The Man sucked on his teeth. The saliva worked in his mouth resting comfortably in the cup of his tongue before spitting it out with a wet-dry smack on the dusty floor. Sunlight glared meanly through dirt smeared broken glass, casting about a grey storm light intermittently pierced by golden lances. The building groaned and creaked and moaned. It settled with a yawn. The Man peered down through a great maw in the floor while tonguing a wobbling tooth. “Why make this?” he muttered half to himself. He had never learned to measure things but the hole was wide and deep. The Man sat down with his legs dangling over the lip of the opening. He took his pack off and laid it to rest beside him before stretching out on his back. He laid there for a few moments, blankly examining the ceiling. The Man closed his eyes and dozed off.
Empty footsteps stirred The Man from his shallow sleep. He sat up and looked around. “You there?” a throaty voice called.
“Over here.”
The footsteps became louder as they approached, echoing about the empty floor, the empty building, the empty city. The Woman entered from a darkened room all clothed in dark cloth and leathers. A bandana dangled limply in her hand as she lowered her hood. “What are you doing?” The Woman inquired. “Nothin. Jest nappin,” The Man, again, muttered. He stood and stretched his arms and back letting loose a series of cracking sounds. The Woman gave him a flat look that he responded with a toothy grin. “I wish you wouldn’t do that around me.”
“I ain’t done nothing to nobody. Specially yew.” The Woman sighed resignedly and took off her pack dropping it with a thud that echoed and kicked up a flurry of dust, some of it caught and caged in those lances. She knelt down and unstrung a couple of rabbits that dangled stiffly from the pack and tossed them to The Man. He deftly and greedily snatched them out of the air. He looked the tiny animals over. Their grey fur flecked with half melted snowflakes. “Get skinnin’,” she said. He nodded still staring at the dead rabbits. He settled down on his haunches stretching over to drag his own pack over to him and withdrew a knife. He grabbed hold of the first rabbit taking its hind legs and cutting the hide just above each leg joint so as to make a ring. From there he made a slice from the rings up along its backside allowing him to pull the hide away to expose the rabbit’s tail bone that jutted out. “Always thought it kinda funny,” he said while cutting the tail off. “What’s that?” The Woman asked. She was working on building a fire removing small sticks from her pack. “Tryn not lit this one on fire now,” The Man warned gesturing with his knife at the building.
“Bet anyway I always thought it kinda funny that animals like this rabbit ere have these tails. Lerks like a thumb that just sets itself above the ass.” The Man giggled at his own words tossing the severed tail into the gaping hole beside him. The Woman shook her head with a smile. The Man made two more rings on the front legs this time and then set the knife beside him. He proceeded to pull the hide down until he got it loose around the front legs where they joint met the torso. He began working his fingers into the sleeves of the front legs, expanding the hide and working the legs through it until the hide was free and swinging about the base of the rabbit’s skull. He lay the rabbit flat on its exposed stomach and shifted so that he was on his knees. He pressed the blade of the knife against the base of the rabbit’s skull pressing his weight shifting the knife back and forth in a see-saw motion. A slight cracking sound echoed in the building as the spine was severed from the skull. The Man proceeded to cut the rest of the head free. Dark, congealed blood sputtered out in some gobs. The Man removed the remainder of the hide from the decapitated body.
“Here.”
The Woman caught the rabbit and nestled in by the popping and sizzling fire. She drew her own knife pinching the skin of the stomach and threading the point of the knife into the raised skin. The Man settled into removing the hide of the other rabbit.
The sun had yet to rise fully. Still exhausted from the previous days exercises, its tendril-like arms stretched over the edge of the world offering whispers of what the day will be. Yawning, before it scrapes the blackness from the land around and shakes it off its arms. The Man had seen the sinuous nature of the sun before in The City. In the winter, like this, when the snow falls thick and heavy, it will be too bright to look at the ground on clear days. The oblivion of the earth by white. He had been there long enough to know that when winter came and settled in like an old friend that you forgot you disliked and the food became scarcer. But he had been there long enough to know where different animals tended to congregate and which areas in The City only got thin rags of snow instead of the heavy blankets.
The Woman speared the two rabbits and set them on the spit and left them to roast. She took the organs she had removed and threw them into the hole where they lay with their heads.
“Still got dat liver and kidney?
The Woman grunted, “Course I still got ‘em. What kind of ass do you think I am? You wash up?”
“Yeah I washed up.”
“Promise?”
“I promise.”
“Cause I dont need you makin a mess again and getting yourself sick.”
“I said I done washed up. If I said I done washed then I done washed. Goddamn.”
The Man squatted down by the fire and the two of them just stayed in a kind of quiet waiting for the rabbits to cook and to eat and to continue on with the day soon to arrive.
His heavy boot crunched the snow, collapsing beneath his weight like the hollow thing that it was. All white and cold. Cold fire was what The Man thought it was. Fire that burned the other way. More slowly. He looked ahead to where The Woman was trudging and then off to his side up and through a narrow alleyway. Cautious and glittering yellow eyes cast their gaze back.
