I woke up before you, looking down at your peaceful, sleeping face. You were curled into me, your breaths warm against my collarbone. I wanted to lean down and kiss you, but you needed the rest.

 

I lifted the corner of the tarp we'd tied into a loose tent to look out at the rising sun. Even here, flakes of ash blew on the morning breeze, cluttering the ground like the snowflakes I hadn't seen for at least a decade.

 

I reached down to my jean pocket and felt the sharp corners of my sketchbook. I was working through its pages, drawing the homes we'd passed, the empty streets. Drawing the image of you leaning down to the cracked pavement, reaching for a glint of gold in an algae-green puddle. You'd stood up quickly, wiping off the slime and holding out the ring to me. It was a plain gold band with a braid carved into the surface and another inside. Letters the size of fire ants spelled out the names Edith and Jane, like a codeword slipped into a crossword. You screamed when you saw that, "See, I told you people like us could get married." 

 

"I already knew that," I said, looking around, still nervous to touch you out in the open, "but I don't need to marry you to know I'll love you forever."

 

 

The sketchbook is the second book in my collection. At least for now. In my backpack, the first one—a thick herbal—is wedged against my spine. We used it to memorize the edible plants growing in the forest. When one of us gets a gut ache or a headache, or an infection, we take out the book and look at the photographs. Even the smell of the pages helps me feel better. I like it when you close your eyes and let me put a leaf or a piece of mushroom on your warm tongue. I love to watch your surprise as you chew paper-thin bark or sour blueberries. You're getting better at guessing what I've found. And I'm getting better at finding things you like.

 

When I'd found the sketchbook, you said I better not make you carry a library. "I'll carry it," I'd answered.

 

 

I felt like giving up sometimes, when I thought about the data centres shutting off or burning up. About the libraries that had moulded and flooded, pages cut to confetti by armies of moths. Or even without the moths, the collections that were torched by other people we used to live with. How normal it was for them to destroy the history of our world.

 

I will never let them take you away from me. On the night when you'd been declared Roy Parson's soulmate (a pink-skinned pastor who was sixty years older than you), we met near the old church and ran to the woods, never looking back. We heard the dogs barking in the distance, sniffing our cold sweat through the mulch and rotting wood. We slipped into the river to lose them, swimming downstream until they tired and went home. Then we went to find ours.

 

 

I opened the sketchbook, flipping through the first few pages of our archive. When I was a kid, I used to photograph everything with the silver, telescoping Olympus camera my grandma gave me when I was only eight. I took pictures of all the kids from school, making them stand in front of the tire swing. I remembered the way the lens jammed with river sand and wouldn't close. How the black battery, thick as a die, stopped holding a charge. This book is like a camera, and it will last, at least, twice as long.

 

 

Today was our rest day, and we had been planning to spend it catching up on sleep, airing our torn skirts in the long grass and repacking our sacks before we continued on. With my black ballpoint I draw the silhouette of your sharp chin. The coat-hook curl of your upturned nose, adding the constellation of dark freckles to your coffee-dark skin. When the sun was high enough to pierce through the holes in the tarp, you groaned, and rubbed your eyes.

 

We were gathering and folding sun-washed laundry when I saw something moving through the trees. "Get down," I hissed, grabbing your wrist and pulling you to a copse of blackberry bushes. It moved toward us, noisily snapping the undergrowth of fallen branches and bleached bones. As it drew closer, I began to realize it was a young quagga.

 

"Oh, isn't she sweet," you said, shaking off my hand and pushing yourself up off the ground.

 

I stood up, too, brushing the tendrils of yellow grass off my dress. "I thought the Order had exterminated all the quaggas from here." The Order was intolerant toward any innovation they believed disregarded the will of God.

 

"Guess not," you said, giddily, tiptoeing to get a closer look.

 

I followed. "She probably just smelled our food, I'll scare her away," I said.

 

"No, don't. I want to see her."

 

"Alright, but no feeding," I said.

 

"I won't," you answered, but I could see your hand slipping into your pocket, full of the blackberries you'd picked earlier.

 

She was beautiful up close. Nothing like the veiny, bloody fanged illustrations we'd seen in the informational brochures that the Order liked to hand out during Sunday service.

 

You held out your cupped palm, the purple berries pooled along your heart line.

 

The quagga snorted softly, pawing toward you. Snuffling over your fingertips. When she'd eaten all the berries and chewed the lace of your boot, she trotted back into the glade, disappearing in the dappled light.

 

"I can't believe she got away," you whispered, looking up at me, your eyes full of hope. The same look you'd given me the day I said we should run.

 

"I know," I said, looking into the dark woods, "I hope we see her again."