The Sun My Destiny

by Logan Ryan Smith

  It didn’t, of course. Even though it didn’t, Momma was still pretty pissed at Papa. He sort of grabbed her and started digging, telling her he knew exactly where to dig so that we’d have a tunnel. She’d refused at first, but Papa being a big old strong man overpowered her. I just followed them. Momma thought we’d have been better off grabbing large pieces of sheet metal or something like that and lying flat on the ground or against a garbage heap. She said so only later, after the ordeal when we crawled out from the tunnel in the trash mountain. Papa laughed in her face and told her that was the stupidest idea he ever heard. “You’d get carried away in the wind like a goddamned kite, you stupid bitch!” he yelled and she smacked him good right across his mustachioed face. She smacked him so good he fell down. When he stood, holding his jaw, he looked at her with wet eyes then stormed off over Mount Circuit City and didn’t return for a full three weeks.

  4

  I killed my first Out-of-Towner when I was twelve. At that age I’d understood English for at least eleven years (I’ve always been smart!) and for most of those eleven years I’d heard stories from Momma and Papa about the Out-of-Towners.

  One story went this way: When Momma was pregnant with me, it wasn’t just her and Papa. No, there was a whole community living in this junkyard. Among the dozens that lived here were Momma’s two sisters and their mom (my grand Momma), one of Papa’s cousins, and a whole herd of animals they were able to keep and breed for food or wool.

  All of them, at some point, had lived beyond the walls of the junkyard, but all of them, over time, sought the security of those high borders. After a certain point they all met and agreed to share their lives. They also agreed to shut themselves off from the rest of the world by barricading the opening in the middle of the south wall. Together, they boarded up the opening and pushed as much heavy garbage up against those boards as they could. Then they found as much barbed wire as they could throughout the grounds and lined the tops of the walls with it. When they ran out of barbed wire, they spiked the tops of the walls with nails, shards of metal, railroad spikes, and the like.

  They also dug the well in the southeastern corner of the grounds, known now as The Drinking and Washing Fountain.

  At that time, their limited livestock could live off each other’s milk and boiled water. They were fed whatever was deemed unfit for humans, and that seemed to keep them alive just enough to fuck and make more of each other. Though Momma never admitted it, Papa told me some of the women would begin lactating whenever a cow or sheep gave birth, and that that helped keep not only the animals healthy, but the men, too. He told me the women’s milk tasted like sugar water, or sometimes honey. While telling the story, he asked if I remembered Momma’s and I told him I did and he claimed she still lactated for him. Momma punched him in the arm and told him to get on with the story, but I had a hard time listening after that, jealous as I was. I mean, I was the baby, even if I was six, or nine, or eleven years at the time they were storytelling. And if Momma really loved me, why was I not allowed to put my mouth to her breast and feed, too?

  But the story went on, and when my jealousy subsided, the tale erupted with swarms of hairless, metal-armored, musclebound men and women in gasmasks storming the junkyard with pitchforks, spears, and hatchets. People were scalped, cleaved in half, and brained real good. One large man with veins ripping through his grey skin grabbed both of my mom’s sisters by the hair, after knocking each out with a quick elbow to the eye socket, and dragged them away. My grand Momma wasn’t afforded that decency. She was simply decapitated. Her head rolled for dozens of feet before stopping at the lip of a trash heap. Everyone was screaming and wailing and the animals, which were penned in, hopped over their fencing and scattered, running toward the ranges of garbage mountains. Some of the Out-of-Towners clubbed the animals, knocking them cold off their feet. They carried the animals away similar to how they dragged off Momma’s sisters.

  All the men in my folks’ community were dismembered and gutted immediately. Papa remembered their intestines splashing to the grey earth like so much wet trash and how those steaming entrails were later collected into giant metal vats carried by two or three Out-of-Towners. He said weeks later he’d come across a foot or finger and dreamily wonder if it belonged to his cousin, still in shock from the whole thing.

  All the women were dragged off, usually after being clubbed unconscious, like the sheep or cows were. I asked how they dragged the cows off, because I knew from my reading that they were rather large creatures, and Papa said the Out-of-Towners were irradiated freaks with strength I couldn’t even begin to imagine and that two or three of them could easily drag a cow for miles without breaking a sweat.

  When the Out-of-Towners were finally gone, the grey land my folk’s community inhabited was red with pools of blood and leaking organs. Everyone was gone, or dead.

  I asked how they managed not to get captured or die, themselves. They said they didn’t know. Momma said they lived “by the grace of God,” another beautiful phrase she invented.

