Why don't you shame the world
Shame them with your words and I'll smile
Why don't you shame the world
Shame them with your words and eyes
A pattern of make believe
Jennifer ran barefoot through the dark, foreboding Blackwater forest, fear gripping her every stabbing step. She was keenly aware of the punishing pain the ground forced into her but she kept running.
She was afraid. She thought for sure she was being chased by a group of miscreants who would have their way with her and then cannibalize her if they caught her. She was trying desperately to find the Blackwater River, a slow, lazy stream of dark water that meandered through the northern Florida flora and fauna and lazily tapered and fell off into a bay that feeds the greedy waters of the Gulf of Mexico. She was alone and had been since the shots rang out and ended the life of her husband, a man she reluctantly married and then found herself amicably loving. Now he was gone. Dead, his tangled, broken body lying in the grip of a bottomed out crevasse of tangled cypress roots that looked like the hands of the devil himself.
The couple camped along a little stream, fleeing and living on the edge of a knife like so many in the hinterlands of the dark north Florida forests. They were overtaken by a gang of unholy savages who had gone bent after the recent nuclear war began and the fallout of neighbors and communities splintered like a crown of thorns through every small town neighborhood in the remotest parts of north Florida.
The bombs that collapsed the country and forced everyone into the dark ages were hundreds of miles away, but the wave tumbled over even the most remote parts of the deep South. The war between the U.S. and its allies against Russia and China finally washed over the land like the first plague, Moses commanding Aaron to stab his staff into the soil. The waters turned to blood, though not in the literal sense. Neighbors shot neighbors, mothers and fathers died at the hands of their own children. Babies were left in their bassinets as mothers lost their minds and fled naked into the open streets, only to be put down like wild dogs by the remaining police who turned on their own.
Jennifer, too, was now alone. She lost her arranged love. The one who agreed to protect her and enjoyed a few untroubled moments of intimacy with her before a gang cornered them. He was killed and the group had their way with her before laughing it off as she lay in a puddle of mud, weeping in misery as they drove away to find more victims and loot.
Now Jennifer only knew how to run. And the hidden forest lanes, cut years earlier as fire lanes by the forestry service served as her guide. She didn’t know where she was going but pleaded with the Lord Almighty she would find a gracious old couple who would take her in, or at least an old lady who needed some help around a cottage. Anyone unthreatening would be a welcomed gift.
After the death of her husband, and the abuse she endured, she awoke in a daze, the campsite disheveled by the marauders and rapists. The small fire from the night before was a smoldering ash heap, smoke barely licking the cool air above before the ghostly fog snuffed it out. Jennifer panicked and backed away from the puddle she rolled in all night. She perched her cold, exposed body against the base of a pine tree. She pulled her knees toward her, the tiny blonde hairs standing sheepishly on end, pricked by the cold. Her pants were gone, in tatters, laying among the remnants of the evening night’s dead fire. She gripped her legs at her shins and pulled them tightly toward herself. Her loose, stretched shirt barely covered her exposed thighs.
Though she was alone in the forest she felt more exposed than ever, the shame of ten thousand devious eyes peering at her small frame nestled in the bottom of a broken, cold and lonely forest floor.
The previous night’s events had escaped her but were beginning to take shape in her mind. She was still in a daze, but the foggy memories began to entangle themselves around her mind like the vines that strangled the shrubs around her. She saw the band of thugs, Joe struggling to keep her behind him as he used his other arm to swing violently in all directions, like a blind man fighting a swarm of bees. She saw them pull him away from her, strip him and beat him remorselessly. She cried as one of the quieter men held her at a distance. He was stout and an unfortunate soul, caught up in things that betrayed his faith but held sway over his weak and cowardly soul. He breathed heavily and sounded like a steaming kettle when he exhaled. He would soon be dead, unprepared for the physical exertion the future would require. If only he knew, perhaps he could have protected both Jennifer and Joe from his gang and find a respite in a quieter future. None of them would ever know.
The beating commenced until Joe fell dead at the bottom of a ravine leading to the creek. A cypress tree’s roots caught his lifeless body. The roots that caressed his broken shell were meant to stay beneath the water, but the fall drought stole water from every brook and creek and river in the region. The exposed roots seemed angry and vengeful. Joe was an unfortunate blood offering and the roots gladly accepted.
