The Sun My Destiny

by Logan Ryan Smith

  Papa did the drawing. He’s pretty good with a pencil, which is easily found around these parts. He said his father was a painter and taught him a few things before the world ended. I guess one could make a living off of drawing things and painting them back then and that’s what his dad did. Papa said his dad is my grandad. I wondered if his painterly abilities were what made him grand. Papa drew a picture of him and told me I look just like him. I didn’t get it because his dad was this old wrinkly fart-face and at the time he showed me the drawing I was only like eight or something. But maybe I’ll eventually look like my grandad. I hope not, but we’ll see.

  “Haven’t seen you around in a while, stranger,” Momma says, still with that wispy voice that disintegrates on its way to me.

  “Sorry, Momma. I was hunting. I saw a seagull!” I shout and plop down in the blue chair—the one that’s always been mine. It’s a comfy armchair with lots of patches Momma put on it to keep the springs from sticking out. I grab the top calendar from the pile on the coffee table and scratch out the last three days with a marker, having been absent from The Memory Palace that long. The calendar has a picture of kittens on it and it reminds me of Dante. Next, I pick up the photo album and kick my feet up on the coffee table.

  “A seagull?”

  “Yeah, two of them! I brained one good with my trusty slingshot but the other got away.”

  “Have you been drinking?” Momma asks, her voice trailing away behind me.

  “What? No,” I say, scoffing, thumbing through the photo album. The album is full of pictures of different families from, like, centuries ago or something. There’s pictures of them on the beach, around a Christmas tree, at school graduations—all that kind of shit, you know. Momma collected all the different photos a long time ago and we’ve decided to pretend that all of this album’s memories are our own. Momma would find a picture of one family on a fishing expedition and her and Papa would ask me if I remembered, and not knowing how to play along at the time I’d say no, but then they’d both weave a tale of how we were out on the Mississippi in some forgotten year, on a boat, and even though I was really small at the time, I hooked the biggest, meanest, ugliest river shark ever and that Papa had to help me reel it in for a whole thirty minutes. The thing was well over six feet long! Momma cooked it up at a cabin we had rented, which is where we also took all our Christmas pictures around that beautiful glittery Christmas tree. Papa told me he built me a bike that I rode around town for days and days on end. He told me I entered a race on New Year’s Day and blew away the competition, winning a trophy even bigger than that stupid river shark!

  I told them I remembered and thanked them for reminding me.

  “I met a girl, though,” I tell Momma.

  “Did you use a condom?” she asks, sternly.

  “I didn’t have one, Momma!” I complain.

  “Dammit, Clyde. Do you want to get tetanus?”

  “She was a real nice girl, Momma. She wouldn’t do that to me.”

  “Next time, Clyde, I don’t want you screwing around with those Out-of-Towners. You’ll get tetanus and your pee-pee will fall off!”

  “OK, Momma,” I say, and toss the photo album back to the coffee table.

  “Come here, Clyde,” she orders, wispily.

  I walk behind the chairs to where Momma’s voice drifts from. I kneel down there and stroke her hair, lean in, and kiss her. But not for too long. And it doesn’t matter. It’s not like she has lips. And the hair I’m stroking is the lock of her hair I keep in my pocket. Momma is just an old wooden cabinet door stuck into the grey dirt now. It says “MOMMA” on it, written in big black marker. Next to it is another one that says “PAPA.” They’ve been gone for a while now, Momma and Papa, but Momma still talks to me pretty regularly. Papa, not so much. He’s been a bit more stand-offish since he kicked the bucket. But I don’t mind. I always liked Momma more, anyway.

  “Lay with me for a while,” Momma says and I whine and tell her I just got up and that I’m not tired and that I’d really like to go hunting for another bird and she shushes me and shames me until I finally lie down on the dirt that covered her body some time ago. I feel her hand come through the earth and stroke my face. She sings a song to me, tells me “Momma’s gonna buy you a mockingbird,” which I imagine to be a really foul, smart-alecky type of bird that I’d love to brain real good with my slingshot. No bird’s gonna mock me!

  Eventually I fall back to sleep to the soothing sounds of Momma singing in the ever-present shade of The Memory Palace.

  I awake atop Momma’s grave to the sound of shuffling, murmuring, and metal clunk-clunk-clunking. A wicked, prolonged growl follows. My bones tingle. My mouth dries up.

