Cadence and Dog

by Lashbrook, Lillan

  Sitting in the pew Cadence look up at the ruined pulpit. It was a small chapel; no more than a few hundred people could have fit. The church she had attended with her grandmother had been in the middle of the city, what most people referred to as a ‘megachurch’. This was every bit a small-town church. If anyone didn’t show up for service or came late, the whole town would know. She sat on the right “just past half way down. Close enough to hear the preacher but far enough not be right under his gaze or spittle” Grandma use to say. Grandma had grown up in a house of the lord like this one. The acoustics in the church Cadence had known had been altered with the use of a microphone and surround sound. Often Cadence had still missed a word or whole sentence during a sermon because of people talking. “This little country sanctuary would never had needed that” she thought. “No one would have dared talk over the preacher” Cadence bowed her head, folded her hands together in her lap, and whispered the Lord’s Prayer and a child’s prayer for protection. When she lifted her tired eye towards the front of the church for the briefest of moments, no more than a flash, she could swear she saw her grandmother. Standing on the stage like she was getting ready to sing.

  She was younger than she had been when she died. Healthier too. But it WAS her! Her hair was a sea of wild auburn curls, a dress of sleek red satin.  Arms crossed against her chest and a cigarette smoldering in one hand. She was smiling, and oh that smile. The smile that had kissed her good night every night. The smile who had taught her reading, and cooking, and swimming and sewing. The warm and loving smile that patched every scrape and every bruise. That smile that encouraged ever imaginary adventure and every dream. The smile that met her at the door after school with a hug. The smile that could turn into a snarl when need be and terrified the bully who chased her all the way home one day. The smile that WAS her grandmother.  She was gone as soon as seen. But there was no mistake, it had been her Grandma. She knew that smile, that face, that attitude and posture. Even into her 80’s Grandma was not someone to be taken lightly. Raising two boys by herself, taking part in every church function, and every school activity. She had been powerful and fearless. She had once apprehended an armed robber in her home with nothing more than a frying pan and telephone cord. When the police asked why she said “Why wouldn’t I, you all were nowhere to be found”. There was no way Cadence could have mistaken her for anyone in the world. Grandma had loved her and taught her to be every bit as capable as she had been. “It’s a hard, stupid world out there sweetie. You have to be strong and try your hardest not be stupid if you are going to survive it”. That world had been a Disney cartoon compared to this one.

  Cadence jumped up and ran to the pulpit even though the image was long gone. “Gramma PLEASE!” she cried falling to her hands and knees. “Please I don’t want to be alone anymore. I miss you. I miss daddy. Please I just want to wake up. I don’t want to live like this anymore. Gramma!” tears pouring down her face now she clasped her hands against her chest. “I’m scared gramma! I don’t know what I’m supposed to do. Everything is bad here. Why am I here? Where am I supposed to be going? Please. I need help!” Dog rubbed against her shoulder whimpering. Her crying always upset him. When that got no response, he licked the tears off her face and lays his head over her shoulder. She wrapped her arms around his neck and wailed into his fur.

  By the time she had cried herself out the sun was well past set. Sitting on the cold floor in the dark sanctuary she didn’t feel as heartened as she had when the sun was high. Indoors was always better than outside. But any child will tell you a building, even a church, was not the same in the dark. She wouldn’t build a fire, but she broke a few of glow sticks and made a circle. She looked at the pews, pushed together they could be a good bed, but she couldn’t move them. One was deep enough to lay on alone anyway. A few sticks of jerky and some gulps of water and she put herself to bed.

  She was standing on the black stone in its once beautiful meadow. The mad men spread out around her in their piles, the pillars still standing in the semicircle around what she guessed to be the front. The top of the trees around her were just begging to change colors. The wind had a definite bite to it. “Autumn” She thought to herself. Her hands hurt; her fingers were dripping blood. It fell on her shoes, and into the cervices of the stone. As she watched it fill up the holes, and she recognized the shape. It was a cross, no bigger than the one around her neck. That one was a gear, and that one was the size of her rock. Her fingers protested the movement but she pulled out the contents of her pockets. Cadence bent down and placed each into its apparent place. They each glowed those faint colors again as they came in contact with the stone. The smears of her blood began to boil on them. As she placed the last piece, the small Celtic cross she had worn since nearly the beginning of her journey, the whole stone glowed! Her blood on the stone and in the holes boiled and hissed! She felt a vibration pulsing up through her feet and legs.  Looking around she saw the madman with the staff and cape staring at her. “He looks younger than me. How old was he before…he went crazy?”  He lifted the staff and brought it down towards her head fast. She caught it and ripped it out of his hands. Scared and off balanced he over balanced and stumbled off the edge.

  Cadence didn’t hear a thump where he hit the ground. She creeped towards the edge, the vibrations getting stronger. The madman who had seemed to be in charge had been impaled on one of the poles. It burst through his chest and he slid ever so slowly down towards the ground. The crowd had stopped their activities when the stone began to vibrate. They could feel it, the trees had even taken up the movement. As it got stronger leaves began to shake loose from branches and rain to the ground. The light from inside the giant stone was growing with the vibration. The staff in her hand was getting hot. She saw it too was glowing and hissing against the blood on her hands. But they had stopped bleeding. Her fingers were healing under the searing heat.

