Conversations with a Wasteland.
Tomorrow: is hostile. The cacti are evolving. What was once matte rubber is now charred flesh. Their long spines bend and twist into painful shapes: fingers sprouting like pin cushions. The last coyotes circle and salivate, but, like me, are too afraid to attack. For hours I watch. The hasty sketches never move. I remind myself again and again, “The cacti are not alive like I am alive.” I crawl on my belly until I am close enough to strike; my hand reaches into the pocket of my worn, impractical twenty first century denim and pulls out a knife. Careful, not to make any sudden movements I rest the blade against the cactus’ thick skin. Beads of sweat fall and drip. The knife slips and I swear I see pink. My heart beat quickens. The fear it will awake is too great. The coyotes and I leave hungry.
Ely Thompson
Memory: fuzzy people that fit neatly in small compartments.
I walk along gravel rivers in search of salvation. Empty house after empty house first barricaded, and now dilapidated. The ones that left, took the time to board up cracked windows and fill porcelain tubs with wet cement. It’s been hard for a while now. They didn’t want the folks remaining to use their toilets or wear their dirty underwear. An abandoned house is a black hole; there is no telling how deep the basements go. Sometimes removing floor boards reveals whole rooms that contain only a single mattress. I make my judgements, but then, put things as they were and turn my back to them. I have inklings about whether or not a building will be a productive excavation based solely on external irregularities. Once a Rolling Stones’ poster plastered to a garage door lead me to a Botticelli. The painting was of an apathetic trio: one woman, draped in royal medieval purple, holds a sword in one hand and in the other an olive branch. A drab maid follows close behind and upon her head is the flesh surrounded skull of an elderly man, wrapped in swaddling cloth. His skin as gray and rippled as an overcast day. None of them bother to even attempt a smile: documentation of the end of the beginning. I take the painting back to my home. In my damp living room, I use an old tube of my wife’s lipstick to draw cartoonish smiles on their dismal faces. When I’m finished, I carry the paintings out to the desert and set it next to other found objects that I have fixed. I lay the image in the sand so it faces the sky and I scream:
“We always appreciated what we were given!” The satellites can see me. I know they can.
At another juncture, I accidentally enter a library. A large owl, perched on the building’s exposed and brittle rafters, winks at me and I know the getting is going to be good. The doors are locked with a rusted padlock put it opens with a gentle tug. Afraid of everything, I don’t want to enter the dark porthole, but I hold my breath and for the third time today, I risk it all. The inside smells of cigarettes, moss, and a sinister amount of talcum powder. The rows of books appear to be relatively intact, except for the skeleton of a palm tree, which, has come through the ceiling and taken out M through O; giving the room a flash light worth of light. Beyond the tree, there is an elderly woman sitting quietly at the circulation desk. Her face is cracked and squashed like a toad’s. Only a few gray hairs remain on her head, and she is missing buttons all over the place. Minding her own business. Writing a note. Pretending not to see me. I rely on stereotypes (still) and yell:
“Are you the librarian?” She hastily finishes her note, neatly folds it, and puts it in an unmarked envelope. She looks up and straightens her sweater.
“I have taken that role for myself.”
“Do you have a degree in library science?”
“I have degrees.”
“Would you like a drink?”
“I’m writing a book, when it is finished, I would like it to be placed prominently in your library.”
“Has it been published?”
“No.”
“I could have recommended a friend, but right now, she’s traveling to peninsular Florida by burro train.”
“I’ll take that drink.” She reaches below her desk and pulls out two shot glasses and a bottle of tequila. Her name is Francis.
“Where did you get the tequila?”
“I’ve been saving it. You’re the first person that has been here since all those quitters left. How about a mystery?”
“Let me take a look around.”
“Suit yourself.” Francis pulls out three more shot glasses, I watch, as she drizzles the Tequila across the table.
