Rescue

by J.M. Jennings

He walked - mostly by day - through the fading shadow of the world that had been; with its broken glass and dead air conditioners, its hulking farm equipment statuary and airplanes debunked of their flying myth, its positive dearth of electronically supplied gregarious isolation. He crossed poisoned streams and forded dead fields, rimed with hoarfrost and the ashy dust of memory, riven into a barren womb by the bitterness of the cold wind and the creeping decay of atoms. When he’d last heard her voice, it had been England; now, for all he knew, it was a pile of blasted rubble, and his promise of rescue - odd thought, that - extended only to a heap of dead bones. But he would not believe that, couldn’t. As he crossed the wide transept of his country, censing with dusty tears the invisible holy altar of God’s judgment, he listened in his heart to the songs she used to sing to him across the vast divide between them. And he walked - mostly by day - toward the ocean, where he would find or build a boat, and sail toward the destiny which, one way or another, they shared.

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J.M. Jennings has written four novels, one screenplay, and fourteen short stories. He currently lives in Wyoming.