“To hell with your superstitious nonsense. I need it to tie my bales of hay. I don’t care what the old texts say,” she said and spat in the dust to indicate that the conversation was over.
“Why do you think they’re all tied together?” the old man asked. “I’ve read about it. If you follow the lines, they go all the way back to The Light Company.”
“There’s no mystery. It’s metal wire. It was woven through the flimsy inner walls of homes in order to give them structural integrity. Why else would it be there?”
“It provided heat and light.”
“It’s copper wire. Copper wire provides something strong and flexible to tie my bales of hay together. Fire provides heat and light. Wire and fire are two very different things.” She pulled back the hammer and plunged it into the wall, revealing another section of wire snaking through it and pulled it loose from the studs using the claw end.
“There were strands of wire in the religious artifacts as well. What about the sin box?”
“We know how the sin box worked. They caught light from the sun and held it in metal boxes where it could be let out a little bit at a time. The glass windows would let the light shine through and the small black windows would catch it and store it. They found one in a lead-lined vault and when they picked it up an image appeared on its surface. The ones who discovered it made a sketch of it. That’s how they know why the sun came to earth to destroy us. What does any of that have to do with me scavenging metal rope from the ruins? If I don’t take it, someone else will.”
“Why did the sun come to earth to destroy us?” the old man asked.
“Because of our original sin. The image that appeared in the sin box was an apple with a bite taken out of it. You know that. We all know that. That’s why it’s called a sin box.”
“It’s no such thing. I don’t believe in that Christech nonsense. It’s just a bunch of stories people made up because they couldn’t explain the sun coming to earth and burning almost every man, woman and child to death. The bones don’t lie.”
“Saint Steven, Brother Bill and the Prophet Elon were all real people who walked the earth. All that they achieved was lost in the Great Burning. One day they’ll be back.”
“How convenient. An ancient civilization mastered feats of magic beyond our wildest dreams, where they didn’t have to labor for their daily meal, rode horses of metal, and could see and hear one another no matter where they were. And every bit of evidence that they existed was destroyed along with them. Pure fantasy.”
“Then what do you want with that copper wire?”
“I figure it’s like a blessing. I don’t believe, but I don’t not believe either.”
Literature in Small Doses 