Nazareth (A Dystopian Short Story)

A few years after an unspecified apocalyptic event, two wanderers share a chance encounter. With faulty memories and no foreseeable purpose in life, they reflect on the nature of faith and loss at the end of the world.

This story is approximately 3000 words. A shorter version of it has previously appeared in The Subtopian Magazine.

Excerpt:

We met up with Arlo right outside of Elsinore. His name wasn’t really Arlo, of course, just like the city wasn’t really called Elsinore. But those, at least, are names I can remember. Arlo was a singer back in the 20s, I think, and Elsinore was a city in a story some guy named Billy wrote about a man who killed his mom and knocked up the lawyer’s daughter.

But no, that isn’t quite right, is it? There was something else once.

In any event…

We met up with Arlo two miles outside of Elsinore. He had dirt streaks on his face. Not from crying, I suspect. It looked more like he’d been walking through a mine somewhere, looking for diamonds or gold or whatever it is that grows in mines. He had a broken watch on his wrist and a small flower in his hair. I wanted to comb it. His hair, I mean. Not the flower. It was long and black tangled like a bunch of snakes nesting around his ears. It used to be braided, I think. Put in dreadlocks, with little red and yellow canvas ribbons woven through it like a volcano had erupted on his head or something.

“You got the time?” he asked, tapping the heels of his brown cowboy boots impatiently. I shouldn’t say impatiently. Arlo didn’t have an impatient bone in his body, not an elbow or a kneecap or a scapula. Insistent is a better word.

“You got the time?” he mumbled, beating the heels of his muddy cowboy boots insistently.

I did and told him so. He didn’t ask what it was.

The others stayed in the road, sitting, standing, talking amongst themselves. I couldn’t hear any of what they said. Nights were too quiet around here. I wasn’t worried about them -- no cars ever came through at night, and if one did, they’d see the headlights long before it plowed over them.

“I was over at the church earlier,” Arlo said. “Jesus is naked somewhere. They’ve got boxes going to Jerusalem.”

I almost scoffed. It was a pointless thing to say. The boxes were a well-known phenomenon. I’d never seen the inside of those boxes before, only the boxes themselves being loaded onto vans, onto trucks, boxes on the television news going off to Haiti, to the Congo, all the other islands where people wore white linen. They -- an anonymous They, nameless, faceless They -- sent boxes everywhere, no surprise if Jerusalem were on the list. You never knew what might be in them.

As for naked Jesus, I’m sure there were a lot of them wandering around somewhere. Everybody’s naked at some point in their lives. We’re born naked, for Christ’s sake. Adam and Lilith were naked when they planted that garden across the river. We’re naked when we shower, we’re naked when we shit, when we fuck. I never saw the problem with it.

Somebody laughed behind us. A coyote sound. Were there coyotes here? I’d heard they were afraid of people. Maybe if we were all laughing, they’d keep away. I didn’t have my knife anymore.