They should be here by now.

They weren’t here, for which he was grateful. It was the last thing he wanted. Nonetheless, the uncertainty ate at him. And he had no way to calculate what might have gone wrong. Or was it right?

The Boy was less concerned. He left the burden of all anxiety on his father’s shoulders as he set about the daily trivium of survival. The Boy wanted to eat and breathe and be relatively free of discomfort as they waited. He understood their fate and wasn’t untroubled by it, but he would not submit to those troubles. He didn’t want to live that way. After all, wasn’t that why he and his father had fled? Because that was the way They wanted them to live?

The sun was unrepentant in its brutalization of their camp. It was nearly 55 centigrade in the shade. For all that, The Boy still smoked a little. Hoping for dreams to come. For deliverance. His father resented it as a waste. But if They consumed the future and the past, couldn’t he still have this, a few peaceful moments of present?