The Sun My Destiny

by Logan Ryan Smith

  “Please! No!” I screamed.

  And then I was in the water.

  I waited for the sizzle. I waited for my skin to fall off and coat the water in a sheen of stretchy pink film.

  But I felt no pain. I felt nothing but cold wetness.

  All I had to worry about was them dropping me further into the water. You can’t learn how to swim from a book, after all.

  They dropped all the line and I didn’t sink. I didn’t sink! But of course I didn’t sink, thanks to my trusty orange life vest I wear as armor against sharp objects and dick-disintegrating tetanus. And here it is, armoring me against drowning in acid water, too.

  I asked why the acid water didn’t scorch my skin off and Joyce stuck her head into the circle of light and said, “Keep it down for a bit, OK?”

  “You’re stupid!” I screamed. “You think I’m going to let you draw any water from this well? My well? You made a big mistake, you fucking idiots! I’ll die before you drink another drop of my water ever again!”

  “Jesus, kid. Do you ever shut the fuck up?” Terrance said.

  Eventually I fell asleep. I dreamed I was back inside my Momma’s womb. It was dark and warm and comforting. Then there was an earthquake and I was shaken and disturbed inside Momma. All the warm fluid that encased me had escaped and I understood, for the first time, the sensation of cold. Next, I was slipping, slipping, slipping. My little heart raced. I reached out, every which way, digging my tiny fingers into the dark flesh of Momma’s insides, but I couldn’t get purchase and fell out onto the grey dirt between her legs. Immediately, I was drawn to her right breast and easily found her nipple and fed, my eyes scrunched tight. Some of that comfort I had felt inside her returned. When I opened my eyes, I saw Papa sucking away at Momma’s left breast, his wild eyes open and on me the whole time, his mustachioed mouth puckering. I withdrew from Momma’s tit and cried, not understanding why. Momma cooed and shushed me. She ran a hand over my little wet skull. I looked away from her breast, then, and up into her face, which I didn’t recognize at all.

  Awake, I find myself no longer wading in the water. They must have pulled me from it while I slept. All the same, I’m just as cold. And I’m imprisoned in this sunken tower, within the realm of my own land, persecuted by interlopers! Papa would be so ashamed of me. Momma, too. After all, I spent all those years pretending to be her protector and here I am, easily snatched up and caged like a one-legged rabbit.

  “Will you be good if we pull you out of there?” Joyce asks from the lip of the well.

  “I’ll fucking kill you!” I scream up at the circle of light where Joyce’s washed-out face appears. “I’ll eat your goddamned tits! I’ll cut your legs and arms and head off and fuck your torso to shreds! I’ll kill you! I’ll fucking kill you! I’m King Clyde! King Clyde, goddammit!”

  “King Clyde, huh?” she says and drops me back into the drink, the water splashing all around me.

  I’m being pulled up out of the water again, ascending in jerks. It’s Terrance up there. He leans over the lip of the well and tells me to “open up.” Something comes flying down at me and I manage to catch it like a trained seal (the ones I’ve read about) despite my bound wrists.

  It’s meat!

  “What’s this?” I say, chewing and squinting up at the circle of light.

  “Rat,” Terrance says.

  “Rat meat? Where’d you find it?” I ask through a full mouth. “I haven’t seen a rat around in ages.”

  “Didn’t anyone teach you how to hunt, kid?” he asks and disappears.

  “Twinkies! Twinkies! Twinkies!” I start yelling the second I see morning light bleed through the well’s darkness. My legs have been cramping up painfully for the last day and the rope tied around me in an elaborate harness fashion has begun cutting into legs and waist. The skin around my wrists and ankles is even rawer. My head’s all fuzzy. I worry that the rat I ate had gone bad. Maybe they poisoned it!

  I don’t want to die. I’m not supposed to die. I’m immortal, like the stars in the sky. The stars I almost never see. Death—it’s not for me. It’s a justice forced upon lower creatures. Not kings!

  “What in hell you goin’ on about today?” Terrance asks, leaning over the well.

  “Do you know what Twinkies are?” I ask, straining my neck to look upward.

  “Sure as shit do, little one. Why?” He spits into the well and I have to dodge it.

  “Do you want one?”

  “What? You hiding Twinkies in your panties down there?”

