Luqmān waited until Hābil was dead before he took stock of their camp. There was an eagle at the mouth of the cave with a brown snake under its claw. It watched Luqmān for instruction. Luqmān ignored the bird and turned his mind to the interior scene. He recalled no apparent use from the embers, cans, matchsticks, the quilt they had laid down for a place of rest. Hābil was on the quilt. Luqmān tried to fold the fabric over his body as a shroud but it came up short. In a hurry to cover him, Luqmān pulled off his own shirt and draped it crudely over Hābil’s chest and eyes.

Luqmān noticed himself trembling. He felt around in the dark for his canvas rancher. He also took Hābil’s baseball cap from their mixed pile of clothes, tugged it onto his own head. Then he made his way in the dark to the river where he washed himself before praying. Grief did not extend his worship. He was a man steady in his devotion and he was shy to make changes. He had little to say. When he was done, he remained on his knees.

In a swift movement, he crushed his hands to his face. “O, God, bury his body,” he whispered. “O, God, save me from burying him.”

Then he looked up to see that the sun was rising from the wrong side of the valley.

*

Luqmān’s stride was quick along the path of the river, hunched, head down. Occasionally, he threw a glance up to check the position of a column of smoke rising through the canopy, and a shadow circling overhead informed him with a cry that he was going in the right direction.

It was not long before the campfire was close enough that Luqmān could smell strips of smoking kangaroo. He came to the edge of a clearing and paused. At the center of the campsite a huge, white man breathed like a horse as he tore chunks out of a red apple. His bulk was a sign that he was a hunter. This hunter had a beard like steel wool down to his sternum, and as he squinted into the campfire, the thick flesh of his cheek congregated either side of his eyes with a heavy brow. Luqmān entered the clearing with his hands held up in truce. On hearing his footsteps, the hunter dropped his half-eaten apple and spun around to greet Luqmān with the blank stare of a double-barrel shotgun aimed at his heart. From this position, Luqmān could see another line strung up to dry clothes belonging to a woman and children. The hunter moved his body to be in front of their tents.

“You better take fifty steps to the left right now,” he said in hushed rancor.

Luqmān began taking fifty steps to the left and the hunter followed him, treading into the bush, gun poised. They walked until they came upon the river, at which point the hunter gestured for Luqmān to stand with his heels at the bank.

“Talk,” he snapped. Sweat plunged like lead plumbs down his face. “Talk before I have you going down the river on your back.”

Luqmān kept his head down and his hands in the air.

“My companion is dead,” he said. “I have to wash and bury him before the sun sets.”

The other man laughed in disbelief. “So?”

“I don’t have much time. The sun rose from the west this morning.”

The hunter went silent. Luqmān looked up to interpret his pause. Then a crash sounded in the canopy, and the hunter looked around for the source but could not find it. His eyes landed back on Luqmān distractedly.

“No. I don’t believe in that End of Days shit,” he said. Then he turned to leave.

Luqmān raised his fingers to his mouth and whistled once. The canopy rumbled. A black mass, an eagle the size of a dog, lunged down in front of the hunter and blocked his path. The man stumbled backwards, dropping his gun. Luqmān whistled again, and the eagle leapt to seize the weapon and deliver it to Luqmān’s hand before settling beside him. The hunter reassessed Luqmān with a look between shock and rage.

Luqmān tugged on his cap, angling it down. “I need a shovel,” he said. He placed the shotgun on the ground. “I saw one at your camp.”

The thick flesh of the hunter’s face trembled, all his ire and pride inflating his body. He hauled himself up to his feet, squared himself, and did what it was his nature to do: survey. Luqmān offered up his own face. The winter sun made clear a haggardness in Luqmān’s short, dark hair, in his brown eyes which were deep-set, in the lines carved either side of his mouth. And when he straightened up for inspection, he revealed himself to be a tall man with a flinch in his posture.

The hunter spat into the soil.

“I’ll give it to you for that bird,” he said. “Can she hunt?”

Luqmān stiffened. “She’s trained.”

