by Cole Alpaugh
A mostly human figure was sitting, had watched the parade of gods from a vantage not risked by mortals. Dash could tell the man-like creature had huge shoulders that slumped forward from unbearable sadness. The figure that was neither human nor godly slowly rose and turned from where Dash huddled with the girl. In a lumbering motion, the giant man took four long strides and stepped inside the thick jungle. Dash caught a glimpse of the tiny dangling light hanging over Willy’s forehead before he disappeared.
Chapter 31
Dash was jarred awake by the ground rumbling and the heavens answering. Lightning scored the roiling clouds beyond the hut’s entryway, made white-hot lines in imperfect seams as if tasting the grass walls. His sleeping mat bucked and slid as the earth tilted hard. He dismounted, crawled to the threshold on unsteady boards, waved down at the four guards huddled on their own collection of mats in the scrub grass and dirt. The expressions of the strapping young men were bewildered; they were apparently still drunk and making no attempt to test their balance.
Villagers emerged from their own sleep, the sky creating a strobe effect on brown bodies stretching and hands rubbing upturned faces. Feet shuffled forward a step or two and then back, some moving side to side, a dance with their god they might have done before. Children were the first to be fully awake, finding their ball and dividing into teams out on the field. A lightning bolt connecting clouds to the tops of trees somewhere out in the jungle went unnoticed by the screaming players, was seen as nothing special. Men scratched their backs and pissed into the ferns next to their huts. Women began stoking cooking fires as on any other day, Dash in awe of their dispassion toward the pending apocalypse.
Clouds turned slow rotations over the volcano’s peak, and Dash could make out the bird flocks gliding on the heated wind over the crater. There was thunder, but most of the noise came from the children, a happy game that took priority over end-of-times declarations from an attention-hungry god. He watched the boys and girls give chase and tumble, sometimes having to pause for the next bolt to show them where the ball rolled in past the jungle’s edge.
Tiki came to him, stepping over the guards and wiggling into the narrow space next to where he watched the world as he’d never seen it.
He shook his head and looked down at her. “What does it mean?”
“Nothing. It’s not time for us.” She leaned into him and put an arm across his bony knee to rest her chin. “Manu wants to know if you’re hungry.”
“I couldn’t eat.” He leaned back against his hands, enjoying a perfect view of the volcano and sky.
“It’s a hard climb,” she said. “So many steps.”
“You’ve been up there?”
“An older boy claimed this wasn’t an island. He tried making us believe we were on the tip of a great land, and that Manu and the missioners lied to keep children from wandering off to places with buildings that touch the clouds. He said any kids who hiked the entire shore became confused, would see a river and not the sea, and that a bridge of dry earth would let us walk to the other side of the world. I climbed the Volcano to be sure.”
“What did you see?”
She looked up, eyebrows scrunched. “It’s an island. And it’s smaller than I thought it would be.”
His voice became a whisper. “Have you seen people thrown into the volcano?”
She was quiet for a moment, and then shook her head. She made crying sounds, and he felt her warm tears wander down his shins. “Only the grownups went to the top. But Manu says it’s important for the whole village to witness our sacrifice. Even the kids.”
Dash was startled by Willy’s voice from behind. “People bounce and then roll down the steep interior. There are loose rocks and ash mounds, but they come to a fast stop against the boulders. They are hurt and bleeding, but most are still conscious. They’ve fallen two or three hundred feet, broken many bones. Sometimes they are screaming, and sometimes they are praying. It all depends. But you hear them because of the acoustics. It’s a funnel shape, and voices rise on the heated air. And that’s what gets them. The heat. No plunge into fire, no instant death. They slow roast like pigs over coals. It might be twenty minutes before their hair begins to smoke, and forty before it catches fire. The human body has good fuels inside, and the people looking down from the rim stay until the fire is burned out, until they know the Volcano has been satisfied.”
Dash waited to see if Willy was done. He listened to the thunder and the shouting children, the sharp claps that followed the brightest flashes.