  “Do you want two-hundred-and-seventy Twinkies, Terrance?” I ask, the dampness now just a part of my bones.

  He chuckles, looks eastward, then pushes away from the well and out of my sight.

  “Wait! Wait!”

  His head pops back into view. “What?”

  “I know where there’s a big old box of Twinkies. A box of three-hundred. But… but I ate thirty of them. You can have the rest!”

  “You’re serious,” Terrance says, and I can see enough of the lines on his face to know I’ve finally got his attention.

  “Sure as shit am, Terrance,” I tell him, my teeth now chattering.

  “Well, alright. Where are they? Where’s the box?”

  “No. Nuh-uh. You have to let me out.”

  “Just tell me where the box is, you little shit, or I cut your line and leave you down there to die.”

  “No. You let me out and I’ll take you to the Twinkies.”

  “Fine. Your call, dipshit,” Terrance says. He pulls a knife and starts sawing away at my tether.

  “What are you doin’?” I hear Joyce yell, stage left.

  Terrance stops, pulls the knife away from the rope, and once again recedes from view. I hear him and Joyce talking off to the side of my watery oubliette.

  “You found Twinkies in this wasteland, kid?” Joyce asks, now leaning over the lip of the well, Terrance right next to her. Joyce’s face is filthy and grey but she’s haloed by morning light and I just want to reach up and play with her tangles of dark hair.

  “It’s not a wasteland,” I mumble.

  “Christ. I’m pretty sure we’ve searched this whole place and we’ve found absolutely nothing of use,” Joyce says, shaking her head.

  “You took my playing cards!” I scream up at them.

  “Those nudey cards belong to you, son?” Terrance chuckles.

  “Yes! And I’m not your son! Give them back!”

  “Listen, kid, where are the Twinkies?” Joyce asks, stone-faced.

  “Let me out of here and I’ll show ya,” I say.

  “Well, alright then,” she says and immediately begins drawing me upward.

  “Joyce,” Terrance says, putting a hand on her glistening shoulder.

  She shrugs it off and keeps pulling me up. “Terrance, I haven’t had a Twinkie since I was a kid. If our new friend wants to share his treats with us, I say we let him.”

  “We can’t trust this little fucker,” Terrance says

  “We can’t trust anyone. What’s the difference?”

  15

  I’m at The Memory Palace asking Papa what I should do. He doesn’t say anything, as usual. I ask Momma what I should do. She says, “Skin them alive and string their bodies over the side of the northwestern wall as a warning to others.” Papa says, “Why are you asking her? That woman doesn’t know anything about anything,” and then they start bickering. She calls him a lazy S.O.B. He calls her a bitch. She accuses him of ruining both their lives. He says, “Ditto, you assless cunt!” I tell them to calm down. I remind them of the danger I’m in. I say, “I’m your son, and I’m in trouble,” and Papa laughs. I ask him what he’s laughing about and Momma says, “Watch your goddamned mouth, Adam,” and he chuckles and scoffs and says, “Yeah, OK, Eve,” and I have no idea who this Adam and Eve are except from the Bible that I read some of even though it’s totally ludicrous and super boring. I remember Adam made Eve out of his tibia bone and had to hobble around for the next 1,800
pages with a wobbly thigh, screaming out every other step, “Ow, you bitch!” until finally Noah shows up in his boat and decapitates him with the propeller. Eve carries on with her sons who bang her and make Jesus, who later dies for all the sins we somehow committed thousands of years before our own births. Then Jesus rises from the dead and marries a whore and that starts the lineage of the Job family, who have a tendency to get eaten by whales until finally they learn to stay away from whales, change their name to Jobs, and conceive the second coming of Christ, Steve Jobs.

  It goes something like that, anyway.

  So, Momma and Papa fight and I walk away with no answers, as usual.

