find food, nothing I ever thought I’d eat and thought nothing of now. I got lucky, really, on the third day I came upon two large possums. Plenty of food for the two of us, for now, but like fire wood; you can never have too much. I’d learned how to do things since the beginning of my wanderings. I tried showing Eve how to clean, split, and cook a possum, but she watched in silence. She was always silent. Her eyes squinted at the processes involved with preparing an animal for eating, but that was all. And she did the strangest thing I’d seen – and I’ve seen some strange things.
As I was divvying up the roast possum she placed her hand on my arm. I looked up into those blue eyes and somewhere I knew she was shaking her head, but I saw the communication in the blue.
No, my arm lowered and I rested the meat on the ground. I ate my portion, walking for days and having little food – or rest, for that matter – I was famished. By the time I finished, Eve had lain over on her side and seemed to be resting peacefully. I admit I took a bite or two from her portion of dinner. Forgive me.
I have always counted myself a light sleeper. Another thing I learned in my wanderings, how to sleep with one I open, so to speak. But in the morning, predawn really – maybe, with the sky always yellow it was hard to tell. The body can assimilate routines of ‘day’ and ‘night’ without the aid of a sundial. Eve stood with her back to me, I never heard her rise, furthermore, I never heard a thing. The campsite was bare: the extra opossum meat, the remains of the fire, everything was gone.
A certain despair filled me, the first night we’d – I’d – had good food in days and everything was gone. An anger flared in me and I looked back at Eve, eyes intent for answers. After all, I was supposed to be protecting her and keeping her in this screwed up world and she couldn’t do anything but make me leave all my belongings, refuse to eat and now… now she was playing child’s games, hiding food.
Slowly she turned and faced me, looked right into my eyes, in fact. There, there it was, that blue that was everything, so much wiser and older than the face that housed them. She quirked a smile at me and, again, I knew. Everything was going to be okay and it was time to start moving. I got to my feet, the stiffness in my knees and back worried me in a deep place in my mind, I thought nothing of it then.
Now, about a weeks worth of walking later, the landscape was changing. The trees in the distance filled me with hope. Maybe we could find some fruit ahead. The vision of a bright shiny red apple filled my eyes. Hanging from a branch that the fruit’s weight alone made droop. The end of that branch almost touched the ground. I remember licking my lips.
I believe Eve read my mind, or perhaps she read my body language. Before I could take off in a dead run, full sprint, her delicate pale fingers entwined with mine and held me in my place. The surety that we would get there, to those trees, to whatever lay beyond them – perhaps a sign post, perhaps an odd dagger – under the dark thunderheads. We would get there, Eve would get where she needed to go. I was certain of it.
Maybe, she should have let me run to those trees. Maybe, if her hand had stayed by her side and I dashed across the thin short grass to those trees everything would have been all right.
The sorrow that engulfed me a day later was of the paralyzing kind. Eve hadn’t liked what I had to do for meat. But this, this was so much more. The sorrow I felt paled in comparison to the sorrow I saw in her eyes.
The ‘fruit’ I was so eager to get at was the most horrible thing I believe I’ve ever seen. Please, I beg, protect your soul from a sight such as hung in those trees. Nothing can prepare, or help forget the scarification the sight of that rotten ‘fruit’ produced.
Chapter 6
We stood now in the copse of death. Rotten things swayed gently in the nonexistant breeze. They weighted down the branches and their toes pointed towards the earth, an earth so stained and corrupted that no dust or motes stirred at my passing footsteps. By then, my footsteps had grown rather heavy. We were approaching the end of another 'day'.
But to stay here was insanity. To stay here under a sick yellow sky - darker now, we had traveled west quite a distance - with sick fruit hanging from dead trees was absolutely not in the picture. While my exhausted mind tried to process the 'solution-to-the-problem', my eyes happened upon Eve.
She had seated herself beneath one of the twisted, thorny, dead, yet violent trees. Her back was leaned against the trunk of this particular tree and I could see the runnels tears had made down her cheeks. Never mind the horror and revolt I felt towards this evil place, those feelings were selfish and childlike when I looked at her. All of these poor souls' pain flooded through her and came out in great sobs and tears as big and pure as the eyes they came from.
I went to her. Without any thought or hesitation, I went to her. I folded her in my arms and I wept with her, I rocked with her. I held her against spasms of pain and sadness that broke against her pale little body like huge waves against massive stone cliffs. I went to her and I held her.
I believe another piece of me died that afternoon, in that plagued land. My tears fell from my cheeks onto Eve's head, and some of them caught in the blue ribbon in her hair. Not my Ruthie's anymore, Eve's - not my Eve, she could never be mine, but perhaps I was hers for just a short time in a much larger life - blue ribbon. I think those tears, the ones that caught and held onto that blue fabric were some of last pieces of me.
