Forever, in Pieces

by Fawver, Kurt

  They stumbled from their beds to the door and pounded on it. I pushed past them and flung the door wide open. They lurched into the hallway and I followed. It was a reel from the most banal zombie film ever made.

  I followed them down the stairwell and all the way to the beach. How they knew where to go, I have no idea. When we reached the razor wire barricade, my family was allowed to shamble past, but I was forced to stay behind. I waved. I don’t know why. It felt right. This was their vacation, after all. I slumped on the road and contemplated shooting myself.

  Hours later, I trudged back to the motel, my footfalls sinking to hell and beyond.

  The next day, I returned to the beach. I pressed my face as close to the razors as possible, hoping to find my family among the growing wall of animated rot. One last parting glance before I left.

  Eventually, I spotted them. And I couldn’t look away. I sat on the blistering tarmac and watched them as they stood in the tinkling Crayola waves. I stayed through the afternoon, then through the evening. My eyes never wandered.

  Long after night had descended and the water’s glow overtook the moon, an off-duty guardsman approached me and asked about my story, about who I’d lost; he said his fiancée was out there, somewhere in the waves. He said he signed up for extra shifts just so he could try to “keep an eye on her.”

  In halting phrases and long pauses, I explained what had happened to Cara and the boys. He shook his head. He frowned at the right points in the story. He offered me a cigarette. We might’ve hugged one another or shaken hands if the pain surrounding us hadn’t been so thick.

  After I finished, we stood in silence for several minutes. Then he told me that a there was a rumor about a program being rushed into existence—a program for the living. He said the program would allow family and friends to obtain passes to the beach. We could pay our final respects to our loved ones. The rules of the program were rigid, though. If anyone waded into the water, he or she would not be able to return to the outside world. To reach for one final squeeze of a loved one’s hand was assured death, if not by the Tide, then by dehydration at gunpoint. I signed up as soon as I could. So did thousands of other men and women.

  Now here we are, watching the watchers. I don’t know how long it will be until Cara’s and Nick’s and Sammy’s legs decay and they invariably float away. Probably weeks, since insects have no interest in their bodies and even bacteria seems moribund in its progress. But it will happen, eventually. However long it takes, I’ll wait.

  I’ll wait and I’ll watch. I’ll bring a lunch, I’ll bring a dinner, and I’ll wait on the glittering white sand. I’ll watch for any change, any movement at all. If I see even a glimmer of life in Cara or Nick or Sam, I’ll wade in. And even though I’ll be more alone with every passing day, I’ll still wait, because whatever happened here is not yet finished. The waves remain astounding and the dead continue to trickle in. Whatever is happening here, I have to see it. I have to know why my family died. I have to see what they see. So I’ll wait. I have no other choice.

  [back to Table of Contents]

  For the Unhaunted

  Some people swore that the house was haunted. It had to be haunted. After all, every other house on the block was haunted. In fact, every other house in the Dixon’s entire neighborhood had at least one apparitional resident. Some were even blessed with two or three or more. There was no reason to assume that the Dixon’s house should be so different, so bereft of undead energy. When friends and family came to visit, they all claimed to hear a shuffling of disembodied feet in the attic or insisted that they’d seen the hazy form of a torso squirming about in the bathroom. They all wanted to believe that Kat and Ryan weren’t unable to call forth a being from the Other Side. But Kat and Ryan knew the truth: the house wasn’t haunted. It was just a series of well-polished rooms and elaborately furnished dreams.

  Try as they might, in eight years of marriage the Dixons hadn’t been able to channel a single specter. At first, they did what everyone else did: they burned incense and lit candles, chanted archaic incantations and hung crystals. They welcomed the past into their lives and opened themselves to a future set in nostalgia. But no spirits came. While their friends threw séance parties and compared the static burble of one another’s EVP recordings with delight, Kat and Ryan sat at home, staring into empty corners and darkened hallways.

  The couple began to consult psychic professionals and make appointments with the best mediums in the state; they sacrificed chickens and goats and prayed to skeletal gods. Still no spirits came. Still no howls of joyful madness echoed through their living room. Days grew longer; nights grew calmer. Ghosts were everywhere but in their home. So, Kat and Ryan decided to take more extreme measures. If they wanted a spirit of their own, they were going to have to force it inside.

