by Daniel Kraus
“You need to lower that,” she said to her son. “You know who you’re acting like?”
Scowler’s lowing intensified. Ry remembered a snippet of something a therapist had once suggested, a ridiculous assertion, that Scowler, more or less, was Marvin. If that were true, who killed whom downstairs? And if Ry was becoming Scowler, didn’t that mean … Ry pressed a hand to his forehead. A strip of crusted dress fabric fell away. The wound beneath had scabbed, though when he touched it the scab slid away on mucus.
“It’s outside,” Sarah said.
Ry gazed out the window, and yes, there was smoke, mushrooming upward along with the soft whooshing and crackling munch of fire. He contemplated whether all of them should take this outside and sift through their complaints while at a safer distance, but Scowler brayed, digging into Ry’s mind with a single desire: Blood. Ry’s vision paled with the overlay of Scowler’s blindness, and his teeth began to divide, multiply, and sharpen.
“Ry, you look at me. You listen to me. I had Sarah to protect. I had me to protect too. Just because you’re about twenty years younger than me, that means I don’t matter? I’m all alone out here. In the middle of all this worthless dirt. I’m practically old. And what have I done, what do I have to my name? And still, still, I know that I must matter to someone. Doesn’t that have to be true? Isn’t it possible it’s you? I needed you here, for me, for me, and if you had to be hurt some of the time, well, so did I. We took turns, Ry. Now put that down.”
“Oh, no!” Sarah pointed at the floor. Wisps of black smoke were eking through the warped boards, and she danced to avoid stepping on the slithering plumes. It looked like fun and Ry felt a brotherly compulsion to play along. His feet—his feet of flesh, not steel—were leaden, but they began to run through the motions, up, down, up, down.
Scowler shrieked his displeasure at this juvenile behavior and Ry clutched at his skull, the cleaver nearly performing a self-scalping. He felt the beast tightening the marionette strings of his arteries and veins. His skeleton was manipulated and the cleaver began to rise. Ry fought it; his whine became a cry. Sharpened seashell teeth began to emerge from his gums and he bit down on his lips to delay their arrival. The pressure built. His lips began to peel apart and quickly, bloodily, in the seconds before Scowler’s jaws took over, he mouthed Sarah’s word: No. No. No. Its repetition made it come easy, as easy as tk-tk-tk, as easy as an Indian chant, as easy as recited facts about meteors that would never, ever fall. Blood poured from his right nostril before he could finish. He licked it from his upper lip, feeling against his tongue a single remnant of a phony mustache.
“Fire! Fire!” Sarah’s exclamations came rehearsed from school safety lessons. “The stairs! The hall! Fire!”
“That doll on the bed.” Jo Beth’s voice was strained. “That stupid doll.”
Ry sobbed in pain. The soft marrow of his bones was being threaded by serrated steel. He doubled over—he was shorter now, much shorter—and watched his nosebleed pour into black smoke until the drainage ceased because he no longer had a nose, while his head—top-heavy, conical—swirled with noises every bit as compelling as Jo Beth’s. Tk-ch-hwr’ch-tk-tk!
“You think I kept those dolls for you.” Her every word dizzied the smoke. “You’re so wrong it makes me sick. I kept them for me. I kept them to cover my ass, because I was worried I’d fail my kids as bad as I failed this shit-hole farm. I kept them as a way out. For me, Ry. Not for you.”
The fire in the hallway ate some floor, rolling their way. The heat doubled.
Smoke could not hide Jo Beth’s heartbroken expression. “It was that goddamned woman, Linda. That woman who barely knew us. She was a better mother than me; she’s the one who convinced you that you were special and smart and had a future and could do anything you wanted. And I hated her for it because you believed every word.”
Was it true? That Ry had ever had such uplifting thoughts?
Even more incredible, was it possible such things were true?
Jo Beth nodded. “That woman was right.”
Scowler’s shriek shattered the mirror. Ry recoiled and spotted the tiny troll pulling himself across the bed the fastest way possible—by his two withered arms, his razor leg halving the mattress behind him. The carnivore mouth widened, nearly ate its own head, but its hysterical sounds were swallowed by the hurricane howl of the blaze. All at once the fire was everywhere, twisting like serpents over the floor, reaching like vines across the ceiling.