Libraries have always been autistic places. Opening book after book, I am taken over with embarrassment at all of our missteps. I use my black markers and spend hours making things appear balanced, climatic, and righteous. Francis doesn’t seem to mind; she is asleep from too much tequila. I find a biography of the Native American military leader Geronimo and I give myself permission to darken sections and footnotes concerning his capture and the years he is caged like an animal and forced to tour with a traveling circus. The last chapter, which gives the explicit details of his grave robbing by a group of privileged and comedically challenged Yale undergraduates, I tear out all together. I hastily use my last glue stick to insert new hand written pages documenting Geronimo’s life as a business man on Wall Street. In graphic detail, I reveal that upon escaping from the circus Geronimo stabs John D. Rockefeller and leaves him to drown in his own deep blood. After, Geronimo collects millions and millions of dollars in cash from a basement vault, he charters a hot air balloon, and sprinkled the fortune over New York City. He goes on to govern the states of Idaho, California, and North Dakota. Geronimo dies at the ripe old age of one-hundred, at his home in Colorado, with his grandchildren. Miraculously, he experiences no pain. Now, we commemorate his birth by way of National Holiday on April 14th.
“Where’s your wife?” Francis, the librarian, has come to and is pointing to my wedding ring. I raise my hand and looked to the crumbling ceiling. She nods and throws back another shot.
Limitations: An annoying itch, a tsunami.
Neither my wife nor I know why we choose to sleep under the bed at night. Now that the human experience is getting rough, we’re suppose to sleep in the bathtub, but it’s full of mildew and I lost my last scrubby brush. I also have a phobia that involves loose hairs touching my skin. When the bombs explode, I shake her. She tells me to knock it off, but I’m afraid the sudden noise will stop her heart and I want to jostle it. Remind it that we survived again. It is still red, beating, and employed full-time.
The ones in tweed coats, leather patches, and complicated, pretentious ideas are disappearing. That isn’t random. At night my neighbors rebel, large fires burn where my dog likes to play. Their existences were not supposed to be so temporal, and they feel betrayed by God and Science, both of whom had made lofty promises. We drink wine with copies of Little House on the Prairie and The Leaves of Grass duck taped to our bellies, amazon.com doesn’t work anymore and it’s possible tonight’s the night when the lights go out. If there is anything fun about what is going on it’s that our actions might finally be contributing to the greater good: legacy. Yesterday, I swallowed a flash drive with Shakespeare’s collected works on it.
It’s important to channel frustration. During the day, my wife assists me on a book of my own I’m compiling. Chapter one consist of letters we write to future generations. Those kids are going to want to know why they don’t have a pot to piss in. She and I feel personally responsible. We remind them that we honestly thought the earth was deeper, and though, we admit to having millions of pictures from space that proved the bottom was quite real; its hard to take that into consideration when you’re just one person. It will be important to remind them that we were told the world would end with a bang, and not a balled up sock pushed deep into our throats. Not knowing you, tykes of the twenty second century, on a personal level, your livelihood did not appear to be directly related to my purchase of a whirlpool bathtub. The television was always mouthing off about hydrofuel and the second coming. At the time, conservation seemed like a real waste—of time. Especially since I was brought up to believe I was insignificant. It’s no accident I have a bachelor’s degree in Human Resources. I promise it doesn’t mean what you think. When I look out the window, the horizon I see is barely even Las Vegas. Beyond that, it goes on for thousands and thousands of miles, and I find it impossible, at any one moment in time, to account for it all. Whenever I try, I sweat, and then instinctually I have to take a shower. I’m sorry if you don’t know what that means.
