I storm out of the room and down the hall and kick down my bedroom door. Natasha’s drugged and slow on the bed and she’s looking up at the barrel of the shotgun through half-moon eyelids, mocking me.
“You need to get out,” I say, pointing the shotgun at her, stars growing evermore present in the universe as they spill out of my mouth, nose, and ears.
“What? Jacky, what?” she says, putting a hand to her eyes as if trying to shade her sight from the light, even though we’re masked in growing shadows.
Except, there’s a supernova growing inside of me, and it’s bright as fuck.
I’m only part of the expanding universe. I’m only one of many who has had his brains stirred by God’s burning fingers.
“You need to get out, Karen. Now!” I yell and she flinches right before her head explodes beneath me.
I storm out of my bedroom, breathing stardust, covered in blood and lost love.
I pace around the house for hours and swat at stars, flies, and buzzing beetles until the sun comes up. I pace around the house inspecting every single room as if I’m going to find more people, like Natasha and Harold, hiding out in it, tucked away behind the washing machine, beneath the refrigerator, in the broom closet. I’ve turned over most of the furniture and, in a rage, swept everything out of all cupboards to ensure no one else besides God was in this house.
Every once in a while I scream and cackle and fire off a round into the dark, leaving a seemingly random but completely ordered spray of buckshot in the walls: star charts.
Wide open eyes, I crawl over to them and name their constellations: Karen, Samuel, Mom, Dad, Harold, Natasha, Mrs. Cardenas. I lap at the hot pellets dimpling the walls with my tongue and laugh and tell them they’re living forever because God said so. Living forever like Cassiopeia and Orion.
I fire off more rounds just to prove the point.
BANG BANG BANG!
More shots! I thought I saw a bear! A squirrel! A bull made of stars!
BANG BANG BANG!
Lights are going out, the house is creaking and croaking and crumbling. My black hole eyes are sucking all the matter away into nothingness and the house is falling down around me. Water and blood spews from the walls and floors.
Sirens surround and orbit the house. It’s the sound of solar winds and moons singing. I once heard Saturn make these sounds, despite the vacuum of space. Despite the vacuum of space one can still find ways to sing.
I sing: You’re lost, little girl, you’re lost, tell me who are you? I think that you know what to do.
Sirens surround the house and God is bellowing, yelling for me to come out. She shakes the house like the Big Bad Wolf. She’s going to blow this house down.
“No you’re not No you’re not No you’re not,” I mutter, crouching now in the shower of the third floor guest bathroom where Karen once wiped me clean. “No you’re not,” I say, loading the shotgun, naked, the water from the shower rushing over me, scalding me, turning my skin red and smoking.
I’m only one puzzle piece of the primordial ooze.
I’m a puddle of life—the beginning of all life.
The sirens are slowing now and the voices are fewer.
I wrap my lips around the shotgun, everything around me being sucked into my eyes and sent down the wormhole.
Wormhole! Rabbit hole! Bear hole!
I’m late I’m late I’m late for a very important date!
The house shakes like thunder.
Once.
Twice.
I burn. Taste metal.
I’m only part of the expanding universe.
My eyes are black holes.
My brain is a wormhole.
Behind my head, right at the back of my head now, in the space just between the tiled bathroom wall and my head—there’s another ripple in reality. A dark nothingness. Just at the back of my head. Wavering.
The water keeps falling into my wide open eyes which I couldn’t shut or squint half-closed even if I wanted to.
I simply lack the will to close them.
I let the world die in them.
I let the world flatten, and collapse, and cease to be as it passes the event horizon of my eyes.
I put my finger around the trigger and remind myself that there are no bears in Illinois and that this is Karen’s gun. Karen’s and my dad’s.
My head jerks back into the black, pixelated ripple in reality…
and I’m crawling through the dirt, on my belly like a rattlesnake, my socks full of burrs and my face full of dust. In the distance, on the horizon, I swear I see crystal palaces, tall towers of glowing glass, wavering in the daylight. Inside them, I know just what it’ll be like: white light, so bright, there’s nothing else. In it, somehow, you’ll know you’re one with everything, but still yourself. In it, you’ll be whole, and perfect. Pure brilliance. In that blinding white light, you’ll be nothing, and everything all at once. You’ll be mom, dad, Karen, Harold, Natasha, and everyone else. You crawl through the dust, clawing thistles in your palms while sand turns to glass beneath your fingernails. On the horizon, starbursts shoot up high from the ground, in broad daylight, so bright the distance doesn’t even matter. You crawl, digging away at the dust, the sand. You crawl and scrape and crawl, burrs in your socks, your teeth turning to rot. You crawl and dig and watch the light dim. You swallow sweat, tears, just to stay awake. The light from those palaces dims and you crawl. It dims and the light, like hands stretching out in every direction, up into the sky, shrinks back toward itself and the earth. You crawl and you dig and you swallow thistles and you just keep crawling, on hands and knees, on your belly, anything it takes. You crawl toward that dimming light. And then you crawl, limbless, into the darkness.
Logan Ryan Smith writes unclassifiable fiction that fits somewhere in between dark fantasy, transgressive, and literary, all with a dark comedy underbelly and lyrical leaning. His other book of fiction, Enjoy Me (Transmission Press, 2015), is a collection of interconnected stories all told from the main character’s POV. Though focusing exclusively on fiction now, his poetry books include The Singers & The Notes (Dusie Press, 2007), Stupid Birds (Transmission Press, 2007), and, more recently, Bug House (Mission Cleaners Books, 2013)—a narrative series of poems that shares many of the same fantastical and thematic elements of his fiction. His stories have appeared in Hobart Journal, Meat for Tea: The Valley Review, and Great Lakes Review, which nominated his story “Bret Easton Ellis” for a Pushcart Prize. Logan currently lives in Chicago.
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