“Well, since you think you’re gonna die, give her to me, who plans to survive.”

Luqmān looked to the eagle. She watched him with expectation. She had been a gift from Hābil—one of many. Luqmān said to the hunter, “Help me wash and bury the body.”

The hunter scoffed. “You want God people, head up the mountain. There’s plenty of your type.”

Hābil would have known what to offer then. Hābil, who knew a gift from a sacrifice.

“Okay,” Luqmān agreed. And he followed the hunter back to his family camp.

The women and children were still asleep. The hunter lumbered over to a plot of vegetables where he had a shovel staked into the ground. He tossed it to Luqmān and Luqmān tossed him Hābil’s baseball cap.

“So she knows you’re hers,” he explained. The hunter squeezed Hābil’s soft, weathered hat down onto his head, raised his fingers to his mouth, and whistled. A commotion came from a nearby eucalypt and then a beating of wings until the black eagle was at his feet, and her wingspan was longer than his body. The hunter regarded her with fright, eagerness, awe. He laughed in delight. Luqmān was silent. His silence gathered itself from surrounding areas and compacted down. He and the person before him had nothing to say to each other. He wanted Hābil, who knew him.

As Luqmān left, the hunter called out, “You’re a fool. The world doesn’t end because your friend is dead.”

“Just a coincidence,” Luqmān said.

*

Soft grass lay thickly over the mountain. Black trees loomed up in witness to past fires, and all over their bodies grew a fluorescent, epicormic fuzz. Amidst these spires, Luqmān weaved alone up the incline.

It was known that mid-way up the mountains was a spiritual commune. People hailed it as being neo-Jerusalem. Luqmān knew he was likely to find Muslims there, had known it even when he had set out elsewhere that morning. For various reasons, he and Hābil had avoided the place. Some of those reasons were to do with a suspicion that to integrate would require a wrenching apart from each other in subtle and obvious ways, but mostly it was that nothing could lure them out of their contentment.

“I just want to live in peace,” Hābil had said after the last big sweep had taken everyone else that they had known. “What do you think? Isn’t it enough to have just one person on the day that you die?” And Luqmān had gifted him a few soft words. 

Luqmān picked up pace in the direction of the commune.

When he arrived, he doubled over and dropped his shovel to cover his eyes.

Corrugated tin shacks were arranged at the commune’s circumference. Bathing quarters were hung with people’s yellowed garments drying in the wind. There was a small building in the corner with the word “LIBRARY” nailed over the door. And at the center of the commune was a mound of human bodies.

Luqmān turned his back on the bodies and grasped for the support of a tree trunk while he could not breathe.

“Too late,” a man’s voice called.

Luqmān jumped. His gaze darted around until it landed upon a man dressed in a clergyman’s suit sitting by the bodies. Alarm made Luqmān observant. He noted the stain on all the bodies’ lips, and the cups in their hands, including the children.

The clergyman stared at the corpses as though still thinking how he could save them. He turned to Luqmān, black eyes glassy and red-rimmed. Luqmān felt the gravity of despair pulling him strong in towards this man, a deep, black pulling. He took a step back to save himself. Without seeming to fully register his presence, the clergyman began to speak: “Did you see the sunrise today?”

Luqmān said nothing.

“It’s over,” said the clergyman. “It’s the end. When the sun rose from the west I told my people, Go to your rooms and pray. That’s what I said…I come out an hour later and they had all poisoned themselves… Poison in the apple juice, of all things.” 

“I don’t trust those communes,” Hābil had said once, lying in a sea of spear grass. “That one where they said a fight broke out and half the kids were killed, doesn’t make sense. People aren’t violent like that. People are like you.” Luqmān had rolled over in the grass and put Hābil in an easy headlock. Happy, quiet, he’d asked, “What am I like?”

Luqmān noticed a newborn amongst the pile of bodies.

The clergyman suddenly laughed. “We’re being punished,” he said, empty. “The world has ended. This is hell. You and I are its janitors.” 