In many of my letters, I like to remind these, our raggedy children of tomorrow, that
“…in the capitalistic society that we lived in, gasoline was a commodity, and water wasn’t even a commodity and commodities are by definition—well according to Wikipedia—some good for which there is demand, but which is supplied without qualitative differentiation across a market. It is a product that is the same no matter who produces it, be it petroleum, notebook paper, or milk. In other words, copper is copper. The price of copper is universal and fluctuates daily based on global supply and demand. Staplers, on the other hand, have many levels of quality. And, the better a stapler is [perceived to be], the more it will cost. So yes, mistakes were made. Gasoline and copper should have been called Gods and not commodities. Water should have been called a word we never took the time to come up with. I bet you’re up to your ears in staplers—I know I am.”
There are incidences I refuse to put into writing because I can only imagine our offspring reading these confessionals huddled around campfires in the middle of winter, dressed like sad clowns, in worn impractical designer clothes from generations before. It makes me feel guilty and I hate feeling guilty. I don’t want to tell them that much of this dilemma is on my shoulders. When industry began to scrape the bottom: people got antsy. They manufactured homemade guns, strapped hubcaps to their chests, and crossed the borders in the thousands. I poked my head up from the bottom of my third story window to watch. The mobs would hold their empty paint buckets out at arms length and insist on being assisted. The first time I saw murder I literally soiled myself. Reeking of urine, I wept over the dead body for an hour. Blood spongy and sticky on my hands. It was a hairy gas station attendant named Ron. His wallet was brown and cheap. I pulled at the velcro and found only loose change. Devastated for him and curious for me, I dug deeper, a crevice, where money was supposed to be. I found photos of his wife and three kids, all arranged by age in clothing that suggested a sincere struggle. I drove to my home and turned the water on. My wife said something predictable like, “Hey, we need that. Unable to speak, I wildly shook my head and showed her the photos of Ron’s kids. She acknowledged that they looked disheveled, but tried to stop me as I began compulsively flushing my own toilet. I lit my stove and let it burn all afternoon. Foolishly, I used my own last tank of gas to drive to a secluded gas station. I wrapped red handkerchiefs tightly around the handles of the pumps. The always faithful gas station attendant, Kevin, inquired about what I was doing:
“I reckon, you’ll have to pay for this mess.”
I told him about Ron and Ron’s children, but Kevin did not care. He was amiable, yet unconcerned about the people who would die in the struggle to zero. I lit a match and dropped it into the pool of gasoline that surrounded my feet. Engulfed in flames, I ran to the brush and rolled fervantly. I drove away with my windows down and the air turned way up: Kevin and Ron hanging recklessly out of the truck of my car. Cringing at every turn, I made it home. I buried both of them in my neighbor Irene’s garden. I had it stuck in my head that they would become food, and their deaths would not be in vain, but it didn’t take long for it all to turn into a pungent mess—nothing is going to grow there for a long time. In the moment, it was clear to me that we should cut the itch off and get on with it. I had a pop up tent and a book about the history of boy-scouts.
Much later, when the resources were gone, and I had a minute or two to give the book a closer inspection, it was apparently more of a biography of the original founders than the instructional guide for building fires and tying knots that I had hoped. My point being: It hasn’t been a cake walk for me either. I’m sorry. I have no idea what your life is like. My hope is that you want one.
Love: A rich food, for only the richest people. see dignity.
I first read that scientists were terraforming an unoccupied planet while reading the back of a cereal box. This planet’s cheap land and green grass revealed themselves to me through a color by number. A microscope with eyes and a mouth pointed to where my parents, my dog, and I would live when the gasoline was all gone. This was years ago, and now that I’ve had to time to think, it’s obvious I shouldn’t have laughed so hard or said things like, what a pompous idea, our hands and our brains are too tiny to make an impact like that. My neighbor, Peter, is a politician and I always pester him for his ideas,
“Peter, are we doomed?” I asked, hesitantly.
“No, quite the opposite. Unless, by ‘we,’ you are referring to the individual—are you?
“Well, yes and no?”
“Ely, no one—nothing—can stop humanity from spiraling out into the universe, farther and farther, until the end of time. You, unfortunately will not fend so well.”
“I want to believe that.” I do want to believe him..
