Life is a precious gift. Protect it.
I stepped under the waterfall and let the cold water wash over me in a soothing, rhythmic flow.
I wasn’t sure what I was waiting for, why I kept putting it off. It wasn’t like there was anything worth living for. Not anymore. But it felt like it would be the most awful betrayal to cast aside a life that had only been possible because of Dad.
I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for him, but…he was gone now, and the loneliness was slowly destroying me from the inside. One day I would wake up and there’d be nothing left of me.
I carved faces in the trees and pretended they were people. I’d have conversations with them but get bored after a while because they never responded.
I was drowning in this solitude, but I had no reason to care. No one to grab my hand and pull me out.
“You’d save me, right?”
I turned toward the simple carving of the smiling face I’d done a few hours ago, then sighed when it didn’t say anything. “Asshole.”
My stomach grumbled with hunger because the apples I’d eaten earlier hadn’t been nearly enough. The small orchard my great-grandpa had planted decades ago produced tons, and it was a reliable source of food, but god was I sick of apples.
Sick of talking to no one.
Sick of sitting on top of this mountain and waiting for something to happen when it never did.
This entire day felt like a waste. All I’d done was sit in a tree and wait, hoping I’d missed something, but no matter how hard I strained my eyes, big animals with lots of meat on their bones weren’t magically appearing.
I hadn’t seen a deer in ten days and was starting to think maybe I’d killed them all off. Or the dead had. Or something else.Maybe something even worse than the dead had spawned in this hellscape.
It seemed plausible. I didn’t really have any way of knowing, either. I never really ventured past the nearby towns.
It was safe here. Familiar. I had everything I needed, and I had sufficient protection from anyone who wandered this way, dead or not.
Nobody ever wandered this way.
Only animals.
I tipped my head back, raked my hands through my hair, letting the water soak it, and thought about all the potatoes and carrots growing in my garden.
Root vegetables for dinner it was, then.
With a heavy sigh, I turned around—and everything in my body shifted immediately to high alert when I saw him.
I was imagining things.
I’d finally lost it.
I was so lonely that I’d conjured up a very real—very dirty—human being.
Was that even a person?
I paused, staring at the creature that had stumbled out of the woods and was just standing frozen across the pit, watching me.
The longer I looked, the stranger my hallucination became. Because it was a boy…a man?…with tattered clothes and raggedy hair. He was wearing something on his face, something else around his neck. Was that a chain?
There was a person here—the first person I’d seen in five years—and I was just standing here with my cock out.
But who gave a shit about that? There was an actualpersonhere.
A tremendous joy burst in my chest, quickly expanding outward.
I couldn’t believe it. There was really someone here. What was a person doing all the way up here, though? How had he gotten here?
