“It was thousands,” said Bale.
“But what if you get hurt real bad?” said Bale.
“Like worse than this?” Murk raised his peg.
“We saw a doctor every week,” Bale said. “Even if we weren’t sick. Poked us with needles and things. Took our blood. I once saw a lady brought back from the dead.”
“When I was young,” said Mira, “this lady used to come around every so often and she had things in bottles you could trade for. She said they did different things to heal you, but pretty much they just made you feel like you were floating and made your teeth loud.”
“Teeth loud?”
“When you clicked them,” she said.
“You got some shadow back,” Bale said to Murk.
Murk stopped. He had a faint shadow emerging. He squatted and sipped it gone. He stood, clicked his teeth. “Loud as shit,” he said, “and that was free.”
“So at the edge of your shadow,” said Murk, “it, like, glows.”
Bale considered it. They walked along. “Yeah kinda.”
“And, it’s like,” Murk rubbed his chin, “everything it passes over, as we’re walking and all, seems to bend. Like time travel.”
“Um . . .”
“And . . .”
“You should quit looking at it.”
They came to a cluster of mesquite trees parked at the base of a bluff.
“It’s as good a place as any to camp, I’d guess,” said Murk.
They dropped their bags near a tree trunk, walked through the coppice hunting dismissed limbs that had been lost long enough ago that they’d gone dry in the heat of days. They amassed a bundle and scratched together kindling, twig bits and dry grass.
They rallied together a sort of camp that way—built a fire at the edge of the trees, laid out blankets to bed on.
Mira had a Dutch oven she set in the flames, warmed goat stew for them to dine on. They ate from earthen mugs with wooden spoons. They passed the canteen back and forth.
“There’s one thing I miss for certain,” said Bale.
“What’s that?”
“Climate control. It was always the perfect temperature in the dome.”
The sky grew dim as night approached.
“Y’all tell ghost stories in the Dome?” Murk asked.
“Kind of,” said Bale.
Mira got excited, sat forward, kind of clapped her hands. “Tell one.”
“Hell, I’ll probably mess it up.”
“We won’t know,” Murk said. “If it’s bad, we’ll just blame dome people in general. We’ll pretend it had nothing to do with you.”
Bale thought a minute. “Okay,” he said, “here’s the best one I know.”
The Miserable Mother
“When my people first moved into the dome it split families apart. Not everyone wanted to go. There was a young woman who was married to a shadow sipper, and they had a son. She loved the boy more than anything on Earth, but when she told the shadow-sipping father she was moving into the dome, he told her she could go but that the boy was staying in the outside world. It broke the woman’s heart. She didn’t want to stay in the sun, but she didn’t want to leave her boy either. He had crystal blue eyes, and she loved to look at them. In the end, she decided she couldn’t leave him. She watched the rest of her family board the train that led to the dome, and she watched the world around her thin out of good folks and get filled up with bad.
“She did her best to raise her child, but, as the years passed, it became harder and harder to provide for him. The husband wasn’t any help. He didn’t hunt or farm. He didn’t keep house or teach the boy.
“One day, the women went off looking for food—all their cupboards were bare. When she got back, her son and husband were in the front yard together. It seemed suspicious. She called her boy, and he went to her.
“She knelt down to look at his eyes, and they were black as eight balls.”
“Y’all got pool tables in there?” Murk asked.
“Yeah, you play?”
“Couple times. I was good at it.”
“Bet I’d beat you . . .”
Mira kicked at Bale, “Finish the damn story.”
“Right,” said Bale. “So she saw his eyes.
“And then she realized she’d made a great mistake. The rest of her family was safe in the dome, and she’d stayed out in the world to take care of a boy now lost to her. It broke her heart, but she decided maybe there was still hope.
“She ran to the train tracks and followed them in the direction her family had traveled off in. It took her days, but she finally got to the dome.
“It was completely shut up, but she walked the outskirts of it, banging the walls. The only family she still knew was inside it. All that was outside and with her had changed beyond her knowing.
“She went insane.
“Her last days were spent aiming to get inside the dome.
“She banged the walls. She attempted tunneling in.
“Ultimately, she died that way. Out there, going crazy.
“When death came, she welcomed it. She slumped against the dome, and breathed her final breaths, happy that her pain and suffering was over.
“But she was wrong.
“When her body died, her soul stepped from it, and as soon as it saw the dome, it latched on to the idea that it could now, without the body limiting it, gain entry easily.
“But the soul could not.
“The rules that governed the woman in life governed her in death as well.
“And so at night, you could hear her. Against the roofs and the walls, scratching and banging.
“And she’d have to go on that way forever.”
“Not bad,” said Murk.
“Works better back home,” said Bale, “’cause you can usually hear banging and such.”
“Think it’s her?”
“I think it’s somebody.”
The night was still. Filled with the music of the fire and insects chirping. Owls hooted. Coyotes howled.
Murk, Bale, and Mira laid back in their blankets. Pretty soon, they were all asleep.
The Women in Darkness
Not far off, Jilly and Mole sat in darkness and, just beyond, Baby Boo rubbed sticks trying to get a fire going.
