A Day In the Life Contest 2040 - The Reader

The Reader

“No need to bury the dead twice,” Lucas tells me as he lifts the shovel. The grooves in his forehead cut across the still-raw scar, the flesh red against the stark paleness of his face. I want to smooth out the wrinkle, want to make the scar gone. But we do not touch when we dig. Not until later, in the dark, and even then we’d do it tentatively, as if ashamed.

The shovel sinks into the snow with a scrape, snow wet enough to hold shape, each rounded mound landing in a clump over the black-shrouded form of a man down below. I step closer to the edge of the hole. I feel nothing for this one. It scares me a little that I don’t, but after burying so many strange men, I’m simply longing for the fire in our shabby cabin and a soft bed to lay down in. Only, this one should scare me. He hadn’t been a stranger to me, exactly. I should be terrified of what I’d done, but I’m only numb with the cold and the tired.

With gloved hands, Lucas flattens out the small hill he’d made. The buck leather is frayed, old, but it’s better than the nothing I have on my hands. That’s why I’m not helping today. No gloves. With the tokens we’ll get for today’s work, I hope to have enough for a used pair. I kick the snow off my boots, toes tingling, a strange ringing at the tips. I can almost taste the smoke of the fire in my nostrils, can feel steam coming off my coat, the stinging in my eyes.

“Not long now,” says Lucas, as if he senses my impatience. Maybe he does. Lucas kneels at the fresh grave and lowers his head. I know not to make a sound when he starts to pray, so I step back, the soles of my boots making a tiny squeak. I stop and stand still, eyes on his bowed head.

“Take this man unto you, for he’d done all he could here. He may not have been a good man, but a man he was,” Lucas starts softly.

I close my eyes and picture the face of the dead man. A cruel face if I ever saw one, dark eyed, big boned, brutish. He’d only gotten what was due him, ‘far as I’m concerned, but Lucas–he believes in forgiveness for everybody. “Take this man into the bowels of hell, if there is such a thing, and do with him what you will. I want him to howl in agony, as he made Mel howl. I want him to feel the kind of pain her poor mother felt, when Mel came back that morning, bruised and bloodied and no longer a girl. I want the sonofabitch to suffer,” I mutter under my breath, a shadow of a whisper that never reaches the man kneeling at the grave. The man who believes forgiveness will fix the brokenness in us.

When we first came to Molton, half-starved and hurting everywhere from all the walking we’d done, we all believed as Lucas does, I think. We couldn’t have made it otherwise, after all we’d seen. Needed to believe we were still human, not beasts, no matter what some of the men did. And the women, too. Selling off their babies for a loaf of bread, a scrap of cloth to cover their bodies with–that was too much. We forgave them all. The men who butchered other men, at first, to get with their women, then later, to sell off for food. That was the thing of it–Lucas had told me then–people would do anything to survive.

I didn’t think that I would. The baby changed everything.

Lucas stands and wipes the snow off his pants, then turns to me. I see the cold on him, the wet staining his knees.

“I’m not angry at you, Adele,” he says, not unkindly, but he doesn’t step toward me. “Someone else would have done it, you know…. I’d rather it hadn’t been you, but it’s done now.”

I say nothing. I don’t know what I could say to make him see it, see what I see, the kind of darkness one can’t be prayed out of. I saw it in the man’s eyes when he looked at Mel the first time, the kind of hunger bread couldn’t fix. I should have ended him then, should have spared Mel the pain of it.

I’d be the one in that hole then, with Lucas putting the snow over me, saying his prayers over me. That would have been alright, except then somebody else would have to do it with the others. Somebody would have to read the darkness in these men that came to us now every fortnight. Somebody would have to protect the few girls we had left.

Lucas takes me by the arm and I shiver at the touch. We walk back slowly, though I want to run. Run from Lucas’s touch, from the accusations I know he’s holding back. And from him knowing me as he does, knowing that I’m still trying to save her, our Sophie. She’d have been Mel’s age now, had she lived. Had I kept her safe then. Had I known how to read the faces of men.

But I wasn’t a reader then, and not for a few long years after. Not until we’d come to Molton, smaller then, just a few military barracks and a silo. A place so deserted no rail went there. It was safe, and the silo had enough grain in it to keep us fed, even if we lived on bread and fish. It wasn’t so bad. Not until the traders found us….

I shuffle up the small hill, alongside a waterfall, frozen blue now, though I can still hear its quiet murmur under all that ice. A sound so plaintive, as if a living creature–trapped, caged. A lark with its wings shattered from when I was a little girl, so many snows ago. It didn’t sing when it couldn’t fly anymore, but it made this soft gurgling noise deep in its throat, as if asking the trees to take it.

I see our cabin come into view, a swirl of coal black smoke trailing into the stark blue of the noon sky. I force my legs to move faster and Lucas lets go of my arm.

I know what I must do now, know where the darkness I hunt for is. They will need a new reader. The thought of it pains less than it should. I should have saved Mel after all.

I let Lucas help me out of my coat, my fingers stiff with the cold. Today, I will let him do as he pleases. I will make my memory in him last. I hope he forgives me in the end, as he does everybody. But maybe, for me, he will cry.

The way he had for Sophie so many years ago. The way he never had since. Maybe, too, there’ll be a whisper of me left, buried under the blue ice of the waterfall, murmuring my soft lark song. Until Spring, when things come alive and Lucas can hunt and fish and touch the soft buds of the tree branches. Until the new people come and he can love again then. I smile and put on the teakettle that doesn’t whistle anymore and take out two porcelain cups, the only things we have left from before The Event. Today I will not worry about them breaking.

This will be my last recording. Today is December 3rd, 13 AE. I am Adele Swan, a Reader. Signing off.

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This is an entry for a One Day in 2040 Contest
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With many thanks to the fantastic editors and writers at The Writers Block on Discord for all your help with this story.

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