by C M Muller
She takes my hands. My sister. My other. All of our broken little pieces buried. Waiting. “Help me,” she says, and we go into the dark together, our fingers filled with cold earth.
The sound is small at first. Something to fit inside of your palm and hide away, but as we pull back the dirt, it grows louder, and Lou smiles. Not one, but two voices crying.
“Please, please,” she whispers, and her words are something like a prayer. Something like begging, and together we find little fingers and little toes and little mouths opened wide, and we hold them close to our breasts. Our daughters.
We wipe the dirt from their hair, and we kiss the tops of their heads, and they curl into us. Safe. Protected. Cradled and far away from anything that might do them harm.
Far beneath us, a hungry mouth opens and sharp teeth turn crimson as it swallows down all of the sorrow and blood my sister has offered it.
Our daughters look up at us from faces that mirror the other; look up at us with eyes that have seen and understand everything the other has seen. A gift for two sisters who bled and dropped tears into the earth.
We tuck them tightly against our breasts, and together, we go up out of the dark.
Phantom Airfields
Christopher Slatsky
Randall still saw Jacob’s face in crowds.
He sat alone in his truck’s cab, absorbing vestiges of warmth seeping from the vents. He found a purity in this ritual, parking near the air-field, basking in a sorrow so profound it surpassed suicidal thoughts, circling back to attain something spiritual. Life doesn’t just pass from living to non-living; there were quiet moments in between, little snatches of sleep and dream and hope along the way. Such thoughts helped him get through each day.
A fist-sized hole had rusted through the floor on the passenger side. The snow beneath the truck was gray. Randall looked out his windshield at the expanse of white ground, still pristine, icy veneer yet to be damaged by any living thing. A tall fence stretched across the field, preventing the curious from trespassing onto the abandoned Sodder Airfield.
This geography drew him in, spoke in a language that refused to be ignored. Here the ground kept luring him back, seducing him to walk among the broken buildings. There were no longer any signs of the old runway—in spring, weeds grew over any trace of what this place had once been used for; in winter, snow obscured the remaining secrets. Randall breathed mist onto the windshield, ran a finger across it.
He watched a mangy dog dart from the trailer park on the other side of the street and into the woods. The animal held a filthy diaper clamped between its jaws. The sight of the stray’s muzzle, slathered with excrement, made Randall think of metal implants in abductee’s mouths, of devices surgically imposed to intimidate, to conduct bio-telemetric analyses.
The rest area was just a mile from here.
He’d stopped returning the detective’s phone calls. Cooperating with the investigation meant accepting their interpretation of events. He was done sifting through photos of children’s corpses. Done with everything.
He pressed his palms against his face, pads pushing against eyes, nostrils filled with the odor of gas station pink soap and grilled onions from the burger he’d eaten late last night. When he lowered his hands the dog was gone. He remembered the day it happened.
Remembered the panic and mounting grief. Running across the rest stop parking lot into the bathrooms, bellowing little astronaut!, his voice echoing between the empty stalls, the affectionate nickname perverse in his mouth.
Hands pressed against temples, running around the rest area picnic tables screaming stop hiding dammit, stop hiding dammit! Blaming Jacob for wandering away. Blaming Sarah for not watching their child closely enough. Blaming himself.
His wife’s voice escalating, their son’s name mangled by her screams.
Stop hiding dammit!
All he saw was their car in the parking space, no other vehicles, the open road beyond empty save for a glorious silver light that filled Randall’s body with a trembling wonder at the majesty of a moment so potent it ruined him.
It seemed as if it had happened yesterday. He put his Styrofoam cup of coffee into the holder and stepped out of the truck.
A raven dipped its beak into a puddle of antifreeze fluid on the pockmarked blacktop that led to the trailer park. It shook its head. Feathers rippled like fur. Randall felt a pang of remorse. This creature meant no ill will, was only obeying its basic survival needs. But the poison would finish it off soon enough.
