THE HAND OF GOD
by Samuel Sullins
=
It was just past noon when Elsie found the bomb.
She’d never seen the snow before, only in pictures. She thought it was the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen. All so soft, and gray, and drifting. It made everything quiet, too, and she stood still on the porch and listened to the sound of the wet flakes dropping gently on her hood.
Elsie had never imagined that anything could be so beautiful as this snow. It covered the smooth mountainside in a gentle, seamless blanket. Rocks and burned remnants of trees were wrapped and smoothed away in a lovely whiteness. It rose and fell, a gentle wave pattern across the ground.
Like a cold ocean—an ocean of pure white and pure cold. A cold that was fierce but still soft and gentle. Once, when she was little, Tom had said that storms were the hand of God.
She understood what he meant now. This snow, cold, dangerous, but yielding and beautiful. The strange power of it all. It belonged here, belonged with the rocks and the last few stumps of burned trees and the last of everything.
Dad, Tom, Jack, all of them had seen snow before. Lived in it. Every winter they’d had snow, lots of it. Tom had told her all about it, how it was cold, and white and soft. Had it been snow like this, though, dead drifts so perfect you didn’t want to touch them?
She stepped off the porch and saw the snow around her boots like wet sand. She waded through it. She tasted it. It was cold on her tongue, but it tasted like ash and burned things and she savored that taste.
She hadn’t gone far when she saw the shed. Wooden, slatted, brown walls against the snow. A little down the hill, behind the house.
That could be dangerous, she thought.
She went to the shed. It was definitely an Old Times structure, with rotting planks that had once been neat, blackened on two sides from the fire that had once claimed the forest. She wondered how it was still standing—but the house was undamaged too. Some fluke of coincidence had held back a tongue of flame here, a gust of wind there—
Elsie walked around the back of the shed and felt a sudden surge of fear.
One of the planks had been pried off.
Her eyes darted upward—the plank was there, nailed haphazardly to one of the corner posts, projecting jauntily into the air.
That’s when she knew there’d be a bomb inside the shed.
She saw the thin wire wrapped around the projecting bit of wood; that would be the antennae aerial, in case they wanted to detonate it remotely. And the only kind of bombs that had antennae were the big ones—the same kind that had leveled Sanburg last year while they watched from the cliffs. Even then it’d knocked her flat to the ground.
When she opened the old door it creaked and dusted snow onto the floor. It was surprisingly dark in the shed—the only light was a thin streak through the gap where the board was missing in the back.
The shed was empty, bare. Bare walls, bare wood floor. Would the bomb be under there? No, too hard to dig…
Above her there was wood, piled across thin beams that spanned the ceiling. And a little ladder was on one wall, bits of wood nailed up like steps. New nails with shiny heads.
She climbed the thin wooden rungs and poked her head up among the wood, moving slowly. Sometimes bombs had a proximity sensor set up. When you got too close, it’d trigger a timer—
There was a soft beeping sound as she triggered the alarm. Three short menacing beeps, then silence.
She turned toward it and saw the bomb right away. It was surprisingly big, wrapped around in brown burlap. Bits of grim black metal were visible between the wrappings, and near her there was a small mass of colored wires. It surprised her, a little, that Tom hadn’t found this one. She’d never known him to miss a bomb before.
Red numbers flashed on a tiny screen: six, zero, zero. The numbers flickered, counting down.
Six hours. Five hours fifty-nine minutes.
Elsie climbed down the ladder again, turning it over in her head. She shouldn’t have climbed the ladder. She knew the bomb was up there. Why had she climbed it?
She went around behind the shed and tugged the crude antennae down, wiggling it back and forth to loosen the nails. The wood was cold and wet. It came off dangling by the wire, and she gave it a sharp jerk to snap the wire. Now it couldn’t be detonated remotely. If there were any enemy left on this mountain.
Elsie didn’t think there were.
She should run inside, she knew, and tell them—but something held her back. The snow, maybe. If she told them, they’d pack up right now, be out of here in less than an hour.
In the snow they wouldn’t be able to travel fast. Six hours might not be enough time to get out. And the stores were low—they had somewhere around three, four days of food left with what they’d found in the house.