“Stupid bitch,” said Jilly. “Just let me make the goddamn fire.”
“If we coddle her she’ll never learn.”
“I don’t give a fuck if she learns. I don’t care if her brain falls out her asshole. I’m cold and it’s dark and I wanna sleep.”
“Think about something else.”
“Like what?”
“I got a story,” Mole said.
Jilly covered her eyes with her hand. “Oh thank all the gods above. Thank the stars that twinkle and the moon that glows too.”
“It’s a good one. Been working on it.”
Jilly lowered her hand, her face angry. She motioned to Mole with a flippant gesture. “Regale us,” she said. “Hesitate not to enamor our minds with the narrative you’ve been a cooking up.”
Mole cleared her throat, adjusted her repose. “My uncle had a little dick,” she said, “and it had a funny flavor.”
Nothing spoke but the night.
Jilly looked around her, side to side. “Am I in some kind of nightmare?”
“Didn’t like it?”
“How the hell is that a story? Ain’t nothing even to it.”
“I was leaving things out, like you said. To make it funny.”
Jilly blinked many times. “How the hell could that be funny? You sucked your uncle’s tiny dick? Fucking hysterical. Does it feel better to get that out? ’Cause I tell you, I’m not much for talking feelings. I feel like sharing shit like that just drags others down. You got a memory like t
hat, you let that shit fester. Keep that poison in you and just learn to move on.”
“I didn’t say I sucked it,” Mole said.
“Come again?”
“He hanged himself. In winter. Mom and I found him and figured he shouldn’t go to waste. We cut him down from his tree branch and cooked him up, and I asked mom what dick tasted like, and she didn’t know so we tossed it in the frying pan a bit and chewed on it some, but it was nasty so I spit my bite in the fire.”
Baby Boo looked up from her fire starting.
Mole seemed proud of herself.
Jilly made to speak, but, for the first time since her year of silence, she couldn’t think of a thing to say.
The Inn
Everything deplorable in that world drained toward the inn at the Town of Lost Souls. Riffraff amassed there in the nights to freely congregate in debauchery. Black-eyed drifters, grim-faced ladies with skirts freely hiked. Each customer foul toothed, speaking slurred profanities. The heavy scent of sandalwood incense, bathtub alcohol, stale tobacco smoke, bodily fluids. Macabre tunes hovered in this fluky bouquet, banged out on an out-of-tune pianola by a one-eyed midget who lowed abridged lyrics seemingly unintended for his audience—hooligans who tarried and bungled their ways about the first-floor saloon of the joint. Upstairs, the doors of a dozen lodging rooms lined a banistered walkway, the banister leading to a staircase that descended against the back wall. In the far front of the inn, on the lower level, a ragged pool table stood, and men lingered about it holding cues, their eyes blinking involuntarily whenever the balls struck each other. Glasses were set on the copper bar, clinked together. Doors were opened and closed. Men and women called harassments at each other. Occasionally, wild fucking could be heard from above.
In his room, sitting on the floor with his back to the door, clutching the leg that could not be traded, the hermit’s wild eyes seemed even wilder. He could feel the sin of that scene against him, could taste the dereliction in the air.
Terrified, he resigned to sleep in his current position, making it less possible that he might be molested in the night.
The bed in his room stayed made. He wouldn’t touch it. He feared it had been soaked through with bad deeds that would most likely bring him nightmares or gift his skin with some communicable irritation.
He whispered some half-remembered prayers to himself.
He tried not to listen to the noise of all the bad deeds around him.
The smell of the putrid leg clutched to him—aroma so blubbery you could mark it with teeth.
Downstairs, a young boy was dragged into the madness of the saloon by his hair, tossed onto the pool table and held down to it.
The leader of this enterprise addressed the crowd. He seemed liked a disheveled clergyman from some religion that worshipped motor oil. “This boy here is the son of my brother, but I will not call him nephew yet. His father is long lost to us, and his mother is buried and I have grown tired of his irksome ways.”
The boy struggled with his restrainers. Flopped about on the felt. Spat where he could spit.
“He is, however, the only family I have, and we are aiming now to tame him some.” The uncle pulled a bowie knife from his belt. “I apologize for the noise, but we’ve no other place to perform the procedure.”
Some madnesses are so bizarre that they entice witnessing.
Those in the bar who had been preoccupied with debauchery, who had been lost in the melee of drinking and lustful deeds, tapered their pursuits in order to watch this odious operation. Even the bartender waved off those waiting for drinks, came out from his station with a bottle in each hand and took up closer to the pool table, pouring willy-nilly shots out for his patrons nearest him, spilling here and there, as his attention was on the nephew now writhing with all his might.
The uncle laid his hand upon the boy’s chest, bulldozed his body down, the thump of it sending shockwaves through the floor, rattling feet. “I’ll give you the choice, a luxury, when you think on it right.”
“Fuck off,” rumbled the boy. His smooth face streaked with tears, his mouth puckered, lips quivering.
