Adventures of Jacko the Conjurer

by Jamie Ott

  Exasperated, he turned back to the news cast. A woman was recorded as she was struck by lightning; a hundred people were huddled under a bridge to shield themselves from acid rain; cars were hanging off the edge of a freeway, its inhabitants screaming.

  He turned back to Gaia, but she looked strange, vacant.

  “Hello! Are you still with me?”

  Gaia was still as a stone statue. Jacko knew that she was no longer there, or she didn’t wish to continue their conversation. He wasn’t done, though, because he wanted answers.

  Jacko walked up to the statue and touched it, but it did not move. “Where did you go?”

  He walked around the room and then he got angry and made to rush Gaia, but as he was about to collide with the statue, he was flipped into the street of his hometown.

  The town was red and yellow skied. Gray ash rained down and a crack split the street in half.

  He jerked his head as a bolt of lightning blasted down, blowing a building apart only a few hundred feet to his right. Jacko recognized where he was, the center of town where the mall used to be. His eyes bugged out as he looked across the street to where there was a mountainous pile of rubble. People ran up and down the street, crying.

  Jacko was shocked. The world turned apocalyptic in just the few hours he’d slept. He knew he couldn’t control the gods, but he still felt somewhat responsible for what was happening to the world.

  Still, he didn’t have time for contemplation, so he ran home. When he got there, and saw the house he once hated, his breath abated. Guilt returned, full flow. The house had been blown to bits, as had nearly every other home on the block.

  Unable to hold back grief he felt, tears welled up behind his eyes. A burned out crisp, the house had become; even the cement steps had been blown to a pile of rocks, through which, Jacko had to gingerly walk to keep his balance.

  Inside, the wall on the opposite side of the living room laid all over the floor, and rubble covered nearly every inch of the floor.

  The only thing that was wholly untouched was the couch. From it, streamed a long, purple blanket with feet dangling over the arm; the feet were blue tinged.

  Jacko became faint, at the sight of the feet. He fell to his knees as he thought the feet might be his father’s, and that his father might be dead. Breathing hard, he forced himself to stand, he walked slowly to the other side of the couch, but what he saw he was not prepared for.

  It took a moment to set in: shock. The face was not his father’s, nor was it Anna’s. What was she doing there? Had she come to find him?

  His mouth opened in silent scream as he saw Sissy lying there on the couch.

  He screamed and he screamed her name. Shakily, he reached out his hand to shut her eyes; they were stiff with rigor mortis, and slimy with decomposition.

  “Sissy!” he cried.

  Jacko held her, not caring that she was dead. “What happened to you? What are are you doing here?”

  He pulled back the purple blanket and saw a huge gap charred into her chest: something or someone had obliterated her insides, like a bolt of antimatter, he thought: the Titans.

  The sight sickened him; he retched.

  A crack ripped through the sky: thunder and lightning, and rain. He jerked his head upward to look through the hole in the room above, and in the roof.

  Carefully, he set Sissy down and walked up the steps, or what remained of them. At the top, he had to crawl over the railing because the steps were missing.

  “Dad?”

  He skipped over a large hole in the hallway. Past his room, he looked inside to see that everything was rubble, too. His father’s room was right there.

  Fear rose up inside him and his throat swelled. When he approached where the door to his father’s room once was, he saw another huge gap in the floor, but this one he couldn’t jump over. He didn’t need to, though, because his father lay in the corner of the room. Half of his face was bandaged and his eyes were still and glassed over. “No!” yelled Jacko who forgot about the hole, and fell through to the bottom of the floor.

  The fall would have hurt, had he not been so upset. He laid face down on the floor and cried.

  Jacko’s head got really hot and vibrations rumbled through his body. He screamed, “LUUUUUCEEEEEEEEM!!!” and his body lifted off the ground. Jacko was too bereaved to realize that he’d burst through the ceiling and was, now, moving upward and through the sky. His rage burned like nuclear fission.

  “LUUUUCEEEEEEM!” he flew upright and threw the clouds.

 

  No Where to Go