She turned it over in her mind, following her tracks in the snow, back to the house. What was the plan? They’d stayed here at the house for a whole day now. Dad was starting to feel a little better. Best to wait at least another day to travel though.
On the porch, she turned and looked out over the snow. There wasn’t any snow on the porch railing; it was protected by the half-torn porch roof. She put her hands on the railing, feeling the old paint that still clung to it in white flecks.
She thought about the Old Times. Dad and Tom told her about the Old Times a lot; they wanted her to remember it, she knew. They did not want the memory of the Old Times to go away—if Elsie remembered it, it would live on when they died.
Tom thought about the Old Times a lot. He didn’t say much about them. Too much to do. Elsie saw it in his eyes, though, when they were walking. Or sometimes when they laid still in a ditch, cradling their weapons, she’d catch a glance, a glance Tom had never meant for her to see.
Jack never mentioned the Old Times. He never spoke more than he had to.
What was it like, this house, in the Old Times? Bright and warm, people who stayed here and never left. Meals three times a day, an entire room packed with food. A car they could drive. Forests filled with tall, green trees. Nothing burned, nothing broken.
It was hard to imagine living in just one place, forever. You’d never see anything. Never feel the different winds of all the different strange places. She’d get tired of that. And the smell of the forests, the ash that drifted on the ground—she couldn’t imagine life without it. This was a broken world, and she knew that she was broken because of it, but she wouldn’t have traded it for anything.
The snow drifted like white ash in the muted midday light.
Her hands were red with cold. She squeezed them into fists, turned and went into the house. There was a fire going in the fireplace, a small one, to save fuel, but it was bright. Dad sat next to the fire, in the chair. He was looking better today.
Jack leaned in the corner, scraping his knife on a stone. He had his coat off and she could see how thin his arms were. It scared her, a little.
Scrape, scrape.
Dad sighed, staring into the fire, and when he saw her in the doorway he let his head fall into his hands. His hair was white and his hands were wrinkled.
“It’s snowing, Dad.” She stood in the doorway in her long grown-up coat, her hands in the pockets that were too big. When she did that Tom said it looked like she had no arms.
Dad looked up, pulling the hair through his fingers. “Is it really, Elsie?”
“The snow’s beautiful.”
Dad didn’t say anything. Jack looked up at her, his knife and stone motionless for a second, and looked back down again.
The door clattered.
“Tom’s back,” said Jack. He could tell who it was from the boots without looking up.
Tom was covered in snow. He grinned at her, and Jack, and Dad too. He dropped an armful of black wood on the floor.
“Snow’s sticky out there,” he said. “Gonna make it hard to travel.”
Tom was special, Elsie thought. He remembered things that no one else could. Or would. And still he was cheerful, always happy, enjoying what he did more than all the rest of them. Even in his cheeriness, though, there was an edge—she could hear it in his voice. Fuel was getting harder and harder to find. They didn’t want to pull down the house, not while they were still living in it.
Scrape, scrape, went Jack’s knife.
“Jack, why are you sharpening that?” Dad didn’t even look at him. “You catch anything last night?”
They all knew there was nothing left to catch. Jack didn’t answer.
“We’ve got some good food here,” Dad said. “Maybe we should have a good meal tonight.”
Thirty long years ago, back in the Old Times, Jack had been a chef. A chef was someone who made food, any kind of food. A chef, Jack had told her once, was an artist.
Elsie believed it. When Jack made the food he always thought of new things to make, clever ways to make the food better. Back at the Garrison everyone had combined their stores and Jack had made a beautiful meal, something out of the Old Times.
There was a thunk and the knife stuck in the floor.
“Not enough food. We can ration it, it’ll last a week.” Jack’s voice was mechanical. He rubbed his angled face with his fingers and moved his jaw and looked at nothing.
Jack’s lost here. He can’t think. He’s broken, just like this world is. Just like me. But it was different; Jack and the world had broken together, at the same time. Elsie had always been broken.
Jack had broken himself, maybe. The things he’d done were enough to tear anybody apart. He was a dead man on the inside. As dead as everything else—he fit perfectly in this world. She could imagine him in no other.
