The Sun My Destiny

by Logan Ryan Smith

  My stomach turned and I dropped to a knee on the hillside.

  The man’s face was gone. Or, skinned, at least, though there appeared to be a big chunk of his left cheekbone missing. The lidless man simply stared right into oblivion, obviously dead, but the monster, it lifted the bucket of water to the man’s mouth and poured. It chittered, almost in encouragement, though the water simply dribbled from the dead man’s lipless mouth.

  When that dead man suddenly coughed and jerked I flinched and kicked random cans and plastic bottles down the slope and they clattered. I dropped flat against the trash and went as still as I could, not knowing what else to do. The monster looked over its scabby, orangish shoulder and its dark eyes peered in my direction, but I don’t think it saw me. In the twilight, I probably didn’t look so different from all the garbage around me.

  The Out-of-Towner coughed again and then began howling, his jaw dropped all the way to his clavicle and his vocal cords nearly ripped from his neck. Distracted, the monster put the water back to the man’s mouth and then put the bucket down and petted the man’s shoulder. The screaming continued for a seemingly endless thirty seconds, but halted all at once. His chest heaved, but he seemed unable to move anything but his dry eyes in that skinless face. He looked all over, eyes finally resting, bulging, upon the sight of the monster at his side.

  “No,” the Out-of-Towner said quietly, breathlessly. “No,” he said again.

  The monster petted him and chirped. Then, with a jerky motion, it dipped down and tore into the man’s thigh with long, curved, yellowed teeth. Again, the man screamed, but only once, seemingly out of energy to howl again. Feebly, he finally pulled his arms from his side and tried to push the scabby freak away to no avail. The creature gnawed away at his thigh then pounced from him. It hopped in a circle around the well like a lunatic, slamming its long-fingered hands into its chest and clapping while hoots and chirps and clicks and screams escaped its bloodied mouth where a long strip of muscle hung and flopped around. It flung its head back and throated down that glistening piece of meat like a pelican eating a fish whole.

  It was getting darker.

  When the monster leaned down and tried to feed the man more water, to wake him back up, I’d guessed, I took the opportunity to stand and run in the opposite direction, back up the mountain, not caring how much racket I was making.

  I didn’t look back but I heard a squeal and a scuffling in the dirt and the clatter of something scurrying up the mountain after me. That clattering got louder behind me and I felt something touch my ankle and slip away.

  I kept running. I just ran and, somehow, I’m still here.

  Lucky me.

  The next day, Momma didn’t believe me. She apologized for telling me those stories when I was just a kid. She said I didn’t see any monsters, that I must have had a nightmare. She said I must have had a nightmare and got confused.

  I told her she was wrong. There’s no such thing as nightmares. Just the world as it is. The one her and Papa brought me into.

  10

  “I seen him,” the skinny one with scraggly hair and haphazard patches of facial hair says, gesturing with his large knife, a chunk of meat stuck on its tip.

  “You saw him?” the woman asks.

  “Yeah, I did. He was trottin’ about with his arms outstretched like a goddamned little freak, making all these odd noises.”

  “Hrm,” the giant man with the bald head grunts.

  “He was probably just a kid,” the woman says.

  “Yeah? I didn’t act that retarded when I was a kid. I grew right the fuck up. I was a man already by the time I was that kid’s age,” the skinny guy says.

  “And look how well you turned out.”

  “Ouch, Joyce,” he says, grabbing at his heart. “That really hurt!”

  “Besides, you don’t even know how old he is,” Joyce says.

  “I know he’s running around this goddamned junkyard like a lunatic landlord—and this ain’t his goddamned land. It’s ours now. Ours, Joyce! I also know he’s not old enough that the muscle attached to his bones won’t still be soft and tender.”

  “Hrm,” the big man grunts again.

  “Terrance, stop it. We don’t eat people. Not even useless, dead weight,” she says, pointing at him with her knife.

  “But—”

  “And we especially don’t eat little fucking children. Goddammit, Terrance. Enough with the fee-fi-fo-fum, shit.”

  “Hrm-hrm,” the big guy grunts, like a chuckle.

