do. Unless it was one last terrorist attack. A jihad. Suppose if it was, then they really did win in the end.”
“Jihad?”
“Kill the infidel. That was their goal. And look around you. Job well done.”
Snow is the quietest kind of weather. After dinner, I sat outside on the stump and watched it fall. It was only the beginning of the winter season, something like September, and it had been snowing off and on for a while already. I’d experienced enough snow to last a lifetime, but I still liked to watch it. There’s something peaceful about those flakes drifting down from the sky, like they aren’t in a hurry. Rain is so panicked and forceful. Walt Whitman—good ol’ Walt—in one of his poems said, “Behavior lawless as snowflakes.” I think I get that. The falling, forming, unforming, drifting, and swirling—there’s a lawlessness about them. I looked up and felt the icy pinpricks on my cheek and in my eyelashes.
There was a crunching in the snow in front of me. I looked down. It was Ramsey, buried in his musk ox jacket, his blond hair tucked beneath a skullcap. He was growing a beard like Ken’s, though his was a young man’s beard with pale stubble patches.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“Sitting.”
“Oh,” he said as if he hadn’t noticed.
He wanted me to say more. I didn’t have more to say.
“Sorry about Conrad.”
“He’s an ass.”
“Yeah.”
Ramsey was a nice kid. Eighteen years old. A good-looking guy, but in all honesty, without Jeryl taking care of him, he would never have survived this long. Sure, he could fish, but how hard was it to hold a stick over the water? He had crappy aim, had next to no muscle, and was timid. Timid got you dead. But he was nice, and I liked him well enough.
“Don’t get too wet out here,” he said.
“Thanks.” He turned toward his cabin.
Only after did it occur to me to ask what he was doing out in the snow himself.
I’d given Ramsey the old college try, as my dad would’ve said.
It was a stupid move, but I showed up at his and Jeryl’s cabin late in the warm season. The snows hadn’t come yet, so the smell of pine and spruce wood was still heavy in the air. The winter would take care of that, numb the senses, make everything smell like ice. But the wind already had a good sting to it, and I could see the air congregate in front of my face. Congregate. That’s a good word. Like my breath was a church gathering, and I was God, breathing life and then watching it drift away in the wind.
The thing about Ramsey was, other than Conrad, he was the only man in our settlement who I wasn’t related to. Which means exactly what you might think it means. And with Conrad being a thieving asshole who was too old for me anyway, there was only one real option. Thanks, apocalypse.
I’d had sex with only one boy before everything changed. His name was Alexander—not Alex, as he liked to tell people. I met him in Eagle. He was tall with dark hair. We’d hang out after school, and he’d smoke in his dad’s basement. There wasn’t much else for us to do in Eagle. I never tried smoking, though. Grossed me out. I didn’t care how cool it was supposed to be.
I liked Alexander because he was funny, because he was nice, because he used words like preposterous, and because he was the only boy who ever looked twice at me.
The first time he kissed me, I pulled away and said, “My dad’s gonna kick your ass.”
The second time he kissed me, I kissed him back.
We started making out a lot. I didn’t let him smoke beforehand because the taste was nasty. I’d take off my shirt and let him touch me, but I kept my bra on. He wanted to have sex. I didn’t.
“You gotta have sex sometime.”
“We’re not old enough.”
“When’s old enough?”
“I dunno, eighteen.”
“Eighteen! I can’t wait that long.” He said it with a laugh. But we were only sixteen, and I guess two years is a long time for a sixteen-year-old boy.
So we didn’t do it. Not then, at least. For a while after that, we stayed friends, but we stopped making out. He moved on to other girls. Then the world ended. Literally. Between the wars and the flu and the TVs going out, it seemed like the end of time. People were already starting to evacuate. But it wasn’t till after Dad died that I really felt the weight of it all. The world crashed down hard around my feet. I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t read, food had no taste.
I met Alexander in his dad’s basement, just to see someone other than my family, someone who didn’t remind me that Dad was gone. I don’t remember if he kissed me or I kissed him, but next thing I knew, we were taking off our clothes, and for the briefest of moments, I felt something. A closeness.
Afterward, I walked out the door while he lit a cigarette.
“Lynn?” he said. But I kept walking, tears filling my eyes.
My dad’s gonna kick your ass. I don’t know why, but it was the only thought in my head.
We continued sleeping together, all the way until Alexander and his dad left Eagle. I never told my mom. I tried alcohol too. But it was the same as the sex. A moment of relaxation, of comfort, followed by emptiness.
And now there was Ramsey. He hadn’t outright said that he wanted me, but I could tell in the way he looked at me and, sometimes, in the way he refused to look at me.
“You realize that we’re the only ones not related?” he said once, back when I’d fish with him every so often. Back before I realized how boring fishing was.
“You and Ken aren’t related,” I said.
“That’s not what I mean.” I knew what he meant.
He tried to kiss me once too. Well, he did kiss me once. But it was on the cheek, and he apologized and walked away immediately after. It was such a childish kiss. And I wasn’t a child. I was a woman. A peck on the cheek didn’t cut it. It wasn’t really about sex. I just didn’t want to feel alone. I wanted that comfort I’d gotten from Alexander. If only for a moment.
So I dug into my mom’s precious stash of vodka, which was brought only for “medicinal purposes,” and took three long swigs from a bottle that had already been opened. It melted my insides. I made my way over to Ramsey and Jeryl’s.
Jeryl answered the door. I swore that guy slept in his clothes.
“Lynn. You all right?”
“Is Ramsey asleep?”
Jeryl