In the silence that followed, Luqmān thought of the hunter, the children asleep in their tents, alive and innocent. He started to have a burning sensation in his gut. 

The clergyman dropped his head into his hands.

“I thought someone would be alive to help me bury my companion,” Luqmān found himself saying. “He’s dead. His name was Hābil.”

Absently lifting his head, the clergyman echoed, “Abel?”

“Yes, in English.”

“To be burying a brother named Abel today…” The clergyman scoffed. “Fitting. The end is as the beginning. I feel sure you are damned. Go away. I’m done with people.”

“He wasn’t my brother,” Luqmān choked. Then a leaden bloodlessness descended over him, and he knew grief was not worth beginning.

*

The bush shrouded Luqmān on re-entry and he was submerged into a coherent world. He walked kilometers. The soil sent a fertile flush into his senses, and a flame robin darted bright before his eyes. The clergyman and his inferno faded. It was always this way for him and Hābil, this sense of unreality in the hell of people, this sense of truth in the natural world.

Hābil had loved beauty, he had loved it like a gift from God. And he had loved to recite verses from the Quran listing these gifts, verses about animal hide having been created in such a way that tents were light to handle in travel. And how out of wool, fur and hair, there were furnishings and clothes which felt pleasant on skin. And the gift of small openings in the rocks of the earth, so that a man and his companion could take shelter in the mountains. “How long do you think we’ve been in this cave?” Hābil had asked one evening, months after they had settled there. “A day? Part of a day?”

A blow struck Luqmān’s soul and he fell against a tree. He smelled a wattle bush nearby; he reached out and shucked a fistful of flowers off the branch into his palms, pressed the cool, damp petals to his face. This feeling of being cleansed reminded him he needed to pray. He searched until he found a little stream in which to make ablutions. Then he completed the noon prayer and continued on up the mountain.

A while later, the slope began to flatten out, and he could make out ahead of him a railway track overgrown with ferns. Luqmān stepped onto the track and headed westward. Now the sun was behind him. People had long ago stripped the railway of its nuts and bolts for more urgent use. Luqmān felt the click of rotted and loose sleepers underfoot.

An old train station came into view up ahead. Flying from a battered sign, the remaining legible letters of which read “ATOOMB,” was a white flag. Luqmān climbed up and proceeded towards a small, shuttered building on the platform. At its door, he paused. He pressed his ear to the wood. The scream of a woman blasted out. Before he could think, Luqmān whipped his shovel out like a weapon and burst through the door. It took him a millisecond to lock eyes with the screaming woman, out of whose body a baby’s bloody head was being pulled by a person on their knees. Luqmān leapt back out through the door and slammed it closed. He let his shovel clatter to the ground and pulled his collar up to smother his eyes and mouth and he paced back and forth on the platform. The woman’s screams crescendoed over the next five minutes, and then there was a moment of silence wherein Luqmān’s body arrested all function, and then a small, piercing wail pierced followed by muffled sounds of relief. Luqmān forced several exhales.

At this point, a woman in a hijāb emerged from the building, closing the door behind her. She made her way over to Luqmān, who quickly shoved his hands into his pockets.

“Can I help you with something?” she clipped. Her build was strong with fat, and the geography of her face had been deepened by age.  She was dressed all in white, drying her hands on a rag, examining him with quick, grey eyes.

Luqmān prepared to be unburdened. “My companion is dead,” he said. “The sun has risen from the west. I need help to wash and bury his body before the world ends. I once heard there is a Muslim doctor here. I thought he could help me.”

The woman looked amused by this information.

Luqmān stared at her. He said, “You’re the doctor?”

The doctor raised her eyebrows at him.

“I thought…” Luqmān began, and then he was at an utter loss. “You can’t help me…” he said dazedly. “I’m sorry… I didn’t know you were a woman. Goodbye.”

“Hold on.” The doctor laughed. “Where did you come from?”

“The river, down east.”

“You spent your last day on earth trekking all the way up the mountain,” she mused, “looking for a man to help you wash and bury a body?”

