Eternity

As the shadows grew longer, I felt my concentration waning. I stole a glance at Aurora as yet another small informant took the place of the one who had just left, and caught her rubbing her eyes fiercely. It was time to wrap things up for the day. I noted down the name and age of the child who had just arrived, and arranged to see her the following day, before standing and stretching, indicating wordlessly that I was done for the day. Aurora finished up with the child she was talking to, and smiled tiredly at me as she gathered together her paperwork. Wordlessly, we packed up the equipment and loaded it into the landrover.
We were some way down the road before she stretched out in her seat beside me.
“That was a long day.”
I smiled and shifted the old rattle-trap into a higher gear. “There are a few more like it to go,” I countered, deliberately understating the situation. She smiled out the window, stretching the days work from her cramped fingers.
The sun was beginning to set, and the hills up ahead glowed copper in the fading light, their almost flat surfaces seeming to reflect the last rays of the sun as it shone into my eyes. Our road was approaching, and I slowed up a bit to delay reaching it.
“Aurora,” I asked tentatively, watching her reaction out of the corner or my eye, “would you like to drive on a bit and watch the sunset?”
She sat up, tilting her head to one side as was her habit when mulling over an idea. Finally she smiled. “Why not. Did you have anywhere particular in mind?”
I smiled what I hoped was mysteriously, and squeezed the accelerator a little, watching in the rear view mirror as the dust cloud billowing out behind us expand a little further.
The park gates would already have closed by the time I parked the landrover beside a sparse acacia, and so the usually well-populated viewing decks were quiet and deserted. I dug around in the ice box, coming up with a couple of apples and a single bottle of beer. Hardly a romantic spread, I thought, but inviting after our long day, nonetheless.
Aurora had seated herself on a bench about half-way along the walk, and was sitting on her hands, staring across the border in the general direction of Zimbabwe, when I found her. I hesitated briefly, wanting to enjoy the sight of her, but my footfall on the wooden deck had betrayed me, and she turned around and smiled welcomingly at me. I walked over to join her, handing her an apple to free up a hand so that I could open the beer. The hiss of the carbonated drink intruded noisily on the stillness.
The sun was setting in the west, and we had to turn slightly and look down river to watch it. She was sitting so close to me I could feel the radiant warmth of her body without touching her. We sat like that, absolutely immobile for what felt like an eternity and a moment as the sun turned red, melted into the surface of the river, and sank from view.
Reaching for the beer, she found my wrist, and ran the tips of her fingers over it, and up my hand until she felt the cold bottle between my fingers. I relinquished it, and unwillingly broke the contact between us.
The sun had left orange and salmon streaks in the sky, highlighting the darker, grayish clouds that were beginning to gather. A chilly breeze rattled the leaves of a bush on the bank below us, and Aurora shivered delicately. The spell was broken.
We drove back to the camp in silence, and I gathered my things together for a swim while I waited for Aurora to finish in the shower. The water was surprisingly warm after the initial shock of diving in, and I splashed around listlessly, floating on my back, and enjoying the sensation of weightlessness, coupled with the sight of the apparently endless, star-studded, moonless sky. Eternity felt very close.