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Face from Below
» A Conversation by Starlight » The Ministration of Wounds » ‘Everybody’s Looking for an Entrance’ » A Midnight Baptism
    The air grows colder, and soon they begin to see snow on the ground.
    I’ll be damned, Abraham says. I ain’t been north in ages.Does that mean it’s winter then?
    January, Moses confirms.
    We missed Christmas?
    I guess we did.
    Abraham looks sincerely disappointed.
    Don’t worry, Moses says. It’ll come around again. It always does.
    A snow flurry stirs up, and the flakes whip around them as they drive. Moses pulls the car over, and they all get out. Abraham opens his palms to catch the flakes as they fall.He watches them
melt immediately into his hands, fascinated, perhaps, by the ephemera of nature that shimmer away on contact with humanity.
    The Vestal Amata opens her mouth wide to catch the flakes on her tongue, as though she would consume greedily the falling sky itself.
    Moses himself remembers the snow from his youth, when he travelled many places. He is and has always been a traveller,for longing rather than necessity – even before things changed. With
the agitation of the dead the world changed, and what it became suited Moses even more than what it was before. But he does recall a year he spent in the mountains of California, the heavy blades
hitched to the fronts of trucks to push the snow out of the way, the mounds of sooty ice collected by the sides of the road.Back then, snow was a nuisance, an obstacle, something to be got around
or over. Now the world has slowed down, there is no hurry. You watch the snowflakes fall lazily on their way, and you are reminded of your own floating, your own speedless descent through life.
    From a ditch by the roadside, they see a dead man stir. He, too, is blanketed with snow, which fissures and sloughs off as herises slowly. He moves with exquisite languor, as though his very
joints are frozen stiff. It takes him many minutes just to climb to his hands and knees and then to his feet. Then, for a moment, he simply stands there and looks around, his head turning on the
creaky hinge of his neck. Who knows how long he has been lying in the ditch, and now what a wonder the world must look from this newaltitude.
    Then the dead man seems to regain his purpose and shuffle slowly to where the three stand by the car. He scrapes his feet across the frozen tarmac and tries to lift his arms in a pathetic
attempt at grasping. His skin is completely grey with blue undertones – death gone to pallid ash. The dead don’t take naturally to temperatures such as this. They don’t move well
to begin with,and the cold slows them down considerably more. For this reason, there are more communities of survivors in the north where the seasons make it safer for many months of the year.
    The dead man reaches for them, his fingers immobile on the stumps of his hands.
    Poor thing, says the Vestal Amata. Do you have to kill it?
    It ain’t doing him any favours to keep him alive, Moses says.
    He walks over to the dead man and pulls a small folding knife from his pocket.
    The dead man reaches for Moses, opening his mouth. There is no smell to the man, dried up and frozen as he is, and Moses can see the shrivelled tongue in the well of his mouth, the cracked grey
palate, the teeth turned to chalky stone.
    The arms grasp for him, but Moses gets to the man’s side and reaches onearm around the back of his torso to keep the arms lowered. It is a gentle gesture, almost like a brother’s
embrace. The dead man looks confused. He tries to rotate his head to a position where he might get a bite out of Moses, but the neck doesn’t allow such range.
    Be still now, Moses says quietly.
    Then he takes the knife in his free hand, unfolds it, and raises it in front of the deadman’s face.
    Close your eyes, Moses says to him. It is tender, the process, like a surgery or a baptism or a sudden kindness. Close your eyes now, he says.
    He raises the knife to within an inch of one of the eyes, and the dead man instinctively closes them. He is peaceful now, his mouth still open but more by muscle slack than appetite. And then,
with quick precision, Moses thrusts theknife deep into the man’s eye socket. A little dribble of fluid, neither pus nor blood, spills from the burst orb of the eyeball – and then the
man’s whole body goes limp.
    Moses lets the body down gently onto the ground and removes the knife from the eye socket. Then he sweeps up a