He pats me on the back as I nervously cross my arms and nod. Then, he tightens his bathrobe, grabs his mail, and returns to his impressive home. I shouldn’t wait for him in the morning like this, but I’m worried it’s all a giant conspiracy and I want to prepare myself.
The news is useless—the anchor and his bouffant hair wondering out loud, while pointing to misleading infographics, attempting to calculate how many people would be able to go and what it was going to come down to: race or sex or class or hair. I was white, male, middle class and continued to be prejudiced enough to think it would not be random. During press conferences, the President, styled professionally in ivory, would give bombastic speeches about the “selection process” and the “perfect equation of people,” but she was going. The people who flooded the streets with homemade signs and bad attitudes, moaning about why it should be random: well, they got exactly what they asked for.
The papers called this selection process Democracy in Action. The TV guide called it Your Ticket to Paradise. Your Ticket to Paradise, a cheesy game show, broadcasted on every continent decided who would leave Earth and who would stay. My wife and I would watch together in our small apartment with our tickets in hand to remind ourselves of our assigned numbers. A cheap carnival filled with B-list celebrities, paid to spread propaganda, calm the masses, and handout useless prizes like vintage Lamborghinis, which, were the specialty coffins, you and the world had been waiting your whole life for. Numbers, numbers, numbers were all anyone could sustain a conversation about. On the streets, advertisements that resembled indy rock posters promised lush forests, living quarters based on recent science fiction motion pictures, and air that didn’t cause cancer. Steel, to manufacture state of the art tools that would assist in treating the cancer you already have. The copy at the bottom read: Human Proof.
Billions of people tuned in to watch the first episode. I’ll admit the show got better as the season went on. Thousands of numbers slowly scrolling across the screen intermingled with dance numbers, comedy parodies, and a dog who walked around with a briefcase like a person. Eventually, my wife’s number was one of them. I saw, out of the corner of my eye, a smile. I put my head on her shoulder and cried when her mother called to congratulate her; she had been chosen weeks ago. Months later, when they called the last number, I threw up in my living room. My wife sobbed as she scrubbed the carpeting. I sat, comatose, at the kitchen table. The weeks after the last number was called were wet with tears. Tears on the radio. The bus was wet. I learned to bring a napkin to sit on. People asked if there were extras, and I never hesitated to share.
Sex: An emotional problem with a chemical solution.
We argued and wrote down various pros and cons. Post-it notes dotted our apartment. I found new ones all the time. Once, while brushing my teeth, I read the words, “Ben Franklin punished fish for eating animals by eating fish.” I get that it’s a cutthroat world. Needless to say, we were getting off topic.
Wednesday while my wife was at work, I walked around the apartment pulling post-its off the wall, and positioning them in a photo album. I added ones that said, “I love you” and “Never forget the lake house.” We don’t have one, but my plan is I’ll remember it differently. When she came home, I told her, I put them down the garbage disposal. She responded with: “You’ll break it, if you do dumb shit like that.” I nodded. Minutes later, in our small kitchen, under the harsh florescent lights:
“Send in your paperwork and make the decision later. It will be easier to think when there is nothing to think about. You never know, maybe there is a heaven, and if so, I’ll find you. We’ll wear angel wings or become light. Either way our molecules will mix again.” I dried her eyes with a dishtowel. “Maybe someone will pull the wrong lever and you’ll die getting there, and I’ll live for one hundred years, by myself, but breathing. I can live in California if I want to. Sea wind in my thinning hair, that’s something I’ve always wanted. Who loses then?”
She shrugged. She does that when I’m being facetious.
That night we wrapped our naked bodies in down, and I kissed her ingrown toenails and the thick hips she was always attempting to Ellipticycle away, even though I’d asked her not to. I kissed her meaty breasts and coarse hair. I prayed to her nipples that she was joking, would refuse to go, would insist on staying with me and our dog, Trixie. With her feet she clung to my back and thanked me for being upfront with my feelings.
