Acceptance.
It flew off his bony, raw and uneven shoulders, leaving a calm breeze. Where every living thought had been a nightmare of the past, there was now nothing left between him and the universe, except him, sitting in his den, contemplating the realm of myriad possibilities but too scared to take that step.
He was running out of time. He had to act now.
✦✦✦
“And I thought outside was bad,” Greek said, holding the bloody handkerchief to his nose.
“Let me guess,” Charity said. “It stinks. Am I right?” Greek grunted and moved on ahead.
The climb down had taken more than an hour, not because they were deep, but because the crater was a mess of old rubble and torn down buildings, unlikely hallways and rooms that somehow had been preserved intact, the walls covered with the pictures of the people buried somewhere deep below.
Crawling ahead of him through a tiny hole between slabs, Charity called out to him, flashing her torchlight in his direction. “Almost there baby bro!” she yelled before throwing a raspy fit of coughing and spitting a gob of phlegm her brother knew was thick with blood.
It wasn’t only the radiation getting worse: they too were.
“I don’t like this sis!” Greek yelled back. “This is bad. It’s been over an hour! We should go back!”
“Don’t be a pussy!” she yelled back at him. “I can see something!”
The tunnel was dark and the floor uneven and he couldn’t see his sister; but as he moved slowly forward, his visibility came back gradually, like the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel—a tiny red glow.
He crawled out behind her.
“I’m telling you…”
“Shhhh,” she said, nodding her head, a finger to her lips.
A man sat on the floor in the middle of rubble and waste. It must have been a man, or what was left of a man. It had the general shape of a man but bits like limbs were missing, and you could see through him in some parts. Although the room was dark, they could see the wall through his stomach.
There should have been blood everywhere, but instead, the man basked in red glow, seemingly bathed in the fluids leaking from the holes in his body and from his missing limbs. There were no feces, expectedly of one without limbs and consequently without movement. The room did not, as they expected, reek of sweat, piss and shit—the musky smell of a lion’s den. There was neither sound nor smell; just a man meditating, his skin bubbling and bursting pus.
“I told you…” Charity whispered.
He almost yelled in shock.
“What? This thing? He doesn’t have enough fingers to wipe his own ass. There are holes on him, sis. Holes!”
There was no sign from the meditating one.
“Ok,” Charity said. “Maybe it’s not the guy.” She coughed, rubbing her eyeball. “But I was right. There was something.”
“He’s glowing brighter, sis!”
She turned toward him, her right eye bouncing against her cheek, holding by a nerve to its socket.
✦✦✦
Me.
The universe,
Is ME.
✦✦✦
There were two intruders in his lair. A boy and a girl. Young. Foolish. Brave enough to have made their way down to him, but unbelievably foolish all the same.
He hadn’t felt his body in a year, but for the first time in his life he felt his soul. He felt his soul in the tiniest of places where it connected with his body, wrapped around his tendons, bit into a neuron in his brain, buried inside his liver; it was still thinking with his body, still denying its own potential, terrified of breaking free and rising.
It was up to him, not Ibrahima Ndiaye the man, but Ibrahima the god.
He could see them, their bodies dying so slowly they could see each other falling apart. There was love between them, not lust; these two were family and there was a bond and a purpose to them. They were foolish, yes, but foolish for a reason.
He didn’t want them to die, but they had made their choice. It was too late for them to turn back.
He only had little time left himself. The time was now.
He bundled the little energy left in him. His heart was empty of pain, his mind free of thought, and his body empty of soul.
He let himself float as the young boy who’d been hit by lightning had let himself go. The boy was young enough to not know fear, and fearless enough to embrace change.
“I’m sorry,” he murmured to the two siblings, but only in his mind, for he had no tongue to speak.
It was time to go.
✦✦✦
“Fuck,” Greek said gesturing towards his cheek. “Your eye, it, it…oh sis…”
She reached to her cheek, holding her eyeball in the palm of her hand.
“Sis…I told you… Sis…”
She pressed her hand against his cheek, and when she removed it, it was covered in blood leaking from his ears and nose.
