Pulling Teeth

by Alan Ryker

  My next physical sensation was of stumbling through furrowed fields, cutting a hand on spears of stubble jutting cruel and dry from the dark earth. My other hand propelled me through the darkness. Outthrust into the night, it dragged me along, confused, rolling, tripping.

  As I regained orientation, I realized that I was being dragged, and dug my heels into the clodded ground.

  "We have to keep going. I think they're following us. We need to get to the creek; we can hide in the trees." My brother yanked my arm hard, in case his words hadn't convinced me, but I didn't move.

  "What?" My voice sounded far away, as if it originated from outside my head. We gasped for breath, and he spoke between gulping inhalations.

  "I can't explain it to you now. We need to make it to cover. Please, just follow me."

  I nodded, and we ran through the night, each by our own power.

  When we finally reached the shelter of the small woods growing along the creek, after we determined we hadn't been followed, my brother explained what had happened, and I found that what little had remained of my ethereal old life blew away that night as smoke on an autumn breeze.

  He'd tried to wrestle the comic away from me. He said I fought like an animal. The long ragged marks down his bruised face, and the familiar crooked dental impression on his wrist that I saw the next morning were testaments to that. He said that after the fragile old pages of my comic had been torn to shreds in our fight, he had managed to choke me out and carry me into the house. Our parents came in and checked on me, but he stayed to watch over me as my father tended to the fire and my mother finished her interrupted evening chores.

  "The fire had grown huge. I think that may have attracted them. Either that, or the books called them." I had passed from unconsciousness into restless sleep shortly before a silent mob from the nearby one-traffic-light town attacked. Our parents died, but he refused to say more than that. In the cold night, lying back to back, I felt his sobs, and I didn't ask him again.

  He managed to escape out the bedroom window with me, one shotgun, a pocketful of shells, and nothing else.

  We stayed by the creek all the next day, trying to decide what to do. We couldn't stay there. We'd starve. The orange sky over our house glowed too brightly to be the book fire, and for too long. Though we didn't speak it aloud, we knew nothing remained to go home to. We decided to go instead to a neighbor's house between where we'd hidden and town. We didn't know them, had never spoken to them, but we could find food and decide what to do next.

  "What did the inside of the comic say?" my brother asked.

  "I don't think I got very far. It said that the new words made themselves from nothing. It didn't say that exactly. I can't remember what it said exactly. You know how when you read, you hear the words in your head, and you see the images, at the same time?" He nodded.

  "There were only pictures. The words whispered and mumbled, making images, but I couldn't understand the words themselves. Like the way the titles of the books were the same they'd always been, but they were also The New Words."

  "I knew there was something wrong with that." We sat in silence for some time before he spoke again. "How did it feel, when the words took over?"

  "At first, I wanted to open a book. My hands and arms and eyes wanted to. But once it was open, and I read what it said, it was like a movie played on the screen of my mind and I couldn't stop it, and the words replaced parts of me, would have erased me completely if you hadn't stopped them.

  "I feel like an ant that lived its entire life in an ant farm, and then it gets dumped out on the table to see that the world it thought it knew, the safe and dangerous everything world it thought was it, you know, was existence, it was just a tiny safe space in a dark, vast, empty universe. The empty is hostile, and huge. And the wall of the ant farm was glass the whole time. I could have seen out before, but I never did. I guess no one did. But now, even though you pulled me back, I can't stop seeing through the glass wall to the emptiness outside, and I don't think the glass wall is going to hold much longer. The old words sheltered us. The new words won't. They're breaking the wall. They're the nothing outside."

  We slept, and when night fully descended, as I shuddered at the blackness beyond the stars, we made our way to the gravel road and then towards the first house. Or rather, the first charred ruin.

  "They're killing everyone who's not with them," my brother said.

  "I don't think so. I think everyone is with them. I think they're burning as they leave. They don't want to leave anything behind for the few who haven't read the new words, and they're driving us into town. We'll starve to death if we don't walk right into the belly of the beast."