Luqmān battled a dam of exhaustion. “It’s nothing,” he said. “I have to go.”

“To do what, exactly?” the doctor asked. She squared him with arms folded. Luqmān could not summon a reply. He wanted to stop being seen, he wanted Hābil, who had understood his nature, who had gifted him understanding.

“Come inside for a moment,” the doctor instructed. Luqmān followed, beyond resistance. Opening the door, the doctor said, “Close your eyes.” He closed his eyes. There came the sound of a curtain being drawn and the arduous puffs of a baby breathing. Behind the curtain, the doctor whispered to the woman he had seen giving birth. When she re-emerged, she said, “Alright, open.”

Inside the building was a chrome smell of blood, but it was not unpleasant. A tartan curtain sealed off half of the space, the other half was lit by light beams piercing through cracks in the shutters. There was a makeshift kitchenette in one corner, replete with the rarity of a gas stove. In the other corner was a stash of drugs surely all past expiration. The rest of the room was crowded with objects Luqmān struggled to place at first, because they fell into an archaic category: sentimental. His eyes glazed over animal tooth necklaces, photo frames displaying pressed flowers, prayer mats rolled and propped against the wall, uncut opals and amethysts, books, and a wooden apple.

The doctor bid Luqmān sit upon the doonas that had been laid out on the ground before passing him a bowl of soup from the stove. He was about to refuse but, catching her expression, thought better of it. He bit into a soft cube of yam and realized he was starving. They sat in total silence as Luqmān downed two bowls. Then the doctor handed Luqmān a greenstick branch and instructed him to grind the end with his teeth until he could use it as a miswāk. After he’d cleaned his teeth, she passed him a sprig of river mint. He chewed that too and spat the bolus into a bin.

“Who’d you say died this morning?” she asked afterwards.

Luqmān said, “My khalīl.”

The doctor scoffed but she examined him with interest. “That’s Golden Ages talk. No one takes a khalīl anymore.”

Luqmān said nothing. If a khalīl was a spiritual companion and an intimate friend, then he had taken a khalīl, but there was no use defending himself.

The doctor frowned at him. She might have been in her fifties or sixties. As if she was comforting him, she said, “Soon the mountains will crumble and then he’ll be buried beneath.”

Luqmān let out a long breath. “Don’t try to help me.”

“Because I’m a woman.”

Luqmān met her gaze and did not bother responding.

“I’m not going to help you,” she said evenly. She reached for the wooden apple ornament and turned it over in her hands. “As you can see, I have my own responsibilities.”

Luqmān turned his head towards the soft, suckling noises from behind the curtain. His pulse quickened. Servicing his curiosity, the doctor leaned her head into the breastfeeding woman’s quarters. They exchanged hushed words. When she sat back in front of Luqmān, the anguish in his face warmed her expression towards him.

“It’s a boy,” the doctor smiled.

Luqmān winced. “Don’t tell me.”

“You should feel happy. Before the trumpet is blown, a soft wind will take the soul of anyone with an atom’s weight of belief. We will not suffer. Unlike you, this brings us peace.”

That Luqmān found this unconvincing was evident on his face. “Listen,” the doctor doubled down. “Do you know why the adhān is not called before a janāzah prayer? Because it was called already at the beginning of a person’s life, it was whispered into their right ear on the day they were born. All the length of a person’s life is just the time between that call and its response.”

Luqmān looked to the doctor with sudden intensity. “The janāzah must be done today. But I can’t do it. I can’t wash his body. I can’t bury him. It will be my sin.”

The doctor placed her wooden apple to the side.

“We are all experiencing this calamity,” she told him flatly. “It’s not just you.”

Luqmān’s look was grave. “I’m not selfish,” he said, and by forcing him to defend himself, the doctor was forcing him back into his flesh. “You didn’t know him. Nobody else knew him.” Luqmān’s voice broke. “There is a limit to sacrifice.”

