The law is the law. You broke it. You knew you were breaking it. - Hugh Howey

There, on that hill, his wife could be seen. She lay like a sleeping boulder, the air and toxins wearing away at her, her arms curled under her head.

He turned the coin over and over and contemplated the only thing unusual about him holding a trinket from a world fallen to ashes - and that was him being around to marvel at the loss. It was supposed to be people who died and cultures that lasted. Now, it was the other way around;

Imagination, she figured, just wasn’t up to the task of understanding unique and foreign sensations. It knew only how to dampen or augment what it already knew. It would be like telling someone what sex felt like, or an orgasm. Impossible. But once you felt it yourself, you could then imagine varying degrees of this new sensation.