The thing kited up and down, cawed a comic tone and Mira and Bale did their best to put it between them and the sun, having to alternate their gazes from the sky where it was to the ground where its likeness would be, all the while dancing about clumsily in attempts to dodge parched, green cactus paddles thorned with bright yellow needles. It was not a swift bird, but it seemed aware of Bale and Mira’s intentions and bounced around on the breezes evading their attempts at pilfering.
“Tell it to stop.”
“So we can make it like my mother?”
Just then, Bale tripped on a crag, plunged to the dirt. He rolled to his back. “Lie to it.”
“Wait,” said Mira. She ran back to the grapefruit tree, and, when she returned, Bale was up on his feet chasing the bird. “Watch,” she told him. She tossed a hunk of cornbread at the bird, and it dipped in the sky, caught the bread in flight. The next bit she threw drew the gull closer. It had vacant, hungry eyes. It chipped wildly. Wherever Mira tossed bread, the bird went. She seemed to have it trained that way, and, as Mira fed the thing, Bale moved stealth-like to find the bird’s shadow pitching across the dirt.
“I just suck it up?”
Mira tossed another bit of bread. “Yeah, but don’t swallow it. Hold it in your cheeks.”
“Does it taste like anything?”
“Nothing you’d know the taste of.”
When Bale sipped from the earth, the bird hooted a hurt tone, and Mira tossed bread, but the gull let it fall. It spread its wings, clung to some new draft and pulled away from them. Bale watched it fly toward the direction of the gulf, his cheeks bloated with the thing’s nasty-flavored shade.
When they got back, Bale was surprised there was any shade left in his mouth at all—he could feel himself accidentally swallowing it as they advanced.
“Did you get it?” Mira’s mother asked. “Were you able?”
“Yes, Momma,” said Mira, “we did,” but this surprised her mother.
“You’re talking,” she said. “How you got it and talking?”
“Bale’s got it. Don’t worry. Bale,” said Mira, as if hurrying him to spit the thing in her mother’s mouth.
But Bale hesitated. He felt silly. Mohawk and bulging cheeks. He looked down at Mira’ mother, noticed her scarecrow-dancing eyes, her skin, pale and grimy. He kind of shook his head no.
“What’s wrong?” But Mira quickly understood.
She leaned to him. It wasn’t a kiss, but Bale felt her lips on his lips, softly parted, could smell the warmth of her. With her gentle mouth on his mouth, Bale breathed into her slow, and Mira’s eyes smiled at him, and she bent to her mother. And poof: her mother was asleep.
Drummond’s Escape
The evening sun bled in through the cargo-car ceiling and Drummond watched his likeness on the floor. It was so easy. He could walk straight up to it. His belly ached, his tongue stuck to his teeth. For all he knew, his brother was dead. He was fairly certain all others in the camp were. How else would they have just let the redheaded fucker move through painting on shit? He had to do something or he would die. The car smelled of Drummond’s shit, which sat in a lowly heap in the corner, and, behind that odor, the tangy vinegar of stagnant piss which pooled and ran in streams. The flavor thickened Drummond’s throat, and he wondered if the shadow would wash it down, he wondered if it could set him free.
Drummond’s bare feet, dirty with his own filth.
The last time he pissed, he’d half thought of cupping his hand in the stream for a swallow of it. He shrugged, “Better than dying to death.” He placed his lips against the wall and drank his shadow.
He felt it first in his skull, as though he were sucking a thick liquid through a straw and the pressure of it squeezed his head. A warmth spread deep in him. His shoulders seemed to flutter with light. Then his back. He stepped away, lowered his head toward his navel. For a moment, he thought he’d be pulled into the fetal position, thought he’d drop from his feet and grovel on the ground, but no. A quick contraction pulled him tight and let go, as though he were merely a hand quickly trying to clap alone.
A joyous sensation. It sillied the mind. Lassoing those odd patterns into phrases would be impossible.
