HE STARED INTO THE COLD, GREY SKY, hoping the face of a divine being would push past the haze, and reveal his life to be an illusion. Her hands were cold; colder than when she was alive. He knelt beside her in the field, wanting to cry, but lacking the energy.
He felt like a specimen encased in amber; unable and unwilling to move. Time seemed frozen alongside him, until he took note of the amassing snow. It had risen two inches up his knees in the time he had been immobile. She was being buried, covered up like a dark secret, but in the world post-fall of polite, this atrocity didn’t need to be hidden. He didn’t have to worry about the force of the law or the judgement of others. He could move on with his life and face no repercussions… but he didn’t want to.
Snow climbed up the sides of her face like moss up the brickwork of an abandoned building left to the ravages of time in the forest of exile. The blood she had lost was already covered by a fresh dusting of precipitation. Now only his own blood shown crimson on the earth’s canvas as it continued to trickle from the gash on the side of his neck.
She had missed his jugular, poor thing. An inch higher and it would have been her kneeling over him.
He wished she had slashed an inch higher.
Snow frosted his skin and settled in the pulsating wound in his neck. Steam pumped into the air with each breath through his open mouth. He couldn’t believe what he had done. She looked so gentle, so innocent. Her hay colored hair was spread haphazardly across the snow like the head of an unruly mop. He hadn’t thought himself capable of such an act, even in this new world.
The slice along his neck stung, but he felt the pain of the wound he had lavished upon the woman far more intimately. He could see past the meat of her throat to her vocal cords. He imagined her singing voice, delicate and warm. He dropped her knife into the snow and it disappeared into the powder.
I should have let her do it, he thought. She was scared, and she had every right to be. He knew he looked scarier than he was at heart, his large frame undiminished by the scarcity of food. How could she have known he wasn’t like the others. Maybe she wasn’t wrong. Maybe he wasn’t unlike the others. They all took life just the same. But they don’t feel bad about it, he told himself.
Unable to reconcile his actions, he decided not to forgive himself. He wanted to freeze solid, to be preserved like an early human, awaiting discovery by a future generation who had sorted out the state of the world. But he knew this world couldn’t be sorted out. Not anymore. The damage was done.
In the end, it was the blood loss that did him in before the cold or the hunger. By the time he fell dead on top of her, there was a thick layer of snow to separate their bodies.
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