Nobody saw the tear that glistened on her cheek for one winter second. Nobody except Tom.
“Dad, there’s—” said Elsie.
Tom interrupted her. “Come outside, Elsie. Let’s play in the snow.”
The bomb could wait. Playing in the snow with Tom sounded more fun.
She almost didn’t think Dad would want her going out in the snow, playing out there. He didn’t like her going outside in the cold. She didn’t like the inside—she’d lived most of her life outside under the sky and the house felt strange, all tight and closed around her. When she passed Dad she looked at him but he didn’t look at her.
“I’m going out, Dad,” she said.
“Go with them, Jack,” said Dad. He had his face buried in his hands.
Jack didn’t answer. Elsie wasn’t sure if he’d even heard. He didn’t move.
Outside it was still, windless. The snowflakes fell, large and heavy, plunking gently on her hood. The snow-smell was all around them; cold and ashen and bright.
“Let’s build a snowman.” Tom had his hands in his pockets, his hood back. She tugged her hood back too—you could hear the silence better without it.
Snow tangled in her hair. “A snowman?”
“Yeah. You roll the snow into big balls and stack ‘em up.” He moved his hands in the air. “Put on rocks for eyes, sticks for arms.”
They rolled snow into balls. It was hard to start the ball, but once it got bigger it was easier. Elsie rolled hers fast and it was bigger than Tom’s. He was taking a long time, rolling the snow. Remembering something.
“Did you do this in the Old Times?”
Tom nodded. “Every winter. Every time there was snow.”
Elsie stopped rolling. Her snowball was too big to move. She looked at Tom, met his eyes.
He tried to lift his snowball on top of hers, but he couldn’t. Elsie helped him lift—it was very heavy. They were out of breath when they were done.
Elsie thought about the bomb, out in the shed. Looked up at Tom, smiling at her. What if I told you there was a bomb here. It would wipe the smile off your face in a second, turn it to the same familiar worry.
Elsie smiled back.
Tim stacked another snowball, smaller, on top.
“Body’s done. You make the head. I’ll go find something for arms.” He went toward the house, slowly, limping on his bad foot. She watched him, for a minute, without moving. He looked old, almost—a black shape in the snow, next to the bigger black shape of the crumbling house. He was strong, but they’d been through a lot. No one was that strong. Someday, soon, he’d break. They’d all break.
Would she break? She felt weak, but she knew she was strong. This was her life. Her world. She didn’t long for anything else, didn’t know any other world. She could only try to imagine the Old Times, and none of it sounded very real to her.
Elsie didn’t know how to make a head.
There were some big rocks under the snow, but they were too big. She kicked around in the rocks until she found a skull. It was white, almost the same color as the snow, and just as beautiful.
It had been a person, once. She was glad for them. It was a joyful thing, a skull, the lasting shape of someone who used to be alive, like her. She was glad she’d found it—it was almost like the stranger was here, now. She hoped that one day, when she was only bones, someone would pick up her skull, and dust it off, and make it beautiful again.
She nestled the skull on the top of the snowman. It really was beautiful.
She couldn’t see Tom anywhere. She found the two arm-bones that had gone with the skull and fit them into the snowman to make arms. Short arms, but she couldn’t find any longer ones.
There. Almost like the person was alive again. She imagined eyes in the empty sockets, looking laughingly out. The skull smiled at her. It looked empty and she took off her hat and fit it over the skull.
She stood and looked at it, such an old thing, an idea from the Old Times, standing here, here in the New Times. In her times. Her times were cold and broken and full of death. The Old Times were warmth and light and open skies and everything plenty. It sounded nice, in a way, the Old Times; but it was only despair to think of things she would never see. She wondered if she’d done it right. Would they have used a skull for a head, back then? It was beautiful, alive, and she imagined it looking at her. What would you say, she wondered, if you were alive again?
Tom was behind her.
“You used a skull.” He pointed at the skull.
“It’s so pretty,” she said. “It’s almost like it’s alive again. I found arms too.” She put her hands in her pockets again and made fists in her gloves to warm her fingertips.
