Historia, Part III

***This is a continuation of the story I posted last night. Any feedback is more than welcome.***

Clifford Jenkins slumped against the stump of a felled tree. The gnarled stump was dead, and would make good tender, but Clifford had built his fire from the dying grasses and weeds. Autumn was closing and becoming winter, making him rethink his decision to strike out for Historia when he did.

As he looked at the smoldering remnants of his fire, and began plucking Auld Lang Syne on his guitar, Clifford found his mind wandering back to when he was ten years old, and he pulled his first “death watch.”

In Nostalgia, it was tradition for a child to face a familial “death watch” as early as possible. The old timers said that it ‘toughened’ a child, and readied him for the world. And with Historia at their doorstep, the children of Nostalgia has to be toughened as soon as possible.

And so it was, that at the tender age of ten, Clifford’s granpappy had fallen ill of ‘the cough.’ Timey the Bar Owner had been an intermittent figure during that awful week, coming in and going out while Granpappy had grown steadily worse.

Clifford, looking at the smoldering fire, could see it as the fire in the small furnace in his granpappy’s death chamber, a small room on the back of every house in Nostalgia, furnished much the same, each with a mirror in it, most with a word inlaid into the mirror-sheen surface, usually Budweiser, a talisman of the old days used to ward off the evil encroaching from Historia like a disease. Like granpappy’s cough.

The bed was nothing more than a cot built up with a light mattress and pillows to make the dying as comfortable as possible. The old timers of Nostalgia had found chairs at some time in the distant past, each with a brightly colored emblem on it, most now sun-faded to the point of obscurity, but some could still be made out. Atlanta Falcons, Chicago Bears, Detroit Tigers. Clifford’s own granpappy, before ‘the cough’ had ravaged him, said that these were once great cities, and that the animals were the spiritual protectors of these thriving metropolises.

Granpappy coughed, a hacking, wheezing cough that brought a light spittle of blood to his lips. Clifford knew that the time was soon. Timey had returned with a pail of cool water and some dried meat.

“’Twont be long, Cliff,” he had said, putting a weather-worn hand on the boy’s shoulder.

From the kitchen of the house, Clifford heard his mother yelling at his father, “No boy should have to do this! He’s watching his granpap, your dad, die, and you’re sitting in here staring at the fireplace!” (Staring at fires was a habit of the Jenkins family.)

Clifford didn’t think twice about it. He had to ‘death watch.’ It was proper for a boy his age. It was the essence of Nostalgia, to strengthen against the blight of the Historians.

Clifford realized he’d long since stopped plucking the guitar and he had to almost physically remove himself from the twilight reverie. He reached for the bundle and pulled the block of cheese from it. With the Swedish Navy knife he cut off a chunk for himself and a sliver for Schrodinger the Mouse.

He pulled his collar up tight around his neck and scrunched as low as he could to protect against the cool of the night. He made it to the foothills on the first day. No small feat, considering that, with those idiots in Historia constantly futzing with the natural order, time was a lost concept.

He waited for Schrodinger to finish the cheese sliver, and while he waited he returned everything to its proper place in the bundle. Once the mouse was finished eating, Clifford lifted it up by the tail (he could sware that made the mouse giggle) and dropped it onto the stick-and-bundle. Schrodinger scurried up into the bundle and nestled between the cheese block and an envelope that Clifford carried at all times.

Clifford Jenkins, sensible as any man of 40 years, leaned further against the old, dead tree, and curled over for some sleep. He wanted to make it to the city of Historia by Boxing Day, which would be no easy task, as snow was already falling in the Antique Mountains overhead.