  We kept going, taking a back way into town, walking down dirt roads for as long as we could, then crossing fields and finally back yards. Every house we passed was a smoldering pile of rubble.

  There was nothing we could do but continue on. Even as civilization collapsed around us, I'd eaten every day. After one day without food and one night of sleeping on the warmth-drinking ground, weariness sapped my strength until I could barely see straight, and my bones and muscles ached. So we walked on. We lived about ten miles outside of town.

  Decades ago, the town was built up around a railroad stop. This is an old story that everyone from the sticks knows. Trucking wiped out the rail. Goods and money stopped flowing through. Jobs went away. So the town movie theater closed, and the hotel, and finally the grocery store and the restaurants. There was one stop light, at the intersection with the gas station. The town could support no more than this. Most of the young people left for the city. The few who remained commuted. Mostly, old retired farmers lingered like the ghosts of a past century, haunting their own homes and churches, watching their town dry up and blow away, person by person.

  So the town was much larger than it need be, since most of the razed buildings were long abandoned. Smoking piles of ash replaced the dilapidated homes. A cloud hung low overhead, acrid and choking. I led us through the dark, and as we jogged through unfenced yards in which trees blocked the moon, I nearly strangled myself several times on clotheslines. I thought I heard my brother almost laugh.

  The new words believed in total war. We found no refuge, and would find no rest. We could see the silhouette of Main Street from blocks away, blacker than the smoke-filled night sky, because every house and wooden structure between us and it had been burned down. Since Main Street alone remained standing, we went in that direction. Without food, we weren't going to have the energy to go anywhere else. Not that I thought there was any place left to go. We could walk out into a field, lay down, and die, or we could head for Main Street. He didn't say anything, but from his expression, I don't believe my brother thought we would see many more days either way.

  The shops on main street were built of stone. The stone shells remained, hollowed out by flame. Seeing this, I felt a spark of hope. Maybe they burned themselves alive. Maybe my brother and I could hunt and garden and eke out a living, and maybe others made it through, like we had. Maybe there were others like my brother, who had been smart enough to not trust the new words as they had the old, and hadn't opened a book. We could burn every book and magazine and billboard and school and live, maybe not as before, but live.

  And then I saw the community center, its roof and door intact. My brother jogged towards it, and with only a moment's hesitation, I joined him.

  He crouched before the metal door and put his ear against it, then looked at me and shook his head. Peering into one of the high windows, I could see nothing but my own reflection, until I put a hand up to the glass to block the light of the moon. In the darkness nothing moved, and I almost began to feel relief, when my eyes adjusted to the gloom. Row after row of people materialized, seated in metal folding chairs, all faced forward. No one stood at the front, on the stage where Santa Claus sat and students performed pageants. Instead, the people looked down at books lying open in their laps. Hundreds of people, mostly elderly, comp
letely motionless. They were all turned slightly away from me, so when the face of one small child, too young to possibly know how to read the book he held, turned from The New Words and looked up at me, the cold white moonlight illuminating his small round face, my heart pounded so hard I gasped for air. It only had time for one beat before every person in the room turned towards me as one, and then rose and ran for the door.

  "They saw me! Run! The whole county's in there." I ran over to join my brother. He quickly tossed me the shotgun and grabbed the door knob. The door opened inward, so the mob couldn't push against it to force it open with numbers. Until the door opened enough for them to get their fingers in the crack, only one person at a time could hold the knob and pull. As long as he could keep it completely shut, they couldn't get through. He was very large, and held the door shut easily against the mob as I took extra shells from the coat pocket he indicated.

  "What are you doing?" I asked. "We have to run."

  "We can't outrun everyone. Go. They have to go around to the other door. You can get away."

  "We have to go together. What will I—"

  "Go!"

  So I ran. I left my brother there to die, to be beaten to death by a mob of cored out husks filled with the words from the nothing beyond the glass. I didn't turn back.

