Jo Treggiari: Ashes, Ashes

Great piles of sheets and bedspreads, mattresses and pillows were piled sky-high in every neighborhood, then doused in gasoline and coaxed into infernos that burned for weeks. When the wind was coming from the east, Lucy imagined she could still smell the acrid fumes like burnt hair, could still see the towers of black smoke billowing against the blazing blue sky. It was not until the Long Dry was over and the Long Wet began again that the fires were finally quenched by the pelting rains. The parched dirt liquefied into slow-moving rivers of sludge and covered everything in mud, including the pits—the deep trenches used once the cemeteries were full, where bodies were stacked in rows like cut logs and scattered with quick lime to hurry the decay in an attempt to prevent reinfection. Then the controlled bombings began, turning high-rises into massive concrete cairns over the sites where thousands had died within days of one another. The skeletal bodies, the livid marks on blackened skin, were buried under tons of rock, and all the crushing details of life as it used to be were erased.

The memories she tried to preserve were of her life before the plague descended, and in her mind it was like those times were lit by a gentler sun, all Technicolor blurry and beautiful. She remembered the smallest things: her mother’s buttermilk pancakes and homemade blackberry jam, the smell of fabric softener, the feel of socks without holes. Now, looking at her grimy fingernails and dirt-encrusted skin, she was amazed at how much she had changed. How things like homework, a daily shower, and a hot breakfast on the table seemed so unimaginable to her now.

She was certainly not lucky. She was Lucy, plain and simple.

She leaned back on her heels, staring at the flattened pile of dry grasses where she slept, her sleeping bag with her vintage leather motorcycle jacket scrunched up for a pillow; the crooked shelf she’d hung from a couple of branches holding a dented tin plate and bowl; a camping knife, fork, and spoon strung on a piece of string so she wouldn’t lose them; her backpack with the essentials; a change of clothing. All she had left in the world besides her knife, the survival manual she’d scooped off the floor of a bookshop with all the windows smashed out, and a few other personal items. The book was battered and stained, pages escaping from the cracked binding, but it was precious.

She scraped her hair back off her sweaty forehead. It was too short to stay tucked behind her ears and just long enough to fall into her eyes constantly. She felt an oozing wetness on her cheek and looked at her hands. Mud, blood, and who knew what else. Tears? Lucy didn’t cry too often. She figured she’d used them all up by now. She bit her lip hard between her teeth and stood up clumsily. She’d been crouched over for so long that her right foot had gone to sleep. She dragged the screen back over the doorway, then limped over to the bucket she kept filled with rainwater and rinsed her hands, drying them roughly on the legs of her jeans.

The turtle wasn’t getting any deader, and she had a lot to do before she lost the last of the daylight. She walked back over to the rough table she’d made out of a few pallets and peered down at the manual, held flat under a couple of rocks. The instructions had seemed simple enough. The capture had been easier than she had expected: sneaking up on the creature while it sunbathed on a mud bar on the shore of the Hudson Sea, grabbing it by the thin leather whip of a tail, and holding it well away from her body until she could shove a stick between the snapping jaws. And she hadn’t felt much sympathy, not after it tried to bite her; hadn’t felt so much as a twinge, even though before everything that had happened she’d been a strict vegetarian. No, she’d held it flat against the ground with the pressure of her knee, waggled another stick in front of the cruel, predatory-bird mouth until the neck was stretched taut, and then bopped it hard on its little old lady head with a handy rock.

She checked the book again. There was a page missing; there must be. She flipped backward and forward, looking for the sequence of actions that would yield four slabs of pink meat, as pristine and antiseptic as anything you could have bought off a refrigerated shelf in a grocery store. If there had still been any around. She stabbed at the creature in a sudden fury. The knife turned on the shell. She yelped and tossed it from her in disgust. She’d gouged her left palm—a long, wide gash that instantly welled blood. She sucked on her hand, not really enjoying the coppery taste. She pulled her bandanna from her neck and wrapped it around the wound, pulling the ends tight in a knot with her teeth. Then she kneeled down and picked up the knife, rubbing the dirt from it and checking the blade for damage. She heaved a sigh of relief. It seemed okay. She ran her thumb over the edge, feeling a burr of roughness, the smallest of nicks. It would need to be re-honed before she could continue.

