Exit Kingdom

populace gone all ugly and cankered at the seams. His own blood, too. His brother not excepted, nor himself neither. For the pursuit of good is
a constant labour, and he ain’t always got the strengthin his heart.
    *
    The sun is directly overhead when the car breaks down. They are shaken by an enormous pothole hidden by the snow, and then the car skews a little. Something in the undercarriage
knocks loud, and they are stopped dead.
    The brothers climb out and Abraham looks under the car.
    The axle’s broke, he says. We’re not goin anywhere.
    Moses looks up and downthe road, but there’s nothing to see.
    It’s a goddamn trial is what it is, he says. How do you feel about freezin to death, brother?
    Well, Abraham says, it sure ain’t the way I thought I would go. But it seems clean at least.
    Clean? You got some mind on you, Abe.
    His brother takes this as a compliment and beams wide.
    Then the rear door of the car opens and the redhead climbsout, rubbing the sleep out of her eyes and yawning.
    How come we’re stopped? she asks.
    The axle’s broke, Abraham tells her and smiles. We’re dyin clean.
    She casts a look of confusion at Moses, but he does not meet her gaze.
    Come on, he says to both of them. We might as well go forward cause we know there ain’t anything behind. Don’t take nothing you don’t need.
    So they bundlethemselves up and walk forward through the deep snow, raising their faces to the noontime sun.
    And maybe there are a handful of blessings left in the world after all, because it is only a quarter of an hour before they find a cut through the trees to their left.
    What is it? says the Vestal.
    Looks like it could be a path, Abraham says. Mose?
    Could be, Moses says. Could be there’ssomething at the end of it. Could be it’s nothin at all. You want to chance it?
    Might as well, Abraham says. After all, we can
see
there ain’t nothing for miles in the direction we’re headed.
    So they follow the cut through the trees, climbing up an incline to a plateau where they find a clearing in the woods. In the middle of the clearing is a small cabin with a collapsed chimney anda sagging porch.
    Hallelujah, Abraham says. Looks like we found ourselves a place to not freeze to death.
    Inside, the cabin looks like it was abandoned many years before. Some of the floorboards are rotted through, but nothing is out of place. It isn’t until an hour later, after they have
hauled their things up from the car and while Abraham is on the roof clearing the bricks out ofthe collapsed chimney and Moses is securing the porch, that the Vestal Amata finds the dead man.
    There’s a pond behind the cabin, its surface frozen over. Under the fallen snow, it’s hard to tell how large the pond is, but the trees around it are cleared to the size of a
baseball diamond.
    I didn’t even know it was there until I slipped on it, the Vestal says.
    They can see the placewhere the Vestal slipped, the snow has been dusted away from the surface of the ice, leaving a clear patch.
    Look, she says and points. Slug under glass.
    They gather around the cleared patch and look down. The ice is clear, and caught under it, like some kind of horrible fish in an aquarium, is the face of a dead man gazing up at them. His body
has gone soft and bloated from being underwaterfor so long, his eyes milky, his flesh gone pale, nibbled at by fishes, his skin peeled off and floating around him like a nest of seaweed. They
could have thought him just straight dead if it weren’t for the fact that his eyes are blinking up at them sluggishly. As they watch, the dead man raises a hand to them, his movements slow,
made almost ghostly by the freezing water in which heis entombed. He places his palm against the undersurface of the ice.
    Moses knows it to be a grasp of hunger, but because the dead man doesn’t seem to be able to bend his stiffened fingers, the outspread palm looks like a gesture of greeting or welcome. The
eyes continue to blink, slowly.
    It is pathetic and awful, the slug trapped underwater and undrownable – like a man staring up atthem from the very mouth of the void, waving his goodbyes as he descends, floating down
peaceful into the great black.
    There is a darkness to nature – the unhurried ways of birth and death.
    Jesus, Abraham says. If that ain’t a sight. I’m gonna be seeing that for weeks now every time I close my eyes.
    It’s sad, says the Vestal Amata. He’s trapped.
    I wish I hadn’t of seen it atall,