  ‘break it’ a voice whispered in her mind. Suddenly a tree shook beyond its bearing fell on the block. More were beginning to sway and fall all around her. ‘BREAK IT’ louder this time. Cadence held the staff against her knee like a branch. With all her strength she pulled with her arms and pushed her leg out. The staff burned every part of her that it touched. After what seemed like an eternity of trying to break the burning rod, she finally felt it snap. The pieces flew apart, but her hands wouldn’t let go. The stone began to crack and shift beneath her feet. She lost her balance, got up only to fall again. She crawled to the edge with the broken staff in each hand but couldn’t see a way down except the cracks and cervices that cut up her hands on the way up. Even as she tried to get turned around the stone shifted and tossed her back into the middle where it swallowed her.

  The light that had been emanating from the stone was only skin deep, the inside was black. Cadence expected to be thrown against rocks and sharp edges, but all she did was fall through the dark, as though she was in some other place altogether. She could still hear the rumbling of the stone as it crumbled but it was distant. Turning her head did her no good, every direction was as dark and complete as every other. She couldn’t even be sure she WAS falling. She couldn’t hear or feel any wind on her face. On a whim she tried to swim through the dark. While she couldn’t tell if she was actually going anywhere it did make her feel better to be doing something. Faint and slow, a small light started to grow in front of her. She doubled her efforts to swim. The light would move back and forth, make a circle or zig zag. She creeped closer to it, and called “hello?” “well do you really expect it to answer? It's probably just some part of the rock that fell in and is still glowing.”  It stopped moving, then floated towards her. It traced her hands and arms, spun around her head and down her back. As if trying to measure her shape. She remembered her doctor doing the same thing at her yearly visit.

   Every time she tried to turn to face it, the glow was somehow on the other side. She could never get a straight look at it. Out of the corner o
f her eye she thought it looked like an eye but square. “hello?”

  “hello” a voice in her head, it was high like the sound of a balloon that’s been let go.

  “Oh! You can talk!” It still wouldn’t let her look directly at it, but it had stopped tracing and floating around when she spoke.

  “Oh! You can talk!” This time it was the low tones of a pond full of bull frogs.

  “You are just copying me.” Cadence didn’t understand why this thought made her so sad.

  “You are just copying me.” The voice echoing back to her was her own. As true as if it had been recorded. An image accompanied the sound in her head. The stone, the madmen around it and the trees around them. Now a book with blank pages flashed through her mind followed by paints and a canvas. ” You talk” the voice in her head ranged through sound like radio stations passed by.  “Me talk” lastly, she was shown a paint brush floating in an open white space.

  “You don’t have words.” Cadence tried to think of a picture that would mean who or why. But that just gave her a head ache. She began to wonder about the objects she had found all over the country on her way here and how they fit into the spaces in the top of the stone. How could they have fit like they were made that way? Was she inside the stone now? It had cracked open and she fell in. Without knowing, she had pulled the images along with the thoughts in her head.

  The light touched her, and she was filled with heat. Searing from the inside out. But she saw the stone before the field was turned to mud by the madmen. It wasn’t solid! She watched it roll and squirm in the sunlight. As she watched the view moved back and she saw the whole continent, there were six little towers of light. Each was about where she had found one of her glowing pieces. ‘Mr. Square Eye is kind of colored like that too.’ She mused to herself. Cadence was only 7 years old. She didn’t know about frequency or the possibility of dimensional shifts. She could put together that the stone may not have been a stone until it knew it had to be one. Until it knew it was missing those small glowing pieces. ‘they pulled me like a magnet. Each piece was a magnet and pulled me to the next one. Then when I had them all they pulled me here. Mr. Square Eye made the stone to get those pieces back? Did they come from somewhere else?’  The little square of light blinked out, leaving her floating in the dark. She tried to call out but her throat felt like she had swallowed sand. When she spun in place and tried to kick herself forward again, she suddenly felt air rushing past her.

  The hard floor of the church, and Dog’s yelp of pain brought her out of the dream. Her arm was sore but such a short fall off the pew hadn’t done any real damage. Her head was spinning, and she was still burning up. Her clothes were wet with sweat. Her hair hung limp and tangled against her head that was throbbing from the inside. Every muscle in her small body ached. The only time she could remember feeling like this was when she was almost a preschooler. Cadence had gotten the flu from another kid. She could remember the internal heat, and her head being all fuzzy. She remembered grandma gave her something pink that tasted like cherry candy gone bad.

   She tried to roll over but she was tangled in the sleeping bag. She was so tired, just getting out of her bed was enough to make her want to fall over. But she needed water. She pulled on the handle of the wagon and it resisted. She pulled harder and ran over her fingers with a tire. She cried and held the hand to her chest wondering why everything was suddenly so hard to do. She tried to stand but the world went wobbly before she got past her knees. It was quickly obvious that she was not going anywhere. But she had to get medicine! She held on to the side of the wagon and tried again to stand. When she put weight on the hand on the wagon it rolled away down the aisle.