  They robbed an unmarked grave and reburied the brittle corpse in their backyard; they invited an elderly homeless man to their house for dinner, then beat him to death and smeared his blood across their walls; they tried violent orgies and sex magicks. Nothing worked. A spirit would not come to them. They were barren. Then Kat became pregnant.

  While her stomach swelled, the Dixons considered the possibilities before them. To be sure, raising a child would be wonderful, but having a ghost was what made life worth living. The tingling excitement of revelation that arose from finding out who your spirit really was and the comfort of knowing that your spirit would never fully abandon you, that it would float by the side of your deathbed and would continue on indefinitely, carrying with it a memory of its time as your ghost: these were the things that gave meaning to existence. Everyone said as much, and Kat and Ryan believed. They wanted a specter desperately. They wanted to be haunted. And so, when the time came, they both gripped the handle of the butcher knife as it slid across their son’s soft, fatty, freshly-powdered throat. They watched, together, as bubbles and blood commingled on a sky-blue onesie. A tear rolled down Kat’s cheek. Ryan’s unused hand trembled.

  Surely, this would work. If a ghost would not come to them, they would make a ghost.

  As the spark in the baby’s eyes sputtered out, something in another room fell to the floor and shattered. Neither Kat nor Ryan noticed.

  Nothing was ever the same again after that.

  [back to Table of Contents]

  With a Ribbon on Top

  Salival strands drip from the crimson intruder’s lips, his putrefied breath—stale and sweet from years of collective evolution and individual decay—coming softly. Despite the crackling hearth burning gently in an adjacent room, the air in the house is crisp with anticipation.

  The intruder treads slowly, an ambiguous jingle of razors or bells or mystic chorales following in his wake. He surveys his surroundings, seeking the incomplete idol, the totem of all that is righteous and all that is corrupt. In this midnight hour, the intruder’s irises burn as atomic flames fueled by the conviction of a billion fragmented beliefs. He will find it. Nothing can hide from his gaze.

  Tearing a bulging malignancy from his shoulder, the intruder sighs and slides forth from the shadows with a mammoth stride. Twinkle and shine leads him on, a pleasant demon drifting under his frosted flesh. The wind howls and the children above twist, unsleeping; he smiles and whispers an assurance—“Soon, larvae, soon.”

  Without thump or thud, the intruder drops the velveteen tumor—his weight of the world—onto the floor and probes its depths for the millionth time this dark eve.

  A scroll, ancient and copied in the script of antediluvian gods, guides his compass, his compassion, and his vengeance; it floods his mind in an unbroken wash of love and malevolence. It ponders no question that cannot be adjudicated in black or white.

  From the depths of the gaping abyss, the crimson intruder pulls the rolled verdict, the karmic notation for all humanity. He reads and nods, satisfied to be an agent of both fang and flower at this quaint waystop on his interminable journey. It will be done. It is always done. There is no choice
in the matter.

  The beacon stands waiting before him, all sigils and signs. It screams with the lungs of the primeval cosmos. Horrifying psychic roars—the excited laughter of a billion children and the heartsick wailing of a billion more—transmit from its golden apex. This meaningless cacophony is the most profound sound in all existence. It is hope and it is despair; it is death and it is birth. It is all things in beautiful concordant opposition. It is beyond reason. He barely even notices anymore.

  More shade than man, the crimson intruder glides forward, his massive steps and behemoth stomp turned to guile somewhere in the soles of his calf-high leather boots that never creak or squeak or make any noise at all. He reaches the idol, the beacon, a point of reference among many in his immortal travels, and crouches. He has several options, all of which he contemplates while casually stroking his luminously unkempt beard, bleached not from age but from witnessing aeons of pedestrian depravity and unspeakable transgression against kindness. Great consideration must be taken. There can only be one proper treasure or one suitable damnation for every man and every woman, every boy and every girl.

  Again, he reaches into the abyss, laying gloved fingers on the intangible. He grazes depression and pushes aside romance, digging deeper. Joseph Drake, Christine Drake, Tyler Drake, Sophie Drake: three punishments and one reward.

