Nightscript 2

by C M Muller

  There was a piety in forcing himself to experience this heartache again and again. Scrolling through baby photos on the computer. Hearing his son’s laughter in videos of their trip to Yellowstone Park. Breakfast dinners. He was a pilgrim seeking penance, the thought of his son’s absence a whip across his skin. He wanted to die.

  If only they hadn’t let him out of their sight. If only they hadn’t dropped their guard to allow the monstrous to intrude.

  Randall had a recurring dream shortly after Jacob’s abduction. In the vision, an astronaut opened his bedroom door, peeked in with its bulbous shiny head moving ever so slightly as it watched him. It shut the door.

  Then opened it again.

  Closed.

  Opened.

  The helmet glistened like wet skin. Its smooth gray face reflected a cartoon frog nightlight near the bed, like star shine on the surface of a placid lake. The head jiggled as if it was going to fall off. The spaceman floated into the bedroom.

  It was the size of a child.

  The intruder tilted its head from side to side, surveying the room. The front of its helmet, where Randall assumed its eyes were located, turned to him.

  The eyelid of its face slid open.

  Randall wasn’t sure if he remembered the dream accurately, or if he’d borrowed it from his son. His memories felt loaned, passed back and forth between those he loved, slightly distorted each time like a psychic game of telephone. He felt as if he were recalling an event that had occurred in some other time, on another path he’d neglected to follow.

  He no longer remembered when or why he’d given his son the little astronaut nickname.

  He allowed the memory of his dream to recede, like a tide pulling strange life back into its depths. He walked into the kitchen. Weeks after the tragedy, he’d been standing in front of the refrigerator, wondering whether to box away their son’s art or leave it tacked to the door with magnets. He’d moved a magnet aside to expose Jacob’s scrawled signature. The paper had fallen, slipped beneath the fridge.

  That day came back all over again. He collapsed on the floor, shook with great heaving breaths, feeling as if he’d betrayed his boy once again. Destroyed a fragile piece of history.

  The day of the incident, when Randall, Sarah, and a sleeping Chloe had returned home after hours at the police station, the couple just sat quietly on the living room couch and didn’t speak until Sarah said she was going to check on Chloe then go to bed early. Randall drank in a failed attempt to forget everything. He woke in the morning to find a deep gouge out of his left thumb, a dish rag collecting most of the crusty blood. He didn’t know how he’d hurt himself. Never found anything in the house broken.

  He’d never retrieved Jacob’s drawing from beneath the refrigerator. As far as he knew, it was still under there.

  It seemed like yesterday. He wriggled his fingers into the gap beneath the fridge. There was nothing.

  He found himself in the living room. He turned the TV on, the volume muted. An anthropomorphic train smiled, rolled its eyes crazily as it sped down a track. Jacob’s favorite show.

  The engine’s face was human. The gray metal organic, as if it could sweat. If Randall placed his palm against the surface he’d feel warmth instead of cold steel, pulse of vital liquids pumping inside, hot exhalations from between the train’s pouty, full lips.

  This was deeply unsettling.

  He turned the TV off, went back to Jacob’s room. He placed the glow-in-the-dark astronaut toy on a shelf, then exited back through the window.

  Randall listened to Sarah’s voice message. Detective Curtis had found a new piece of evidence. Randall hadn’t bothered to check his phone in days, much less return any calls, so she’d gone to the station to identify it by herself.

  When he heard the abject devastation in Sarah’s voice he knew that the pants found buried in the woods near the trailer park were the ones Jacob had been wearing that day. He knew they’d still be cuffed just the way Jacob liked them.

  Randall didn’t need to listen to the rest of the message.

  The cab of his truck spun. He pressed his palms against his face, drooling hot saliva onto clammy skin. He thought of tracking devices sliced into muscle tissue, machines injected into blood, sewn beneath skin, sending electrochemical signals to the brain and nervous system. Underground bunkers filled with the soft bodies of children. Manipulations and a universe that maims and kills and abducts, all to some mysterious end.