  An image flashed inside her mind. With what seemed like great effort Cadence pulled off her pants and tied a leg around the handle of Dog’s back pack. The cold cement floor drove her into her sleeping bag. When she moved towards the wagon, she resembled an overgrown caterpillar, but it was safer than trying to stand up. She found herself out of breath by the time she lay alongside the wheels. When she had enough air she sat up and looked over her few belonging, things would have to go if she was going to sit in the wagon. Her water bucket had to stay. Her cross bow and bolts. Food, but she could take out some of it. She set what she felt she could live without on the floor. If she got better, she could come back for it. Holding on to an arm of a pew and the wagon she maneuvered herself slowly into the space she had made. Only to realize she had neglected to tie the other leg of her pants to the wagon handle.

  After a brief nap she hadn’t know she was taking cadence fished her cup out from behind her and scooped a drink of water out of the bucket. Then another. And another. She couldn’t seem to get enough water in her. It was like she was full of sand now. She set the cup down behind her and reached for the handle of her “all terrain” wagon. The only thing that had looked different to her was the wheels looked like her cousin’s little monster truck. Despite being careful to lift it slowly she still managed to smash her face with the long arm of the handle. She cried out and felt the blood pulsing in her lip. Dog, as had become habit, walked up to her and licked her tears away and the small drip that came from the cut. One hand on the rod one hand on dog she slid her hand down his back hen down the pants she had tied to him. When she got to the end of the free leg, she tied it to the handle.

  The universe reached out. The map in his mind lit up like Christmas lights, he knew what was needed of him. Dog pulled against the backpack. The wagon rolled behind him. They went down the wheelchair ramp and into town. Before they got their Cadence was asleep again.

  Ch

  Dog brought her attention to a shelter. A billboard had fallen down from some storm. Fell and crumpled against the concrete barrier blocking the residential from the highway, making a kind of cave in the grass. The misting of rain was soon going to be a downpour. Cadence and dog creeped around to the open side, cross bow at the ready and Dog in front as they entered, scanning everything. One rainy day like the rest. One more hole to hide in for the night. But even after just a few weeks on the road she had learn not to believe anything she saw or heard. She began to wonder why she was even trying. She still felt weak from the sickness. It’s not like she had anywhere to go, and nothing to do if she did. The only thing she was doing was surviving day after day. She began to think about just sitting down and giving up. A few piles of trash and a pile of rags near the back was all there was here. Good a place as any. Dog growled and leaped onto the pile suddenly. An old man yelled for help and rolled away. Just hearing him speak was enough for them both to know that this poor man was not one of the madmen. Not that she had seen any of them wearing clothes to begin with. Still cowering the old man began to beg. “No, no, please don’t eat me! Please I’ll go just don’t hurt me” Cadence pulled her cart the rest of the way into the billboard cave and pulled out a can of soup. She walked towards him slowly, having to bend down as she got farther back.

                  “Stay” She said quietly holding out the can to the poor man. “You were here first, and we just wanted out of the rain.” Her voice was still hard and scratchy. When he didn’t take it, she set it beside him and turned back to clear a space for a fire. In her cleaning she found a paper coffee cup and what use to be a book of sonnets. While the little girl who went to school and listen to her father read every night would have cried over the sight of any book in this bad of state, the girl who had wandered alone and tired and cold with barely a second glance ripped it in half. It became the kindling for her fire.

                  Old man reaches out and pets Dog. “He is beautiful. You love him ‘lot hu?” when she has food ready, she places a bowl down for dog and hands the old man hers. She hasn’t needed more than the two. “You are too small to be alone. Where are your parents?” he doesn’t wait for an answer or even silverware. Drinks down the soup in the bowl and licks it clean. She takes it back and
refills it and hands it back. She sets a bucket in the rain and drops a purity tablet in it. The rain has picked up making the little shelter into a drum, the sound rolling around them. “What did you put in that bucket?”

                  “Pretty tablet. Makes the water taste funny but safe to drink.” She takes the bowl back and fills it for herself. Tilting Dogs bowl towards him to ask if he wants more, he lays down content. She eats her food, and waits for the bucket to fill.

                  “Where are your parents?” the old man asks again. She only shrugged “you cannot be alone out here.”

                  “Not alone, I have Dog.” With her bowl also empty now she walks to the end of the shelter and holds them to the downpour, washing them out and putting them away. She takes one quick step out into the rain to retrieve her water bucket and brings it back to her cart. It takes a little bit of effort and a grunt but she manages to get it back in its accustom space. “He takes care of me.” She said bringing Dog a bowl back filled with water and a cup for herself and the old man. “You are alone.” She didn’t say this as a question or as a reference to herself, just a statement of facts. But then everything was just facts anymore. The act of talking at all had become strange in this world.