Jennifer sat against the base of the pine for a few moments. In her mind, she might have sat there for centuries. Suddenly, a flock of migratory starlings called overhead as they passed, just above the heavenly reaches of the cypress and pine canopy, a few stopping to land briefly before continuing with a rejoinder toward the flock. Jennifer was startled by the unsettling sound. She sat up and the sun finally rose high enough to kiss her thighs and provide a degree of warmth. Her aching muscles screamed. Her nose, unchecked and desecrated, ran remorselessly, the snot and tears mingling through the night and eventually drying into a crusty pie of tainted goo that she would want to look after. She tentatively arose from her place and wiped the crust away from her face. She looked around. Like a madman, suddenly free from arrest, confusing his would-be captors through sheer magic, she, too, wandered at her surroundings and the whirling daylight blindness that suddenly dried the crisp, overdue contacts covering her eyes.
The struggle began anew.
She wandered around the campsite. She panicked when she saw Joe’s lifeless, graying ashen body tangled among the roots. With no shoes, no survival bag, no plan, Jennifer ran. She had no idea where she was going but most people in a panic don’t. She ran until the night broke through the daylight. All she knew was she needed to flee the place were she was and find a peaceful place to fall and perhaps die.
The following morning, Jennifer awoke along the bank of a lazy stream. How much time had passed since she fled the campsite where Joe’s lifeless body lay? She was delirious from hunger and suddenly felt the jolting pain of the previous night’s run stabbing into her bruised feet. She gasped, which reminded her the brief sleep was breathless. She sat up and began to cry. The slumbering winter sun still hid behind the cypress and pines but blushed a sweet, warm amber glow that announced a new merciful morning in an otherwise dismal world. The light was weak and gentle, and like a sweet mother, it gently brushed her hair aside and showed her eyes that she was still alive and free. She crawled toward the gentle water and dropped her face into the thin winter stream, which was lower and more accessible than normal due to an ongoing fall drought that lumbered into winter. She collapsed into the cold stream. The water lapped over her — cold, like a quick burst of lightning. She immediately burst forth from the stream with renewed energy, letting out a high-pitched squeal. The water was bitter.
It was December, and even in parts as far south as the northern Florida Panhandle, the weather could be cruel, bitterly humid, damp and cold. On this day in this particular year, the weather dropped down as low as 16 degrees in the dark, bleak corners of the northwestern Florida frontier. The eve of Christmas Eve — the Christmas Adam — was a full moon; the rain drizzled and the temperatures sunk below 20 degrees in several parts, a rare flurry of ice and sleet gathering in the treetops and even falling in disparate, scant sheets onto the earth. How did Jennifer survive those temperatures in nothing more than an oversized threadbare tee-shirt and her underwear?
The water had long cooled from the previous months of kayakers, bass boaters and river rats who gushed their High Lifes and discarded them along the banks. Not to mention the abrupt break in life of nuclear war, the immediate shutdown of all technology and the fierce battles between neighbors that ensued.
Jennifer arose from the stream, flailing back and girding herself on her tentative legs, growling angrily and loud as she realized the water served two purposes. It awakened her physically, but also sent a lightning bolt up her spine and into her brain, awakening a dull center that had fallen asleep or had been suppressed altogether amidst the rigors of fleeing near death experiences. She was alert now, if for a moment, and was aware of her own demons. The anger at the world, the cruelty of neighbors, the cowardice of the comfortable, the willful blindness of those in power. She was truly alone and that recognition spurred within her a bleak hatred for mankind. She worried it would remain. And just as soon as she worried of its arrival, she let the hatred cradle her within its deceptive grip. She felt a brief, calm comfort, rocking back and forth within its clasp.
The hatred was captivating, but like all evils, it wanted something from her, it breathed on her neck, it enticed her and lured her in her weakest moment to submit to its rip and slash from reality. It forced her to outwardly foment rage, a poor decision for an already weak and vulnerable small woman all alone in a deep, endless forest that was only interrupted by the repetitively gloaming lazy water. The anger took hold of her until she was a different beast altogether. She, though small and normally charmingly affectionate toward all creatures, had the same temptations as all men; the lure to submit completely to an evil made her delirious, like a mad person withdrawn from days of a needed medication; she began to respond to the surrounding canopy with rage. She screamed. “Why!?” She screamed. She cursed. She blamed God and nature and man for her plight. Perhaps there was some truth tucked within those accusations, though none of them were neatly arranged so as to test the merits of her manifest angers. The rage could only last so long. After all, she was surviving on two days of hard physical punishment, nearly freezing to death, a broken emotional state and a stomach that could use several thousand calories to return some sanity to the withering grey matter within her brain.
