When he woke in the woods in the dark, he’d marvel at the cold, the boy, the ash, the gray, the world, the silence, the lack of quotations marks and apostrophes in their dialogue.
Are we the good guys?
Yes.
Are there bad guys?
Yes.
A lot of them?
Yes.
But we carry the fire, dont we?
Yes.
Okay.
Okay.
He shuffled through the ash with a shopping cart. He fixed it when it needed fixing. The boy asked a lot of vague, depressing questions. He answered in kind.
He thought of her. Then he slept. Gray flakes fell like snow. He dreamed. He woke.
The silence.
The boy was hungry. He was hungry. He coughed up blood.
Sometimes they found food stored away. Sometimes they hid from cannibals. Once they found a bunch of people. Later they found an old man. And a boat. Someone stole their stuff.
Rivers sluggish in their beds. The sun obscured behind a scrim of gray.
The boy would live.
If this Pulitzer-winning style of writing isn’t the word of God God never spoke.
Once there were brook trout that smelled like moss and hummed.