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.
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