  It’s the Out-of-Towners that Momma was talking about. Albeit, she confused my loveseat love-affair with Out-of-Towners, which are real people and a real threat.

  Like a Protein Bean whose rock has been lifted, I scurry away from Momma’s grave and into a little crevasse in the nearest trash heap, Kmart Mountain. I tuck myself away in there, this grocery store shopping cart sticking out overhead, affording me this little nook. The cart’s sunk into the ground, leaving only a crawl space, so I have to lie down flat against the ground and I’m sucking in the grey dust I kicked up.

  Big, dusty boots clod past, kicking up their own grey dust. I can’t see the Out-of-Towners, just those fat, mean-looking boots. I imagine underneath all that dust are a bunch of nasty blood stains from where they kicked the back of a hundred kids’ heads in before eating their faces. As they stomp past they’re also clacking the earth with sharp sticks. Debris from nearby mountains tumbles all around as they prod and poke with those sticks and search for what, I don’t know. It’s all trash and it’s all ours. There’s enough to go around. But it makes me angry. It boils my goddamned blood. It’s not really all of ours. It’s mine, King Clyde The Destroyer’s! I have conquered and claimed this land of junk. If there’s anything special in any of these endless mountain ranges within the distant walls defining my Kingdom, it’s mine.

  I’m just about to slither out of the crevasse and eat these ugly fucking intruders’ faces off when giant, drooling jaws jut beneath the shopping cart and snap-snap-snap away at me, snarling and spitting and snotting. This monster’s got a foot-long snout and teeth stained brown with old blood. It sticks its claws beneath the shopping cart and starts digging with quick, tiny motions, howling and barking like the thing’s gone completely fucking crazy!

  “Over here!” a distant voice shouts and someone else yells at the dog (I think it’s a wolf) and yanks it away, ordering it to “knock it the fuck off!” in a gravelly voice. The dog leaps back toward me with one last snarl, digging its claws into the dirt before being hauled away again. I see the animal is being controlled at the end of a restraining pole, a loop around its neck tightening with every tug.

  “What’s his problem?” I hear a muffled female voice ask.

  “Dunno. Probably found a rat or something. Or thought he did. He’s starting to go mad with hunger. Or rabies.” The man’s voice is also muffled.

  “Rabies?” the woman asks. “Shit. So we can’t even eat this useless fucker?”

  “Eat him? Eat Mr. Snuffleupagus? This big pussy cat? Never.”

  “Come on. Sam is calling us. He’s found something. At least his dog is both edible and helpful.”

  “You say such cruel goddamned things about a man’s dog, Joyce, and you might find yourself at the end of this control pole.”

  “Pillow-talk me later, asshole. Let’s go.”

  Their barbs and bickering fade as they move on. I wait and listen to them climb the first mountain southward, a cascade of metal and tumbling of plastic annunciates their ascent.

  The sun’s just setting behind The Swill Alps westward when I finally gather the nerve to crawl out from beneath the shopping cart. Even though the whole world’s a mare’s nest, I can tell immediately the disturbance to my surroundings made by those monsters and their fanged beasts. Ther
e’s just something slightly askew and wrong about all the trash heaps in sight. Not only that, but those fuckers have gone and traipsed through and over The Memory Palace! My blue chair’s knocked over and there’s a new rip in it and I don’t know if Momma can sew it up from the grave! The coffee table’s also overturned, the photo album’s pages flap in the wind, and the calendars are scattered and out of order. Then my heart tries to yank my tongue down into my lungs—where’s the footlocker? I run to The Memory Palace, set all the furniture upright and scan my surroundings—the footlocker’s nowhere in sight. Then I spy it, cracked open and lobbed haphazardly up a garbage hill down the way. I scramble up that hillside and sit right atop the garbage and rummage through the rubbish, not even worrying about being poked by a rusty spring or steak knife.