  “Joyce, I’m just saying…”

  They’re sitting around the fire, eating some kind of meat and drinking water from their canteens. Their gasmasks are off because of that, and they have all of their faces, though I wonder what’s wrong with the skinny guy’s beard. They’re wearing fingerless gloves, big, mean-looking boots, black pants, and black jackets. Joyce has her jacket off, however. She’s wearing a black tanktop, her nipples pressing against the fabric, her slick shoulders coated in a membrane of grey dust.

  “You’ve said enough,” Joyce says. “Tomorrow we’ll find him.”

  “We will?” the skinny guy asks a little too excitedly, meat dribbling down his chin.

  “Yes. But we’re not eating him. We’ll bring him back to the others. That’s what Kenneth would want.”

  “Kenneth,” the skinny guy guffaws. “Right.”

  “Kenneth,” the big bald guy repeats in a slow, low voice.

  “Yes, Kenneth. Don’t forget who’s kept you alive all these years. And don’t get impulsive. It’s everyone’s least favorite trait of yours, Terrance.”

  “Ah, come on, now, Joyce,” Terrance says, setting his knife down on the dirt. He reaches over and roughly rubs the inside of Joyce’s thigh with his grubby paw. “Don’t be like that,” he continues.

  Joyce picks up and flings his hand away.

  “Ah, Joyce! Come on, now. Me and Sam here were hoping to have a nice bit of romance with you on the eve.” The big guy’s head goes red as a cherry (the ones I’ve read about). “I’m pretty sure I’ve built enough juice back up since the last time,” Terrance continues, smirking.

  “The last time was the last time, slime,” Joyce says, tossing the last of her meat to the hounds. They wake groggily, but when they see the meat between them a snarling fight erupts. Joyce walks over to the wall and slides out through the hole on her belly, out into The Great Beyond. The other two hop to their feet and pull the hounds away from each other, then coo and hush them until they’re placated.

  I should have plunked them with my trusty slingshot right there when they were divided and distracted and the hounds were still tied up, but I lost my nerve. Divide and conquer is a tactic introduced in The Art of War. So is inducing confusion in order to disadvantage your opponent. I just wasn’t thinking clearly at the time. I wasn’t thinking quick on my feet, like Papa. The big bald guy must have been at least seven feet tall! He was a real monster, that guy. Terrifying, for your information. And Joyce didn’t look too different from my dear departed Momma, what with that long dark hair and those beautiful dark circles under her eyes. I just wanted to run right up to her and hop in her lap and put my ear up against her heart.

  Perhaps that Terrance guy was right. Maybe I haven’t grown up.

  That Terrance guy. Now, I wouldn’t have any problem grabbing him around his bony throat and twisting all the air out of his stupid body. He’s an ugly fucker. And he wants to eat me? I could destroy him with my left nut tied behind my back. No problem! He’s just too skinny. He talks about being a man? I’m more of a man than he is! I mean, sure, I’m pretty skinny too, but wrapped around all my unbreakable bones is hard, ropey muscle. I’ve earned this muscle mining garbage mountains, firing off slingshot rounds, and ripping seagulls and small burrowing animals to shreds. Not to mention all the broken air conditioners, stoves, and refrigerators I’ve had to overturn at Sears Mountain and elsewhere in my hunt for Protein Beans. My right arm is especially strong from all that w
ang-pulling, too.

  Yeah, against King Clyde The Destroyer, that puke-face, Terrance, wouldn’t have a chance.

  Yet, I did nothing but hide behind trash and watch them, paralyzed, as they camped out in Monster Island, a place appropriately named now even if I did dream up that disfigured, orange bogeyman.

  I feel so stupid. I feel so weak. I pounded myself real good in the chest all night before I fell asleep. Of course, my orange life vest prevented any real injury. I’m too much of a pussy to even take off the vest when trying to teach myself a lesson!

  Where’s a dad when you need one, right?

  I’m really “down in the dumps” right now, which is another phrase my elocutionist mother coined. It works on so many levels. She was so smart!