She shook her head, pointing to the man in the middle of the room. “I don’t think it matters anymore,” she whispered.
The man had not moved, and perhaps couldn’t move anymore, but kept glowing brighter. The faint red light now blazed a violent crimson, radiating heat, burning hotter second after second, the skin on his bones melting off until the bones were completely bare. From his body seemed to emerge something vaguely shaped like him but translucid, as if his shadow had taken on the life he had left.
Charity’s eyes fell out of her skull and Greek’s eardrums exploded, but the man glowed brighter still, the red tide washing over them, the raging heat barely registering against their frayed nerves. They grabbed each other’s hand, pulled each other close, their flesh melting into each other, and a voice rang in their heads: I am sorry.
The man glowed with the strength of a dying star and exploded in one final burst of radiation, leaving his shell intact, but taking them away with it.
✦✦✦
Ibrahima floated in the immensity of space, struggling to keep himself together. A ball of blue and green and brown shone in the distance, and glowing all around like diamonds were hundreds of mining satellites, so small from where he swam in the void that they seemed like mere pinpoints, though each of them was deadlier than an army.
He felt himself dissolving, losing the solidity he had felt in his flesh and in his soul. There had to be something he could hold on to, something he could anchor himself to. There was yet one last thing to do, he remembered.
The mandrill. He remembered its jaw etched in energy and the primal rage of its paws. It couldn’t let go of itself, not with all that rage; it was ready to bite and tear apart friend or foe alike. The beam had consumed the beast after all.
But he didn’t have to.
There was a beauty in retaining part of oneself. His former self sat abandoned in the rubble, amid thirty-four million square kilometers of broken earth, of ancient knowledge, of bones buried in the bedrock. He was but an empty husk; he couldn’t recognize in himself the young boy he’d been, the boy who’d been content with the simplest things.
He would have to let go of himself, but not just yet.
He called out and let himself expand, feeling himself grow thin, almost dissolving into the void. And gathered around him were the tiniest of particles, fragments of fragments of possibilities, worlds that had flirted with existence, all drawn from the very edges of his immortality.
✦✦✦
He snapped his fingers and the pieces came together, the one last thing he still held on to. His middle finger struck a chord. A polyharmony in B minor rang from a bass of space dust, drawing an undulating ♫ on the void from a tense string.
The sun shone inside his iris, a nebula tickled his inner ear, and each satellite mining Africa from space sparkled around the blue pebble where he had abandoned his body.
He poured a planet’s energy into the instrument, the sound box expanding, his fingers drumming
the thick chords with the fury of a mad pianist. The satellites winked out as giant ♬♫♩♪ hammered them in waves, destroying cities across the planet. Somewhere, his body died. His fingers merged with the chords till he and the bull fiddle were one vibration, and he was everywhere at once, bouncing between satellites until the drifting debris circled the earth in a ring. He inhaled, or rather somewhere in the vastness of space a galaxy exploded. He let his fingers rest. Light years away the bass line birthed a star.
He reached out a hand and grabbed the strange world and smiled, rolling it between his fingers.
His grin lingered as he dangled the insignificant planet, tempted to crush it. Then through a black hole somewhere in infinity, something glowed, something new, and he turned his eye away from Earth forever.
THRESHER OF MEN
MICHAEL BOATMAN
Officer Greg Fitzsimmons was working up the nerve to tell the chief to kiss his hairy white ass when Black Edie attacked. Six months of modified duty with the Lincolndale P.D.’s traffic unit had nearly drained him of the will to breathe, and since no one who knew him believed he would ever make Detective, Fitzsimmons figured real estate offered him a brighter future.
He was scrolling through some listings on his iPhone when he looked up to see Black Edie’s silver Mercedes Benz bearing down on him.
“Shit!”
The old tank swerved to the left and the driver’s side mirror smacked Fitzsim-mons’s right wrist and sent his iPhone flying.
“Owww!” Fitzsimmons yelped. “Hey!”
