Southbound

There is no quickness to the end of all things.

The woman seen crouching at the fire in the flatlands of a place known as Oklahoma watches the dark beyond the rim of firelight as if it would bring something deadly, something inhuman, yet she expected nothing more than another person.

No one came.

Whether by luck or circumstance her fire in the black night plains went unseen. A red sun rises over the endless tracts of land heralded by a purple morning skyline wherein the stronger stars still shone.

Six years since seeing home, two years spent walking to it. There were days of hunger and thirst, days of pain. She gathered wounds like bad memories whether by the intent of others or by accident. Her face is scarred, she is missing two fingers on her left hand, her breasts were cut off in a shack back west in a place near Gallup, New Mexico.

Thus cauterized and in agony, she remembers the face of the man who did it. He who cooked the meat of others from his corral of people.

Home awaits. She tells herself that, closest to a prayer and conversation as she would get.

She stokes her morning cookfire to life from the ashes of her night fire. She cooks a small rodent of unknown kind. The meat is unseasoned. There is no luxury to the meal. The wind brings with it a scouring cold, unceasing, gusts strong enough to move her unbalanced as she ate, crouched there alone on the prairie like some exile from an ancient tribe.

She crushes the fire and its warmth beneath a worn hiking boot and gathers her supplies into a backpack and moves on. Marching on into the eastern sun with her long shadow cast behind her like the past clung to her heart until it blended back into the deep western dark.

She watches the highway a half-mile to her left. The sun is tracking to noon. As she hides in the tall wildgrass, she watches two trucks move west. People are piled in the back, supplies are hauled in flatbed trailers. She sees the vague shape of them, their guns. She asks nobody about how long their gas will last them.

In a time that seemed decades ago, her vehicle and the gas that went with it were stolen mid-way through Arizona.

Before that she, her friends, her lover, all occupants of the Vegas valley watched the world fall apart piecemeal. Like being trapped in slowly boiling water, by the time the heat rose to fatal levels all acted as the drowning do. Clawing over another to escape the boil. She remembers fires alight in the valley from one side to the other. The sounds of anarchy, sirens, screams of the deranged and the beggared.

The woman on the plains watches the trucks move west and upon seeing no other travelers, she moves on.

That night she lies on her back to watch the stars fall. She hungers, although earlier she caught, plucked, and roasted a bird on a wooden spit. Her fire is out. She smells of smoke.

In the autumn cold, she is wrapped in blankets as if something cocooned. Her breath is a dark, puffing shape against the starswept sky. She sees a lance of orange light streak toward its doom and she smiles and makes a wish. It felt wrong not to do so.

There is no notion that the endless dark pays heed.

In the morning she wakes with the exposed skin of her face chapped and dry. She shakes off the weariness set in her bones and crawls over to the small firepit. Her hand hovers over the ash pile. There is faint warmth. She places a handful of coals from a bag onto the ash and places dry grass on it for kindling and leans down to blow gently, sees the dull cinders flare orange and the grass begin to smoke. She stokes the fire alight with a stick and fights the morning chill by warming her hands.

Where sky meets earth an orange sun leers up from the horizon and setting the crest of clouds afire like the glowing wings of some mythic bird.

Home awaits, she tells herself.

She rolls her blankets and fastens them to her backpack. Once the straps are snug to her shoulders and the hip belt snaps securely round her waist, the scarred woman moves on.