The rest of me went later. The part of me I think of when I think of Abe Kastel, that part went later. Just then, in our huddle beneath the hateful tree, Eve was shaking herself loose of me and as she rose to her feet I slumped against the tree truck. I remember I couldn't see well through the tears and all. A blurry image remains in what's left of me: Eve stood under the tree in her pain and sorrow, under an umbrella of the dead and lifted each arm to grasp the toe of the body to her left and the one to her right. She wrapped her slender perfect fingers around the big toe of each and the tears streamed down her face. Her head was tilted back and the sound of unbearable compassion came from her open mouth. Maybe it came to me through my ears, maybe she connected with the me that's left, I don't know.
I don't know how long Eve's cry for the dead - not just the two right here, for all of them - went on. I know my eyes closed and my hands and arms grasped the wooden box I'd carried all this way. All through me, in every pore and cell, Eve's voice resonated on to forever.
Her hand was on my head and my eyes, squeezed shut as they were, opened slowly and my breathing turned from hitches and sobs to deep breaths. "It's okay now," the tears were still wet on her face and down her dress. Almost mechanically, I undid the strap around my box and opened it. I looked into Eve's eyes, for reassurance perhaps, whatever I looked for in those infinite blue eyes I found it.
An empty box lay before me on the ground. Opened wide the top was and Eve knelt down in front of me, she placed her hands gently against my temples again and again I can't be completely sure of what happened next. Maybe what I saw, I saw in the foreground and background around me; maybe what happened all took place in front of my old treasured, loved wooden box.
The bottom of the box seemed to glow. I tried to squint but my eyes stayed open despite my efforts. Then, in the distance past this evil orchard I could see a small hut and the name DAVID assaulted my senses with comfort and wellbeing. Maybe Eve, holding my head, turned me and my sight back to what hung above us, close up. There I saw a sight that rocked me more than anything ever has, or had, or ever will.
There swinging from the branch, a woman. She wore a big smile as her hands gripped the branch and she swung her legs back and forth. On the forward swing small giggles escaped her mouth and her full, beautiful lips. Lips I knew, I knew the silky brown hair flowing like water behind her as she giggled and swung. Delicate feet padded softly to the ground when she let go and the dust from the midsummer drought puffed up around her ankles. I knew those ankles, those knees, that smiling face coming toward me.
"I just love it here, don't you?" she managed somehow through the pure delight on her face.
I looked around at the country side, dotted with houses here and there. The orchard we were in, the tree she had been swinging from weren't doing the greatest - it was the dry season, after all - but they had buds on their branches.
"Yes, dear," I said. "But not nearly as much as I love you," and she giggled again and wrapped her arms around me and nestled her face in that special place in between the jaw and shoulder.
I fumbled in my pocket and brought out my fist closed tight.
"Love..." I took a deep breath, "Will you..." and now, looking back from this place I think in that moment we shared that telepathy that only the truly in love share.
She released a breath of relief and shouted for all the lonely hillside to hear, "YES, YES, YES" and there were tears. We shared the only kind of tears the truly in love can share. She jumped up off me and pulled me to my feet and we danced around under the half-alive trees in the setting sun. Before the world burned.
Our dancing slowed and we held each other. "I don't have no ring," I said.
"Any, Abe, any ring," she giggled into my chest. "And I don't care about rings or fancy dresses. I love you."
"Turn around, turn around for me," and she did, and I tied a blue ribbon in her hair.
"My Ruthie."
We made love on that hillside under those trees, and the sun set - or maybe the lid of the old wooden box - and it was night and dark and lovely. And has been ever since.
Afterward: For Abe
A hillside plagued with death orchards. The wind never stirs here and birds don't chirp at anytime. There is no day, no evening. There are no porches to swing on and enjoy those afternoons in. Just this cracked and bountiful, only in torment hill side. But there, down by that tree over there.
The lid on a worn yet, cared for, wooden box stood open. Blonde hair falling over the shoulders of the girl gazing into a very bright interior. Eve was crying and smiling at the same time, looking down into that box. In her left hand she held tight an old frayed blue ribbon. With reluctance she placed the ribbon inside the box and lowered the lid so very carefully. She then wrapped a leather belt around it so as to keep it closed. She was alone.
Eve rose to her feet and turned west, towards the darkness - towards him. But there, see, over there. Down the slope a ways a little shack stood all by itself. Not more than a sturdy tent, really.
With her belt bound box and loose blonde - almost white - hair and her peace gate, she made her way down the slope towards hut. David's hut, she knew that.
She paused by a crude and splintery post in the ground just short of being clear of the twisted grove of twisted trees. Her right hand reached up to grasp the post, the sign above to high for her to read: NO TURNING BACK.