The silver Mercedes rolled over his phone and continued along Lincoln Avenue at a stately twelve miles per hour.
Fitzsimmons jumped on his Harley and gave pursuit. He hit his lights and siren and punched the public address button on his right handlebar.
“Pull over,” he roared via his helmet microphone.
The silver Benz crossed two lanes and jumped the curb in front of Mel’s All American Barbershop. Fitzsimmons thought the old bat was going to plow through Mel’s front window until the sedan swooped to the left and bounced back onto the street. It trundled along with its right- side wheels up on the curb, the busted exhaust pipe striking sparks. It swerved to avoid a fire hydrant and rammed into the street-light at the corner of Lincoln and Main.
“Jeee-sus fuck,” Fitzsimmons snarled, envisioning the shit-ton of paperwork he’d just inherited.
The old Mercedes had come to rest in front of the newer downtown Starbucks. A gaggle of looky-loos was already buzzing around the scene as Fitzsimmons rolled up to the intersection. He reckoned they were mostly hipsters and retirees. Who else had enough free time to buy gourmet Crap-in-a-Cup at ten o’clock on a Tuesday morning?
Fitzsimmons massaged his throbbing wrist as he dismounted.
“Lincolndale Police!” he barked. “Clear a path!”
To Fitzsimmons’ savage delight, even the geeks and trannies that drank iced Senegalese butt-milk acknowledged his authority and let him through.
A jet of steam was whistling up from beneath the Benz’s crumpled hood. The murdered streetlight had snapped in half, and now its shattered lamp swung like a lynched pervert, mere inches above the Benz’s roof. As he shouldered his way through the crowd, Fitzsimmons mentally counted the citations:
Failure to Yield to a goddamn emergency vehicle. Destruction of goddamn City Property. Reckless frickin’ goddamn Endangerment…
“Goddammit, lady! You nearly killed me!”
Black Edie was trying to restart the Benz. The old hermit kept turning the key and stomping on the gas pedal so hard she was bouncing on the driver’s seat. By way of a reply, the car she’d owned since Jesus was a toddler wheezed, smoked… and died.
The look of dazed resignation on Black Edie’s face infuriated Fitzsimmons even more.
Black Edie (for that was what everyone on the right side of the tracks called Lincolndale’s only African-American librarian) wasn’t just old; she was practically prehistoric. And as far as the Lincolndale Illinois P.D. was concerned, Edith Frazier was a royal pain in the ass. She’d harassed the chief about her asshole nephew every day since the shooting.
“Hell,” Chief Krieger always said after one of her daily rants. “Maybe if she’d raised him right, the stupid son-of a bitch would still be alive.”
That one always got a laugh out of the fellas.
Except for Driscoll, Fitzsimmons thought. For some reason, Fitzsimmons’ former partner had refused to lighten up about Roosevelt Frazier. But since Danny Driscoll was the one who’d shot him, Fitzsimmons and the other guys usually just let him sulk.
Fitzsimmons wasn’t laughing now, because his wrist hurt like a bastard. And why did everything smell like…
“Hey,” Fitzsimmons barked, rapping on the crumpled hood with his nightstick. “What the hell’s your problem?”
Black Edie squinted up at him. In the glare from the summer sun she looked as if she’d just been caught sleepwalking.
“Blood on these streets,” she muttered. “Too much blood for such a small town.” Then she tried to start the car again.
Great, Fitzsimmons thought. Probably got Alzheimer’s.
“Oh, I remember you,” Black Edie said. “Master Gregory Fitzsimmons: The rambunctious one.”
Fitzsimmons grimaced. He hated Edith Frazier. As far as he could remember, she was the only black who’d ever been allowed to work at the public library. Apparently, she was the only person, black or white, who’d ever wanted the job.
