Just once, we touched, but not with our hands.
We breached the human frame
with grace and hope. While the world still stands,
bright souls the dark days tame.
He was almost tempted to stay when the job ended. But there were too many workers already doing just that, and they would have spoiled it. There was enough half-joking insinuation of child molestation and the girl prodigy didn’t need that hanging over her head. What they thought of him hardly mattered, but she had a life in front of her.
Nor would he be returning home. News through his employer indicated half the city whence he came was in ruins. There were riots in other parts of the country, too. No, they had promised one fuel stop in some other Latin American country on the way back and that would have to do. His Spanish had gotten only slightly better because, where they had spent two months building that secret thing on the dry plateau, the locals didn’t really speak Spanish. It was something mixed from that and various primitive languages. But his ears were somewhat better attuned to the Latin lilt and rhythms.
He traded a good chunk of his pay for one of the aging laptops the contractors had been using. It was sturdy, a rough service model. Keeping his promise, he had reinstalled the OS from the recovery partition, then allowed the supervisor to check. No company data remained on his new writing machine.
He knew better than to give the girl or her family much money. The parents weren’t nearly so wise as their daughter. They weren’t stupid, and seemed of the better moral grade among the peasants trying to eke out a living there in that tourist trap village. But he had seen cash corrupt even the best people, and only his own life scars kept him honest. Instead, he explained he was offering her the best schooling possible in that part of the world — the Internet.
There was an Internet cafe there in the village, and he had tested the signal in the back alley where the girl could sit quietly, hidden in the brush. But that day he paid to sit with her in the cafe. He showed her how to use the software and keep the tiny machine in proper working order. They quickly reviewed search engines, then academic sites, and computer help sites. It took only a couple of hours, and it seemed she knew almost as much as he. She took to surfing the Net as naturally as she spoke in those long conversations they had up on the rocks.
The netbook was hers, and he dismissed from his mind any worries. There was nothing more possible for him to do. He didn’t even leave her his email address. Instead, he showed her how to find his poetry where he posted it online. While he was sure she would eventually understand, it didn’t matter. He steeled himself against her few tears; it was the first time she showed much emotion.
His time with her renewed hope in him some humanity could still rise up from the coming conflagration. He didn’t think it was time for the world to end just yet, but perhaps a lot of lives, taking with them a lot of stuff. Their time was past. The rest of the world would go on just fine without the mass of dark souls somewhere to his north.
There were at least one other bright soul he knew about, shining inextinguishable in the dark days coming.
End.