  But I have nowhere to go. I sit in the dark, in the ashes that fill this one-time auto shop, counting my shells with my fingers over and over. My family and the old world are dead. No one cares if I get vengeance. And vengeance against what? There are no people left, only rinds bloated with whispering nothing. They're already dead, and the death of their bodies won't matter to the new words. It will only hasten this tiny speck of a planet to their desired end, if they do desire. So it's for myself that I'll take as many of them as I can, and I count my shells to be certain of how many I can kill and still have one left. I could head into the fields and wander until I die, or I could end it now, but I think this will be better.

  I never believed I had a soul, but now I wonder if when I die, I'll be drawn into the nothing from whence the new words spoke themselves into nonexistence, if I'll hear their endless, hollow whispers for eternity. Even after all they've done, a part of me, a part that the words wrote over and replaced, a part that I feel growing, wants me to open a book and let them in. My last wish is that I end when the shot goes through my brain.

  BIRTH AND DEATH

  Jake's wife refused to see a doctor about her depression. She denied that she was depressed. In fact, she sometimes made fun of Jake for having a therapist and taking an antidepressant. Jake knew the signs of depression. Susan slept too much, didn't eat enough, and was generally a bitch. So Jake convinced his doctor that he needed his dose of Effexor increased from 75mg to 150mg, and he crushed up half and put it into her coffee every morning. He thought it was working. She seemed like less of a bitch.

  The day was dreary and drizzly. He normally liked Saturdays like that, but Michael had a soccer game, and unless it started really raining he'd shortly be spending two hours sitting in a fine mist that would seek out and saturate every dry spot on his body. But it was fun watching Michael run up and down the field, and Michael had a great time, so it was worth it. That's what therapy and Effexor had done for him. He wouldn't have seen it like that a couple of years earlier.

  They'd redone the kitchen in yellow pine. It set a nice contrast with the gloom outside the sliding door as the brightness of the wood fought the gray of the dead light. Michael chopped his pill into two, crushed up one half and stirred it with sugar into a big mug of coffee. He took it up to Susan. It had become their morning ritual. She thought he was just being nice.

  "Honey, here's your coffee."

  She opened one eye, her face still buried in her pillow, and nodded. He sat the mug on the nightstand and went back downstairs.

  Michael had gotten dressed and made his way down to the kitchen for breakfast. He was a morning person and had already been up watching cartoons for hours in his pajamas. Now he stood in front of the sliding glass door in shorts and a green shirt, the front emblazoned with a white soccer ball, the back with "Nelson Hardware." He'd also managed to get his shin guards on by himself.

  "Dad, look. It's a deer." He pointed out into the yard through the sliding glass door. Jake looked out.

  A doe paced in place just inside the tree line at the back of their yard. The property's back border was a small creek with about fifteen yards of trees on either side. The illusion of being close to nature was what had drawn Jake and Susan to the place initially. Perhaps it wasn't just an illusion.

  "Is that a boy or girl?" Michael asked.

  "I think it's a girl. A doe. Do you know what a boy deer is called?" Michael shook his head. "A buck."

  "Like a dollar."

  "Yeah, I guess so." Jake smiled. He was always amused by the associations Michael made about things he'd long taken for granted.

  The doe's belly was swollen, and when she stood at the correct angle, he could see a hoof sticking out from under her tail. That must be why she was acting so strangely. She was giving birth. Jake wondered if he should divert Michael back to the television until it was time to leave. They'd had a starter birds-and-bees talk, but Jake didn't know if either of them was ready for this. He decided it was a rare learning opportunity.

  "I think she's having a baby," Jake said.

  "Is that what's hanging out of her butt?"

  "Her vagina. Yes."

  "Wow. Maybe we should stay home and watch this," Michael said, covertly glancing at Jake.

  "I don't think so, buddy. But we can watch right now. If it starts to bother you, we can go watch television for a little while instead. Isn't Looney Tunes on?"

  "Yeah, but this is better."