  This must be why the ghosts of Sodder Airfield called to him, the reason the past taunted Randall with its secrets. Like the Nazca lines, the Wurdi Youang in Australia, the Carnac stones. Sites visible from above.

  A memory of Jacob years ago, sitting in his high chair, contentedly chewing on a mushy portion of toast.

  A memory of Jacob in his perfectly cuffed pants.

  A memory of Jacob.

  Randall let the remaining voice messages play as he howled silently into his open hands.

  He parked in front of the trailer park near Sodder Airfield. He sat in silence. The cab stank of stale coffee. The morning was clear and crisp. The snow deep, the sky bright. He held a box cutter in his hand.

  He left the truck, walked towards the faded runway, to the familiar dilapidated buildings and chunks of concrete.

  The box cutter’s hard plastic handle was cold.

  Randall planned to hurt himself, then curl up in the center of the crater and bleed out. Maybe that would force them to bring Jacob back down.

  But the airfield had changed.

  Antennae now sprouted from the earth like monstrous insect palp, the molted remains of something that had long departed this planet. Their tips flaunted blinking lights. Rows of these pencil-thin antennae ran through the center of the airfield. The metal was putty-colored, as if the alloy was decomposing. Their topmost points swayed in the wind hundreds of feet above, swinging back and forth with a strange metallic hum audible on the surface of the planet.

  Randall approached the depression. A flash of silver caught his eye.

  An astronaut stood in the center.

  It turned towards him. The blue sky reflected off its featureless face.

  Randall didn’t know if it was a plastic helmet, or aged bone brittle from the abuse of months. Its cranium was cracked, stained a putrid yellow, as if a sickness was leaking from inside. The visor was thick as a cloudy cornea. A perfectly aligned row of gleaming teeth was visible within.

  The astronaut scrambled out of the crater, shuffled towards Randall. Its skin flaked away like old crinkled aluminum foil. Silvery specks mingled with snow that had somehow already been polluted with a lead-colored substance.

  The lights on top of the antennae grew brighter.

  The spaceman stumbled, its short legs and the snow preventing it from moving any faster.

  Randall waited patiently. He wasn’t afraid.

  The astronaut’s helmet began to fall away, the thin cord connecting skull to neck fraying from too much jiggling. A broken toy that had been played with too much.

  Its arms and legs moved in a familiar manner, the tilt of its shoulders all too recognizable. It was so very small. Just a child.

  Randall dropped the box cutter in the snow, ran to the astronaut. Fell, regained his balance, ran until he embraced the small corpse.

  He said oh my my my little astronaut because any other words were out of reach. He held his son against his chest, cradled his wobbly head to prevent it from dislodging. Wept until his lungs burned, the sensation dissipating into the vast cold emptiness of the morning. He wasn’t sure what to do, didn’t know what was expected of him as a father.

  He couldn’t open his son’s visor and view the familiar face. To look past the time and decay, to see what he’d set out to find all those months ago would confirm every fear, every desperate certainty that there was no joy to be found in a world governed by entropy. Everything rots. The world dilapidates. Everyone will vanish into no
thingness.

  Children are taken away from bathroom rest stops.

  Little astronauts never return home.

  So he told Jacob made-up stories instead. Old ones heard many times, new tales he’d never had a chance to tell. He spoke of his boy’s first steps, first words, favorite toys, told him about his little sister, how his mother missed her son so much. He recounted every maudlin parent cliché he could imagine. But Jacob never made a sound or even acknowledged he understood anything at all.

  Randall continued until the tiny graceful presence of his boy lulled him into the first semblance of comfort in far too long. His face touched his son’s helmeted face. His grip loosened.

  He felt his son’s head waver, then tumble over his shoulder onto the ground. The head gouged a shallow furrow in the snow as it rolled away towards the crater.