  A sudden clatter startles the peaceful deliberation. The crimson intruder waits. Footfalls, perhaps descending a staircase. Clothes rustling. A yawn. Slowly, a boy stumbles around a wall in the hearth-warmed room. Thirteen. Maybe fourteen. Rodent teeth, bulbous nose. Long, wavy blonde hair. This is Tyler Drake, who intentionally broke a homosexual classmate’s wrist during a flag football game in phys ed, punches his eleven-year-old sister’s blossoming breasts, kills sparrows with a friend’s air rifle, and stole fifty dollars from his grandmother’s purse to buy a video game. This is Tyler Drake: a tender morsel for the hounds of hell.

  Cautiously slinking lower and lower, farther into shadow, the crimson intruder slips an onyx icepick-like object from between his belt and his abdomen’s heft. From certain angles, the strange object’s end is translucent, a spectral stiletto, a weapon of nothingness.

  Tyler shuffles closer and closer toward the idol, attempting stealth. He cranes his neck to glimpse what surprises may lie beneath its glistening lines and smiles in delight.

  Yes, come. Come into the darkness, the intruder thinks. Your present will arrive early, as you wish it, child. Your ignorant heart will soon beat with the cancer of knowing.

  Young Tyler Drake is oblivious to any abnormality in the scene before him. Heaped upon the floor are boxes and bags, shining, yearning for acceptance and admiration. “Fuck yeah,” he murmurs. All is as he expected. He moves closer still and bends to inspect one of the intricately decorated packages.

  This, this is the moment of viper strike. As Tyler leans over an enormous rectangular box, the crimson intruder wheels from his hidden position and, in one swift, flowing motion, thrusts the onyx shadow-pick into the rear of Tyler’s developing brain.

  An avalanche of understanding suddenly crushes the boy’s mind. In one instant, he realizes that the classmates he bullies—the “different” ones: the gay ones, the overweight ones, the poor ones, the learning disabled ones, and even the physically handicapped ones—are all gradually eroded by his insults and his punches. He feels the uncontrollable self-doubt they all feel for being themselves in the face of his insults, in the face of a culture of insult. Young Tyler Drake wants to live, but he wants to die. He wants to love, but he wants to hate. He has never known the price of existing outside his superior “normalcy” and blissful mediocrity until now. In one volcanic moment, he realizes that he is no better than anyone or anything else.

  Simultaneously, in a space beyond time and thought, Tyler witnesses his grandmother pleading with a pharmacist. “My pills,” she says “are for my blood pressure. I need them. I had the money for them, but I must have lost it. Can I please put them on a payment plan of some sort? Please don’t make me choose between food and my pills. Please, sir.”

  The pharmacist, granite-faced and vacant-eyed, simply replies “No” and calls out “Next, please.” Tyler’s grandmother turns, exits the pharmacy, and wanders to her car. Her heart crumbles inside Tyler’s own, as she comes to the realization that it was Tyler who stole her prescription money. Blood of her blood has turned. One lone tear, shed as much for her present as for her grandson’s future, runs through a wrinkle on her cheek. She doesn’t know why Tyler stole from her, but she loves him so fully, so graciously, so unselfishly, that she is willing to risk death for the next month so that he can engage in whatever shallow pleasures her cash may bring him.

  All this and much, much more Tyler knows in one brief cerebral flash, as if his mind has gone supernova. Suffering of unimaginable proportions is no longer a vague vision on the television or a blip on the internet. It is the acrid odor of incinerated flesh floating into Tyler’s nostrils on a breeze from Dachau; it is the interminable crack of a neck snapping in Tyler’s ears somewhere outside Jackson, Mississippi; it is the salty tang of a rapist’s semen mixing with the draining blood from his victim’s broken nose and congealing in a puddle in any back alleyway in the world.

  Tyler slowly slumps to his knees, tears dripping onto snowflakes and bows. He cries. He cries for all the people he has hurt and all the people he will hurt. He cries for himself and his gangrenous soul. He cries for the dead, for the living, for the unborn, for all those he will never harm. He cries because crying is the only reasonable answer to the question “Why?”