Tom looked at the skull that wore her hat and the arm-bones and then he looked down at her for a moment. He watched her, saw her smiling, and he smiled too.
“Yeah,” he said. He sounded a little choked. “But it looks so dead.”
“He’s alive now,” she said.
“Guess so.”
Footsteps crunched in the snow, behind them.
“I brought Dad,” said Tom.
Behind Tom, Dad scooped up some snow, made a ball with his hands, hurled it at Tom. It struck him on the shoulder. Tom grinned at Elsie.
“Make snowballs,” he said.
°
The snowball fight was over; the sky far getting dark and far away.
They lay in the snow on their backs, laughing.
“I remember when you could see stars up there,” said Dad. He was laying in the snow, next to Elsie.
“Me too.” Said Tom. “Constellations.” He traced shapes with his finger in the air.
Elsie didn’t say anything. She couldn’t talk about the Old Times, only listen.
Dad turned toward her, his hood scraping in the snow.
“Elsie, I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry.” Just a whisper now.
She didn’t say anything. She wasn’t sorry. In her mind she saw the bomb, again, in the shed, brown burlap. The broken antennae.
“We should go inside,” said Tom. “Jack’s said he’d make dinner tonight.”
The smell of food drifted out to them, like a tangible smoke moving across the drifts. It smelled good—really good.
Almost, Elsie thought, too good.
Dad said something to Tom, and Tom chuckled.
Elsie went inside.
There was a fire in the fireplace, still, but now it was bigger and brighter. There was a table by the fire, and chairs, and it smelled like food. Strange food, smells Elsie had rarely smelled. There was a meat smell and a potato smell and something that smelled strong, almost like old wood, and something that smelled thick and fruity.
Jack was bent over the fire, stirring something. He looked up as they came in—he didn’t smile, but Elsie saw it in his eyes, a kind of happiness.
The fire glowed warmly, and everything in the room flicked with bits of warm light. The smell of the food was strange. Everything was too warm. Too good. It felt like a slice of some strange heaven, like the hand of God again.
The snow was the same thing. The snow and the burned forest and the skull. They were beauty, just as the light and the warmth were beauty. A cold beauty and a warm sorrow—beautiful sorrow, for a time that was buried deeper than night.
God had two hands, then. The Old Times, bright and glowing and gone; and her own broken time, death that was life and cold that was warmth.
Dad and Tom came in, talking together, and Elsie heard Dad laughing quietly as he closed the door. It felt good to hear him laugh. She hadn’t heard him laugh for years. Years was a long, long time.
She felt old, suddenly. How old was she? Ten, twelve years? All of a sudden she couldn’t remember. It didn’t matter. Time was nothing; you lived one day at a time.
She watched as Dad came in, as Tom turned the corner. The look on both their faces was one not of plain happiness, not the warm glow of the snow that Elsie felt on her own face—their faces were longing.
“This feels like home,” said Tom. And Elsie glimpsed a tiny crystal tear on his face before he wiped it away.
The bomb wouldn’t have a lot of time left, now. Maybe an hour.
Jack stood up, a dish in his hands. He set it down on the table. Elsie realized then that this must be the last of the food. Tom must know it, Dad must know it.
“Jack,” said Dad.
That was all. Nobody else spoke. They were all filled with familiarity, longing for home. Elsie watched their faces. She’d never seen any of them like this before. They were different people from different lives.
She stood and watched, with her coat wrapped around her, with the snow melting in her hair. They arranged dishes on the table and poured water in cups and set Dad’s salt out on the table.
In that moment she was an outsider, a stranger. She could never eat this much food, could never be comfortable living in one place, forever, never wish to eat by a fire while there was snow to stand in and foggy wind to brush your eyes.
Jack spoke: “Come here, Elsie.”
She came. Sat down with them. The food was plentiful, too plentiful. There was a pot of beans that smelled odd and a massive bowl of potatoes and all of the canned fruit cooked together with sugar on the top. There was meat in a stew sprinkled with spices. There was bread, roughly shaped, with green spices.
Dad said: “You found spices, Jack.”
Elsie didn’t understand spices—they’d had some on their food once, at the Garrison. The spices made their food taste mysterious and good, too good, strange.