  Randall wanted to call out, to halt its progress. Wanted his boy put back together, to be a whole child once more so they could be a family again. But his limbs ached, unwilling to move his sore body any more than was necessary to maintain a heartbeat. He stared at the dirty snow.

  His life wasn’t worth Sarah’s life. Or Chloe’s. Wasn’t worth Jacob’s life. Maybe things had worked out for the best. He loathed himself so intensely nothing could harm, humiliate, or affect him in any manner he hadn’t already inflicted against himself.

  His boy’s body dissolved into silvery bone meal in his arms. The dust trickled from his lap to the ground, then dispersed on a sparkling breeze. Randall tasted sunlight.

  He didn’t deserve to see the dust speckle the air with resplendence. Didn’t deserve to see his son’s head fall into the crater, the air around the hole shimmer with a glorious fervor the color of nebulae, the diaphanous form of the reconfigured child astronaut ascend, picking up speed the higher he rose towards the exosphere.

  Randall kept his gaze below, mesmerized by the patterns and pocks in the snow. He only deserved to stare at filthy ice.

  Jacob waved at his father far beneath him, but Randall couldn’t rescue his son from oblivion. Couldn’t even own up to his responsibilities as a parent and reach out. Couldn’t save his family. Couldn’t save himself from eternity.

  Jacob kept waving, but Randall remained motionless until he became nothing more than a speck on the surface of the planet.

  Then the little astronaut faded into a pinpoint of silvery light.

  Then they were both nothing at all.

  En Plein Air

  J.T. Glover

  A gust of wind boiled off the James without warning, flattening cattails and clumps of spikerush as it swirled around the inlet where I was painting, and of course it caught my canvas. The morning’s work rushed away from me like a sailboat before a storm, taking my light easel with it. Just as I was sucking in breath to howl with frustration—it shuddered to a stop in midair. Two pale hands held it fast, reaching around from the back.

  “Whoa,” said a woman with frizzy brown hair as she looked around one side at me. “I expected a lot of things today, but not an easel attack.”

  “Damn, I’m—thanks. That wind came out of nowhere.”

  “Been there,” she said, smiling.

  The woman walked toward me and set the easel back in place. I was instantly delighted and wary when I saw her umbrella, pochade box, and other painting supplies. On closer inspection, I noted that her gear was highly customized and showed the kind of wear that came with long use.

  “I’m Sharon,” she said, sticking out one hand.

  “Delia,” I replied, appreciating her firm grip as we shook.

  “The wind comes up suddenly here sometimes.”

  “Yeah? This is my first time. Usually I paint out in the country, Goochland or Louisa, out that way.”

  “Nice,” she said, nodding. “I’ve been out there a few times, but I’m a city girl. I probably paint right here more than anyplace else. Something about the way the light falls, and this stretch of Cherokee Road doesn’t get much traffic.”

  “Huh. Didn’t mean to poach.”

  “No worries! I don’t own it, and every so often people come by here anyway. I don’t think it’s actually all that scenic, but it’s isolated enough that people sometimes assume it is. They don’t hang around very long.”

  She nodded amicably and walked a little distance away, far enough to be out of my picture plane.

  Courteous, and not falling all over herself to tell me about her work. How quaint.

  The woman wasn’t a complete exception among artists I met in Richmond, whether life drawing at VisArts or touring galleries on First Fridays, but an awful lot of them just seemed to want more followers on their Instagram. Sharon appeared to be most interested in painting, and that’s what we both did, mostly in silence, for the next couple hours.

  The wind didn’t kick up that strongly again, but the clouds thickened partway through, going a slate gray that promised rain. I’d chosen this spot at random while driving along the river, thinking it was a nice blend of dry land and tidewater, and as the light faded, I was mildly surprised by how the shadows thickened, falling into a startling range of hues and values. Most people wouldn’t have considered it beautiful, but it was the kind of challenge I liked as a painter.