Sarah screamed, threw herself at the window, and tore at the sill.
Jo Beth grabbed her son’s collar. Here was the physical contact Scowler had wanted. The parts inside of Ry that pined for violence, the bones and the teeth, drew together like magnets and the cleaver hopped to striking position. Ry clenched his muscles but some of them had turned into traitorous, jellified cancers. The blade teetered in the balance.
“I’ve kept you in a little box, just like them, so you couldn’t escape.” Jo Beth’s forearms extended from the smoke, took his face, not caring that his teeth were sharp, his skin leathered and frayed. “But I’m letting you go. Right now. This is your chance, baby. Make me proud.”
The wall cracked in two. Patterns of wallpaper became instantly mismatched. The lamp swinging from the ceiling tore free, its electrical cord ripping from the plaster across the ceiling, down the wall, an endless umbilical. The floor opened up with an elephantine sigh, and decorative lamps, a jewelry box, and a half-dozen dusty bottles of perfume skidded across the surface of the dresser as it pitched. Red embers billowed up from the first floor and attached themselves to everything like hellfire insects. The dresser dipped like a seesaw, then paused on its fulcrum. Floorboards caught beneath the weight snapped and fired across the room like spears. Sarah took one in the back, Ry the shoulder.
He straightened, for a moment a man and nothing more or less. Death, violence; survival, violence. These equations were jumbled, had been in his classroom history books, would be till humankind’s dusk. The meteorite had changed nothing about these problematic rituals; its silt had merely acted as the sugar that made ordinary poisons go down easier. The decisions, all of them, remained his, and Jo Beth was right. It was now or never.
Long ago in this room he had cut his mother free.
At last she was returning the favor.
The cleaver flung backward, slicing the smoke into two continents. Ry hurled himself forward, the blade taking only a few hairs off Jo Beth’s head and a single button from the sleeve of Sarah’s jacket. The edge of the cleaver struck the very center of the window. Glass shattered, hot wind sucked inward. Ry reeled and Scowler leapt onto his back, sinking one thousand teeth into his spine. Ry went blind and clung to the frame, gobbling down noxious fumes, anything to suffocate the parasite. The initial implosion of smoke roared over his head, and he felt an inrush of cooler temperatures and glimpsed only stray tongues of fire below. The north side of the house had a favorable wind. They could still make it.
More of the floor caved in with the sound of steers making a final mad dash through the corn.
Scowler tunneled inside of him. Bones were chipped, organs pierced, fluids boiled. Ry kept focus by taking advantage of Scowler’s finest classroom talent: Math. He counted the curved segments of glass still clinging to the frame and recalculated them into fractions. One-third of the surface area of the window still survived, sharp enough to bleed all three of them. He raised the cleaver to do some simple subtraction but Scowler took hold of his rib cage and rattled it. Ry gasped and the cleaver toppled from his hand, cartwheeling over the sill. For a single moment he knew absolute loss. Then he saw a faraway flash, the cleaver stabbing into the lawn below, and realized that all he needed to do was follow suit.
Ry backpedaled for a running start. His final step landed upon air where there was no more floor, and he tipped backward to meet the firestorm, the meteorite, what was left of his father. But Jo Beth’s fingers snatched his wrist and pulled with canny timing, and he found
himself balanced upon the same heel that nine years ago was broken and minutes ago had been savage metal but now was a man’s strong and healthy foot, and he turned on it and drove from it, and did so without a word or look of thanks, because such manners were unnecessary between mother and child. Lost deep inside, Scowler continued to scarf his host’s intestines, but it was a loser’s feast. Ry had the advantage of glorious momentum, God’s gift to the young. He wondered if he always had.
His form was spectacular. Not a single inch of his tall-for-his-age body touched the frame. What glass remained was blown outward by his elbows and shoulders and hips, and the storm window never had a chance. Ry went head over feet, end over end, and before landing believed that he glimpsed his mother, way up above, already helping Sarah through the opening.