During the day, she thought up reasons why we weren’t meant to be together. At night, during sex, she would sweat and bawl about the injustices of the world. After she would cope by getting into my ears and whispering plans for eternity. “Maybe next time I’ll be a boy and you’ll be a girl,” she’d say. “Trixie will be a baby and everything will be green.” I would close my eyes and pretend not to cry. I don’t believe in God. But I agreed,
“Everything will be green, she smiled and told me,
“You’ll be the last thing I think about in this body. Light years from now and here.”
Apotheosis: A proud and disappointing moment.
The morning she left we tried to recreate an average morning. I told her that was what I would miss the most. Drinking coffee in our bathrobes and having sex in our shower. I remember my breakfast cereal had chocolate in it and I didn’t bother to conserve. I ate my fill. We laid in bed, her head on my lap, her hands nervously kneading my thighs like bread. The doorbell rang twice before either of us moved. Right before she left, I made a mistake. Standing in our doorway I said,
“Don’t go.” Her mom was waiting at the bottom of the stairs. She began shake her head.
“Are you serious?” she said.
I lied. “No, I’m not serious.” I grabbed onto her yellow sweater and clenched my fists. I bit her shoulder and I put my hands around her fragile neck. I repeated, “No, I’m not serious.” Her small hands pulled my cheeks to her mouth and she kissed me; soft at first, but then a deep bite into my lower lip. I pushed her aside. She stumbled, turned, and didn’t look back like they do in the movies and I knew why.
“Hey, I have something for you!”
She paused, confused and irritated.
“Wait a second.” I ran to my bedroom and grabbed the two objects I had meant to give her earlier. I hid them behind my back.
“Pick my left hand if you want to forget. Pick my right hand if you want to remember.”
“I want to forget, but I won’t be able to.” She reached for my left hand and I handed her a kaleidoscope. “It’s beautiful. Thank you. I’ll call it Ely and never forget.” She slipped it into her pocket, clenched her teeth, and went away.
After the door closed, I ran to the window. I used my new telescope to watch her enter the parade of people walking west. Later, I wrote to the children of the future, that she had begged to stay; I had even been forced to barricade the doors and windows. I also mentioned that there was an insurrection involving trees and the humans were being forced to cut them down.
I charged my batteries and prepared a grand meal for Trixie with the last of our perishable food. As the sun went down, I climbed out our bedroom window and onto the fire escape. I made my way to the roof of our building. Large cruise ships filled the sky from horizon to horizon. For months previous, they had hollowed the remaining mountains for iron ore to make the metal giants. They bulldozed and hoarded skyscrapers, railways, and airplanes melting and mixing them into molds. In the last days, hundreds of tank trucks went from gas station to gas station, coast to coast, suckling and swallowing the final drops of dark power. The ships glistened white, some ten and some twenty stories tall. Each ship’s main deck was connected to the ground by eight translucent covered stairways. Through the diaphanous tubes I could see the shadows of the lucky ones climbing to paradise. An exodus, so brilliant, I couldn’t help but applaud our ingenuity.
Government officials erected cement walls to keep the rest out of the way. Snipers poked guns out of deep crenels, and shot anyone making a ruckus, or standing by someone making a ruckus. Smoke began to block my view as the ships broke away from the connecting stairs. A diaspora as big as humanity got smaller and smaller as it got further and further away. The people left behind went for broke: the city was soon ablaze. The only structure strong enough to resist the heat were the stairs to nowhere that now stand, in every town and country, as monuments to our last day together.
When the ships were gone and safe from any harm we on the ground could cause them, the lights were turned off. I sat on the ledge of my building with my feet dangling over the edge and watched as small squares in every direction went dark. At first it was one a second. Then, it was three or four at a time and then, it was me. I pulled a flashlight from my back pocket and crawled back down the fire escape. Trixie was lying on our bed. We slept for a long time.