“I could hear your god talking,” Tiki said, sniffling. “I couldn’t understand what he was saying, but I could hear his voice.”
Dash stroked her hair, touched the places where she must have tried hacking it away while he was drifting at sea. “He’s not really my god. He’s more of a friend, I think.”
She turned her head to look up at him. “That’s the best kind of god.”
* * *
The guards came fully alert when a pack of kids ran across them, chasing their ball, one washboard stomach used as a launch pad, a perfect ashen footprint left as a temporary brand. The men cursed in their own language, looked up at Dash and cursed him, too. When Tiki lifted her head and glared down, the men looked embarrassed, got to their knees and seemed to become aware of the hullabaloo going on all around. The largest barked orders that sent one scurrying toward the chief’s hut, while the other two sauntered off and cut to the front of the outhouse line.
Tiki sat up, but still leaned heavily. Her skin was cool in the humid air, eyes perfectly white despite all the tears. “Manu says the soldiers will be back soon.”
“Did the volcano tell him?”
“She tells him everything. He says our sacrifice will send them away. But he calls it ‘his sacrifice’ because of me. Did you ever want children?”
“Yes, someday.”
The tone of her voice altered, turned bitter. “If I had children I would keep them safe instead of killing them.”
The vent’s billowing smoke changed color, went from orange to red in a swirling vortex. Lightning flashed over the expanding mass in super-heated tunnels, fat arteries and a mesh of tiny capillaries. It wanted to grow a heart, Dash realized, wanted to come to life in a way it didn’t yet understand. Perhaps a lack of any soul kept it an angry mountain, limited it to brief monthly visits in a masked human form.
Dash knew how to mix vinegar and baking soda for science class projects, but was clueless about the stages of eruption, or even if there were stages. Maybe each volcano behaved differently, the important workings deep inside the earth, somewhere in its distant brain. But the abrupt shifting of the ground made it feel close to something big, its remaining fibers poised to snap. The low haze had gone from amber to a deep shade of yellow, the odor sharper, a spoiled food smell beyond the stench of rotten eggs.
“Brimstone,” he said.
“Who’s that?”
“Not a person,” he said. “It’s a stone that burns. Someone I knew used to say it a lot.”
“Sarah?”
“No, it was actually someone on television who was more like a missioner. She was on late at night, and my college friends played a game where you took a sip of booze, of clap-clap, every time she said the word.”
“The men here would play that game.”
The real draw to the cable-access show was the lovely preacher’s gothic looks, which half the guys argued was unintended. Jet black hair that fell to her ass, heavy boots that nearly reached a knee-length skirt, leaving flashes of pale skin that drove everyone nuts. She used the same middle finger knuckle on her right hand to push up librarian-style glasses on a silver chain. She pounded the lectern and shook a fist in the air. There was an old-fashioned blackboard with the message of the day written in thick script as a backdrop.
“Brimstone!” she would herald, head thrown back, long fragile throat exposed above a white rectangle.
“Drink!” they’d sing, tipping shot glasses all at
once, and then slamming them down for refills. Victory to the last man standing.
She was a caged animal stalking the stage, spitting scripture for venom, Bible clasped as a weapon or shield.
“Brimstone!”
“Drink!”
“Brimstone!”
Sarah was missing in action the week after they’d met. Everyone claimed to have just seen her, but nobody knew where she was. Check this guy’s room, or maybe she’s with that guy. Give her time, buddy, she’s gotta come up for air sooner or later. Dash was alone and already drunk when the preacher came on that night. He sat with a bottle half empty, microwave chirping that his burrito was done.
The word ‘suicide’ was written in the preacher’s harried strokes, slashed across the blackboard in lowercase script.
The preacher ranted about the evils of the unforgivably selfish act of taking one’s own life. He forgot his food, remembered the private family room’s smell, where the funeral home director had led him and his mom before his father’s viewing. It was an escape from well-meaning mourners, a place to rest your ears more than anything. He supposed the wilted flowers were recycled from earlier services, one more shot to brighten misery. A cold cut tray and pre-sliced rolls sat preserved and untouched beneath stretched plastic. He considered the significance of the knife’s absence.