Let us say that he felt like a great ship pushed from a dock and into the ocean for the first time, so that he’d seemed to have always rested on the wrong surface and had now found his true home. Sure he’d been built elsewhere, but he’d been made for this.
His eyes went stark and his skin paled and his veins darkened, as were the symptoms, and Drummond gazed back at the sun, which he could see through the torn-open roof, and it seemed truer than he’d ever known it, and a mellow sort of prayer chanced his mind, and then Drummond, as if by force beyond him, was drawn to the opening, and he smoothly squeezed through it.
He was then in the open. In the deeper light. In the smell of fire.
He ballooned. He felt the wind on him. He began running.
He felt like a child.
He kited forward.
He was alive.
Murk the Murderer
Murk came to the door, stood with the bloodied peg leg in his hand.
Bale pointed, “What’s that?”
Murk raised the peg leg. “A murder weapon.”
“Who you after?” Mira asked.
“Already aftered him. He was painting those skulls.”
“The fella Jessup was after?”
“I think so.”
“Then Jessup owes us even more. Where’d you find him?”
“That’s the thing,” said Murk. “He was painting on your train.”
Bale thought on this. “My train?”
“It’s fucked,” said Murk. “Like the one from yesterday, just fresher. Fires still smoldering.”
Bale grabbed his rifle. Bale ran out the door.
Black-eyed Children
Mole, Jilly, and Baby Boo chased the graffiti across the countryside, finding it on water towers and felled train cars, painted skulls on tree trunks and the doors of abandoned houses.
“It’s never taken this long,” Mole said.
“Shit. We becoming worse soldiers?” asked Jilly.
They saw a small posse of shadow sippers in a prairie and Jilly scoped them in her rifle.
They were boys at play. Four of them rascaling about. They had a ball they were wrestling over.
One boy would get hold of it and run, the others trying to strip it away. If it came loose another would take up a turn. Their laughter floated like any laughter would. It wasn’t stained black like their eyes.
“I’m gonna shoot one,” said Jilly.
Mole gaped at her. “Why?”
“To prove I still can. I ain’t seen combat in forever.”
“It’s a bad idea.”
Baby Boo listened to see what the verdict might be. Her moony eyes gleaming.
“It’s not like they’re gonna grow up and grow out of it,” said Jilly. “They’ll get worse and hurt others with their worsening.”
The Shadowless Army didn’t attack shadow addicts as a primary function, but when they got in the way, they’d knock them over.
“We don’t have orders to, and they’re not bothering us.”
“Shit, Mole. I’m bored. Out here. All this damn nothing but walking.”
Mole looked at Jilly and Baby Boo. They seemed to encourage her with their eyes. To whisper, let us at them, with their thoughts. Mole watched the boys at play. In the grand scheme of things, what were they even worth?
“Don’t use any bullets,” she said, and Mole barely had the words out of her mouth when Jilly led the charge. Baby Boo followed closely. Mole trailed them.
Bored soldiers slaughtering the innocent predates the naming of war, will go on after the words we call it are broken. But the glistening of their bayonets, the lad
s with their hands fumbling at their spilled entrails, the shrieking and their grievous, black eyes. Some echo of that injustice will travel out with the expanding universe, get back to God if there is one, become a thing we’re remembered for forever.
Mole thought about that as she watched her warriors whetting their appetites for pain. She pouted toward heaven. Shrugged to say, “If you didn’t want it, it wouldn’t be.” Then she raised the butt of her rifle and brought it down against the skull of one of them. Who was she to judge?
Baby Boo kicked their bloodied ball and the thing bounced across the field, and Jilly laughed as it went bouncing.
Drummond’s Death
Bale walked the debris, kicking this and that, tapping his rifle barrel against charred cadavers, against refuse caked with ash that broke to reveal sun-colored embers. Gray blankets of smoke drifted casually from sinking fires. The stillness of it got to him, his jaw ached and his chest shimmied and he swallowed stiffly.
“You didn’t see anyone alive?”