  I got away from the Out-of-Towners, obviously. I did just as I said I would. I took them to the Twinkies. I had them hidden at The Used Car Lot in the trunk of my hotrod where my dead tree-bride pokes through the passenger seat and the soft, rusted ceiling. I placed them there for safekeeping, thinking I’ll come back to them when I’ve learned some self-control. I asked my dead tree-bride to watch over them and like a good dead tree-bride she did. I was sure to give her a kiss during the visit and Terrance sneered and smacked me back of the head and said, “What the fuck is wrong with you?” I just rubbed the back of my head, looked at him, and smiled. The big old dumdum, Sam, seemed confused. But mostly he burned holes in the back of my head with his hateful eyes, still sore about the loss of his poor pooches. Joyce pretended to ignore the whole thing while retrieving the box of Twinkies. Setting it atop the closed trunk she opened it and said, “Well, shit,” and Terrance asked what the problem was. She said, “The kid wasn’t lying,” and reached into the box and pulled up a few handfuls of Twinkies and laughed. “Shit,” Terrance said, snatching one from her, his eyes glazing over. He tore into the plastic wrapper with his teeth, held the golden treat in his dirty hands for a few seconds, then placed it, whole, into his mouth. His eyes rolled into the back of his head and he made obscene sounds as he mashed it in his stupid jaw. Joyce tossed one to me, “Here, kid. Dig in.” I caught the Twinkie, but didn’t open it. I just kept my eyes on the three of them and kept quiet.

  Soon they were sitting up against the side of my hotrod, their pants unbuttoned, their bellies bulging. Terrance thanked me, licking his fingers. The giant even gave me a lazy-eyed smile and Joyce had me sit next to her, her arm around my shoulders. I laid my head into her chest and heard her sweet heartbeat for just a second before she shoved my head away without a word.

  “Ain’t you gonna eat yours?” Joyce asked, gesturing at the Twinkie in my lap.

  “I’m, uh, saving it for later,” I told her, relishing the warmth of her body next to mine.

  Then the big one suddenly uprooted himself from the earth and loped through the maze of cars until he found one far enough away to duck behind. Terrance soon followed, running in the opposite direction, finding a distant car to hide behind, yelling, “Oh, goddammit! Goddammit! Goddammit!” the whole way. For a second it seemed that Joyce might have been spared the same fate, but, no, she too left my side and sprinted in search of some desperately needed privacy.

  It didn’t take long before I was running in the direction none of them had taken, finding myself here at The Memory Palace with my kitty calendar, family portrait, photo album, and bickering parents.

  As far as I know, Joyce, Terrance, and Sam have been shitting themselves silly for the last few hours. I imagine they’ll then need a day or two to recover, same as I needed. Plenty of time to unleash the second wave of my attack strategy.

  16

  They captured me. Again. They found me sleeping atop my mother’s grave, clutching the photo album. I’d fallen asleep flipping through it, listening to Momma tell me about the time we vacationed in Hawaii, which was this paradise of blue skies, white sands, and aqua waters. It was a place people often visited for vacation or to throw friends and family into volcanoes as a means of sacrifice, which appeased God and ensured the sun would rise at least another day. But that’s not why we traveled there. No, the pictures in the photo album reminded Momma that we were once a happy Japanese family that visited Hawaii to wear grass skirts, hike lush green hills to crystal waterfalls, and drink fancy drinks from coconut shells. Momma remembered how we ran out of coconut shells on the beach one day and that she was about to drink her rum straight from the bottle—like a regular Out-of-Towner, she scoffed. I wouldn’t allow it, though. No, sir. So, quick as a squirrel with a firecracker up its butt, I scurried up one of those palm trees and swatted at dangling coconuts, knocking several down. One conked Papa on the head and an angry red lightning bolt opened up on his scalp. We spent the rest of the vacation around his hospital bed, drinking rum from the coconuts I’d gathered. It was a good trip, Momma told me, and I remembered.

  Now, I’m once again in the big guy’s arms, being hauled back to their camp in Monster Island. The trash-heaps are high and close around us, the sky grey and low.

  “Why aren’t you guys wearing your gasmasks, anymore?” I ask, noting that they’ve not worn them since the first time they captured me and threw me down the well.

  “Don’t need ‘em,” Joyce says, striding alongside Sam.

  “Put me down,” I order. “I can walk.”

  Joyce nods to Sam just as Terrance protests, but the giant gently sets me back onto the grey earth.

  “Then why were you ever wearing them?” I ask, stepping in between the giant and Joyce.

  Joyce looks down at me and a half-smile cracks her grey-crusted face. “You’re sure being social for a recaptured prisoner.”

  “I let you capture me,” I tell her.

  “You did?”