Black Edie was infamous for her collection of hideous pantsuits. Each one was like an abortion for the eyes, and they came in a variety of cornea-blasting colors. For decades, Lincolndale’s kids had made naming each pantsuit a rite of passage. There were doozies from Fitzsimmons’ time, like “The Booger-Green Ass-Hammock”, or “The Camel Toe Express.” Fitzsimmons’ own nephew, Chase, had come up with last year’s winner; “The Cat-piss Yellow Monkeynut Pimpstriper.” The one she was wearing now.
But what really annoyed Fitzsimmons was the way Black Edie talked. She had this grandiose way of speaking, like she thought she was better than all the white folks in Lincolndale. She’d even had the nerve to correct his English once. And in front of Jenny Gorlick of all people.
Civilized people don’t say, “ain’t,” Master Fitzsimmons.
Now here he was, twenty-five years later, remembering the hot flush that had raced up the back of his neck. Jenny Gorlick had treated him like he was a ree-tard for the rest of freshman year.
Bet you weren’t so snooty when they scraped ol’ Roosevelt’s brains off the sidewalk, bitch. Bet you hollered like a regular old…
“Dan Driscoll knew my Roosevelt,” Black Edie said. “All you boys played football at the high school.”
“Look, lady,” Fitzsimmons said. “I’m only gonna say this…”
“Ms. Frazier, young man,” the old woman snapped, cutting him off mid-sentence. “Ms. Frazier.”
Fitzsimmons itched to reach through the window and drag her scrawny ass out of the car, but then he remembered all the “citizen journalists” surrounding them, a virtual army of assholes just waiting to whip out their smartphones and push “Record.”
“I heard he returned to full-time duty,” Black Edie said. “My Roosevelt’s been dead for two years, but Dan Driscoll gets to act like nothing ever happened.”
“Take it up with the chief,” Fitzsimmons snarled. “Right now we need to get this piece of shit off… ah…”
There it was again: the odor of gasoline, heavier now that he was close enough to reach for the door handle, the fumes so strong they pricked at his sinuses.
What the hell?
The smell was coming from inside the car.
Fitzsimmons saw them then: Six red five- gallon plastic containers lay in puddles on the back seats. Two overturned containers lay next to Black Edie on the soaked passenger seat. Each of the containers was open. Someone had removed the yellow safety caps.
&n
bsp; Fitzsimmons heard a sound like the edge of a quarter scraped across the teeth of a tiny steel comb.
“It’s my birthday, Gregory,” Black Edie said. “I turned eighty-five today.” The inside of the car was soaked with gasoline.
“Hey now,” Fitzsimmons said. “What the hell…?”
“Folks my age get lonely,” Black Edie said. “Roosevelt and I were the last of the Illinois Fraziers. After he was murdered, I travelled along strange byways seeking a worthy champion. Then… I found her.” The old woman chuckled. “On the internet.”
“Okay, lady,” Fitzsimmons said. The fumes were giving him a headache. His wrist hurt and he needed to take a piss. “Gonna need you to exit the vehicle.”
“Turns out she’s an old family acquaintance,” Black Edie continued. “There were certain arrangements… delicate preparations… and then…last night… she came to me.”
“Lady,” Fitzsimmons growled. “You got gas all over the place!”
“She made me an offer, Gregory. In exchange for a small token, a leap of faith, she promised me the answers I’d sought for so long.”
Fitzsimmons heard that tiny, metallic sound again.
Clink.
“‘Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord,’” Black Edie said. “That’s from Romans, Gregory. Chapter 12 verse 19.”
“Not gonna ask you again, lady,” Fitzsimmons said. ”Step out of the car. Now.”
“Your God demands our forgiveness, yes?” Black Edie said. “I certainly wouldn’t have survived this long without that.”
Like a magician performing a coin trick, Black Edie opened her right hand. When Fitzsimmons saw what she was holding he grabbed for his sidearm, only to remember, too late, that he’d surrendered it during the Frazier investigation.
“My savior has a long memory, Gregory. Longer than King James ever dreamed. And she’s strong. She doesn’t have to forgive.”
With a flick of her wrist, the librarian opened the Zippo lighter… “Vengeance is hers, boy. Kisazi forgives nothing.”
Dominion Page 28