  "Okay, but you're going to eat a breakfast bar." Jake went and got two out of the cupboard, opened both, and handed one to Michael. Michael took a bite and chewed absentmindedly.

  Michael always tried to find a way to get out of soccer games. Jake could see traits of his own in Michael that he wished weren't there, like anxiety. Once Michael got used to the practices he enjoyed them, but he never got used to games. He tried every tactic possible to stay home. He'd claimed everything from a stomach ache to PMS, which he must have gotten from a sitcom.

  Jake didn't know much about deer. From its white tail, he assumed it was a white-tailed deer. It paced in place, walked back and forth in small circuits, stood up and lay down. He supposed that was all normal behavior, though he wondered why it had wandered out of the trees.

  "It's raining a little. Go get your jacket on and I'll be right down." Jake went upstairs. Susan's face was still buried in her pillow.

  "Susan. Susan. Susan. Susan." She opened an eye. "Michael and I are leaving for his game. I just wanted to tell you that there's a doe in the backyard giving birth."

  Her eyes opened. She propped herself up on an elbow. "Really? A deer giving birth?"

  "In the backyard. It must have walked along the creek."

  "What a strange way to wake up. Tell Michael good luck for me." She took a drink of coffee. It must have been getting cold, but she didn't seem to mind.

  It made Jake tired just watching Michael run up and down the field. He wondered if he'd ever had that sort of energy. Sitting in the metal bleachers, he tried to lose his thoughts in the bustle of children and the gentle stippling taps of drizzle on his hooded rain jacket, but Bobby Macallister wouldn't let him. Bobby and Michael were on the same team, but you wouldn't know it from the way Bobby played. He stole the ball from any teammate passive enough to not sock him. He plowed into any competition for the ball, kicking away indiscriminately at the other children's shins. And his parents didn't seem to think it was a problem. Jake had a recurrent fantasy of picking Bobby up by the ankles and beating his parents to death with him. Luckily, Bobby got sidelined for his aggressive behavior, and for a few minutes Jake could forget about him and watch Michael play.

  ***

  Michael was
athletic. That had been such a relief to Jake, who hadn't been, and who felt he would have had a much easier time in school if he'd been good at sports. Unlike most of the children his age, Michael didn't have to watch the ball as he ran down the field with it. He had a grace and unconscious awareness of his body that Jake knew would take Michael far if he could only get him to be more competitive. Too many times he'd seen Michael just let Bobby take the ball, though Bobby would miss the goal entirely if he didn't lose the ball to the opposing team. They were working on it, though. Michael was too nice, but Jake hoped that could be changed.

  The scene of the gray sky over the vibrantly green field was beautiful and peaceful, even with the gaggle of squealing second graders passing back and forth through it. Jake was glad that Susan didn't want to go to the games. They would have bickered.

  The two teams walked past each other in rows, palms extended, and slapped each other five. Afterward, Michael jogged over to Jake. He was wet with sweat and the rain, and Michael put a jacket on him and pulled up the hood.

  "Did you see me make those goals? Didn't I do good?"

  "You did great! You were the best out there. Now go get some snacks before that little jerk Bobby eats them all."

  ***

  As soon as they walked through the door Jake could tell something was wrong. The house held some sort of charge. Susan stepped out of the kitchen with big eyes and fluttering hands.

  Michael said, "Mom, Dad said I did the best. I scored three goals!"

  "That's so good, Michael. Why don't you go up to your room and change? Pick out a game and I'll be up in a minute to play it with you."

  Michael ran towards the stairs, and Jake cocked an eyebrow at Susan. "What's up?"

  "The deer. The deer is still there. The fawn is hanging half out of her, backwards. I called animal control, but I don't know when they'll be here."

  "It's okay. I'm sure it'll be okay."

  "I don't think so. I tried to help her, Jacob. She was crying and crying and getting up and lying down and finally she just lay over on her side and didn't move. I thought she might be dead, so I tried to go outside to help but she got back up."