The Sun My Destiny

by Logan Ryan Smith

  I started having that dream a lot more than the first one and I wondered what it was that Momma was trying to tell me. I’d ask her and she’d claim no responsibility for dreams. She said, “Just remember what I used to tell you before I unlearned how to breathe,” and I’d shake my head and cry because it’s OK to cry in front of your Momma sometimes. Even when you’re fifteen and a man. I’d cry and say, “No, Momma. No.”

  Besides pennies and dreams, Momma and me would also talk a lot about my brother. Not Sam. I know Sam’s not my real brother. My other one. My real one. Momma would often tear up and ask in that airy, drifting voice of hers, “Where’s my boy? Where’s my baby boy?” and I’d say, “Right here. I’m right here, Momma,” and she’d snap and yell, “No! My boy! My little boy!” and I’d tell her I didn’t know. I’d say, “I thought he’d be with you, Momma,” and she’d reach out and slap me and scream, “He was still breathing! He was still breathing, you little shit! He was still breathing!” and I’d get up and run away, back to Joyce, back to Sam, and even back to Terrance.

  Other times, when Momma was being more civil, I’d read to her and afterwards we’d talk about my brother and how much we missed him. One time Momma told me I had to find him. Momma said family is all you got in this world. Momma said blood is thicker than water, yet another wonderful turn of phrase she invented. I’d tell Momma I was sorry and she’d say, “Tell that to me again when you really mean it,” and I’d shake my head and she’d brush the tears off my cheeks and I’d hold her hand, keeping it on my face.

  It occurred to me, soon after, that I had not named the trash mountain at whose lips my mother had drawn her last breath. I had not named the mountain that swallowed my baby brother whole. And thus I had a very hard time finding my brother, for things without names tend to be forgotten, tend to be looked over and lost to time. Things without names tend not to exist at all.

  I couldn’t find my brother. I wracked my brain, attempting to remember where exactly it was I found Momma on that terrible day, but in that memory the landscape of my Kingdom was just the continuous repetition of junk. Everything was the same. One piece of trash was the same as the other. So, being unable to hunt my brother’s bones down, I caught a jack rabbit, and though I hadn’t seen one in months (we’d been on a strict diet of Protein Beans for a long time), I snapped its neck and took it to Dante’s Inferno (where no one went these days) and I skinned it and left it atop the ash heap for several weeks until it was properly rotted. Then I kicked it around, ripped its ears off, and pulled at its limbs until its joints ripped and went wobbly. Picking the stinking thing off the ground and holding it under the forelegs, like a baby, I was sure that this skinless, rotted, broken thing could pass for a long-dead baby now. Taking it back to Momma, I said, “I found him, Momma! I found my baby brother!” and Momma gave me a surprised look and rushed to me and took the slimy, gelatinous, overripe animal from me and squealed with delight. She turned away, holding the thing protectively. Without facing me, she thanked me over and over again, cradling the little monster as if it was a perfect, pink-cheeked baby boy. I told Momma I was glad that we could all be together again and she just cried, her glistened eyes refusing to leave the abomination. “Dylan,” she said in her wispy timbre, rocking it. “What?” I asked and Momma said, “He needs a name. Your brother. His name’s Dylan. Dylan, say hello to your big brother, Clyde.” Momma brought the putrid thing to me and told me to kiss my brother. I refused but Momma wouldn’t hear of it, so I put my mouth to its dark red viscous head and felt my lips leave an imprint in its skull. When Momma got tired I took the beast from her and let her sink back into her place. Quickly, I dug a small hole for my brother Dylan and placed his effigy into it.

  I knew it was a lie, but it made Momma happy.

  24

  Momma’s much happier now that she’s reunited with her baby boy. So happy, in fact, that I haven’t visited her much in the last few months. Even when I turned sixteen, which I did, just a few days ago. I grew another few inches. Put on a few extra pounds of pure muscle. The other day when Joyce was cutting my hair she ran her fingers over my biceps, pretending to do it accidentally, but I know she was admiring my formly form. After all, that twerp, Terrance, is all skin and bones with a patchy beard and dumb, gross face. Sam’s enormous, but he’s so dumb there’s no way Joyce could admire him the way she’s been admiring me lately. Besides, I think Terrance and Joyce might not be my mom and dad for much longer. I don’t hear them making noises too much in their ramshackle hut. I’m thinking soon Terrance will be bunking with Sam. Yeah, I’m thinking that’s likely to happen very soon.

  So, like I was saying, Momma doesn’t seem to need me around as much since she got Dylan back. Every time I visit to tell her about my day and how good I’ve gotten at hunting small animals or braining multiple fucking birds out of the fucking sky, all she wants to talk about is my dumb dead brother. And it’s not even my brother! Of course, I don’t have the guts to admit that to her now. What difference would it make, anyway?

