Ain't Talkin'

The night moved forward with it’s plans and high into the nether regions of space all of the stars glowed as they slowly died. Roche leaned his weight against one knee pulled into his chest and swigged off of the bottle. A cigarette was lit and held between two fingers of the same hand. With his other the walker flicked the hammer of his Ruger, forward and back, forward and back. The clicking of the gunmetal was the only sound for miles in the wastelands.

The memory played over in a fast forward. Twelve-times motion and a gibbering of speech and sound and Roche was sixteen.

Harvest had come in, a ripe and bountiful one considering the nuclear ash that had breezed in from the west and covered a good deal of the crops for nearly a week before it was safe for the farm hands to go out and shake loose the soot from each stalk of corn and rash of beans.

Somewhere around the middle of October the farms would gather together in the grange and pool their crops, divide them and plan rotations for the next season. Most celebrations and holidays had died away with the catastrophe, but the town council believed in the morale that came with the October harvest festival.

While the farmers met with in the grange, the townspeople prepared a grand feast. Even some electricity was allotted for lights in the streets on strands of cord. There was dancing, there was a band, for one evening the world seemed alright.

Roche had started smoking the summer before and a hand-rolled cigarette hung from the corner of his mouth. His shoulders had grown broad from working at the mill, and his hands were leathery and thick. Sun-dried hair hung past his neck and over his cheeks. When he found the time, he still read and re-read his books feverishly.

And she’d been there that night. The yellow-fluorescence of the lights hanging over the street bounced rays off her hair. She had flowers from her mother’s garden in her hair, too. There was something shiftless about her dress. She was barefoot even though the first cold days of winter in the northeast had already set in.

She asked him to dance with a curled finger and her eyes.

Within the hour they’d borrowed a bottle of berry wine and split it between them. Their dancing grew silly.

By midnight they were well sloshed.

By midnight she’d kissed him, just the one time, and it had been just as sloppy as they’d been.

That was the first time he’d kissed a girl. He’d known other women since that night it ways he’d never known Mollie Groux. But his heart would always belong to her.

She’d fallen asleep with her head on his chest in McMullin’s hay loft. Old Man McMullin had been long gone, drunk and passed out by the time they’d snuck in. The both of them were gone before he woke.

Roche walked his Mollie Groux home and she planted a kiss on his cheek, her breath still vaguely smelling of wine.

Halfway home, Roche skipped a beat and sat with his boots in a ditch by the side of the road, watching the blue of the sky rotate into a shade of strange green. The world’s record slipped a needle and the walker was back in the Mojave, his bottle held by the neck and his cigarette ashed into nothing in his hand.

Roche dug out a little ditch with the heel of his boot, drunkenly thinking it was so similar.

The sky had turned the shade of sunglasses with the approaching dawn. Roche stood shakily. He belted back another draught, finding the bottle with barely a few drops remaining. He cursed his luck, spat, and turned back towards the old general store.