In meetings held in high school gymnasiums all across the country, the officials were blunt, “You are free to use the nuclear reactors just as soon as you know how to turn them back on.” For a few days, I studied the instructional manuals they passed out at the meeting. In my attic, I rooted out a shovel that looked like it could be used for plutonium enrichment. It did not break when I hit it on things. The small number of people who I was in contact with were afraid of what secrets would be disinterred from digging even a foot underground. They were also skeptical of my enrichment abilities. Instead, they wanted sunshine and anarchy. They burnt the streets, stole all those stereos, poisoned the water with the last bottles of Drano and boxes of Tide. Watching the fish rise to the meniscus of the water with their newfound bloated color guarded scales was more than Trixie and I could handle. They took off for more temperate climates, and I sarcastically waved goodbye as they left. For the first couple of weeks, I scrubbed day and night. I had an economy sized bottle of Pledge, but it was never enough. I kept going back to the store. The doors were torn from their hinges and all the ice cream was gone gone gone.
Before my wife left, I comforted her with thoughts of me getting a deal on a mansion in Beverly Hills. But before I could say, gold rush, the Japanese moved in. I thought I’d go to Japan just to spite someone or something, but from what I hear, a Chinese Realtor has turned the island into the newest eco-tourism destination. A place for anyone who loves rowing boats and fasting. Most days, I think, right here is fine for now. The desert gets a little hot sometimes, but it’s all mine. I never could grow anything but maybe I won’t have to. There could be a cataclysmic event around the corner.
Governmental Body: An external mouth with no external ears.
My friend Chavez used to wash dishes at a casino and now he’s mayor of Boulder City. Chavez’s life will be important to how this time period will be defined by future generations, and I spend time every week interviewing him and writing his biography. He says, “Without the 4clutter of society I can reach my full potential.” We knock back some of the last beers in the world and drink to that. He says, “Finally, no money—no problems.”
This new system doesn’t hassle Chavez like the old one did, and he doesn’t mind being lonely. He wants to learn as much as possible about the history of North America. Maybe create a graph and a timetable that explains how it all came to be in the way that it did. He has big plans to become a scholar. I tell him the textbooks he’s reading are biased, but he insists they were written by a Fortune 500 company. He found an astronomy book and on days like today, he likes to tell me about a mathematician from the seventeenth century who predicted that the universe is littered with black holes.
“They never made it.” Chavez says, “Or they made it somewhere, possibly another dimension, but not paradise. The closest thing to paradise is right here.” He leans back to get a better view of the sky.
“No, they made it—everything they took, all the technology, the Pope, the Vice-President, the piece of the true cross, the Mona Lisa, the Eiffel Tower, the Magna Carta; if it was a risk they would have left us something to honor.”
“Do you want to visit the wax museum again?” Chavez thinks the likenesses are uncanny.
I shake my head and wonder out loud,
“What do wax sculptures say about our place in history?”
“Maybe you’re right. They should be bigger than life like the statue of David. But it’s a Catch-22, Ely. If they hadn’t been made to scale then those scavengers would have taken wax Micheal Jackson and wax Maya Angelou with them. They wouldn’t have given it a second thought.”
Chavez drinks the last swig of his beer and jumps on his bicycle. “I should get back before dark.” Chavez lives alone in Boulder City. He’s afraid that if he is gone for too long someone will take it from him. I live alone, too. Well, except for Francis, but she keeps to herself. If you don’t mind the desert, you can have your own town now. People like it that way. The food will last a while and then the Earth will sigh with relief. The roaches can have it.
Livestock: Beings that would rather be taken advantage of than extinct. See elderly, dogs, hamsters.
I wear a sash all the time now. Not many people see me and the ones that do don’t think I’m putting on airs, or trying to be something I’m not. It’s a gold sash. I found it while I was rifling through an apartment. It used to say, Miss America, but I scribbled that out. The dean of my undergraduate university once said, “Ely, you’ll be an important man, a sash you should wear.” Whenever I hear that word Important that image reverberates in my brain and I can’t help think what was suppose to happen. I have to be physically knocked back into reality.