The screaming and staggering went on briefly until it puttered into slobbering sighs and mournful cries. Jennifer was otherworldly at this point, a fragmented shape tangled among the drowning roots of the cypress tree that effortlessly pulled Joe away from her, from her present, away from an old life that was all but a foregone conclusion.
Then the rage found a temporary conclusion. Staggering and breathless, she fell again, headlong into the shallow river stream. This time she didn’t get up.
The water, weak and gentle, moved lazily around Jennifer. It was so shallow her half turned head had no problems staying above the flow even as her cheek pressed into the sandy bottom. The water didn’t wash over Jennifer’s face as much as it meandered around it, her head like an ancient stone in a shallow stream, diverting the water and mindlessly reshaping its surroundings.
It was a new morning. The sun was bashful and hiding low on the horizon, behind a veil of fog and distant trees. The world was about to awaken and in doing so, awaken Jennifer. It was still brutally cold and she would most likely suffer as a result.
She let out the briefest, tiny cough. It was enough to allow a small plug of water to tickle the back of her throat. She lifted her head out of the water, unable to immediately open her eyes. She opened her mouth and out of the weakened corners the burglarizing water dripped away and rejoined the stream. She slunk back onto her knees, barely away from the shallow water’s edge. She lay with her legs folded, her knees into her breasts and her face down in a prostrate prayerful position, resting heavily onto her crossed forearms. There was no weeping. There was no recognition of the world around her. These firstborn moments of the day were devoid of feeling, of regret, of anger, of fear, of pain. There was simply a vacant tomb possessing her mind; she wasn’t allowed to begin the day with a predisposition toward the past, toward her circumstances. She was just there. Just like the trees were there. The lichen was there. The moss in the cypress, the water in the stream. It was all effortless and yet a holy orchestration of creation playing its song endlessly, every day, all day. It was the dying, mournful soliloquy contrasted with the crescendo of the forest erupting with a buck deer chasing a doe, the unabridged change of wind direction that startled the tree tops and caused them to whirl and swoosh. The birds, for no reason other than what was known only to themselves, fleeing one tree canopy for another. The forest had its audience. Jennifer didn’t know just how fortunate she was to experience the priceless symphony.
She sat up from her prayerful position, wiped at her eyes and noticed faintly a slow, drifting smoke in the distance. She was hopelessly vision impaired without her contacts, but as the time and harsh surroundings dictated her future, the ones angrily squeezing on her eyeballs were becoming increasingly troublesome. She finally made the difficult decision to remove them and then immediately tossed them into the stream. She was far-sighted, so she would at least see the forest for the trees. She was more specifically engaged in the smoke. Where did it come from? Was it merely a flush of steam and fog lifting from the river stream, or was there something there? She got up and barely noticed the dull, cruel pains along the bottoms of her feet, the cool river stream numbing every step. She staggered slowly toward the smoke, which rose from the opposite side of the river where the land seemed to dip slightly away and hide from the rest of its surroundings. She staggered across the stream and was immediately reminded of the previous days’ pains, the weakness in her body and soul, the frail state of her mind. She began to weep as she drew closer to the smoke. She staggered like a zombie from some now-unattainable movie from a previous age. A gentle ridge revealed a chimney delivering the smoke, and attached to it was a well-build, rustic cabin that looked as old as the earth surrounding it. There was a long, open front porch with two lazy swings dawdling and playing with the morning air currents. A stack of firewood as long as a Buick dressed out the edges of the porch. As Jennifer approached, her vision began to blur; her heart raced but seemed to clumsily clip away at a weak pace. She had to trudge up a shallow but formidable ridge that concealed the world beyond from the low-lying creeping river bottom.
Upon reaching the top, she saw a new land. An open space with a garden, an ancient cabin, a chimney billowing smoke, signaling life inside the home’s walls. A relief washed over Jennifer and quickly tickled her vagus nerve, which caused her to crash into a heap where she would remain unconscious for several hours.