  “Of course. This is my Kingdom. Nothing happens here unless I allow it.”

  “Of course,” Joyce says.

  “Jesus, Joyce, don’t pander to the mutt,” Terrance says and Sam releases a brief, deep-throated chuckle in response.

  “Mutt,” Sam says jovially. He says it one more time, seems to mull the word over, then his shoulders slump and his face goes dark. He’s dragging his feet in the earth.

  “We don’t need the gasmasks anymore,” Joyce says. “We weren’t sure what kind of… dump this was—what was in all these heaps. But we went through it, and we found you, so we assume it’s safe.”

  “You know what we do need, though, mutt?” Terrance asks, his patchy beard looking grosser than ever.

  I don’t answer. I give him the evil eye, instead.

  “Dogs,” Terrance snaps, answering his own question. He hacks up something and spits into the nearest garbage mountain, Mount Mervyn’s.

  “I wasn’t talking to you,” I mumble and before I know it Terrance has tackled me to the ground and we’re rolling around in a grey dust cloud. He’s trying to get his hands around my throat but I head-butt him and roll until I’m on top. He tries to scratch my eyes out but I yank him up by his shirt and head-butt him again and I’m laughing as I grab a fistful of grey dirt and shove it down his throat—really smoosh it into his maw good.

  I’m plucked from the twerpy Terrance by the bald giant. He’s holding me off the ground by the back of my shirt and I’m kicking and swinging and pounding myself in my orange life vest, screaming, “Let me go! I’ll fucking kill him! I’ll kill him!” and Joyce is kneeling over Terrance, carefully wiping blood from his nose as he spits up soil, but she’s laughing. Terrance pushes her hand away and stands, spits a few more times. Running a hand under his nose, he first looks at the blood on his fingers, then he looks at Joyce, then he looks at me. Then he’s storming off ahead of us.

  “Oh, Terrance, come on! Wait!” Joyce calls after him, still laughing. She motions for Sam to set me down.

  I look at skinny, grey Joyce with the scraggly brown hair, giggling. I look up at the giant, his big bald head like a new moon in the overcast sky. He starts laughing. They’re both laughing. Then we’re all laughing, together.

  “The monsters…” Joyce says, sitting around the fire, a small, dead rodent in her left hand, the knife in her righ
t carving it up.

  “What about them?” I ask, drinking a tea Joyce has learned to make from the few weeds that apparently grow along the outer perimeter of my Kingdom’s walls. It’s bitter and new. It’s soothing and comforting. It makes my head feel kinda funny. I’m excited to be sitting here, drinking this bitter brew, talking with this frail yet strong and filthy woman.

  “It’s like… do you know what elephants were?” she asks, and I nod. “So, elephants were, like, these giant animals—and you’ve seen a mouse, right?”

  I nod again, sip my tea from a tin mug, and relish this story time. Terrance sits far away, his back against the well, cleaning his fingernails with a knife. Sam’s on the other side of the fire, lying on his side, already asleep. His snores create a kind of musical accompaniment to the crackling of the glowing-red wood.

  “Anyway, elephants were huge. And very smart. Yet anytime they’d spot a tiny little mouse, they’d stand up on their hind legs, trumpet, and run in the opposite direction.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Those monsters out there, if there are any,” she says, pointing toward the wall with the knife she just used to slip the guts from the rodent, which fell to the grey dirt with a splat. “Those monsters are like elephants, and our dogs were like the mouse. Who knows why. It’s just what I’ve always been told. But, you took away our mice, kid. You fucked us pretty good.”

  “Oh,” I say, staring down at the gleam of guts on the dark earth.

  “Besides, Sam over there,” she says, pointing with the knife again, “was pretty fond of those pups. He’d have ripped your ribcage straight out of your body already if it wasn’t for me.”

  “Thanks,” I say and take a piece of rodent meat from her. I jab it onto the end of a sharp stick and place it in the fire.

  After a few minutes of listening to the fire and Sam’s snores, I say, “Who’s Kenneth?”

  She seems startled for a moment, then pulls her stick from the fire and checks the meat’s doneness. “Kenneth… he’s kind of our… our leader, I guess. He’s good at getting around places like this. Places like what the world’s become. I guess he’s good at keeping us together. Keeping us from killing one another. Or, he was.”