A Living Dog

He sat in the carcass of an airplane alien amongst the winter pines. An old bird on its terminal journey to recommit itself to the earth, indifferent to the will of its passengers. He wore two jackets. One jacket was his own and the other belonged to a dead man, but he did not wear hers. He could not bring himself to leave her stripped naked, stripped of the all the dignity due her. He had buried them both as well as he could; her first and then the pilot. He could not bear to look at their wooden faces frozen in agony, though they still haunted his dreams. The thought of staying in the plane, the place they had died, made his stomach turn. He forced himself to stay because he knew his chances were better there. Beyond the halo of his fire the immense blackness of the night loomed, threatening to engulf the light and whatever hope it might bring with it. He thought of how much better the fire had made his situation, but it had not come without a fight.** The long hours of the suffering the deadly temperatures had eaten away at all but his most basic instincts to survive. He carried on only because of her. Abby, he thought. The light of my life. Why did she have to go? Why not me? He moved his hands closer to the fire; its warmth reminding him of her warmth. Lying next to her, holding her. The snow danced and slanted across the air in its own vigil, pausing and then increasing in velocity with the yell of the wind, as if being pursued by some banshee or demon.
She was faithful to her god and he took her…took her instead of me, he thought. Lord knows I wanted it. Huh…lord. What kind of lord allows his own to be taken like that? And the way she had gone…
A cloud of his breath spewed out over the fire. He bowed his head into his hand...

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... too afraid. He had always been too afraid. Now it was different though. He had wanted to end it all, but when he actually had come close to death it scared the hell out of him. He could smell it. Death had a smell. That was the weird thought he couldn’t get out of his head. He had stepped close to the threshold and saw the bottomless pit. He wanted to believe that something good could lie beyond that doorway, but experience told him otherwise. There was no return from it. No second chance. His father’s face had been one of surprising horror when he died. He knew what was at the bottom of that pit. Yet Abby had faced death with an unearthly integrity that he knew only she was capable of; as much as can be expected anyways. No one dies gloriously. All dignity dies with our passing. In the end death always wins, he thought. Death is a disease and the world is broken.