She didn’t know any of this food. She didn’t know what to do, so she just sat there, watching Tom and Dad and Jack serve themselves heaping portions of food. The last of it.
Should she ask Jack why, why now, why take all of our food, why cook it, why now. She didn’t, though, didn’t because she knew the answer. Because she knew, felt it inside her, the death, ticking away with the bomb in the shed.
Jack served Elsie gently, smiling at her, and he used his knife, the one he always sharpened, to cut the bread he’d made.
Across the table, she saw Tom. He stared at the food on his plate, looking, not wanting to touch it. Lost in thought.
Dad spoke first.
“We thank God,” he said, slowly, “for this food. God be praised. And we thank God for Jack, who can make bread—without burning it.”
And Jack and Tom looked at each other and chuckled, remembering something that Elsie would never know.
There was a lot of laughter that night. Smiling, laughing—Elsie hardly knew these people, and she knew that they were gone, back in the Old Times. What she was seeing was a window, a window into those times. A window with the glass broken but one you could never climb through.
She found herself eating her piece of the bread. It was good, so good that she ate it slowly, one small bite at a time.
Across the table Tom was staring at her, his eyes unfocused, thinking. Lost in some memory, maybe.
She pushed her chair back and got up, chewing the last bite of her bread. She didn’t want to eat more. She didn’t understand it.
She stood on the back porch, leaning on the railing, her hands clasped together. The snow was gray and cold and everywhere, and the sun was setting somewhere behind the thick pall of gray clouds.
The door closed. Tom came, leaned beside her. He was big, beside her, and she felt suddenly small. He would have belonged in a place like this, leaning on a railing, looking out at a vast unknown.
Elsie felt she belonged here, now, with the snow and the peeling paint and the jagged edge of the broken roof.
She picked up some of the snow, crunched it in her fist, sucked on it. It tasted good, wild and dead.
“Elsie,” he said, “We’re going to die.”
She looked up at him. “What—“
He dropped his hands head into his hands, screwed fists into his eyes.
“That’s the last of our food. There’s nothing—no food, no houses, no buildings, no animals—not for a hundred miles at least. You saw how far we came to get here.”
“I know,” she said.
“In that shed, there,” he said, “there’s a bomb there.”
He looked at her. She said, again, “I know.”
“Of course you do.”
“I found it this morning. I broke the antennae. You must have missed it, yesterday.”
“I didn’t miss it, Elsie.” He pulled something silver out of his pocket, held it in his hands. Jack’s radio-detonator. “I was going to do this, later. Maybe tonight.”
Elsie didn’t say anything. He looked down. “Maybe that’s bad, evil, wrong. I don’t know. All I know is that we’re all going to die and it may as well be quick.”
“Tom,” she said. She rarely used his full name.
“Tom, you don’t have to do that.” Gently, she took the detonator from him. “I triggered it, by accident. Proximity rig again.”
“Timed?”
“Yeah. Timed.”
“You know what I always tell you about those.” He was smiling.
Elsie laughed, softly. “I know.”
They stood there a minute longer.
“Goodnight, Elsie,” said Tom. He squeezed her hand.
Elsie looked at him, felt a sudden strange urge to cry. She felt tears on her face and turned back to the snow and let the cold wind blow against her eyes.
She heard Tom choke back a sob as he turned and went back inside.
Elsie stayed out. Out there, on the porch, there was peace. Her world, her own dead world, at dead peace with itself.
In there, in the house, it was the Old Times. Laughing times, with fire and too much food and warmth and the smell of mysterious food.
Inside the house, she heard them laughing. Dad, and Tom, then Jack.
I am dead inside too, thought Elsie. I have always been dead—like the snow, like the ashes out in the burned forest.
Late story this week.
I finished only a few minutes ago :)
Turned out well though. It’s one of my own favorites.
I based it on an idea out of my idea bank.
The idea’s from last year: “A happy snowball fight, later revealed to be taking place in an apocalyptic wasteland. Extremely sad.”
The final story’s a long way from that, but you can see some connections.
Thanks so much for reading.
Have a great weekend.
— Samuel
If you have any questions, just drop a comment or reply to this email. ↓