Towns are filled with important decisions. Chavez and I had an argument about what to do with the animals. He said, “Feed the small ones dog food.” The fresh produce had been eaten and the canned food was a necessity. On our first visit, Chavez had brought his 44 magnum. He told me it had once been owned by Clint Eastwood and that Clint had named her Betty Paige. My mind imagined a lot of inappropriate things. I followed close behind him carrying a large bag of Kibble and Bits.
The main entrance of the zoo was sculpted with ornate gothic animals. The original artist had exaggerated the size and sharpness of the creatures’ cement claws and presumed carious teeth. The screeching and croaking din of hungry, impatient animals was so loud I almost didn’t hear him fire Betty. A brown bear, surrounded by cheap plaster rocks, reared up on his hind legs, exposed his teeth, and then collapsed like a marionette.
Chavez returned Clint’s gun to its holster. “We can’t have bears running around.” Chavez explained that we had to eat every part of the bear. It was the sensible thing to do. We climbed over the low fence and jumped into the pit. With one cut, the bears viscera was on the ground, and its ribs gleamed light. I knelt down and kissed the bear on its forehead. After that, I told Chavez, I would take care of my own zoo. He spit on my shoes and told me I wasn’t prepared for the responsibility.
It was clear to me that I must take every opportunity to restore life to its natural order. I found a bolt cutter in the back of a Home Depot. My method for release could have been more…methodical. It took the cougar five minutes to eat six penguins. They were perplexingly slow. I should have given those penguins a proper head start. Much to my chagrin, the carnivores never seemed to fill. They roamed the streets searching for prey, and in only a few days they began to hunt each other. By the weekend it was just me and Lucy, the lion. Chavez shook his head at all the missed opportunities for Thanksgivings and meat. He told me he was hungry and to shoot it. Francis told me to shoot it, too, but I couldn’t.
Now, at the same time everyday I break open an economy size can of corn beef from Costco for Lucy. Recent events have worn her down. Her hair is mangled, her fur is matted, and her hips protrude sharply; she’s out of shape and slow. I know where she sleeps and every morning, before the sun is up, I ride by her on my bike. I throw the hash and pedal like mad. She always wants more, and I know she wants me. I’ll never kill that lion. Every day that I share food with Lucy is one less day I’ll live, but now I have something to honor, and that keeps me alive.
Friend: Bugs that bring their dead home, so that they can be buried in their own beds.
Large dunes surround my town. I spend my days on the top of the tallest building, an Arby’s, with a pair of binoculars I’ve had since childhood. I’m vigilant about watching Lucy, the lion. If anyone stumbles upon my town, I want to show them some good ol’ American hospitality. A man came by the other day. He must have been fifty or sixty years old. He had a backpack and a sleeping bag strapped to his back. On his shirt he wore an official badge shaped in the form of a star. On his head he wore a cowboy hat. His beard was ratty, and his face was grizzled. I filled my pack with the last few cans of hash in case I ran into Lucy, and went to meet him.
“Good morning, Sheriff?” I said, as he made his way over the thick sand that bleed into the city.
“You don’t have to call me that if you don’t want to. I just wear it to impress the ladies.”
“I sort of do, want to.”
The man tilted his head and read my sash.
“You mayor of this town?”
“Yes, almost two years now. I’d be glad to show you around.”
“You’re the only one living here?”
“Well, there is a lion and a librarian in the mix, but they don’t eat much.”
“Seems crowded,” he said with a frown.
I shook my head. I motioned for the man to follow me. I gave him a bicycle tour of the town. The food supply was dwindling, but we shared a large jar of pickles. He followed diligently as I showed him a sampling of the available real-estate.