Murk stood off at some distance, panting. “You knew I followed you?”
“Could hear you from the start, that wood peg tap-tapping.”
“Only saw the redhead.” Murk pointed with the bloodied wooden leg. “He’s over there.”
Bale glanced back at Murk, off in the pointed direction. “You check him?”
“Check him?”
“His pockets and stuff?”
Murk held the bloodstained false appendage. “I got his leg.”
“Show me the rest of him.”
The two walked to where the murder had occurred, both silent as though partway sleeping. The gray-going world seemed to suffer from nausea. No wind stirred, but smoke drifted. The smell of it pleasant, somehow.
“Made work of him,” Bale said, looking down at the boy’s broke-open head.
Murk lobbed the peg leg toward the battered brains. “I was agitated.”
Bale reached down to check his pockets, but kind of staggered. “I’m woozy,” he said and he leaned on his rifle like a cane. He pointed at the boy. “Look him.” He couldn’t quite form sentences.
Murk fidgeted his fingers into the crevices of the dead boy’s clothes, coming up with a few trinkets that seemed like makeshift playthings. Some twine. A small glass bottle. A petrified frog. “What am I looking for?”
“Something that seems like it should be found.”
Murk stood when the job was done, contemplated the pile of plucked-up things. “None of this meets that description.” Bale frowned. Murk felt his disappointment, pain. “If you want,” he said, “we can go back through, look for whoever. I’ll help you bury folks.”
Bale straightened up. Held his rifle like a soldier should. “Bury?”
“Sure,” said Murk, “putting the dead in the ground. You domers don’t do it?”
“Nah. Never heard of it. What’s the point?”
Murk swept his tongue across the front of his gray teeth. “Fuck if I know. Something to do, I guess.”
“I don’t care much for digging,” Bale said. “Back home we burn the bodies.” The fires fumed. “Someone’s already done that bit for us. I had a brother in that mess somewhere. Didn’t figure I’d see him again ever. I guess now I know for sure.”
“Should we say something over it?”
Bale stared at Murk. “I just did.”
“But, like, to your God or something?”
“Thanks a lot, God,” said Bale. Then, “Did you want to add something?”
Murk shifted. “I like your haircut.”
“Not what I meant, but thanks.” The sky darkened. “Don’t you dare fucking steal it.”
Most times, Murk would’ve argued. Instead, they walked back to Mira’s house in silence.
Drummond Thirsts
Drummond needed food, water. His head spun in the new daze of his foreign state. His vision puttered and shimmied and his ears seemed reshaped so that every sound registered as something exotic, remote. His own feet against the earth, for instance, reverberated, buzzed, signaled out echoes that seemed to race in every direction and this cacophony spooked Drummond into believing he was continuously followed. Smells had been similarly reinvented to him. His odor, ripe and fetid, perched him in a kind of smog of stench. The milky perfume of his reek seemed thick enough to chew on, blow bubbles with. Every time he swallowed, the flavor, as thick as grease, seemed to scrape down his throat, slump in his guts. The night sat heavy on him. Humid dark stretched infinitely above and he felt a column of it weighting his shoulders, crowning his head. Walking meant parting the chunky, black air, creating a wake that rippled out behind as he moved. Each star was a needle of light aimed at his eyes, but all things were one.
He sensed the trees breathing, grass alive. He knew where birds would fly from. Their courses were patterned out before them like dotted lines. Like bits of bread they followed the trail of.
Drummond could see his own path too. He was pulled forward as if by his nose, and he could nearly see the force pulling him. Shapeless but present. Steady but ungoverned.
For hours he moved, over grasses he swore could talk to him, between clusters of trees he was certain were fucking. Birds chirped at him and it was as if their music swam down his ears, danced in his brain.
Some time passed before he realized he knew where he was going. Somehow, his nose had found water. His body ballooned, his skin scant, stretched. “I’m a beast,” he said to himself, but his voice bled from him shrill, seemed to cast blue fire, skipped off like fairy flight. He giggled at it, and gray rings of laughter spread out and dissipated.