“Stupid, stupid, stupid,” she told herself.

At the bottom of her backpack was a narrow rectangle of gray stone. It felt like fine sandpaper. Five sweeps of the blade against it and the edge was sharp enough to draw a thin line of blood across the fleshy part of her thumb. She turned the knife over to sharpen the other side.

Lucy walked back over to the book and pushed her hair back behind her ears again with force. The gory remains of the turtle were laid out on some broad leaves. It looked nothing like the neat illustration. The vibrantly colored picture showed tidy quarters of pale rosy meat—not this mutilated lumpy mass leaking muddy water and blood. The shell was the problem. Bony, hard as granite, it just wouldn’t come off. She’d followed the instructions, tossing the corpse into a saucepan of water over the fire. She’d even left the turtle in the pot for longer than the ten minutes specified, but now she had to wonder if perhaps the water hadn’t been hot enough.

The words danced in front of her eyes. She stared so long that they stopped making any kind of sense. The sun was setting, and the light leaking through the willow screens was dim. Lucy inserted the knife between the shell and the carcass and jimmied it around. There was a snap and the tip of the blade broke off. She stared at the knife for a moment, disbelieving, and then with a cry of rage, she picked up and threw the book with all her strength, sending it skidding across the dirt floor.

“Crap!” she yelled, and instantly was aware of the frustration welling up in her throat and the hot tears coming. She bit down hard on her lower lip until the pain pushed back the angry sobs catching in her throat. Deep breath . You did not waste food. Not when it was so scarce. Not when the birds were poison and squirrels were skittish. Carefully she checked over the knife. The main part of the blade, about six inches, was still good. She could use it for most jobs. With a sigh, Lucy bent down and picked up the book, shuffling the pages back into the binding and smoothing the cover.

She leaned over the body, poked at it with her finger. The turtle’s legs flopped like a rag doll. She couldn’t imagine anything less appetizing, but there was no way she was going to give up now. She hadn’t eaten anything since that morning, and then it had only been a scoop of porridge and a handful of dried, shriveled raspberries, which had tasted moldy. She took a couple of pieces of wood from the scanty pile stacked beside her and added them to the fire. She held her hand over the mouth of the cooking pot. It was hardly steaming. The wood was too green, the fire still not hot enough; the cooking stones barely sizzled when she aimed a gobbet of spit at them, and the dented saucepan of water refused to boil.

She sighed. Her fists were clenched and she could feel the pinch of her nails against her palms. It was already too late in the day to build up a good fire. The turtle’s mottled skin, the ragged ruin of its neck, were taking on an unhealthy gray appearance. And she could smell something swampy and briny, like stagnant water. It was already cooler than it had been for the last six months, but still warm enough to turn meat bad fast. If the last four hours weren’t going to be a complete waste of time, she’d have to do something. Lucy hefted one of the heavy, river-smoothed rocks she kept nearby and smashed it into the shell, which broke into irregular pieces, some large enough to dig out with her fingers, some small bits, like yellow pottery shards, embedded into the leathery skin of the turtle’s underside. She went to work picking out the pieces until she could make a long incision in the belly. She shoved her hand in under the tough hide and scooped out the stomach and intestines, careful to breathe through her mouth. She’d gutted plenty of fish in the last year, and the looping entrails didn’t bother her too much anymore. They were neat little parcels as long as she was careful not to puncture them. She piled them on a few broad dock leaves and covered them up against the flies. Later she’d bait her fishing lines with them and see if the catfish and eels liked innards better than the night crawlers she normally used. She flipped the turtle over, smashed the upper plate with the rock, and picked out as much of the shell as she could. After consulting the book again, she made four slits down the inside of each leg and cut away the skin. It slipped back easily, sort of like peeling a banana, and with only a little bit more cutting she was able to pull it free from the turtle’s feet.

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