“Not yet,” said the uncle. “Arm or leg?” He raised up from the boy, tested the sharpness of his knife blade with the pad of his thumb, awaited the answer. But no answer came. The uncle cleared his throat. “Choose or I’ll choose for you.” He tapped the light that dangled above the pool table. His face was marred with scars that must’ve been made by human fingernails. His eyes twinkled hideously. “Arm or leg?”
Now the audience participated. “Leg,” screamed one, “hooks don’t work for shit.” He raised his right arm, and the hook on the end of it gleamed.
“You ever walk on a peg, dumb fucker?” hollered some other patron. “Give him the arm you use least, I say.”
Then there was a sort of blathering of opinions. A cacophony of suggestions. Expert testimony as to which limb to choose. Simple stories about hindrances that would emerge either way. Proclamations as to how no matter what, he’d get used to it.
“Neither’s so bad,” said some spooky woman. She was missing her left leg. She was missing her right arm. She only had two teeth in her mouth and she licked at them wickedly as though trying to make them clean with her tongue.
The uncle shook his head, a perturbed mien in his eyes. “I’ll give you ten seconds,” he said, stepping up closer to the boy. “Nine.”
“Don’t make me choose neither,” the boy said, bucking. “I’ll be perfect from now on. I swear it. I’ll do as you say.”
“Eight.”
Chants came up from the crowd. “Leg. Leg. Leg.”
And in opposition. “Arm. Arm. Arm.”
Louder now, the uncle, as though to some god or magistrate or arbiter or czar, “Seven.”
“Leg. Leg.”
“Six.”
“Arm. Arm.”
“Five.”
All the heaving preposterous stenches of breath and adrenaline and shock and dismay. All the stale light and dirty glasses with drops of moonshine in them quavering with the impromptu ceremony.
“Four.”
“Let me keep ’em both. Daddy wouldn’t want it like this.” The boy heaved this way and that. Wriggling and floundering and tussling and strife in his eyes. Every vein preached forward behind his skin as though he’d burst open in some seismic rupture, spew out of himself like a tidal wave and wash against those who crowded him.
“Three. Daddy’s dead or doesn’t care else he’d be here.”
“Leg. Leg.”
“Arm. Arm.”
And the one impartial woman with her wild open mouth licking her two teeth furiously, a kind of fucked-up glee in her eyes.
“Two.” And the uncle set into the boy, his arm oscillating, so his bowie knife dangled now over the shoulder, then over the hip. The shoulder.
“Arm. Arm.”
The hip.
“Leg. Leg.”
“One,” said the Uncle.
“Wait, wait,” said the boy.
A great silence fell. The labored breathing of the held-down boy.
The knife. Above the shoulder. Above the hip. The stillness of the waiting crowd. All things pitched up to nothing. Like some arrow shot straight in the air that pauses, briefly, before gravity calls it home.
A voice came from the shadows, “Sorensen says that hearing silence is a successful perception of an absence of sound.”
“The fuck?” said the uncle.
“And that pauses depend on sounds just as the hole of a doughnut depends on the doughnut.”
“Who the hell is that?”
Doc stepped forward. “The boss,” he said. All eyes averted then. To be able to see it as Doc saw it. The quick flick of the gaze of all present toward the ground. Obedience in gesture form. “I thought I’d weigh in.” Doc went then to the edge of
the table. “I got a leg just this morning for the machine. So, I say we take an arm, keep things even.”
The arm faction cheered.
The boy struggled. “Which one you use least?” Doc asked. He patted the boy’s brow. Gazed into his eyes. Bowed his head a bit, showing pity.
“No, sir, please. You can help me, I know it,” said the boy.
“Look at these people, son. You can tell from their eyes. It’s going to happen. You can’t change minds when they’re this certain of what they want. It’s important you answer. And answer me true: which arm do you use the least?”
The boy struggled some more. Thrashed in his captors’ grips. But he was spent. “My left,” he said, his black eyes rimmed so deeply red they looked as though they might launch from his face like rockets.
“You sure?” said Doc.
“Yes.”
“Think it through,” said Doc. “All the tasks you do. You use your right arm the most? Opening doors? Wiping your ass?”
“I’m sure,” the boy said. “I’m right-handed. I barely even use the left one for anything I don’t guess.”
“Good,” said Doc. “So long as you’re sure.”
“I’m certain. I’m certain.” He nodded as much as his restrainers allowed him. “Right-handed all my life.”
Doc beheld the uncle, the nephew. “Not anymore you’re not. Give me his right arm.”
“Wait. I was lying. I was lying.”
The crowd erupted. Guttural hymns the color of nightmares. Sound so thick you could eat it off a cracker.
“It’ll be a good lesson for you,” Doc said. “Don’t ever let anyone choose for you.”
“Fucking no,” the nephew gasped. “Uncle, take the left. Uncle.”
Doc motioned for it to begin, and the uncle swiped the massive bowie blade across the right shoulder’s flesh, and the thing drained open, the pool-table felt guzzling up the oozing blood, and the stain crawling out around the boy the way universes expand.
The shrieking then. The wild bemoaning of the boy and the euphoric cheering of the crowd that heaved forward into the table’s frame and formed some thick audience, roaring with jubilation as the boy’s favorite arm was hacked from him.
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