  By the time I packed it in, a thin drizzle had started to fall. I walked over to Sharon, halfway thinking about seeing if she wanted to grab lunch. She’d popped her umbrella, though, and even if it was there to diffuse sunlight, it didn’t do a horrible job of keeping off the rain, and she was still at it. Her brushstrokes were fewer and more precise than mine, and large piles of paint remained on her palette, even after most of a day’s work. Her picture was dark and muted, entirely unlike my cheerfully over-bright painting.

  “Hey,” I said, “thanks for saving the day earlier. Are you...”

  “I think I’m still going to go a little longer.”

  “Okay. Well, don’t get caught if it storms.”

  “Will do! Maybe see you again.”

  I said the same and walked off toward the embankment that led up to the road, slogging through brush and the band of trees, mostly elms and redbuds, that started where the ground angled up. When I had everything stowed in the Jeep, I looked back toward the river. She was still working, carefully and deliberately. From this distance her painting stood out like a wedge of night in the rain.

  That week I stayed late at the office, trying to finish a new client’s website, and painting had to take a back seat. By Thursday I’d overdosed on screen time, and I saw style sheets every time I closed my eyes. When I hung up my coat and dropped the keys in the bowl by my front door, I knew just where I was headed for the night.

  My apartment was in a subdivided house in the Fan, an old brick building that sat on a corner of Grove Avenue. It was close enough to the bustle of Robinson Street that I could meet up with friends at Starbucks or a bar five minutes from my door, but my block sat in one of those oases of quiet you get sometimes in Richmond. I’d lived there since I got my first design job after VCU, and so far I hadn’t wanted a house badly enough to move, or found anyone comfortable enough to bring home for good, so I stayed where I was. Shabbily ornate window frames and chipped bricks had been plenty elegant to see me into my thirties, and the tiny parlor that the landlord had apologetically offered as a living room served nicely as a studio.

  Visitors occasionally commented on the odor of linseed oil, but I never noticed it anymore, so the smell in the studio that evening took me aback. It was a little bit oil, a little bit miscellaneous art junk, and something like...standing water, undisturbed for long enough to grow algae. My ancient tortoiseshell, Rollo, had died during the winter, and I hadn’t been able to bring myself to replace him yet, but he wouldn’t have stood for this. I smiled sadly, imagining him squeezing behind boxes and jumping from shelf to shelf, trying to find the source of the stink.

  I circled the room until I stood in front of the canvas I’d started the previous weekend. Eve
n under color-balanced lights, the thing wasn’t right. I’d always been drawn to the Fauves, and Pop, and the garish proclamations of poster art, but somehow my painting no longer looked so vibrant to me.

  What the actual fuck? You aren’t supposed to paint like a web designer. You have a style, and that’s it—right in front of you.

  No matter what I told myself, though, something felt off about the picture before me. I loved landscape paintings, however uncool some of my college teachers had said they were, but subtle palettes weren’t my thing. Never had been.

  So why does this one feel weird to you? It’s not like all the rest of your paintings went bad.

  Looking around my studio was unexpectedly distracting. It was as if I were peering through a pane of dirty ice. The bright, high-chroma colors that I loved were a mess. The self-portrait I’d been lazily hacking away at for a few weeks looked dead as a monochrome underpainting, despite the wild impasto and glass granules I’d worked into it. Not bad, just...not for me, not right now. It was the strangest sensation, like looking at pictures from childhood, at a part of myself walled off by time.

  “You need a change of pace,” I said aloud. “And it’s summer, so why not?”

  That felt right, and the thought of sun and fresh air was a tonic after the long week. I wandered back toward the kitchen, thinking vaguely about making some stir fry. I paused at the bookcase in the hall, looking at spines and gravitating almost unconsciously to a book of Charles Burchfield’s winter landscapes. I pulled it out, glad I’d held this pale, slender volume back from the thrift shop box the other day. My appetite vanished as I studied gray skies and empty houses. The pages weren’t free of color, but it was a near thing. Soft rain started outside, and something coiled up inside my heart, sleepy and well satisfied.