“Got a wolf,” he called to The Woman. She looked back with lazy eyes and just nodded to acknowledge the fact. They just kept going along. Occasionally looking backwards to make sure there were no predators following their footprints so temporarily embedded in the snow.
Iron blood filled his nostrils. In the blinding bright the only thing capable of guiding him was the equally bright red spots that spotted and flecked the ground, reflected in his vision, obscured only slightly by his shrouded breath that fogged and silvered in the cold, cold air. The blood trail led into one of enormous shelters that he has utilized. The ones that tower over even the trees and swayed like them, too. He passed by some rusted arches and twisted structures of unknown purpose, forgotten and swallowed up by some great beast, pass these things and through the shelters entrance. The trail was somehow more obvious once indoors. The blood was darker and offered a seemingly more contrasted color with the grey of the stone of the floor than on the snow. More out of place here than there. The blood flowed upward. He stood there, at the foot of some stairs, and looked up toward the ominous and inviting top. He drew his pistol, unsure of what to find. His brain nudging him to be cautious, he could still not contain his excitement and curiosity as to what he would find. Somewhat giddy, he mounted the steps bounding up them two or three at a time. At the top the blood trail smeared and off to the right, and, just around the corner, he was upon her.
“We’re here.”
The Man shook himself out of his stupor and looked around. They had arrived. A squat building that lay near the edge of all the others and near a section of land filled with trees and a pond boxed off, isolated and forgotten by the stone roads laid around it. “Right,” he said. They went up to the top level, ambling up the stairs with an occasional shiver. There were only five levels to the building and each level had small individual rooms. The Man had been told, at some point in his life, that it was used to shelter dozens of people. There, in this building, the duo stored most of their supplies and luxuries in various rooms and the like. The park nearby offered a kind of sanctuary for animals as well as a source of water when it wasn’t frozen over.
At the top level they entered into one of the rooms and settled in. A fire pit lay on several metal sheets that overlapped, and surrounded by stone to prevent embers lighting the place ablaze like a new dawn that traveled too close to the world. The Man went and threw a couple of small logs and twigs into the pit and stoked alive the embers still smoldering black and red in its bed of ash. The wall behind the pit partially exposed them to the weather, but the stone wall for the pit helped funnel most of the smoke outside.
The Man glanced over as The Woman bent over to warm herself by the newborn fire.
The Man glanced over at the woman by the fire he had crafted. Underneath a blanket of various animal furs and hides. Her breathing was a ragged and stuttered. She stirred a little, whimpering in pain like a wolf pup without a she-wolf to care for it. The Man turned and slumped down, not sure what to do with her beyond to wait and see.
“Ya know, those-”The Man began, unsure of what the word was exactly. He had heard it before, from the Old Man, but he had forgotten it. The Woman looked at him curiously. Still he could not think of the word and opted instead to using his finger to draw an arrowhead in the sky with a line crossing through.
“Letters?”
“Yeah! Letters. Yew know ‘bout ‘em, right?”
The Woman nodded. “Yeah, I know ‘em. Why?” The Man grinned.
“Somethin’ I’ve seen ‘round before, I wanna show it to you. Tomorrow.” He added, seeing the shadowy sky. The Woman nodded and smiled small-like.
“Why’d you help me?” the woman asked with a nervous edge that cut and caused her voice to waver. The Man stared at her a moment. He shrugged. “I don’t rightly know. I jest did. Yew were in pain so I helped.”
The Man stood and shuffled over to the fire, stirring a pot that was bubbling gleefully, and spooned it into a bowl. He proffered the bowl to the woman. She shirked back a little. Uncertain. The Man frowned. Peering into the bowl so as to inspect its contents. Also uncertain. He proffered it again. “Jest deer meat.” the woman accepted the bowl with a bow of her head. The Man returned to where he was, settling on his haunches, his knees drawn to his chin and he stared at the woman. Silently encouraging her to eat. the woman took a spoonful. “Thank you,” she said. The Man didn’t respond. He had never seen something so exotic before. This person before him, who acted and looked similar to him, but wasn’t.
He had dressed her wounds and clothed her in something warm and dry, and he was disconcerted by the physical differences between them. The larger chest and the lack of other things. “How do yew piss?” The Man said abruptly. the woman glanced up from her bowl, regarded him a moment, then returned to eating.
“Same as you I reckon.”
The Man spat. “I reckon yew don’t.” She shrugged.
“Don’t know what else to tell ya.”
The Man just nodded still confused by the woman he did not understand. Unsure of the person he just invited into his city.
The Man crawled in under the several layers of blankets made from hides and furs that he had collected over the years. The ones not used for clothes. The Woman followed suit and they were both covered by the blankets. They lay there in sexless silence and pinching the edges of their makeshift blankets lest the cold air invade, the warmth from their bodies emanating heat that filled their bed and was trapped with them. And as they lay there warm and quiet save for the few breaths that came out ragged, they slowly dozed off, drifting about somewhere in that infinite dream space.