The Outside by Laura Bickle Read Free Book Online Page B

knit. “Where will you go?”
    His gaze drifted off to the horizon. “I have nieces and nephews out west. And following the sun doesn’t seem to be bad advice these days.”
    He patted my cheek, pressed his hand to Alex’s shoulder. I saw the green tail of a garter snake in his beard. He rose up, took one last look at the church, and walked across the field with his hands in his pockets.
    I gripped Alex’s sleeve. “Will he be all right . . . alone?”
    “Yeah. I think so. And I don’t think he’ll be alone.”
    In his wake, the grass rippled, and I saw the shadows of snakes following him.
    ***
    We turned away from the smoldering fire. I carefully climbed up on Horace’s back. I cradled my wounded arm in my lap, but the jostle of the horse’s stride made it ache enough to set my teeth on edge. But walking was just as bad, and Ginger had ordered me to conserve my strength.
    We headed north, as we always did. I did not turn back to the burned church. I saw Ginger looking at it sadly as we moved across the meadow. I imagine that Lot’s wife had much the same expression on her face.
    “Don’t look back,” I said. “It’s
Gelassenheit
. God’s will.”
    She shook her head. “It would have been good to stay someplace for a few days. To rest. But not with the snakes.”
    I lifted my chin. “And not with the fire. Fire is something that all Plain people fear.”
    “Because of no fire department?”
    “
Ja
. By the time that someone can run to find a phone, it’s usually too late. And it is a particular fear in the winter.”
    “Why winter?”
    “Because our chores stretch beyond the daylight hours. And we carry lanterns around many flammable things in the barn. One overturned lantern can engulf a barn in minutes. It can kill animals, people . . .”
    “I guess I never feared fire much before,” Ginger said. “But now that those modern conveniences are gone . . . perhaps I will again.”
    “It feels strange to be afraid of something so essential to survival,” Alex said. “I wonder if Prometheus knew how much we would fear it.”
    “Who is Prometheus?” I asked.
    “In Greek mythology, he was a Titan, one of the old gods that were a generation before Zeus and the rest of the Olympians. Zeus asked Prometheus to create man, but in doing so, Prometheus felt some sympathy for his creation. Prometheus watched man struggle to find enough to eat, to build places to live, and felt pretty darn sorry for our incompetence.
    “So he brought us a gift. He stole one of Zeus’s lightning bolts and gave it to man. It was the gift of fire. It kept man from freezing to death, helped him cook food. It saved man from a short life of cold savagery.”
    I shook my head. Alex’s stories were exactly that—good stories. But I did not believe in the underlying morality of those old, cruel gods.
    Ginger kept walking backwards, looking for the fire. And I resolutely looked forward, remembering how Lot’s wife looked backwards, full of salt and tears. No good could come of that.
    Within hours, my fear proved to be a prediction.
    We smelled the fire before we saw it.
    It wasn’t the benign, warm smell of wood smoke. This was acrid, chemical. It was the stench of man-made things burning: plastic, gasoline, rubber.
    We’d walked through the morning, having found a two-lane road. Horace trotted along the soft shoulder to save the wear and tear of pavement on his hooves. The clop of his hooves on the earth created a mechanical marching rhythm and an ache in my bones. We didn’t speak, shuffling along at Ginger’s pace. She struggled and wheezed a bit, but we went steadily. There was no traffic. No cars. Just buzzards circling in the distance. And a dark haze on the horizon.
    The road fell away at a crossroads, and we plodded over a hill that seemed to go on forever. When we reached the crest, we stopped.
    A city lay below us in the valley, burning.
    I sucked in my breath. I had never seen a city before. I had imagined that it