  Last week I brought Terrance to visit Momma at The Memory Palace. You know, kind of hoping to make her jealous. She’s sort of gotten used to the fact that I comingle with Out-of-Towners, but she doesn’t like it. She really doesn’t like hearing about them, either. Like, one time, I told her how Terrance taught me to spot rat droppings and where they’ve been nibbling away at something in all these garbage mountains around us, and Momma just said, “Did you know that Dylan said his first word the other day? He did. As a matter of fact, he did. And what do you think he said? He said ‘Momma,’ of course. Of course he did. He’s such a good boy. Such a good boy. Don’t you think he’s a good boy? Isn’t he the best boy?” So I dropped the topic altogether and let her go on about Dylan.

  When I brought Terrance with me to visit Momma, she was even less responsive. In fact, she wouldn’t talk to us at all. Quiet as a headless jack rabbit.

  Kicking back in the red chair, his feet up on the coffee table, Terrance told me I was crazy bringing him here to visit my Momma. “The dead don’t talk, dummy. Besides being a royal pain in my ass, you’re plain crazy,” Terrance said. Then Terrance suggested that we bring the chairs back to the camp at Monster Island. I stabbed him with my gaze and he shrugged. I told him nothing leaves The Memory Palace. Nothing. Everything stays in its place. Just like at The Library, The Drinking and Washing Fountain, Dante’s Inferno, and The Used Car Lot. Places don’t remain meaningful, don’t remain sacred by changing things in and out. Besides, Terrance could find another chair easily at La-Z-Boy Mountain or elsewhere, for my Kingdom is The Kingdom of Plenty! I don’t know why they haven’t made our little camp more homely, now that I think about it, but I always assumed it was because they didn’t really think of this place as Home. It’s insulting to think that they feel they can do better, but one’s subjects can’t always be perfect subjects. I mean, Joyce cuts my hair and cooks my dead animals and makes me weed tea and mud cakes for my birthdays. Sam gives me rides around the land on his shoulders, washes my clothes, and carries all the heavy stuff I want him to. Terrance… well, after Terrance taught me how to spot the domains of burrowing critters, I guess he’s mostly just been in the way. I’ve pretended to like him, for the sake of peace in my Kingdom and among my people, but he’s growing more tiresome by the day.

  For instance, when we were visiting my mute Momma, Terrance asked why I’m always staring at Joyce and I told him I wasn’t and besides she’s always staring at me. He kicked his big mean boots off the coffee table and turned toward me, elbows on his knees. “What, you two having staring contests?” he asked before hawking a phlegmy wad of spit into the grey dirt. I adjusted my orange life vest and felt my toes curling at the end of my big rubber boots, but only because my feet got too big for them months ago. I just don’t want to give them up. I don’t wanna change anything.

  “Look, boy, Joyce is mine,” that stooge told me. “Mine, as in, not yours, not anybody else’s, you understand me?”
r />   “I don’t think you’re in any position to give orders, Terrance,” I answered, snidely.

  He leaned back into the chair, kicked his big mean boots back up on the coffee table. “How’d your momma die, boy?”

  “I’m a man now, Terrance. Not a boy. In case you haven’t noticed.” I crossed my arms and flexed a little bit for good measure.

  “How’d she die, kid?”

  “Why?”

  “Was it pills?” he asked, spitting into the dirt again.

  My heart fell all the way down into my left foot and pulsed and pulsed inside my rubber boot. “What?” I said.

  “Yeah, I thought so.”

  “What are you talking about, Terrance?”

  “Your momma died, what, a year or so before Joyce and me showed up? Right? Maybe not quite a year?”

  “I asked you what you’re talking about, Terrance.”

  “Well, we basically had been circling this area for a while. Sometimes we’d do bigger circles than before, just to give a good impression, I’d guess. Kenneth was supposed to lead us to a city. A real city with a real population. Something like civilization. I knew he was just walking us in circles because we kept passing through the same damn town about ten miles from here. You know, just to stock up on stuff from their abandoned stores. You know, nothing like bottled water or anything like that—that shit went first thing a lifetime ago. But there ain’t been many people through this neck of the woods, know what I mean? I mean, almost everything was just wiped out, right? Plain and simple.” He paused, looked around at all the glistening garbage peaks around us. “Well, I suppose you wouldn’t know nothing about that.”

  “There ain’t no towns out there, liar.”

  “‘Course not. Why would you think so? But, listen, kid, how do you think your dear old momma got them pills?”

  “I didn’t say she took any pills!”

  “No. You didn’t,” Terrance said. He eyeballs me for a few cold seconds.

  “She found them. In my mountains,” I finally said.

  Terrance crossed his arms then crossed his ankles, smirked, and took another look around the jagged junk heaps. “Your mountains? Suppose she could have. Or, maybe she got them from me.”

  “You’re just a dumb, stupid liar, Terrance. Why are you even making this stuff up?”

  “Look, boy, while you’ve been rolling around in your own shit and all this fucking garbage, we’ve been out there,” he said, pointing in no particular direction. “We’ve been out there, traveling among the monsters. We’ve seen what’s out there. You have no idea. I remember when… I remember…”

  “What? You remember what?”

