Ashes (Part 3)
Nick watched the adaptation of The Road on his laptop. He no longer owned a television. The film included several flashbacks, scenes of life before the apocalyptic event. “The man” (as he was called in the novel) shuffled along a burned landscape with “the boy.” He once had a wife and a piano. In one scene, she taught him to play. In another, he chopped it to pieces with an ax while she watched, remorseful.
Cut to the present day. He and his son are scavenging through an abandoned house when the man happens across a piano in the living room. He runs his hand over the dusty wood, then collapses to the floor, crying and bracing himself against the instrument. Phantom pains of a severed limb he could not remember to forget.
He played a few chords, then left.
Nick rented a room in a house that bordered a forest preserve. One day after work, he walked into the woods and dug a pit. For three days he carried various items to the pit, tossed them in and set them aflame. Some were of personal significance, others only superfluous possessions.
On the third day, he considered the afghan that spread over his bed. For months, his grandmother sat in her La-Z-Boy, wrinkled hands crocheting row after row while dementia descended. He took it up in his hands and looked at it, asking himself, Did this bring me joy?
Yes. It did.
But if a snake does not mourn the molting of its own skin, why should he mourn meticulously patterned acrylic yarn?
He decided this would be the last item he would purge–a remaining attachment to a dying world. He carried it into the woods, dropped it into the pit, doused it with lighter fluid, and tossed in a lit match. He stood watching as every stitch burned, rising into the canopy of late-autumn trees in a dark plume.
He waited to see how he felt inside.