END OF TIME

      She yearned for the gelid air of December when the ice would creep through her veins and seal her eyelids and shrink her lungs in a frigid embrace. But the heat still basted their bodies, cracking skin like the parched ground around them. The man stirred beside her and she knew he would soon wake them to carry on their journey. Sleep was a gift not a necessity. She wanted to call out to him but he had told her before that names were not important and to forget who they were and think only of the journey. He would leave them, her and the boy to check the road. Once, they took turns staying with the boy but the man had started rising earlier. She had been careless and they had found the place where the man and the boy slept. When she arrived he had used five bullets. Only two remained lodged in his pistol that glinted like the burn of sunlight on a watch. That morning he returned just when the dark gave way to dusted rays of light. It was time to leave. He packed away the fragile pieces of plastic they slept on and woke the boy.
         “It’s time to go.”
         “Now?”
         “Yes. Go to your mother.”
         “Why can’t I stay with you?”
         “Because I am untying the rope around where we slept.”
         He went to her but starred at his father. She tried to talk to him and give him choices from the cans of food they had collected. She had asked the man to end it, for the baby but he refused. He knew that bringing a new life into the dismal world was his gift of hope. If only she was as barren as the land around them. He was born when stations stopped broadcasting, phones stopped working and all contact with the world slowly faded to nothing but a memory. But memories were pointless now.
         “Are you still tired?”
         “No.”
         “You’re not hungry?”
         “I’ll wait for Papa.”
         “But I’m here.”
         “Maybe he is hungry too. Maybe there isn’t enough.”
         “It’s ok”
         “Ok.”
         He did not eat and sat wrapped in a threadbare blanket. When the man returned with the rope, he offered the boy a can of corn she had brought back the day before. He never asked where the food came from. He was sure her experiences were the same as his. Every neighborhood looked the same and the falling dust covered all tracks and signs of life, blood and burn effaced by time.
         She did not tell him that the day before she had escaped them. She had entered a house that was once white, lashings from dust and wind, had stripped the paint from its frame years before. They emerged from the cellar, one of them carrying a sawed off leg. She had just placed three unlabeled cans in the bag they carried with them when she heard the heavy steps and chants of victory. Her instincts told her to run to lead them to the man and the child that were waiting for her return, but her feet grasped the ground. She hid under a table that was covered in bones and skin and waited. They ate the leg that came from the cellar then roved into the streets in search of hapless souls. She eased herself from concealment and headed back just as the dusty sky grew dark. She knew she should have told him, should have pointed out the house in warning. But part of her wished for the night they would bypass the rope. It would mean a fate with an end.
         “What took you?”
         “Mostly empty cupboards.”
         “Did you find anything?
         “Three cans.”
         “I’ll go out tomorrow.”
         “What will happen when all the food is gone?”
         “I’ll figure it out when it happens. We’ve been lucky.”
         “You call this existence? We’re better off dead.”
         “He’ll hear you.”
         “He should.”
         “No.”
         They had had many such exchanges and the boy saw the hopelessness in his mother’s eyes. His father had said that she was putting them in danger. He had told the boy he had to be extra careful, to keep his eyes open for them. He had shown the boy how to use the pistol to point at the forehead of an enemy or at himself if he was ever to be captured. The woman looked at the figures off in the distance, the sand settle around them and they looked liked shadows against an umber wall. The boy never stayed with her not since the last day he loved her. At night, the balefires of the troglodytes brightened the sky thick, powdery sky and she moved silently beneath the lambent glow.
         She would find it in the shopping cart. The casing stripped cords would accompany her fingers and the flex of her wrists around his feeble neck. She wrapped her feet in the shreds of blanket they used as rags and gloves to soften the crush of the twigs beneath her. She looked at her sleeping offspring and remembered that she wanted to deny him the milk of her breast so he would not survive. The cord was the first thing to touch his wan neck. He did not stir. She wished him a painless end but the man clutched the pistol to him in sleep. The cord began to sink into the fold of skin in his neck and still her slept. She felt it growing taut in her fingers and closed her eyes. The grip on her wrists slowed the blood in her veins and it pulsed there in a warm pool. The man cleaved the cord from her fingers and heaved her from the boy.
         “Why?”
         “It’s my duty as a mother to protect him from anymore harm.”
         “Duty? You’re his mother. Not his God.”
         He turned from her and went to the boy. He slept untroubled. Tears brimmed the man’s eyes and he vowed to protect him from harm and from weakness. The man did not sleep and spoke again only when she moved. She had made her decision and wanted to take the child with her into the whipping grains. He begged her to stay but had already lost her to the tender arms of death. Failed as a mother. Failed as a murderer.
         She untied the rags from her feet and placed them on the shopping cart. They would need them. She would not let them take her and the cool sharpness of the stone prodded her once soft palms. She walked out to the road and breathe in the grit and cinder and her lungs choked and convulsed. The salient tip of the stone nestled into the blue vein and she looked back to where the man watched the boy sleep. The image had disappeared behind the dark, ashy curtain. Her feet took her further and weakness made her stumble. She looked down at the hardness still settled in her vein. Red, crimson, sanguine. She had forgotten color. She thought of the man and boy and longed for them to see what she saw. The world slipped into Cimmerian and an icy wind wrapped around her body and cooled the drops that reached to quench the ground.