Why was the air so much cooler on his trip back down to earth?
Why was the weight of the world finally gone?
23 HRS., 48 MINS. AFTER IMPACT
Life drained from him as steadily as if from a spigot. The last memory he carried, the one of impact, was no different from the ash raining all around him, picked up in the breeze and stolen. The only impressions left were sensory. How the breaking of bones sounded like the rending of steel, how the scuffing of skin felt like the tearing of cloth.
But he was not scared—angels were smiling at him. Their eyes were crazed and imploring. One of the angels was called Sarah and her words were too quick and too many to follow. The other was called Jo Beth, and she slapped his cheeks and through a manic smile moved her lips in the same pattern until Ry picked out the syllables: Stay with me. Stay with me. Stay with me.
Her face was painted with soot and she held in one hand the shotgun. This detail mattered to Ry; it meant she had dared to sprint onto the back porch of a burning house. There was a time, only a few hours ago, when he would have viewed such action as proof of her need to salvage the meteorite, to turn it into cash. The mother he believed in now was better than that. She, the greatest hero of them all, had braved toxic smoke, disfigurement, death. And all because the gun meant safety for her children and there was no telling what fresh dangers the new day would bring.
Far across the yard the fire continued to burn, insinuating itself into the daylight. The weathered dairy barn, the wilted chicken coop, the leaning corn crib, the corroded silos—all were revealed as structures of utility and grace. Someone must have rigged Ry’s perception so that he had spent his whole life seeing only the ultimate futility of these structures while concealing what made them worthy, the struggle itself, the striving for a better day.
Ry would give anything for one more hour in this paradise.
He tried to raise an arm to touch their faces. The arm went nowhere. He traced his mother’s panicked lips—I shouldn’t have moved you, but the fire—and he tried to shake his head to tell her that she did right, she had always done everything right. The head did not shake. Frustration pricked at his mouth, the only part of him he could feel. He gathered his energy and pursed his lips. They leaned in, wild for his words.
And there was so much he wished to say! Troves of wisdom and insight were suddenly available to him to spend as he saw fit. He was Mr. Furrington: He believed in his mother and sister and during dark times this belief ought to light their way. He was Jesus Christ: His sacrifice would remind them of the wisdom they held like doves and how rewards would be theirs when they let those doves use their wings. He was Scowler, too: They could not let any future Marvins stand in their way, no matter what town or city or path they chose. There was a new talisman for Jo Beth and Sarah to carry and its name was Ry Burke. Please, take of him what you need.
None of this made it across his tongue. Jo Beth wiped his forehead and mouthed sympathy—Shhh, baby, don’t try to talk—and he had no choice but to comply. After all, he was tired. He had never been so tired.
He let his neck slacken so that his right cheek dropped into overgrown grass he could not feel. The sight line did not include the blazing house, but there was plenty else to appreciate. There was the garage, a grain bin, the junk shed, the machine shed, the McCafferty Forty, even Black Glade. All things considered, not a bad final view.
At the closest edge of the field, trudging back to the crater hand in hand, were the Unnamed Three. They had not perished; Ry admonished himself for having entertained the thought. What’s more, they were no longer pale or gnarled or burnt. They stood at their full, proud heights and moved like happy toys, if toys could move at all, which, of course, they could. Scowler was in the middle, swinging from the arms of his taller companions, his head bowed as if smarting from a recent scolding. On the left, Furrington hopped on one leg, his progress tireless and ebullient. On the right, the long banner of Jesus Christ’s body flapped in the occasional gust. Birds, their numbers growing every second, circled the Three, the gentlest escort.
They were twenty feet into the McCafferty Forty when, one at a time, they turned around.
Furrington touched a paw to his bowler, as if to say: Farewell, lad. We had some fun, didn’t we?
Jesus Christ pressed an open palm to the air, as if to say: If thou needest us, thou knowest where to look.
