Ashen Winter (Ashfall)

broke. The end of the spindle hit my palm, twisting the nylon and burning my hand through my glove. I snatched my hand back and the spindle went flying. It had drilled clear through both the thunderhead and fireboard.
    I shook my hand and looked down. The hole in the bottom of the fireboard was nearly filled by a huge spark glowing atop the ash.
    “Now I know what we were doing wrong,” Darla said. “We were supposed to put a notch in the fireboard to let out the spark. Probably supposed to lubricate the thunderhead somehow, too.”
    I gently lifted the fireboard. There were bits of snow and ice around the spark on the floor of our foxhole. If any of those melted, our spark would be extinguished. I picked up my knife and slid the blade under the spark.
    Slowly, very slowly, I lifted the spark while groping around for the bird’s nest. Darla placed it in my hand. I gently slid the spark off my knife and into the nest, cupped in my left palm.
    The spark was growing, igniting some of the black dust I’d scooped up along with it. I scooped some more of the dust from the fireboard with the blade of my knife and gently fed it to the spark. It grew larger still, a glowing coal nestled in the shredded bark on my palm.
    I whispered to my spark, letting my breath coax it, “Burn. Burn, damn it, burn.” And with a pop and whoosh, it obeyed. The bird’s nest flared to life. I set it down slowly, not caring if it singed my fingers. We had made fire—created life!
    We fed the fire together, starting with slivers of leftover wood and quickly moving on to twigs and branches. Darla’s hands shook so badly that the twigs she dropped occasionally missed the fire altogether. I shuddered to think what might’ve happened if the fire-by-friction set hadn’t worked.
    I took the hatchet and cut three long limbs with forks on their ends. By jamming each branch into the snow and interweaving the forked ends, I created a rough tripod next to our fire. I took Darla’s frozen clothing off my belt and draped it over the tripod to dry.
    Darla was huddled right up against the fire, getting warm. I squatted next to her. “Let me see your hand,” I said.
    She held out her right hand, and I pulled off her glove. She had two roughly parallel crescent-shaped wounds between her palm and the base of her middle finger. Benson had bitten her so hard he’d drawn blood. The bite was scabbed over, but the flesh around it was red and swollen. I got some clean snow to scrub her wound.
    When I started washing it, Darla screamed. I found a mostly clean leftover piece of cottonwood and gave it to her to bite. “Sorry,” I said. “I gotta clean it.”
    Darla nodded, tears rolling down her face. I kissed her cheek, tasting salt. She laid her hand back in my lap, and I resumed scrubbing while she cried.
    “I think it’s getting infected,” I said as I finished.
    Darla just moaned.
    I put her glove back on and rooted around in my jacket for a minute. I’d kept the Cipro tablets zipped into my inner pocket with the kale seeds. I took out a tablet and handed it to Darla. “Take this.”
    She spit the piece of wood out from between her teeth. “They’re for you.”
    “I’ll take a half.”
    “How many do you have left?”
    “Five, counting that one.”
    “Aren’t you supposed to take antibiotics for, like, ten days or something?”
    “Doc said seven. I’ll take a half. If you take full ones today and tomorrow and then go to halves like me, we can make five tablets last three more days. By then maybe we’ll be in Worthington. Maybe we’ll be able to buy some more.”
    “My mouth is too dry to swallow this damn horse pill.”
    “I’ll get some clean snow.”
    We had no pan to melt the snow in, so we put little balls of it in our mouths to melt. That was tolerable with the fire roaring beside us. Darla swallowed her Cipro, and I cut a tablet in half with my knife. The rough edge of the tablet caught in my throat. I had to eat a bunch more snow to choke it down and wash away the nasty taste it left in my mouth.
    Then we cleared off snow from a larger area to sleep in. By the time we’d done that, we needed more firewood. So we spent at least a half hour chopping enough wood to last through the night.
    I felt woolly, like I’d been awake for three days straight. My eyelids drooped, and I had to force myself to concentrate as I chopped wood lest the hatchet miss and add to our growing inventory of injuries.
    But Darla looked even worse.