He slammed the door shut. The doomed bird flew away. The chill of the snow penetrated his boots. He sucked frosty air into a mouth sour with black coffee.
The trailer park was starting to wake up: chatter of right-wing AM radio talk shows, wheeze of an unidentified instrument played by clumsy hands. Probably a child’s recorder, borrowed from school, presumably much to their parents’ dismay. The sky was bright with a post-snowfall glow. Randall’s ear lobes stung. White plumes of exhaust spiraled from worn mufflers as people began their daily commute.
He didn’t need to worry about going to work; the final wave of layoffs at the mortgage company saw to that. His ineffectual boss had crumbled under pressure from corporate and now a dozen employees were desperately seeking new ways to supplement their income. Nothing but time these days.
He followed a familiar path towards Sodder Airfield. Scuffed his feet through gray slush, slid down an embankment beneath a closed bridge. Concrete pylons prevented vehicles from passing over from either lane. He walked along a shallow stream. Clumps of gravelly ice on the surface made disconcerting sounds, rasping like teeth scraping against aluminum foil.
He ducked through a gap in the 12-foot high fence. Corroded wires snapped. Bureau of Land Management property, but Randall had yet to come across any security monitoring the land.
He passed over nearly a mile of level landscape before arriving at the abandoned airfield. Sodder Airfield had once managed P-40 operational overflow during WWII, but all that was left was an ILS antennae, the upper half having long fallen to the ground to sink into the soil, winter-yellow weeds covering any remaining metal. The low generator buildings had crumbled into empty squares decades ago. There was one wooden shell Randall thought may have once been a guard station. On the other side of a knee-high fence, beneath a mound of snow, a row of battered 50-gallon drums sat, the bottom of most having rusted away.
He paused to stare at the spaceman spray-painted against a slab of concrete leaning like a dislodged piece of ancient dolmen. No matter how many times he saw the graffiti, it filled him with an indefinable dread.
He studied it for the hundredth time. It reminded him of the Solway Spaceman. The puzzle of that photograph, the menacing figure looming behind a child—did they mean to abduct her or merely observe? It all promised a life far more exciting than what was available here. Of better worlds where mysteries were benign and parents couldn’t be destroyed in one brief moment.
The graffitied figure’s helmet was a perfect circle, the artist utilizing cracks and pits in the concrete to add a decayed effect. The crooked jaw was sloppy, a spattered application that captured an otherworldly appearance. A hint of a human skull lurked behind the visor, teeth faintly visible.
Randall noticed a slight decline in the landscape, a subtle depression deepening further away. The ground had been flat every time he’d roamed previously, but now sloped into a shallow crater about the circumference of the water fountain in the center of town.
When had this occurred? Had the weight of the snow collapsed an underground bunker or storage area?
He pondered this new mystery for several hours before heading back to the truck.
“I don’t think Chloe and I can stay in the house, Randall. I don’t like coming home anymore.” Sarah nestled their baby daughter securely under her arm, deftly twisted the cap tighter on a sippy cup. The diner was filling up fast. A movie must have just let out at the theater next door.
Randall saw Jacob’s mannerisms in Sarah’s gestures, in her black, tightly curled hair, the tapered shape of her hands. She was so much like Jacob in so many ways.
He reached across the Formica table for his daughter.
“You need to stop going there,” Sarah said.
“Where?” Randall paused, hands frozen in position to take Chloe.
“Don’t play dumb. You know what I mean. The airfield.”
Randall lowered his empty hands, picked up a glass of soda, held it tightly, the cool surface firm under his grip. All he had to do was let go and the glass would shatter on the diner’s chipped linoleum floor. Or squeeze it as hard as he could until it fractured into slivers. Create one pristine simple moment.
“Wide open space. Helps me think.”
“Isn’t that what your therapist is for?” Sarah shifted their daughter to the crook of her other arm. Chloe began to wriggle.
Randall slid his glass away. “I can hold her you know. You don’t have to do everything.”
Sarah looked up abruptly, surprised by his offer.