Scowler made no such special address. For some time he stared with blind eyes and a gaping mouth before turning away and pulling his companions in the direction of the crater. Ry thought he saw Furrington’s paw touch Scowler’s back with shy affection; a few seconds later, he was almost positive that Jesus Christ touched his stigmata to the top of Scowler’s pointed head. Scowler’s malformed feet picked up speed, began to skip. Ry could not help but smile. After so much excitement, the little guy must be looking forward to lying down.
Ry would have enjoyed watching their slow act of disappearance but his body did not cooperate. His eyes closed. He felt a plummeting sensation—or was it a rising? He felt his mother’s touch, just barely, but it was enough to guide him softly along an unlit path. There was a sorrow that came with entering into this void, but he told himself that was a good thing, even a great thing. You can’t recognize sorrow, he reminded himself, without having first known joy.
The Soft Ear
TUESDAY, AUGUST 25, 1981
26 HRS., 0 MINS. AFTER IMPACT
He was wrapped up to his neck in a blanket so natty and hay-threaded it must have been peeled from the floor of a barn. It smelled sharp and real, and he pulled it tight around his shoulders. It was midday and Ry found himself sitting against the side of the block shed on the farm’s eastern end. At his side was a mason jar filled with pump water, and from the looks of things he had drank over half of it. He had no memory of rebirth.
The house was cinder. Though it had been one of the property’s smallest buildings, its obliteration made the farm look empty. Within the black smolder, white fires burned with persistence, billowing forth brown flakes that could have been flayed from Sarah’s notebook. It was impossible to reconcile this modest pile of rubble with the proud house he had lived his life inside, with all its familiar labyrinths and infinite dead ends. He considered the possibility that this was a dream, but he tossed that idea away upon noticing shapes inside the wreckage that did not look like wood or furniture.
A car horn honked. It took Ry a bit to appreciate the significance of the sound. He tore his eyes from the debris and watched as a dust-caked four-door sedan pulled into the grass thirty feet away, ignoring the gravel driveway because of its proximity to the house. He heard shouts of hello and saw Jo Beth approaching from the direction of the garage, clutching the shotgun in her left fist, Sarah’s hand in her right. Both of them were clad in old jackets Ry had last seen housing spiders in the garage. Jo Beth waved the gun in a salutation.
Quite abruptly Ry became aware that it was a gorgeous day.
The car door opened and Kevin Crowley, a short, pudgy fellow with pale skin and curly red hair, exited. He held a weapon of his own, a rifle. He walked up to Jo Beth and extended an arm. Jo Beth hesitated, then accepted the offer and moved in for a sideway
s hug. The two weapons clacked in a duck language. Upon release, Kevin looked dazed but still managed to muss Sarah’s hair. He said something; Jo Beth nodded and said something back. She gestured at the house. Kevin pointedly did not look at it.
Ry heard other car doors open and watched as an astonishing number of Crowleys unfolded themselves from the sedan. Kevin’s wife, Peg, was the first out, followed by an indeterminate amount of girls and a single boy. They wandered closer to the remains of the house as if drawn by an interstellar magnet still possessed of a degree of power. Ry considered the trail of smoke feeding up into the sky like a twister and wondered what would happen when this meteorite dust was rained back down upon Iowa.
Ry drew the blanket close to his chin and let go of the macabre thought. Finally one of the Crowley kids began to approach. He recognized her, felt a fluttering nervousness, and almost laughed at that reaction. Still, he touched his nose to check on that zit and was relieved to find that his coat of dried gore was plenty thick enough to conceal it.
Esther Crowley stared down at him with concern.
“Ry,” she said. “Are you okay?”
He nodded. It hurt his neck.
“I’m sorry,” he said. The words came out mushy.
Esther cocked her head. “About what?”
Ry shrugged. “College,” he said. “You were supposed to be leaving.”
Esther looked at him strangely.
“It’s all right,” she said. “But thanks.”
Even disheveled, she was a knockout. Ry licked his lips. “You all right?”
Esther shrugged. “What happened to your hair?”
Ry reached a hand up and touched the bare, scabby skin.
“It’s gone,” he said with wonder. He saw her worried expression and tried to sound reassuring. “It’ll grow back.”
Peg was suddenly there, kneeling at his side.
“Esther,” she said. “Hush.”