  Eventually I fell asleep, though. I pitched a tent last night over Momma’s grave at The Memory Palace and slept after filling my belly with cockroaches and boiled water. But first I asked Papa for manly advice regarding the Out-of-Towners. I lay atop his grave and played with my penny collection and asked Papa what I should do. He didn’t answer for a long time. From six-feet-under, he just shrugged his shoulders at me. Then he said, “What year’s that one?” and I told him it was 2049 and he said “Oooh, that’s a good year.” Again he went silent and I asked him why he wouldn’t give me any advice and he told me it was because of his splitting headache and I laughed but he didn’t laugh with me.

  As I put my pennies away and tied the sack up, Papa said one last thing: “Don’t go lying on top of your Momma, now.” But I just stood, stuck my tongue out at him, and crawled into my tent set precisely over Momma and fell asleep to her singing about babies falling out of cradles stuck in trees for some damned reason. All the babies in that song died from blunt-force-trauma to the head.

  Poor babies!

  They’re wandering through The Used Car Lot now. I’m crouched atop a trash heap, expertly spying on the enemy. They’re in their gasmasks and usual black uniform. They’ve got the hounds on those restraining poles, but those giant beasts are dragging the Out-of-Towners around like rag dolls. Even that big bald dope seems to have trouble. Those awful beasts are standing up, sticking their muzzles into every other car. They’re wild, digging their claws into the grey earth, running from rusted, busted-up old car to the next. Those cars seem to stretch out for miles beneath me, running into the eastern wall or north into a great big jagged garbage range. All the skinny, dead trees poking through the land cast crisscrossing shadows, despite the overcast skies. Surely they’re looking for me so they can feast on my young and supple boner. No matter what the lady said about not eating kids. Besides, I’m not really a kid, so I’m not really off limits. Those fucking monsters. Those fucking Out-of-Towners. Again, it’s just the three of them and their two hounds. With the nub of a pencil I make a note of that in a little book of lined paper and slip that into my pocket.

  11

  For dinner last night I had twelve Protein Beans and a canteen of boiled water at The Memory Palace. I enjoyed my meal while looking over the photo album and recalling that time we travelled to Japan and defeated a mammoth green monster called Godzilla. We also ate raw salmon even though we could have gotten salmonella! It was an experience, I tell ya. I also put a big old X over yesterday in the kitty calendar and wiped a week’s-worth of dust from the family portrait. Then I kicked my feet up on the coffee table and read a little bit of ye old Art of War, preparing to make up for my recent cowardly ways. In the tent over Momma’s grave I lit a candle and had a little shadow puppet show against the wavering red wall. I can mostly only do bunnies so I made those bunnies hop around and eat carrots, which are just shadows of the fingers on my other hand, you know. That got boring so I moved on to a show featuring the Stick People (again, just my fingers). The Stick People mostly ran around and hit each other a lot and said things like, “Oh, no, you bastard!” and stuff like that. Eventually, however, after all the hitting and smacking, they started going crazy all over each other until one Stick Person knocked the other Stick Person over and tore off her clothes with his teeth and knocked her down and sort of bounced on top of her for a while, just grunting and spitting. After that I had to yank on my junk, of course. I didn’t want to on account of the blankets in my tent getting kind of crunchy, but I didn’t really have a choice, did I? I mean, that was some pretty saucy entertainment!

  After Papa died, Momma let me sleep in her tent all the time. I didn’t even have to ask. I’d just crawl in when I was ready to go to sleep and she’d accept me into her arms and press my head to her breast. She found Papa about four days after The Incident. She was used to him disappearing for a while, but this time she got anxious after only a few days and started walking around The Kingdom calling out his name. Eventually she was screaming it. I’d follow behind asking her what’s wrong. She’d turn to me, wild-eyed, grab me by the shoulders and ask me where I last saw him. I told her I couldn’t remember. I said the last time I saw him we were following those fucking birds in the sky, trying to find the right place to fire off a few shots and drop them out of the grey dome. She shook me and said, “Clyde, what did you do? What did you do?” and snot would start running from her nose while her eyes got red and wet. I told her I didn’t do anything and just kept following behind her as we stalked the grey earth in search of my headless father. Every time I caught up to her I’d reach for her hand and she’d pull hers away and then shove me back. I wasn’t allowed to walk alongside her. Eventually I stopped following her and just went back to our tents to wait.