  “Never mind that. I just thought you’d like to know your momma came to me for them pills. She came to me a few times for them. Us—Kenneth and the rest—we used to set up camp a few miles outside these walls. It wasn’t too uncommon to find us out there when we were passing through, just awaiting Kenneth’s next move, which, god, most of us must have known was never coming by then. Kenneth, he just kept us moving. As if that was enough. Maybe it was. Lord knows nothing much has come of ourselves just sitting around this dump. But, I think for Joyce—I think more than anything Joyce wanted to believe. She wanted to believe we were going somewhere. Even if it was just circles… circles… circling the drain…” Terrance said, drifting off. “Gotta believe in something these days, I guess,” he said, his eyes back on mine. “But we had dogs. We had supplies. We had each other.”

  “You didn’t know my Momma!” I shouted, walking over and shoving his dumb boots off my coffee table.

  “Long brown hair? Skinny? Like Joyce? Kinda looked like Joyce, didn’t she?” he said, sucking on his only canine tooth left. “Soft voice, too. Yeah? The softest. Like silk. And, well, there was that little old birthmark just above the nipple on her left tit, right here?” he asked, pointing to his own chest. “Right?”

  I just stared at him, breathless and dumbfounded.

  “Well, son, how’d you think she paid for all them pills?” he asked, showing me the black holes in his grin.

  I launched into him and the chair tipped backward into a grey cloud.

  When I got back to the camp I dropped a handful of hair still attached to the skin into Joyce’s lap. She was sitting outside her shanty drawing or writing something in pencil on a piece of cardboard. She looked up, confused. Then I spit out the pinky finger I’d been chewing on the whole walk. I spit that out and called Sam over from the well and ordered him to guard the entrance to our shanty. Then I went inside and buried my face in my filthy mattress and screamed and screamed until I screamed myself to sleep.

  Something else I learned recently: The world didn’t end hundreds of years ago. In fact, it ended somewhere closer to twenty-five years ago. And even though it ended twenty-five years ago, there was still some semblance of a society here and there, outside my Kingdom’s walls. At least, that’s what Joyce tells me. She told me this after things in our little fake family settled back down, as they tend to do. So, one night, lying by the fire, my head in her lap, Joyce told me there was once a world out there, and it had even been there shortly before King Clyde the Destroyer was brought into existence. Then there were pockets. Pockets of people here and there, she said. I laughed at the idea: pockets of people. But people started dying off real quick. “They’d turn green and their heads fell off, right? Or did they all get tetanus and die when their dicks fell off?” I offered and Joyce just nodded, stroked my head, and said, “Something like that.” On top of that, useful people were being snatched up by gangs, she said, much like the one Joyce, Sam, and Terrance were following. These gangs would snatch up useful people—builders, chemists, doctors, electricians—and basically enslave them. I asked Joyce if Kenneth’s group did this and she didn’t answer. I asked her what the hell kind of good Terrance could be and she sighed. I asked her what her role was and she looked away, off into the darkness and her eyes were swallowed by it. I didn’t ask any more questions. I didn’t ask, but I was contemplating: According to Joyce’s account, my folks, apparently, gave up on the world before it had completely gone to shit. Before it was patrolled by diseased, long-limbed monsters. Before it was a fissured land smoking beneath a barrage of lightning strikes. They ran away to this junkyard and tried to pretend that this was all there was to the world. They buried their heads in garbage, like those big old dumb ostriches I’ve read about. And that’s what they taught me. My Kingdom, these ridges of metallic, wood, and plastic mountains, The Memory Palace, The Used Car Lot, Dante’s Inferno, The Library—it was The Alpha and The Omega. It was my Kingdom come. They taught me that this was the whole world, and as my makers, I had no reason to doubt them. As a small boy, which I was not too long ago, I wouldn’t dare test the truth of their geography. These four high walls and all this trash—this was it. Not that it’d make much difference, I suppose, if I’d known any better. But, still, Momma and Papa gave up pretty quick. Didn’t they? Don’t you think they gave up pretty quick? They gave up and decided to smash private parts together and make me, anyway. Even after they had given up on this world. I don’t know. It just makes you kinda wonder why.

  25

  A lot’s happened in the last few years. Then again, not much of anything has happened at all.

  Ever since my scuffle with Terrance we’ve basically avoided each other. We’ve been civil for the most part, but we’re not much of a family the way we were for a short time there. But he still tries to be a dad to me sometimes. Like, he’ll show me how to tie a particular knot so the wobbly parts of the shanty Sam and I still share will be less wobbly. Even though he’s got only nine fingers, he still ties pretty good knots and now I know how to, too! We (meaning Sam and Joyce) were worried there for a bit that Terrance might have had tetanus after I bit his goddamned finger off but Joyce assures me he did not. He had an infection and they fixed it with some expired antibiotics Joyce had stashed away for a bloody day. Joyce told me that medicine was invented by the Ameri
can military so it was built to last, like Protein Beans. Or like King Clyde the Destroyer!