Chop Wood Carry Water

A Story by cleankitchen

Some kind of postapocalyptic tale, started out as a story based on the song As I Went Out One Morning by Bob Dylan.

Before enlightenment; chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment; chop wood, carry water.

She grabbed his arm; he paused to stare into her eyes and was shaken by what he saw there. Their pace slowed as she pleaded wordlessly, far away a bell rung and neither heard. He spun abruptly to face her again, desperate for something to say, reaching deeply but coming up dry. Their lips moved as they stared into each other’s eyes, the air was dry and he blinked. A tear escaped and rolled down her tanned skin.

Again the bell rung, shocking them in the still night air. Neither moved, her hand closed around his wrist, her grip was firm and icy, her fingers were cold and felt to him like an iron shackle. He tried to pull away but his feet were heavy. Time ceased and no birds sang, there were only two this moment locked in an endless struggle. He noticed her then, for what she truly was, his eyes went to her feet and he saw she wore no shoes, to her belly where he saw the scars, to her breast pale and heaving.

The moment was over in an instant as a man rushed up. The man was dressed in black, a black hat crowned his head shading where his eyes might have been. His feet made no sound, muffled by the ash as he came upon them fast with purposeful strides. For a moment the man thought he might be swept away as well, a coincidental casualty in an endless war he knew nothing of except what he’d seen in her eyes.

His wrist was white where her grip was pried from it; the man in black was neither forceful nor tender in his actions. The woman wept openly now, her crimes were unknown. She was dragged off in the ash, her shoeless feet scraping the rocks. The bell rung and the man turned once to the north and began walking. He looked back only once, desperately searching for the tattered woman but finding nothing. Turning again to the north his pace quickened. Chop wood carry water.

This land was torn and dirty, the sky hung like a wet rag. Clouds of dust billowed up around his feet as he walked, briefly obscuring the rocky path from time to time so the man had to carefully feel his way along during these moments. He looked up only occasionally to scan the surrounding hillsides for what he did not know; it was things he did not know that scared him the most. Things unknown waiting to take the life he was unfamiliar with, to take the home he did not have, the long gone family he wept for in the night. The bell rang ceasing his day dreaming and forcing him to focus on the path and to ignore all things of which he had no control.

The man scraped his foot on and unseen rock jutting out of the craggy, gray soil, muttering one silent curse he limped on. One solitary drop of blood leaked out of his wound leaving a stark contrast for one short moment before dust and ash buried it forever. This land was hard and broken, eating all it could and never satisfied; like an angry beast that kills not for sustenance but for the pleasure of seeing terror in the eyes of its prey.

The wooden bar felt gritty beneath his calloused hands as he stepped into place. His job, like so many other men was simply to push, nothing more and nothing less. Chop wood carry water. Push till your back ached and sweat stung your eyes, push till your mind shut down. Push until you die. Push until the next pusher steps in to take your place as your body cools; and pushes until his bones too turn to dust.

As he hunkered later over a small oily fire warming his meal he allowed himself to think of the woman girl? and who she might be or who she might have been. The strange desperation in her eyes was certainly nothing new, but there was still something different about her. Something different than the rest of them, with their hollow and defeated faces. Their telltale scars and mouths that never spoke. Something deep in her eyes shining out through the gray smoke like a beacon. Her keeper however, was like all the rest of them: nameless, faceless and cold like a corpse. The way they treated those women made Caleb almost feel something like anger. It was close to an emotion he might have known once, now like everything else it was buried under miles of gray nothingness. Still running like a deep current.

From the withered tree a flower blooms.

There was a time when the sun shone down on green fields. When Calebs daddy once held him as they rode out to mend fences; he remembered the smell of the grease of the wagon axles mixed with the sweet smell of grass wet with the afternoon dampness. He remembered watching his Daddy stretch the wire with his gloved hands, twisting them together to repair the damages. Those days were sparkly; those days were new and inviting; those days before the lights went out of the world and it became something different.

Mending fences, traveling the lines as his father called it. Caleb shivered as the winds shifted and howled through the leafless trees. Green grass and wagon grease. This one memory was all Caleb had of a time when people were free and possibilities were endless. He kept this memory in a box in his mind, a wooden box with a discolored hasp and lock. He pushed this box so deep in his mind that it sometimes took him days to retrieve it. There he kept it safe from those that pry.

Others had memories that were similar, maybe some had more or some had less but one thing remained the same. They clung to those memories like drowning sailors in the waves. They hid those memories so they would not be taken, because they could not be taken.

Days before things changed, before the ash; before the pusher and the striker, the taker and the giver. Those days time meant something and people dreamed. This world was not dying, this world was dead. Men pounded at her chest but she did not respond. Not even the drivers knew how deep the cancer ran, or how it had spread. No one knew and no one cared. Men and women were husks, spent shells, dead on their feet. Enslaved and crushed under the ash; forcing their footsteps for fear of fates much worse than this life and far much worse than death.

The Giver