  I snatch a fistful of rubber tubing like a garland of snakes and shove those back into the trunk. Those are backups for my slingshot and I’m glad the Out-of-Towners didn’t know their value and take them. All my extra plastic lighters are gone, but that’s OK, I’m sure I can find more and I still have the one on me. My bowie knife is gone, as is all the rope I had stored away in there. Most of my old toys, like the wooden plane and army men are still here, but I don’t care about those too much. They’re for babies and I’m not a baby. The brown piece of tattered, folded fabric is still there, thank God, even though every time I pull it out to look at it my stomach turns and my chest hurts. I’d be really freaked out, though, if it went missing. The Out-of-Towners didn’t take all the vials of teeth, either. Some are mine, some are my folks’, some belonged to some girl. I look around for what else they left behind and my eyes start tearing up. I’m about to cry like a big fat baby (which I’m not!) when, off to the side of the trunk, down the hill, I thankfully spot a drawstring cloth bag. It’s full of my penny collection, which I started collecting with Papa when I was old enough to toddle. Back then he’d put me on his shoulders and carefully tread this tumblesome terrain, asking me to eagle-eye anything shiny from my perching point. We’d walk around all day hunting for birds or bunnies, of course, but to kill the time in between, we’d hunt for pennies. Sometimes I like to pour those pennies out over Papa’s grave and just run my hands through the cool copper and read out the years on each of them. He rarely responds with an, “Oooh, that’s a good year,” like he used to, but that’s OK. Opening the sack, I stick my hand in and let the pennies flitter between my fingers then tie the bag up and put it back in the trunk. My old, one-eyed stuffed teddy bear is still in the trunk but the pack of cards Momma, Papa, and me use to play Go Fish are gone. Those cards had pictures of naked ladies on them and were special to me. Momma didn’t want to let me keep them but Papa convinced her I was old enough and mature enough at age nine to accept them. I felt so grown up and I also felt, for the first time, that tingle in my junk. Not the junk surrounding me, of course, but my dick. It was a funny feeling, especially those first few times, but I grew used to it. And one day I was going to find one of the ladies on those cards and repopulate the world with her. I was gonna stick my junk right up into her and make a human baby inside her. I couldn’t wait. I had hoped to be able to stick my junk into one of those ladies soon, and often. But now I don’t have the cards and I’m old enough to know those ladies have been getting gnawed at by irradiated worms for a long, long time.

  Again the tears are about to flow but I bite them back. A deep breath floods my lungs with the ammonia-heavy scent of urine. I forgot I had pissed myself when that fucking dog found me hiding away in the trash and started yapping at me. I thought for sure it was going to eat my face off or that the Out-of-Towners were going to pull me from my hiding place and eat my face off, but only after splitting me open from dick to Adam’s apple and playing around with my guts.

  It wasn’t luck that they didn’t, though. I’m sure it was Momma that lured them away.

  I take her lock of hair from my pocket and roll it between my thumb and forefinger until it’s twilighting around The Kingdom. Then I shut everything up in the footlocker, grab it by the handle, and drag it down the hill behind me. I’ve got to find a better hiding place for this. Then I’ve got to make sure those Out-of-Towners have vacated The Kingdom of Clyde The Destroyer. If not, I guess I’ll have to kill them and eat them, just like I’d done before.

  3

  “Vroom, vrooooooom, vroooooooooooom,” I growl, jerking the steering wheel left, then right. I see the biggest, dumbest garbage heap right in front of me and boy am I gonna jump that fucker and just fly. I climb over a thousand years of trash, flinging it behind these roaring tires, and when I hit the summit I press the turbo button and whoosh, I’m flying, flying, flying right up there where all those fucking birds used to be!

  I’m not, of course, but I have a pretty goddamned good imagination, right? Momma always said so. I’d often pretend I was protecting her from the Out-of-Towners. She’d sit in her red chair with a book and canteen of boiled water and I’d patrol the grounds, my noggin tucked into an old hockey helmet with cage mask. I’d carry a trashcan lid as my shield, and wield a wooden sword, for I was Sir Clyde of the Junkyard, Defender of Momma.

  For hours I’d fight off imaginary foes, knocking them down with skillful swordplay. Then as they gaped, begging for mercy, I’d stick my hands into their mouths and pull upward and downward until I’d ripped their bottom jaws loose. I’d always return to Momma and give them to her as a gift and she’d clap and say, “My hero!” and swoon. After I was done being her hero she often let me fall asleep in her lap, my genuflecting face pressed close to her breast.