He maneuvered on in his newfound way. His thoughts were shallow puddles of this and that. Nothing lasted longer than a breath. Knickknack nouns rummaged by bric-a-brac verbs.
“Hello!” he shouted at himself. The letters of the word floated into the stars, became a constellation. Twinkled.
He climbed a hill. The moon grinned from high. His naked body gleamed in the grin of it.
At the top of the hill, he surveyed the crater. At the bottom of the hill, a pond showed the moon again. Two smiles—one above, one below. He stepped toward the lower one, lost his footing, went skidding in the dirt, racing as he rolled, head over heels, clumping toward the bottom, toward the water.
The ground leveled before he reached the crater pond’s edge. He came to a stall on his back, eyed his ribs, rubbed raw by the earth. Rashes seemed to spring on his flesh. He touched them, sticky against his fingers. A dull ache traced his wholeness. Each breath stung, but was flavored by the brackish water nearby. He rolled to his belly, dug his elbows in the mud. Edging forward as a snake might, slipping into the ooze of moist earth and scum, he pulled his body to the water’s edge, placed his lips against the cool, dark surface, slurped earth and liquid into his mouth, chewed the swallows across his dried lips, leathery tongue.
He felt crazy in his drinking, the water had ahold of him. It seemed he’d drink until he drowned, as though he’d never be able to pause for breath.
Lust forced him forward, and he moved on into the pond, until he felt weightless, bobbed on the surface like a loose blade of grass.
He rolled to his back, ran his fingers through his sweat-thickened hair, let his head sink. He kicked out deeper. The splashes of his swimming sang out into the crater, mirrored out into the night. A vast, indigo universe straggled above toward forever, and Drummond’s gaze wandered amongst the stars. Not all of them were white, but Drummond couldn’t think the names of the colors. A rage paddled across his heart. His jaw tensed. There, floating limp in the crater puddle, he squinted at the sky. He reached his fingers at the stars he couldn’t remember the colors of, made as if to snuff them away.
The Name
Mira stood in the doorway, watched Murk and Bale drag their feet. She held a pitcher of water, chill, slightly cloudy, pulled up from the well.
It had a mineral flavor, a prolonged aftertaste of earth. She filled a glass, held it out for the first to get to her, and Bale jogged forward toward it, grabbed it and guzzled. As he drank, Mira poured a glass for Murk. He took it, sipped at it, swished and swallowed. Sipped some more.
“Was the train . . .” Mira began, but Bale avoided her eyes.
He lowered his glass toward her to be refilled, breathed heavily, “Your mom remember the name?”
Mira took the glass, decided Bale wasn’t being himself, poured him more water. “She thinks she does.” The sound of the water stopped. Bale took the glass back, drank again. “But I don’t know where he’d be. But that’s not all. I looked in my mom’s almanac, and it shows that comet’s coming. So the folks you met couldn’t be all wrong.”
“But who is it?” Murk asked, his upper lip wet with well water. “The thief?”
“Joe Clover,” Mira said.
Murk snickered. “Figures,” he said.
“Why’s that?” said Bale.
“Cause all Joe Clover wants is shadows and shadows and shadows again. If he were a dog, he wouldn’t come to your knees. But he’s all teeth and claws. He says he was six when he drank shadow the first time. His own mother’s. Since then, he’s just been tussling around with bad intentions. Hangs out a place called the Lost Souls.”
“Let’s go to town then,” said Bale.
Mira and Murk seemed traumatized by Bale’s suggestion.
Drummond Again
From a distance, he probably seemed dead. Nude. Afloat. His eyes wildly staring off. Something so lost about them now. Black, sure, but the domestic tone they used to have, lost worse than dead languages are lost.
But it’s the music of language, mutely finding his submerged ears, that forces him to reconfigure, roll to his belly, tread water meekly so his nose and eyes peer from the pond. Some man-shaped amphibian that indigenous people would dream up to scare their children with.
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