by Tony Burgess
“Cor?”
She calls from the middle of the room.
“Cor?”
From the middle of the house.
“Cor?”
From the middle of the yard.
“Cor!”
The top of the street.
“Cor!”
Oh no, he didn’t. He didn’t. He didn’t.
Belle dashes to the end of Erie Street and runs through the intersection below the community hall. Gravel trucks and seagulls shred the sky around her. A row of rusted barrels hold back the cherry trees in the alley. A bathtub sits on bare dirt. A Christmas decoration. Rudolph. Santa.
The house is a frightening face, dark and grinning, but Belle doesn’t notice this as she leaps across the porch and trips through the screen door.
“Cor!”
A stove in the middle of the sitting room to the right.
“Cor!”
A pigeon in the kitchen. A pigeon!
“Cor!”
Belle stands at the bottom of the stairs. She can’t see the top but knows this is where it happens. Each step is bowed and worn smooth as a shin. Halfway up she can see the top of the couch. Then the arm rests. It sits against the wall below a painting of a boathouse. The cushions are heavy and settled deep and empty. No old lady’s head. No head.
“Cor!”
Belle stands for a moment listening to silence and leaning in the mote-pricked sunlight at the top of the stairs. A sharp pencil of light. Another. Belle raises her hands, unsure of what she sees. Tiny holes are opening in the wall and sending white beams of sunlight across her path. They make a cat’s cradle of daylight pulled tight from wall to wall. Belle instinctively steps back from where she thinks the next one will appear. And it does. Bullets. Bullets are popping in through the walls. She turns and runs down the stairs. Cor lies on the lawn in the backyard beside the man.
She skids across the ground. Nothing can stop her. She is fleeing death. A monster is screaming at her.
At the end of the alley she tries to stop. But she is too late and she slams into the side of a pale blue pram and tumbles through its upended wheels. A gravel truck grinds its brakes into the clouds and a long white pupa unravels under Belle. The baby’s face is twisted in a cry and it is rust and yellow with spidery veins breaking on its cheeks. The baby throws a small hand up that falls off. Dung bones separate from dung flesh as a thousand curls of fetid air become unbreathable clumps of light.
Fairground Road
The world is a place of mighty lights. Huge things collect on us, around our voices in hurried shapes and on the outline of our actions. We see things, giant things, and quickly we claim them—wars are particularly ours, but so are pandemics and the influence of falling things on newspaper hats. Lost to us, in that white noise, are the millions of moments, unlike singular wars, which happen, then hurry from the stage, hardly ever lasting beyond the breath it takes to say they’re here and are so monumentally shattering that we would break from reality to cope.
In a small village in China a child is found alive in the bowels of a trout. There is a pond on a farm on the brink of the Amazon that is so full of paint thinners that a faint flame lives in the air above it. There are people born without legs. With four legs. With beaks and sticks and ten eyes and goat bellies and humpback chub eyes and mouthless and earless with brains exposed to winter wind and hands not there that pull on a strange mother turning away and unzipped bowels with chattering teeth and fin tongues and gill lungs and hundreds of tiny eyes and hundreds of tiny feet and thousands of tiny mouths and these things, these part words that never rise to any level, are seething and happy that we will all die with them. We will all die with them.
Jason is standing on the east side of Fairground Road walking north. It is why they call this part of the country Clearview. Wide meadows reaching into farm fields that lift slowly at first, then trot up quickly onto the knees of Blue Mountain. He can see a great distance from the side of the road. Crumbling black barns and long stitchy lines pull and follow the land like details on an old sweater. The oldest movement of sky and earth are visible here—the clouds tear on the escarpment’s razor with the same sound they have made for millions of years. Silence is what it is, but it sounds like somewhere in all these giant brown and green tumblers a terrible ripping is deafening the ground.
Jason has seen things here, postage stamp things. The Collingwood Horse Show where the Olympic team, headed by the silly face of Captain Canada, rolls around on hard brown-and-black horses, bounding over Saabs and Peugeots. A long summer afternoon with rich children sitting on collapsible chairs while thin uncles and ropey moms scrub million-dollar beasts. When the clouds are canker white and the ash trees are green and the sun is a minute old, there is nothing as perfect as being here with tan pants on.
Jason remembers the summer before last, he and Liz made their way back from the final jump. An improbably short pear-shaped girl had won. Jason was tempted to think that the rich can afford not to look sporty in their sport. Liz spotted something. A round little boy running towards them with arms waving. A magical panic balloon bounced towards them between the highest sky and the brown irregular lines vanishing under him to the horizon.
“Mister! Help! Mister!”
Liz stopped. She looked back: Well, Mister?
Jason jumped forward, feeling odd to be running toward a boy in a painting like this. The boy was crying and red; his friend, he said, was stuck in the mud. Jason walked with him along the wet ditch as the boy sucked slobber back between his scarlet lips.
Now that Jason is standing here, across the road from where this happened, it can’t be recalled without raising the dead of a year ago. He stops for a moment and tries to picture everything that stands between the two summers. The summer of the child in the ditch and the summer of hundreds dead. In this field. Some shot to be buried. Some families like long worms spilling from a paper carton into the earth. It’s an old story, the lining of things with children, but it was new here, in this fairground, abandoned now, abandoned but for Jason and his little string of memories of the boy’s friend stuck up to his knees in fine sucking silt. We killed them all, didn’t we? In our madness and our fear we tore through ourselves to get somewhere better, maybe to get to here, to now. Jason’s standing on the soft graves of last summer, remembering the saved horse trader’s son, crying out from the mud, “Don’t tell my mommy!”
Jason and Liz had a better day after that. He had proven he could save children.
The bumpy little road is still here and the low fences cordoning off acres. During the Great Northern Exhibition there are Ferris wheels and cotton candy stands. Massive bulls and prize chickens. A skinny man with long grey hair runs a squalid little petting corral. The skinny man sells green pellets in orange cones from a dented metal dish. He winks at the children who touch his short, hard-cheeked pigs. He grins at parents, a pot smoker’s grin, and refers to children as “the little ones …”
There is an orange-and-red SUV up ahead parked in the middle of the field. A man is sitting on a metal chest while another stands examining a large camera. Jason lowers his head and continues walking. There is smoke rising from a chimney near the base of Blue Mountain. Jason kicks something and stops. Four blue cylinders. Shotgun shells. They were supposed to have completely cleaned this ground. He bends down and picks them up. They must be new. Things that happened so long ago don’t glow in blue plastic. War crimes aren’t toadstools. Somebody shooting birds. Squirrels. Probably not fired into the backs of captives.
“Excuse me, sir?”
The two guys have run over to Jason. He drops the shells.
“Hi.”
“Hey, what brings you to the fairgrounds?”
Jason is not normal any more so he kills them.
« THE END »
Acknowledgements
Thanks to the folks at Anvil—Brian, Karen, & Aimee
Rachel let-the-right-one-in Jones
Griffin and Cami
lle for listening
TONY BURGESS is the author of The Hellmouths of Bewdley, Pontypool Changes Everything, Caesarea, and Fiction For Lovers. His writing has been featured in numerous anthologies and magazines across the country. Most recently, Tony was nominated for a Genie Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for Pontypool. He lives in Stayner, Ontario.