Chloe rejected the sippy cup. Her fussing became louder.
Sarah had kicked Randall out of their house four months ago. Days later, a terse text message confirmed she’d initiated divorce proceedings. Randall knew she needed time and distance. They’d never be the same again, but a respite might help. They’d done their best to remain cordial. Sarah had even agreed to meet him once a week, usually at their favorite greasy spoon, to spend time with his baby daughter.
Chloe was whining now. A piercing wail that all babies acquire to announce their distress, to force parents to drop what they’re doing and come running because everything revolves around children. This is what’s expected of them; nothing left to do but obey the commands of an infant, even if it meant your life was effectively over.
Randall took a sip from his soda. He could bite down and break the glass against his teeth, lacerate his gums, express his helplessness with howls and drooled blood foam, a stupid pointless tantrum of violence. Fantasizing about hurting himself was the only semblance of control he had these days.
Chloe was screaming. A shrill-voiced creature reminding Randall of his inability to protect his family. A terrible thought ran through his head—what if their daughter had devices implanted inside her, something that influenced her behavior? Something to control Chloe, and in turn her parents, manipulating them to react in ways they wouldn’t normally react?
Keeping them from learning the truth about what happened to Jacob.
Randall tamped down an atavistic urge to break the glass over his child’s skull. To shut her up so he could gather his thoughts, have a normal adult conversation with his soon-to-be ex-wife. A few moments of peace and tranquility. Stifle the acidic panic that filled his gut, spilled from pores like sharp vinegar.
One terrible moment. He loathed himself for even thinking of hurting his daughter.
Sarah bobbed Chloe in the air. Made cooing sounds to calm her down. A young couple at the booth next to them looked over, frowned in annoyance at this intrusion on their date night.
“Stop going to that airfield. There’s nothing there. You disappear for days sometimes, and I can’t get ahold of you. What if detective Curtis needs us to identify something?”
Randall heard a car alarm in the distance. He imagined himself bobbing in the air, through space so cold it snagged his skin like hooks. He could see the curve of the planet in the distance.
Sarah changed tack. “I can’t go into Jacob’s room anymore.”
Her voice pulled Randall to attention. “Why’s that?” His mouth felt dry despite the pool of sweet cola on his tongue.
“I thought I saw...” Sarah gave a weak smile, not trusting herself to explain what she may have encountered. Chloe made deep gulping sounds, gagging on her own phlegm and frustration.
“You saw Jacob?” Randall asked.
Sarah’s eyes burned. She hesitated.
“What did you see?” Randall persisted.
“I don’t know. It was, someone, someone in his room. I thought it was him at first. But that can’t be.” She lowered her head to look at the untouched mound of eggs benedict on her plate. Breakfast dinner had always been Jacob’s favorite. She pushed a fork through the thin hollandaise sauce.
“A shadow, a car drove by and its headlights made it look like something silvery was moving in the bedroom. A silver light. Just a car.”
She seemed to grow older in that moment. A filter of time applied over the lens of how Randall remembered his wife. He thought she’d grown more lovely as time progressed. The haunted were capable of depths of compassion most were not capable of expressing. Those who’d suffered tragedy were less likely to trivialize the tragic.
“Just a light Randall.”
Sarah touched the dry, coarse knuckle of his right thumb. She looked at him with a trace of resolution. She’d always care, though they’d never share lives again, their tremendous loss a chasm that kept them apart. Her eyes were bright. Pupils wide.
Randall couldn’t stop thinking about broken glass and Chloe’s head dangling limply. He heard himself before he knew what he was going to ask.
“You saw an astronaut in Jacob’s room, didn’t you?”
Sarah began to cry.
Randall returned to Sodder Airfield the next morning. The sun had just risen, soft-edged shadows and clumps of snow melting away under its glare. It was too early for people to start waking up. He liked these calm moments when he could look to the sun and it wouldn’t harm his eyes.
He began walking towards the airfield.