“Brimstone!”
“Drink,” he’d answered, lifting the bottle and resolving to pick a bushel of flowers for his shitty room if he woke in the morning.
The camera zoomed in on the preacher, tongue moving across her bottom lip, specks of perspiration where tears might gather. She inhaled deeply then spoke directly to Dash. “Three words to know, to write down and copy a hundred times, and to share with everyone you touch ….”
He looked around his room, but his notebook was zipped away in a backpack.
The preacher stepped in front of the blackboard and pulled down on its wood frame. It rotated to display the other side, where three words were written in the same script: suicide hurts, amen.
“Words from our Lord and Savior,” said the preacher, turning back to the camera, hair swishing back over thickly padded shoulders. She righted her glasses then lifted the Bible over her head with two hands, head down, shirt pulled taut across full breasts. “Suicide hurts,” she said.
“Amen,” Dash whispered, putting down the imaginary knife he’d been holding to his wrist.
“Amen,” Willy repeated from behind, the rumbles and lightning waning as the sun began its rise from the hidden sea.
“Amen,” said Tiki, who was smiling, watching the storm recede.
One less morning remained in Dash’s life. He considered the active volcano might draw attention from the outside world, but there must be dozens if not hundreds of similar events, many within easier reach. And they were likely beyond the time when scientists would have evacuated, instruments left to record and transmit data, as well as providing the fate of recalcitrant villagers refusing to leave.
A new mist descended over the compound, and Dash held out a palm to discover it was a fine, gray powder. More snow, he thought, weighed down with despair. Soon it will shower rocks, and then it will rain lava. But I’ll be long dead, and won’t get to see any of the real fireworks. Manu was right about the volcano keeping the soldiers away once and for all. They’ll have no reason to come to a barren atoll populated only by charred skeletons half buried in cooling lava. No more pretty little girls.
He touched Tiki’s lopsided hair as they watched the four guards convene in the morning light, adjusting their underpants, the one back from Manu’s hut talking fast, pointing up at the volcano. Their hair had turned white, as if they’d suddenly grown old.
“I wish I could have a kitten for one day,” she whispered, right hand stroking his forearm. He could feel her sharp fingernails, could see how ragged they’d become from her new bad habit of chewing and spitting the tiny pieces.
He wondered how far the little amber disk had floated.
Chapter 32
Cooking fires were kept burning to light the afternoon when the sun was nearly snuffed out. Dash and Tiki sat over untouched food bowls left on the hut’s front steps. Their last supper was the same as every other meal, except that this one was coated with ash from the persistent flurry.
A line of young men formed in front of the stage curtain after someone got the idea to use the ceremonial paints. Bright red triangles were drawn on cheeks and foreheads to represent the volcano. It was the same color that had been used on the women’s nipples to entice Dash’s libido. The demeanors of the decorated men changed once the paint was applied. Each one stalked away from the woman doing the artwork energized, ready for a fight.
“They look dumb,” said Tiki. “I draw better volcanoes.”
“The island is turning into a snow globe.” Dash watched the smoky dome and wafting ash. “My father’s store had glass balls with winter scenes inside, and loose plastic shavings for snow. The balls were filled with water and some kind of clear oil that made it thicker, so the snow fell slower. You turned it upside down and shook, and the scene became a winter wonderland. People collect them.”
She held out a hand to catch a flake of ash. “I think the Volcano turned us upside down.”
“And she’s still shaking,” he said. “I guess we’ll be going in a few hours. Did Manu say how long?”
She ignored the question. “Is Sarah pretty?”
“Pretty on the outside. The kind of pretty that made me wonder why she fell in love with me.”
“But she wasn’t pretty inside?”
“She hurt me.”