  On the morning of the fourth day of Papa being missing, Momma walked into my tent and kneeled beside me and nudged me awake. I looked up into her dry, white eyes.

  “Come on,” she said and exited the tent, not waiting for me.

  She led me to the place of Papa’s demise, me trailing behind her. She was calm and calculated and didn’t say much. She instructed me to get on the other side of the big old rusty filing cabinet and lift on the count of three. Flies curlicued and hummed around us. “Three,” she said and we huffed and heaved the thing off my poor old Papa. His face was totally mashed—flattened and bloodied. His eyes were wide open. He looked surprised. The grey earth beneath him was brown with his old blood. Flies crawled into his nose and out of his smashed up mouth.

  That was my Papa.

  I have to admit, I didn’t think much of him at that moment.

  I took Momma’s hand. She held it for a second, squeezed, and let go. Then she ordered me to grab a shopping cart from the rubble mountain. I found one near the top and pushed it down the slope. It tumbled and flipped and crashed to the bottom. Momma righted it and pushed it over to Papa, the wheels on the cart all wonky. It made a squeak-squeak sound. Momma and me then plucked Papa out of the grey earth and deposited him into the cart. He was stiff and we had to kind of force him into it, the dry sound of tendon and dead muscle snapping. All along the way, back to The Memory Palace, we didn’t say a thing. It was just squeak-squeak, squeak-squeak, and flies trying to keep up with us the whole time.

  A week later, I was sleeping in Momma’s tent. She woke me in the middle of the night. There was a full moon on the horizon and it lit The Kingdom up, reflecting off the close sky. This land of trash looked like a sea of diamonds in that moonlight. Our tent glowed. We slept with the flap opened. Momma stroked my head. She was crying. I tried to tell her not to cry, that everything will be OK, but she shushed me, a finger to my lips. She said, “You’re a man now,” and I knew it was true. She said, “You’re the man around here now,” and I knew that was right. Then she asked me to strip from my clothes.

  For a while it was like that. I’d hunt birds or bunnies and gather Protein Beans, and Momma would cook up the brained animals or pluck the heads from the cockroaches. We’d eat by the fire of Dante’s Inferno and get drunk together off a couple cans of Coors or Mickey’s that we’d find here or there. Momma was growing a taste for the stuff and she often sent me searching for beer or bits of whiskey in bottles that ha
ve somehow survived the centuries. I’d grab one whiskey bottle and pour the drops of another right into it. Whatever I found—vodka, gin, brandy, antifreeze—I’d just gather it into that one whiskey bottle. Eventually I’d scoured enough to make two drinks. One time, after beers and bunny meat at Dante’s Inferno, we returned to the tent for a “night cap,” which is a word for one last alcoholic drink of the day. Momma made that one up, too. She was such a wordsmith! Still is. We took the alcohol mixture back to the tent and Momma was feeling really good that day. She asked me to strip again before we enjoyed our night cap. She sat back with the bottle and looked me over then took a swallow from the bottle. When she offered the bottle to me, I didn’t take it. I told her she could have the rest. Her eyes got wet and she showed me her teeth as her lips curled then quivered. Then she swallowed the last of the bottle, dropped it and crawled on hands and knees over to me. She wrapped her arms around my naked middle, tight, and pressed the side of her face into the hair that grows down there. I petted her head there for a long time while she just cried and cried.

  Those were the happiest days of my life. And they didn’t last long. Now, I’m Lord and Master of The Kingdom, and it’s being overrun by unwelcomed Out-of-Towners. Nothing is right anymore. I try to wear a happy face. I’ve shown it to you this whole time. But nothing is right. I know it. What am I to do, though? I carry on, I guess. I carry on and talk to Momma from time to time and grow use to Papa’s cold shoulder. I carry on and prepare myself for battle.

  12

  “Dammit.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Where’d he go?”

  “Who? The boy?”

  “No, goddammit. No. Where could he have possibly gone?”

  “Dunno, Joyce. But don’t worry, love. Don’t worry.”