Page 43 of Paradox
Looking up, I see Eden and a shovel. “What am I meant to do with that?”
“If you want out so badly, then go dig.”
Dropping my feet back to the ground, I take hold of the shaft of the shovel with one hand, while Eden still grips the handle. “What am I digging?”
“Does it matter?”
My head dips to the side.Touché.
Eden lifts the shovel, standing me up in the process. Pushing me towards the door, he follows so close behind me that he bumps into me when I pause to slip my feet into his—far too big for me—work boots.
On the porch, he reaches around me to open the screen, then jabs me in the back. “Dig.”
“What the hell am I—”
“Just dig, little man.”
“Stop calling me that!”
“Stop acting like a baby.”
“You’re the baby.”
Landing face first in the snow is a lot more shocking than you think it would be. It looks soft—and it is for the first few inches, then it’s like the coarsest sand scratching at your skin.
“Why don’t you start there? And in an hour I’ll see how far you’ve gotten.”
Walled in by white, I roll on my side, and push the snow-covered hood off my face so I can look at him.
“Is there any purpose to this?”
Eden tosses Tek’s jacket on top of me. “Is there any purpose in anything I do?”
“You’re a sociopath,” I tell him, then struggle to get myself back to the porch landing.
The game controller is back in Eden’s hands by the time the shovel is in mine. But at least I'm outside. It is what I wanted.
Starting with the top step, I clear it and toss aside the snow as far as I can get it.
After the stairs are done, I clear a patch about one yard in diameter, then work in circles from there. Digging down a foot at a time, I toss the snow away until I reach the grass, then move out a little further, and start again.
I’m even a little smug about it when Eden shows genuine surprise at how far I got, though it’s short lived, because, as he gathers his hair into another stupid bun, he’s barking the next lot of orders at me.
“Fire pit. Wood. You know the rest.”
I give him a sarcastic salute, and he glares back. Then I tell myself the reason he turned and walked back inside is because I’m still holding onto the shovel.
The fire pit is the collapsable camping type with four steel pieces that slot into each other to make a trough.
After momentarily heading back inside for some newspaper and matches, I’m building the fire like it’s second nature.
Sitting back on the top step, I watch the largest pieces of wood catch a light as the sun starts to set. It’s only early, maybe four-thirty, and the lower the sun sinks behind the tree tops, the colder it gets.
I look down at my feet and see the gash I left in the bottom step the night I got here.
I wish I still had the axe.
“Here,” Eden says, dropping a beanie in my lap as he walks down the steps. As I pull my hood down to put it on beneath it, I watch him place four aluminum foil wrapped parcels into the fire.