Impatience and compassion filled the doctor’s next words:

“What you loved was a man. And all men die.” She took a moment to search him. “Soon you will be in the grave with him, soon you will be resurrected. Why all this grief and drama? Did you forget that before eternity, there is One you must meet?” An urgency leaked into her expression like she was desperate for him to stop thrashing in defiance of a fate that would destroy him if he did not submit. “I don’t think you are ready.”

“I-I’ve stayed too long,” Luqmān fumbled, embarrassed at having spoken. He stood abruptly, but the doctor halted him placatingly.

“Please, I’ve fed you,” she said. “I’ve given you company. I need you to do something before you leave. Sit, it will only take five minutes.”

Adrenaline was hot in his veins, but Luqmān forced himself to sit. The doctor reached into a container beside her.

“Soften a tiny bit of this in your mouth but don’t swallow,” she said. To his wonder, she passed him a dried date. Luqmān softened a small bite against his palate. The doctor instructed him to press the softened date to his fingertip, which he did. But he did not expect it when the doctor drew the curtain back to reveal a dark woman barely awake, having wrapped her child in a tea towel. And he did not understand what was happening to him when the mother passed the baby into the doctor’s hands, and the doctor lowered him into Luqmān’s arms, and the baby was crying. Luqmān looked to the doctor in agony.

“Give him the date,” the doctor nodded.

In shock, he placed a finger trembling on the baby’s cheek. The baby turned to latch and was settled by the sugar and the comfort of being held. Luqmān’s breaths became haggard.

“Would you call the adhān in his ear, brother?” a new voice asked. It was the child’s mother; she whispered through the veil of half-sleep. Luqmān turned his attention to the baby in his arms, weighing so little it was like carrying an empty blanket. The baby hid its face in his chest and it sucked on his finger, full of trust.

“Please…” Luqmān begged the doctor. The doctor would not excuse him. Stunned, uncomprehending, he lowered his face to the baby’s ear. His mouth brushed the cartilage of the boy’s ear, the fine hairs on his cheek. A bewildering pain slammed into his chest and stomach. The baby huffed against his finger. Luqmān whispered the call to prayer.

He lowered the baby into his lap. Tears streamed down his face. The doctor relieved him of the child. Luqmān turned from her and the other woman, turned his face to the wall. They watched his frame quake, stiffen, compress. Disappointment surged in dark waves out of his body, and his soul prepared.

*

Luqmān went back down the mountain, carrying the shovel. He followed the path of the river. The banks were marshy with tall grasses concealing tiger quolls, and the waters rippled under the disturbance of dragonfly larvae.

He stopped to dig a grave. Then he continued to the camp.

Hābil’s body lay untouched. In a swift movement, Luqmān lifted him, laid the man’s head against his neck, and carried him, chest to chest. The late sun burned off the reflection of the water—bright gold—as Luqmān walked with the body into the river. He took the water in his hands and washed it over Hābil’s skin. He washed it over Hābil’s hair and his ears. He washed Hābil’s throat, the two puncture wounds on his neck. He washed his shoulders, the thick hair under his arms. He washed the crook of his elbow, his wrists, his fingernails. He washed his chest and stomach; he washed his thighs, his calves, his ankles, the arch of his feet. He washed his eyelids and his mouth.

Then Luqmān dredged himself and Hābil out, wrapped Hābil in a quilt, and stood to pray. When he was done, he lowered Hābil’s body into the grave. For a long time, Luqmān looked down. He remembered waking in the night to a hiss followed by Hābil’s sharp intake of breath, body thrown over Luqmān’s to protect him, tensed at the pain of a bite before he fell onto his back. Luqmān had struck a match in panic, and when he had seen the brown snake and realized what had happened, realized Hābil’s sacrifice and what it would cost him, he had whistled for the eagle then grabbed two fistfuls of Hābil’s shirt, shouting, “No! What have you done!” And Hābil had watched on, the smile of end times flushing full across all the love in his face.

Luqmān pushed soil onto the body. He continued until Hābil was buried. By the end, Luqmān was coated in dirt. And then the ruby edge of the sun slipped beneath the east horizon, and then a soft wind cleared through the air before an awful sound.