Sarah left a voice message saying she and Chloe would be out of town at her sister’s place, so Randall couldn’t see his daughter until next weekend. He knew this may or may not be true; she’d prevented him from visiting before. He didn’t care anymore.
His Survivors of Child Abduction support meetings offered 60-minute increments of gray mouths opening and rarely closing, smacking teeth against tongues, against palates, forming words into sentences of self-help platitudes. They talked at great lengths about how Randall must never give up hope.
He couldn’t argue the point. Hope helped snag a few hours of sleep before the sobbing woke him up. Hope meant that Jacob might actually be safe and sound, and the slim possibility this stubborn insistence wasn’t a phantom in a distressed brain to ameliorate the shock of it all.
Little else had come of therapy save for a steady prescription of Paxil that made Randall feel as if his head was as empty as outer space.
He’d once confided to his therapist about his theory regarding Jacob’s fate. But she’d countered with bizarre scenarios: a cabal of child abusers had tricked Randall with magician’s props, deceived a grieving father’s susceptible mind. She spoke of a conspiracy of kidnappers, of military technologies, sonic machines that scrambled minds, intravenously administered drugs to distort perceptions—all manner of trickery utilized to concoct artificial memories concerning stolen children. Pseudo-memories to protect him from accepting that his son had been led from a rest area bathroom to a stranger’s vehicle.
Randall found her allegations far more outrageous than his own hypothesis. As time passed, however, nothing seemed real. The depths of grief assailing him at every turn held a false aspect. Mind controlling machines implanted by a conspiracy of pedophiles was just as incomprehensible as a child being whisked away by a stranger.
Tragedy was absurd in all its manifestations.
Jacob hadn’t wandered over to the vending machine near the bathrooms, fascinated by the soda can lighting up every time he pressed the button while his parents argued over whose turn it was to change Chloe’s diaper, oblivious to their son’s whereabouts. This could not be how lives were crippled.
The sky was enormous this morning, so clear and pale he could still see last night’s stars. The airfield’s crater was a dark oval from this distance. As he drew closer, a
chartreuse glow caught his eye. He moved towards the source.
The glow was emanating from something on top of the snow in the center of the crater. He slid down the shallow embankment. There were no footprints, the snow was undisturbed.
A translucent spaceman.
An action figure, articulated better than those he’d played with as a kid. Glow-in-the-dark plastic casing, magnetic ball and joint limbs. Jacob had been obsessed with astronauts and rocket ships—he’d been playing with something like this when they’d parked at the rest stop. Randall put the toy into his jacket pocket.
It had to be Jacob’s. No parent should ever have to be submerged beneath the vast reach of hopelessness.
As Randall began the trek back to his truck he saw a silvery orb float behind one of the concrete structures. He explored the area but found nothing unusual. He looked up into the sky, then around the rubble to see if a Mylar balloon had been caught or deflated at ground level.
He didn’t find anything.
Randall wandered the house like a phantom the first few days after Jacob disappeared, not sure how to proceed with the day to day routines. Lifting a toothbrush to his mouth had become an effort. He’d quit shaving, neglected to brush his hair. Even today, eight-months on, he still felt like a ghost buffeted about by gentle gusts, pushed through darkness from room to room on currents his weak soul was unable to resist.
Tonight he crawled through the unlocked window of Sarah’s house. The divorce proceedings forbade him from coming onto the property—this was no longer his home, but Chloe and Sarah were still at her sister’s place and Randall couldn’t resist. The lure to return to his old home was second only to the call of the airfield.
He stepped into Jacob’s bedroom. Sarah had kept the room exactly as it was the day he was taken. Bed perfectly made, toys in their place. Even the dirty clothes hamper remained untouched.
He reverentially touched the dresser, the bed, bookshelves. Opened the closet. Rows of shirts, never to be worn ever again. He ran his fingers across the fabric, luxuriating in the memory of his son—the smells, the tactile warmth of the cloth. He was touching the garb of someone holy and they were going to step out of the closet any moment now, lay a hand on his brow, tell him everything was going to be alright.