Mike Mullin - Ashfall

I retched, bringing up nothing but scalding stomach acid. When I was done trying to vomit, I dug a crude hole with my staff and buried the dead rabbit.

Darla watched.

“We should go,” I said as I finished kicking ash over the tiny grave.

Darla stared at the blackened husk of her home. The roof had collapsed completely. The walls and chimney still stood, but all the windows had burst from the heat. There were flames gnawing on the skeleton of the house here and there. Darla whispered something: “Mom,” maybe.

“It’s okay,” I said. What a stupid thing to say. It definitely was not okay.

Darla just stared. Maybe she was looking at the roiling brown smoke rising from the fire, searching for her mother’s face in the ever-shifting doppelganger cloud.

I took one of her hands in mine, pulling it away from the rabbit. I led her closer to the house, until we could feel the heat from the fire on our faces.

I stopped and tried to pull my hand away from hers, but she held on. “We should have buried her,” Darla whispered.

One of the walls crashed inward, and sparks flew into the sky. “Some people get cremated when they die,” I said. “And she’s at home. I don’t think she would have minded.”

We held hands in silence for a while. The rabbit squirmed in Darla’s other arm, and she gripped it tighter.

“You want… should we say a prayer or something?” I said. “Like a funeral?”

She nodded.

I wished I hadn’t said anything. I’d only been to one funeral, for my grandfather almost ten years ago. At that moment, I couldn’t remember a bit of it, only the waxy pallor of his skin in the casket during the viewing and the way his dead hand felt-cold and plastic, nothing like real skin.

But I had to try. “Dear God, um…” Not such a good start. I had no idea what to say. I stood silently, holding Darla’s hand, searching my brain for something, anything, to talk about. I thought about the first time I had seen Mrs. Edmunds pouring corn into the gristmill, right before I passed out on the barn floor. So I began there:

“When I met Mrs. Edmunds, I was almost dead. I’d been running-skiing, I guess-away from trouble for days. I was bleeding, dizzy with pain, struggling to keep pushing one foot in front of the other. I was hoping for nothing more than a quiet barn to hide in, a place where I could heal or die.

“Instead, I met Mrs. Edmunds and Darla. They took me in, fed me, and sewed up my side. I’m alive because of the kindness they showed to me, a complete stranger.

“God, I don’t know if I caused Mrs. Edmunds’ death.” I tried to drop Darla’s hand, but she held on. “Maybe I led Target to her, or maybe it was just horrible luck. I wish… I wish Target had killed me instead of Mrs. Edmunds. I would have been dead anyway if not for her help.

“But I can’t change that. And I guess You have some plan.” (A crappy plan, one that had transformed Iowa into an ashen hell, that had left Darla an orphan and me unable to discover whether I was an orphan or not. But saying all that wouldn’t help her.) “So I’m thankful that I met Mrs. Edmunds. She welcomed me, made me feel… loved, I guess. Wherever she is now, please welcome her the way she welcomed me, a bleeding stranger at her barn door. Amen.”

“Amen,” Darla said. “I miss you already, Mom,” she added, whispering.

I hugged her. We stood there a long time, warmed by the dying embers of Mrs. Edmunds’ funeral pyre, the rabbit squirming between us. Three fading sparks of life on an endless, burnt field of ash.

I snapped my boots into my skis and shouldered Target’s pack. Darla hadn’t moved.

“We’ve got to go,” I said.

Darla stroked the rabbit.

“Put your skis on and get your poles.”

Nothing.

“Damn it, Darla, we’ve got to go. There’s no shelter here now.” It was probably midmorning by now, and I was feeling antsy. I didn’t know why. The burnt buildings, Target’s body-I wanted to get away from the farm as fast as possible.

But Darla wasn’t budging.

I wanted to scream in frustration, but instead I said as gently as I could, “Put your skis on, now, please.”

Finally, she moved. She transferred the rabbit to one arm and slowly clipped her boots into the skis.

“Pick up your poles.” I tried to take the rabbit from her, but she shied away, clutching it with both hands. I gave up and handed the ski poles to her. She took both of them in one hand, the other still clutching the rabbit tightly against her chest.

I sighed and pushed off powerfully with my pole and staff, heading for the road in front of Darla’s farm. About thirty feet off, I stopped and turned. She hadn’t inched forward at all.

“Come on, Darla. Get moving!” I yelled.

She shuffled out to meet me.

It was excruciatingly slow. Darla held the poles as deadweight in one hand. Twice, the rabbit got unruly, and Darla dropped her poles to cuddle him. The second time, I stopped and strapped her ski poles to the back of my pack.

We made better time then. At least the rabbit wasn’t holding us up-with both hands free, Darla could keep him under control. Better time didn’t mean we made good time, though. Without poles, Darla couldn’t balance as well or push herself along. I had to stop again and again to wait for her to catch up.

I couldn’t keep going this way. I felt terrible for Darla. She’d lost her home, her mother, everything she’d built, and almost all her rabbits. I thought I partly understood how she felt-at that moment I wanted to stop, curl up into a ball, and let someone take care of me again. But even more than I wanted to check out and give my emotional wounds time to scab over, I wanted to live. Neither Darla nor I were likely to survive if we kept heading for Warren at a snail’s pace. So when we reached the intersection where I’d planned to turn east, I turned south toward Worthington instead. Darla followed me.

A couple miles farther on, we skied down a steep hill into a small valley. A creek burbled merrily under the bridge at the bottom of the hill. It had washed away some of the ash from each bank, revealing a few tendrils of sickly yellow vegetation.

I stopped, shrugged off my pack, and sat on the guardrail along the edge of the bridge. As I dug through the backpack, hunting for lunch, I talked to Darla.

“We can leave the rabbit here. There’s water. There are some plants to eat. It’ll be okay.” I didn’t really believe this. That rabbit was dead either way. If it stayed with Darla, she’d probably eat it when she got hungry enough. The plants by the creek looked dead-and there weren’t enough of them to sustain a mouse, let alone a rabbit. I was just hoping she’d give it up, so we could move at a reasonable pace.

“No,” Darla replied.

Okay then, that was progress, I guessed. It was the first word she’d said since we’d left the farm over two hours before. I handed her a strip of smoked rabbit. Lunch.

She held the strip of meat in one hand and the rabbit in the other and sat beside me on the guardrail to eat. The rabbit sniffed the meat and wrinkled its nose-in disgust, perhaps.

When she finished eating, Darla rummaged through the backpack one handed. She came up with a handful of cornmeal and started feeding the stupid rabbit out of her hand.

“What are you doing?” I shouted. “We need that food!”

Darla gave no sign that she’d heard me. I yelled some more, but I might as well have screamed at the ash for all the good it was doing. I thought the rabbits wouldn’t eat corn, but it seemed to be nibbling on it now. Maybe it had gotten so hungry it couldn’t afford to be picky anymore. Anyway, I closed up the backpack and took off, skiing along the road to Worthington.