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36.
He felt fire in his eyes and awoke with a start, throwing blankets aside. He remembered the dead faces he’d seen, and the losses they meant to him, and let out a muffled yell as if coming up from a drowning well.
Sunlight stabbed through the reed doorway in dozens of thin shafts, and had found him on the bed and caressed his eyelids.
He sat up rubbing his eyes and slowly remembered where he was. The fire had gone out, and the fireplace overflowed once again with white and black ashes.
He rose and stumbled to the bench, where he found half a clay cup of water and drank it to relieve his thirst. He found a few bits of dried fish and chewed on those while pulling the door open.
Outside, the rain and fog were gone. The normal semitropical warmth filled the air, hot and moist. The air smelled bracingly of the sea, and the wind itself was fresh and cooling. Alex walked down the beach to the edge of the sea, which was at low tide. There was no sign of the old woman. He walked around the long bend in the direction he’d come, and found the young woman’s body still on the beach. A half dozen pelicans were working around it, scooping up the crabs that had come to feast, while swarms of insects filled the air and covered the sand around her.
He sat on the beach cross-legged for a long time, chewing on his fish and holding his cup. At times, tears welled up in his eyes when he thought of what could have been. If only he’d been here a few weeks earlier. He wiped the tears away. If nothing else, he knew now there were other humans, and maybe he’d find more. Just realizing he had not been alone—even if perhaps these had been the only other two humans in the world, and he was perhaps again alone—changed everything somehow. It did not make the world any less tragic or awful. It did not make it any more or less beautiful and mysterious either.
It was extra scary now, in a way it had never been before. He’d been resigned to his loneliness. Now he was starting to let hope torture him. If he never met another living person, that would be a crushing disappointment he could not bear. He thought about this, and decided it would be worse not to try. It would be worse not to hope.
He knelt down in the soft, creamy sand near the water and dug with both hands. By trial and error, he found just the right consistency of sand so that it was wet enough to stick together and easy enough to dig without collapsing constantly inward. In a short while, he had dug a longish depression in the sand. He tested it by rolling into it, and found it was just deep enough. He walked over and carefully, assailed by the smell and the angry buzz of disturbed insects, dragged her to the hole. He tried to avoid touching her, and pulled her by two bunched handfuls of her wool cloak. She was empty, and light, like the older woman, and moved across the sand with a soft sighing sound of grains moving under material. When he dragged her away from the indented and stained place she’d lain, he saw a fine stone knife in the sand. It was of smooth blue stone, with no markings. Even the chippings had been polished smooth over many hours of fond rubbing.
He slid her into the slot and used his feet to push sand over her, while pinching his nose shut. When he had her fully covered by six inches or more of sand, he brought some rocks down from the upper beach, until he’d covered her with a loaf-shape of stones. Done. He picked up the knife and walked down to the tidal strip. He rinsed the knife and put it in his belt. He washed himself in the sea, though he was sure it was more symbolic than hygienic. He paused for a minute over the grave to think about who she might have been, and how he might have spoken or laughed with her.
He hoped she had had a good life. When there was nothing more to think, he walked away.
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