  The crimson intruder retracts the apparitional lancet. Behind the boy, he speaks, his voice a skeleton containing only the barest elements of tone or volume. Not sinewy. Not booming. Not a whisper or a rattle. Simply nothing. A pin-drop language.

  “You know, Tyler Drake. You now know. This is my gift. Understanding. Understanding of your nature. Understanding of all natures. The most terrible knowing. The greatest knowing.”

  Tyler turns toward the voice, his temples throbbing, his senses aflame. He wipes the blur from his eyes and beholds the crimson intruder.

  The intruder is a man, yet not a man. His face is grandfatherly, flowing ashen hair and a wiry beard framing a wrinkled pleasantness. His eyes, though, lack pupils. In place of black dots, there is only sweeping, luminous color which shifts dramatically between greens and oranges, reds and purples—the aurora borealis in miniature. He is clad in robes of the deepest crimson; they ripple of their own volition, a tide of plasmatic cloth enshrouding his slight form. A thick black belt holds the robes in place.

  The intruder smiles down at Tyler’s wanting gaze. His teeth are sparkling, translucent glaciers. His is a mouth full of crystal.

  Tyler tries to speak, but says nothing. Foam forms at the corners of his mouth.

  “Tomorrow,” the intruder utters, “you will not remember me nor will you remember this conversation, but the knowing—the knowing will remain. It may destroy you or it may shape you into something greater than a vicious beast of sinew and claw. It is my gift to you. Now leave me to my work and return to your bed, child.”

  The crimson intruder gestures to the stairway from which the boy descended. Tyler stares at the intruder’s hand, sheathed in a tattered glove. It holds six fingers.

  “Go. Go now.” The intruder points again.

  Gradually, Tyler rises and stumbles back to bed. His reality is tilted several degrees, his brain still spinning. He will not sleep tonight, but neither will he be awake. He will lie under covers, staring at a ceiling of dying clouds and rotting sky. He will wake from the daze tomorrow and he will laugh and excitement will pulse in his veins, but a haunting tingle—a unwanted certainty that his life is void—will also lodge in the base of his spine and cause his hands to tremble ever so slightly when he tears into the precious baubles his parents have seen fit to place in his lap.

  With Tyler gone, the crimson intruder completes his task under
the idol, touching several packages lightly, weaving chaos and order into cardboard and paper. The air unravels, twists, turns to static, then snaps back into focus.

  He has wasted time here. Unacceptable but inevitable. There are millions more yet to seed. Some will spy his stealth delivery. They will have to be dealt with, too. Tyler Drakes of all colors, all shapes, all sizes. Wishing he was able to rest, he shakes his head, slings his bag of potentiality over his shoulder, and evaporates into shadow.

  The next morning, amid rich cashmere sweaters and buzzing electronics, the remainder of the family tears open the unseen fabric that veils possibility from reality and partitions infinity into discrete worlds. They cannot help but do so. The crimson intruder has gifted each one a piece of the intangible realms. So when Joseph Drake—a bank manager who dispenses predatory loans with impunity—pulls the gilded wrapping from off a brand new GPS system, he also smilingly receives the Parkinson’s disease which will begin to manifest itself as uncontrollable hand tremors in only a few short weeks. When Christine Drake—a legal secretary who, within the past year alone, has had two affairs with men from her office—pops open a jewelry box wherein nestle two ruby and diamond earrings, she also gasps gleefully at an auto accident in May which will leave her with a punctured lung and a concussion. And when Sophie Drake—a nearly straight-A student who volunteers at an animal shelter with her school’s junior Key Club and constantly implores her parents to donate money to African relief programs—loosens the ribbon tied securely around a MP3 player, she also gapes in wonder at her first kiss, a sweetly hesitant burst of lightning. It is the kiss by which she will measure the strength of a heart’s beat and the heat of a moment’s passion; it will live in her until the day she draws her last breath.

  And meanwhile, between the unwrapping of fates and destinies, the crimson intruder peeks through the cracks of perception and laughs not with a deep bellied guffaw, but with a shrill sonic spike that reverberates at the base of two billion spines and is, almost without fail, mistaken for joy and excitement.