He pictured the disheveled bed. The sheet was an escaping ghost half on the floor, blanket pushed across his nightstand. They’d broken the shade of a hundred-year-old lamp, a gift from his mother. Maybe it was a Hong Kong knockoff. Tommy Chamber’s hairy ass fully visible as they humped away directly on the dimpled mattress skin. Sarah’s fingers were claws, nails pressing deep enough to puncture flesh, touch bone.
“You were going to marry her.”
“Love does messed-up things. I hated what she did to me, but I lost control of my life. Her power over me was humiliating.”
“Like when someone opens the outhouse door when you’re not done?”
“Sure,” he said. “It was just like that. But I convinced myself she’d change. I wanted to believe.”
“Manu says I can’t be loved because of what the soldier did, and no man will ever want me. The Volcano God is the only thing left for me because the soldier made me dirty and spoiled.”
“Manu is wrong.” His voice made her flinch. “What happened didn’t change you. It was nothing but violence, something a weak man does to feel powerful. But even if you’re small and have tiny muscles, you can still be stronger than the man who hurt you.”
“I’m more valuable to the Volcano than the village.”
“Manu is shit for saying that. He’s giving the soldier power, and that’s the opposite of what anyone should do.”
“He’s my father.”
“Fathers are wrong all the time. My father was a coward for leaving us. He did the weakest thing possible,” Dash said, then added, “except for what Manu is doing to you.”
“You think Manu is a coward?”
“It’s a cowardly thing for sure,” he said. “A wise friend taught me where gods are born. You know how to see gods, how to get close to them. But do you know where they are made?”
She thought for a minute, and then shrugged.
He spoke slowly. “People create them from nothing. They are invented to fix broken lives, when a god is needed the most. A god becomes real when people believe he is real. You told me I needed faith, to welcome the gods into my heart. Maybe I was too broken, or maybe I was just too broken before I met you. You taught me belief is everything, the most powerful thing in the world.”
“Like how magic works.”
He nodded. “And you have to understand that the soldier
is a coward, driven by his own fears of what he really is. He has no power to change who you are, unless you believe in him. It’s entirely up to you.”
“He was strong,” she whispered. “I fought, but he was too strong.”
“Shitter bugs move balls of poop that would be mountains to us.”
“He’s a shitter bug, right?”
Dash reached out, put fingers under her chin to lift her face. “Maybe someone with a heart like Sarah’s never gets better, but cuts and bruises heal. Chopped off hair grows back. I believe you are the same beautiful girl as always.”
She smiled.
“And bee stings heal,” he said, and also smiled. “Do you know what a princess is?”
“I think so. There was a story in one of the burned books. A princess is a girl who marries a prince to get her glass shoe back.”
“Okay, yes, and a princess is also a girl who will one day become queen of a village filled with people who love her.”
“I want to be a princess.”
“You already are a princess. You have a beautiful heart everyone loves. Manu learned things in another time, when people didn’t know any better.”
She fidgeted with one of the bowls, flattening the rice and then making indentations to form a face. She looked up at him. “Nobody will have a chance to love me, because I’ll be dead.”
* * *
The drinking circle grew louder as the painted men took their places. They laughed and elbowed each other, full of bluster as the cup made the rounds. The sounds were raw—backs being slapped, slurred curses, loud spitting. Dash guessed the young men were boasting in their language about girls they claimed to have kissed, fish they supposedly caught. Dash was an insider when it came to those lies, had joined right in at the beer pong table a hundred times.
When the ash fell thicker, Dash and Tiki moved back under cover and shared a mat. The air grew more humid, and thunder rolled back heavier than ever as their final afternoon passed into night. Everything was cast in the color of unhealthy skin. The sky’s energy competed with the volcano to shake the buildings, knocking dead bugs and dry leaf slivers from the walls and ceilings to litter floors. A new wind mixed up the trash, carried some out to where the fog swirled like a wizard’s hands. Great gusts occasionally pushed aside the haze to provide a fleeting glimpse of a moon nearly in balance, half black and half bright. Then darkness would fold back over, dirt shoveled onto a coffin.