The fireblackened boulders like the shapes of bears on the starkly wooded slopes.
The faintly lit hatchway lay in the dark of the yard like a grave yawning at judgment day in some old apocalyptic painting.
The boy so frail and thin through his coat, shivering like a dog.
The flames lit the darkening glass of the window where the boy stood in hooded silhouette like a troll come in from the night.
The melted window glass hung frozen down the walls like icing on a cake.
The road crossed a dried slough where pipes of ice stood out of the frozen mud like formations in a cave.
The nights were blinding cold and casket black and the long reach of the morning had a terrible silence to it. Like a dawn before battle.
Sketched upon the pall of soot downstream the outline of a burnt city like a black paper scrim.
Sitting like a starved and threadbare Buddha, staring at the coals.
Out there was the gray beach with the slow combers rolling dull and leaden and the distant sound of it. Like the desolation of some alien sea breaking on the shores of a world unheard of.
Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before. Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world.
Main Title: The Road
Raw cold daylight fell through from the roof. Gray as his heart.
Scrolls of fallen wallpaper lying in the floor like ancient documents.
Shifting in and out of the curtain of soot like a house in some uncertain dream.
Secondary Title:
The small wad of burning paper drew down to a wisp of flame and then died out leaving a faint pattern for just a moment in the incandescence like the shape of a flower, a molten rose.
The soft black talc blew through the streets like squid ink uncoiling along a sea floor ….
They went on. Treading the dead world under like rats on a wheel.
They went on in the perfect blackness, sightless as the blind.
They set out upon the road again, slumped and cowled and shivering in their rags like mendicant friars sent forth to find their keep.
They were discalced to a man like pilgrims of some common order for all their shoes were long since stolen.
They’d tied a small length of pipe to the can to sink it and they crouched over the tank like apes fishing with sticks in an anthill for the better part of an hour until the jug was full.
When he looked back the old man had set out with his cane, tapping his way, dwindling slowly on the road behind them like some storybook peddler from an antique time, dark and bent and spider thin and soon to vanish forever.
Wearing masks and goggles, sitting in their rags by the side of the road like ruined aviators.
They plodded on, thin and filthy as street addicts.
They moved through the streets like sappers.
The world soon to be largely populated by men who would eat your children in front of your eyes and the cities themselves held by cores of blackened looters who tunneled among the ruins and crawled from the rubble white of tooth and eye carrying charred and anonymous tins of food in nylon nets like shoppers in the commissaries of hell.
The warming house creaked and groaned. Like a thing being called out of long hibernation.
The wreckage of buildings strewn over the landscape and skeins of wire from the roadside poles garbled like knitting.
Their half muted cranklings miles above where they circled the earth as senselessly as insects trooping the rim of a bowl.
They came upon the road unexpectedly and he stopped the boy with one hand and they crouched in the roadside ditch like lepers and listened.
Then it passed beneath them like an underground train and drew away into the night and was gone.
Long curve of beach beyond. Gray as lava sand.
Like the great pendulum in its rotunda scribing through the long day movements of the universe of which you may say it knows nothing and yet know it must.
Following a stone wall in the dark, wrapped in his blanket, kneeling in the ashes like a penitent.
Eyes collared in cups of grime and deeply sunk. Like an animal inside a skull looking out the eyeholes.
Downcountry a storm had passed over the isthmus and leveled the dead black tress from eat to west like weeds in the floor of a stream.
Great squid propelling themselves over the floor of the sea in the cold darkness. Shuttling past like trains, eyes the size of saucers.
He ducked his head and then flicked the lighter and swung the flame out over the darkness like an offering.
He kicked holes in the sand for the boy’s hips and shoulders where he would sleep and he sat holding him while he tousled his hair before the fire to dry it. All of this like some ancient anointing.
He got the binoculars out of the cart and stood in the road and glassed the plain down there where the shape of a city stood in the grayness like a charcoal drawing sketched across the waste.
Creedless shells of men tottering down the causeways like migrants in a feverland.
Beyond that the ocean vast and cold and shifting heavily like a slowly heaving vat of slag and then the gray squall line of ash.
After a while they heard the truck begin to roll. Lumbering and creaking like a ship.
A single gray flake sifting down. He caught it in his hand and watched it expire there like the last host of christendom.
A forest fire was making its way along the tinderbox ridges above them, flaring and shimmering against the overcast like the northern lights.
And on the far shore a creature that raised its dripping mouth from the rimstone pool and stared into the light with eyes dead white and sightless as the eggs of spiders.
And somewhere two hunted animals trembling like ground-foxes in their cover.
At the tide line a woven mat of weeds and the ribs of fishes in their millions stretching along the shore as far as eye could see like an isocline of death.
At night when he woke coughing he’d sit up with his hand pushed over his head against the blackness. Like a man waking in a grave. Like those disinterred dead from his childhood that had been relocated to accommodate a highway.
He looked like a pile of rags fallen off a cart.
He looked like someone trying to feed a vulture broken in the road.
Houses or barns or under the bank of a roadside ditch with the blankets pulled over their heads and the noon sky black as the cellars of hell.
His face in the small light streaked with black from the rain like some old world thespian.
He’d trained him to lie in the woods like a fawn.
In an old batboard smokehouse they found a ham gambreled up in a high corner. It looked like something fetched from a tomb, so dried and drawn.
In the draws the smoke coming off the ground like mist and the thin black trees burning on the slopes like stands of heathen candles.
Like pilgrims in a fable swallowed up and lost among the inward parts of some granitic beast.
I’ve not seen a fire in a long time, that’s all. I live like an animal.
He’d stop and lean on the cart and the boy would go on and then stop and look back and he would raise his weeping eyes and see him standing there in the road looking back at him from some unimaginable future, glowing in that waste like a tabernacle.
He’d come down with a fever and they lay in the woods like fugitives.
He slung the tarp of goods up over his shoulder and took the boy’s hand and they went on, tramping in the sand like parade horses against tripping over some piece of driftwood or seawrack.
He shoved the pistol in his belt and slung the knapsack over his shoulder and picked up the boy and turned him around and lifted him over his head and set him on his shoulders and set off up the old roadway at a dead run, holding the boy’s knees, the boy clutching his forehead, covered with gore and mute as a stone.
He squatted and scooped up a handful of stones and smelled them and let them fall clattering. Polished round and smooth as marbles or lozenges of stone veined and striped.
He trudged out through the drifts leaving the boy to sleep under the tree like some hibernating animal.
He went through the cans again one by one, holding them in his hand and squeezing them like a man checking for ripeness at a fruitstand.
He turned and looked at the boy. Standing with his suitcase like an orphan waiting for a bus.
A drainpipe. A trellis. The dark serpentine of a dead vine running down it like the track of some enterprise upon a graph.

Featured Simile

A hush had fallen upon the town after the outburst of wailing and lamentation that had swept over the river, like a gust of wind from the opened abode of sorrow.
-- Lord Jim - Conrad, Joseph - 1900