  But now I’m no longer Sir Clyde of the Junkyard. No longer a lowly knight, I am King. And King Clyde The Destroyer is now in The Used Car Lot, pretending to be one of the Hollywood Stuntmen I’d read about. In all my reading, I understand that people used to have to “make a living,” which is a really weird phrase. You’re living already and yet you still have to “make it.” Seems pretty dumb. But, anyway, those stuntmen had the best job ever. If you have to have a job, why not drive cars all crazy and shit and get paid for it? My grandad got paid for making pictures out of paints and some people even spent their whole lives selling cars like these and I heard other people did stuff with all the computers that fill Mount Circuit City with blank screens and uselessness, but driving cars and jumping off buildings and out of helicopters and shit—man, that’s my bag! That’d definitely be my thing. I’d be the best at it.

  Unfortunately, all the cars here in The Used Car Lot have been “gently owned” to death. They’ve got no engines and no tires. Most of them are stripped and partly sunk into the earth so that you can’t even open the doors—if they have any. Beyond that, there are all these thin-trunked, dead trees poking through their empty engine compartments and skeletal bodies. In fact, there’s one poking through the passenger seat in the one I’m in. I like to sling my arm around it like it’s my gal.

  The Used Car Lot takes up a wide swath of the southeast corner of The Kingdom of Clyde. I survey my surroundings from the driver’s seat, gripping the wheel and sipping from a canteen of boiled water. It’s just grey trees and cars and those debris dunes hundreds of yards in the distance in all directions except for east where The Kingdom Wall is, of course. I’m not far from The Drinking and Washing Fountain, either, which tucks into the nexus of the south and east walls. That’s where I filled up this canteen and my backup, each of which I keep hooked onto my belt. Always stay hydrated, that was Papa’s motto. Not as clever as Momma, but he was trying, I guess.

  All day I slinked around these grounds, trying to find where those Out-of-Towners went, but they evaded me. Those maniac villains were one step ahead of me the whole time. But I was ready to ambush them and rip out their tongues and shit down their necks, one by one. I was gonna make them pay, that’s for sure! Maniacs think they can come on my land and destroy the great order I have spent my whole life perfecting? It’s unforgivable!

  I’ll soon find them and rip their jaws right from their skulls. Then
I’ll present them to Momma as proof of my continued devotion. I may be King but I’ll always possess a knight’s honor, just like Lancelot.

  It’s really coming down now. A little bit ago I tried to leave The Used Car Lot for The Library to take something to read back to The Memory Palace, but the sky started taking a dump on us. I wanted to go back and read to Momma and sleep on her grave, but I know better than to go out in this torrential downpour. The rain is acid rain. It’ll burn your damn face off! And I like my face. But you don’t ever want to go out into acid rain unless you have a plastic tarp to drape over yourself. If not, all your skin will fall off, including your dick, if you’re out in it long enough. It’s just not worth the risk.

  All water is acid now. Or, it’s all acid rain. I know that and I’m careful. When I collect water from The Drinking and Washing Fountain, I’m always very careful not to get any on my precious grey skin. I carefully funnel the water into my canteen and then I stick the canteen in a flame at Dante’s Inferno and boil the shit out of it. Water’s not too unlike cooking a seagull. You’re fine so long as you’re careful.

  I’m grateful the winds aren’t kicking up right now. The windshield of the gutted hotrod I’m in is gone and I didn’t bring my plastic tarp with me. The winds do kick up pretty fiercely from time to time and it can also be dangerous. Momma and Papa learned that the winds are somewhat seasonal, so I keep the approximate dates of those bad winds I call God’s Breath in my calendar. In fact, we may be due another dose of God’s Breath so I better consult my calendar as soon as I can make it back to The Memory Palace. But if God’s Breath and acid rain occur at the same time, it’s a nightmare. It happened only once when I was younger. Momma, Papa, and me burrowed our way into a trash heap. That was nearly as dangerous as staying out in the windy acid rain that can slice through your skin like a knife through hot butter, but when it came upon us we had little time for anything else. It was dangerous because even though some of these trash mountains have stood for a century or more, they’re not all that stable. You can easily bury yourself. But when the acid rain started falling during God’s Breath, Papa decided to think quick on his feet, and there we were not ten minutes later, hunkered down with tons of trash above us waiting to obliterate our soft skeletons.