“And this one is a three bedroom with a nice size patio and a cement swimming hole. There is an outhouse in the back that I dug myself.”
“What would I do with a swimming hole?”
“Options seem limitless.”
The man took his sweet time testing my outhouse.
“Sir, I think I’ve been wasting your time. I’m a private man.”
“How about you take half the town? The lion, the librarian, and I will take the other. In fact, we don’t mind, we’ll move, and you can have the good half. The one with tallest building. Just come by every once in a while and we’ll play cards.”
He took his time letting his eyes roll over everything I had showed him.
“Nah,” he said. “I’ll just keep on walking. Got to find me my own town, don’t you know, there’re unclaimed states out there.” He pointed north. “I’m thinking about making Alaska mine, all mine.”
“Don’t you ever get lonely?”
“Never had the opportunity.” Walking away, he muttered something about a design he has for a burner that is powered by perpetual motion.
“What happens if it breaks?” I yell to him,
“Don’t know.”
“You won’t have any food.”
“Not much here either.” He left then, jogging. I shook my head and began to call Lucy.
“Here kitty kitty, here kitty kitty, here kitty kitty….”
History: An uncomfortable feeling in one’s stomach, a wish to do again, to do better.
In the 80’s, my parents, my sister, and I lived in a hot rural town in New Mexico. The ground was firm and dry, which made farming difficult. My father had the idea to raise and sell turkeys. My sister and I called the big one Tom. My father spent weeks creating a makeshift fence out of hay bails and barbed wire. On Sundays, he would sacrifice one for us to eat. Every week he would wear the same bloody outfit and, with the same dark crowbar in hand, he would pant as he chased the turkeys around their pen. My sister and I would squeeze palms when he grabbed one by the neck. In one motion, he ensnared the bird’s feet under the crowbar then stepped onto it with his large boots. I covered my sister’s eyes with my hands as I solemnly watched from behind the hay and through the wire. With the turkeys feet trapped under the crowbar, and his boots’ on top of the bar driving the bird’s feet into the ground, he pulled with all his strength on the neck. Cluck. After the breakage, the bird fervently flapped its wings in an attempt to fly until the heaviness of death stilled them. Feathers found ways of escaping, and after my father was gone, I would gather them and put them somewhere safe. Later, with blood and flesh caked under his fingernails, he would lead us in prayer. We would bow our heads and thank God for turkey.
Turkey became his obsession. The extra money allowed him to stay out late at night and keep secrets. After a while, blackbirds began to encroach on his new freedoms. They were stealing the turkey eggs and became the enemy. After dinner, he would crack a beer, light a cigarette, and sit on the back porch with a rifle under his arms until way after it was too dark to see. The shots were loud and sudden. I never knew where he was pointing, so at night I took my sister and forced her and myself under her crib. For protection, I pulled the crib-bars down. One night, I lost her. The first shot was fired, and then the second, and the third. I ran out the front door and grabbed my dad by his large biceps. “Stop, please, stop.” I wiped large tears and blew my nose on his red shirt. He spit out his cigarette and together we squinted our eyes at the darkness.
The piles of sleek black feathers and rotting bones, from before the accident, littered the yard, sending a message to the obstinate birds. The piles had grown high enough that the blackbirds thought twice and found other eggs to eat. The piles attracted rats and after they finished with the blackbirds, they ate our turkeys.
Gravity: A sticky mass that keeps you from flying—jumping from city to city—being super.
Walking out into the desert, I lay on my back, hold my telescope to my eyes and try to find her. During the day it’s too bright to see what has become of them. At night, it’s too dark. I convinced Francis to let me burn the last of the unaltered evidence against us. I had hoped the light would fill the whole sky and there would be a chance I would see her. You’d think they would want to know how Earth is doing. Someone—somewhere—must think so much of themselves that they believe they own here and there, and everything else I can see. If they don’t comeback, something will, and it will find a use for all of this sand.
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