Ashes

Ashes

That was the year the sky fell. It drifted around them in pieces, some clumps as big as mittens, others like eyelashes, feather-light. For all the world like silver snow. But of course, it didn’t get cold enough to snow much later, after the sun stayed blocked and the sky was a steady, righteous gray. After the caldera erupted, fire, water, earth, air combusted and merged, covering the browngold world to create this new one – cold, wet, dark.

That day, when his mother finally succumbed to the fallout, Jam became alone. Jupiter Ascending McSweetley was a strange child, even when the world wasn’t coming to its end. Wily, stubborn, agile and scary-smart – in these times, a gift more than a curse. Of course, the fruit fell close to the tree. His scientist mother, Megby McSweetley, with her last breaths, said, “Jammer. My love, it’s all in the book. Run. Now.” Her bony fingers pushed the threadbare backpack into his arms, she gasped a final, awful breath, and died.

Jam had no time, really, to escape from this final earthquake (because, really, how could there be another? This one felled mountains, suffocated already choked rivers, upended trees, and disappeared almost every living thing. And always the ash, mountains of it, high as houses.) Jam hardly knew a time without disaster in his 13 years. Fires and floods, earthquakes, war, murderous thugs, rampant chaos. Now, he knew where to go. It was all in the book. He grabbed the backpack, plus his own, packed with a blanket, pot, tarp, knife, small tools, dried fruits and beans.

Megby’s notebook was filled with science and stories, lists, ideas, recipes. But Jam knew what she wanted him to find. Her maps, pages of them bursting out of the notebook, would lead to huts, water and caves above their cabin on the mountain.

For days, Jam moved through the lunar landscape until he found the tiny hunter’s shack, hidden among boulders and trees. Not too far, a weakened creek ran into a narrow underground cave. It was there he stopped to catch a few beetles that had burrowed into the thick layers of ash. As he ate, he read. Then slept, like the ash, like the gray world, like the dead. In the morning, he dug along the roots, down from the cave. He found the two backpacks, wrapped in heavy canvas. In one, was money. Paper dollars, the kind not used for decades. Thousands of them, 20s, 50s, hundreds. He counted $20,000 altogether. In the other backpack were his mother’s seeds. What she had lived for, besides Jam. What she believed could saved the few who made it through.

The wolfhound was there again that day, silent and curious, following Jam as he went back to the hut and made a fire, which he fed with the paper money. He had seen her yesterday, too. This was the day they both surrendered to trust. When she finally came close enough, he discovered that underneath her pewter fur she once had been white, pure white. He called her Neju, or as close the name was that sounded like what he said the first time she approached him, “I need you.”.

The paper was a gift and he silently thanked his mother for knowing how much he’d need the dry paper in this dark, wet world. With Neju curled at his side, he read about the seeds, and puzzled out the maps, hoping he could succeed in bringing them into a new world.

The sky held no relief. No stars, ever. Lightless days, leaden nights enclosed fear, struggles, even nanoseconds of joy. Days passed with Jam and Neju, following maps, exploring, hunting, making temporary homes. Up and down mountains, as they were, powered by grief. They saw no soul, and precious few chippies, squirrels, rabbits, nothing bigger. Until that evening, fire fully aflame for the dinner Neju was out hunting. Jam was hit from behind, a punch to the head, a dull knife in the back. The evil-doer had found paper dollar ashes and followed their tracks. He grabbed the packs, and what else he could, and skulked around for more. Neju attacked before he saw her, but he managed to take out her eye and break her foreleg in the battle. Neju caught his throat and he died quickly.

Deadish, boy and dog lay together as they slowly reentered the harsh world. Their fever dreams must have meshed, how could they not? Their broken flesh and bones must have healed through a mutual miracle. And they did. Wretched and wrecked, they survived. They ate the last bits of dried fruit, and the tiny, stillwarm creatures Neju eventually laid beside the boy. Steamed water, bone broth. And called out to the nothing sky with what could even be called prayer, though surely Jam knew nothing of that.

He didn’t choose survival. He didn’t want to dig around those first tips of green or to crush the sharp leaves, the smell filling his mouth like a meal. But still, that year, the silver sage rose slowly up on the mountaintop, pushing through the ash, whether it wanted to or not.