  It’s why I still pray to God to this day, despite the fact that I’m going to Hell where Satan will boil my tongue for all eternity and rip my dick off and tear my butthole apart all daylong with angry red branding irons. If I wasn’t immortal, that is.

  So, as you can imagine, I was champing at the bit for a chance to rip one of those Out-of-Towners to shreds. When I was twelve, my first chance arrived.

  I was strolling around the land between The Memory Palace and The Library, just kicking up grey dirt and fingering a lock of Momma’s hair, enjoying the day. My intention was to walk for a few hours and gather my thoughts, which were many, and still are. Then I would turn my attention to hunting birds or gophers with my trusty slingshot. After all, I was becoming a man and a man must provide for his family. But I wasn’t very good at it since Papa never taught me how to hunt anything but pennies.

  Lost in my thoughts, as I often am, I turned around the bend of Best Buy Bluffs and stopped dead in my tracks. There, a hundred feet off, was one of them—an Out-of-Towner.

  I dropped immediately, hid behind trash, and watched. She seemed to be staring at a particular piece of trash, mesmerized. For a second, I wondered if she really was an Out-of-Towner. They usually traveled in packs, but then I realized we all need time to ourselves, and in that way they probably weren’t any different. Besides, she had the trademark gasmask on. Aside from the gasmask, she wore an attractive blue summer dress with a yellow flower print. Her legs were thin and pale, indicating she either stays out of the poisonous sun entirely, or she was wearing that dress for a special occasion.

  For a minute, I didn’t want to do anything to her at all but let her be. Her hair was a kind of light reddish color I’d never seen before, and it flicked in the breeze behind her at the nape of her neck like harmless flames. It was captivating. But not being able to see her face reminded me just what kind of person she was. This was not the ladies of my Go Fish cards and this was not someone to be compared to my own mother. She wore a gasmask and was a monster. She was part of the monsters that murdered my folks’ whole colony. They’re ruthless, lawless, godless, and sick. And it didn’t matter how pretty her dress was. It was camouflage for evil.

  Still, my hands shook when I took out and aimed my trusty slingshot. Just then she looked my way and I froze, nearly pissed myself, but she didn’t see me behind all that garbage. Then she bent toward the trash heap she stood near and picked something up with her thumb and forefinger, delicate as could be.

  As she was standing straight to admire her discovery I let go the taught band of my trusty slingshot and, THUNK, hit her right in the temple. She didn’t drop immediately, just sort of stopped all motion for a second or two, then fell over.

  With no time to hesitate I rushed at her, pulled my bowie knife, straddled her limp form, and yanked her head back by her light reddish hair. She made soft guttural sounds, but no muffled words escaped her gasmask. For a moment I considered pushing up
her dress and pulling off my big rubber boots and unzipping my jeans, but Momma’s voice ran through my head telling me that was wrong, and so I didn’t. Besides, Momma’s always been the only girl for me! Instead, I gripped the hair at the back of her head and sawed through her throat.

  Next thing I remember is waking to Momma shaking me. I was covered in blood and drunk on it. I hadn’t had any malt liquor or beer or the bits of whiskey we sometimes found in bottles. No, I was high on the blood of the girl I’d brained and decapitated. When her body dropped away from her head, which I held by her light reddish hair, I saw what she had found so interesting in the garbage heap: a flower. I think they called it a dandelion. I recognized it immediately from pictures in magazines, but couldn’t let it distract me, given what I’d just done, which was murder. My first murder. It just wasn’t something I could allow myself to contemplate. Instead, I focused on the fact that she was an Out-of-Towner and that I was hungry. So, I dragged her headless body to Dante’s Inferno and tried to ignore that she held onto that dandelion the whole time.

  You see, a bird or rabbit might be rich enough to make one dizzy, but those are few and far between, accounting for the dizziness. Imagine the sweetness of human blood, drunk by the mouthful to satiate a mouth that’s been dry for days if not weeks. Imagine the cooked, sweet flesh of human muscle that spent years maturing and becoming something more than animal. Imagine the richness, the almost sickening richness of cracking open a girl’s thigh bone and sucking away at the marrow until your face is slathered in juices and oils. Imagine gnawing away at a face so tender and innocent.

  Imagine.

  I have to. I can hardly remember as that first time I passed out from sensory overload, the pure indulgence of the feast. I have to imagine as remembering often turns my stomach sour and fills my lungs with ball bearings. Sometimes I even puke!

  I woke the next day to Momma shaking me where I lay, yelling, Papa standing behind her, a stoic sentry with that goddamned goofy mustache. Momma slapped me and asked me what I’d done and only then did I realize I was holding the girl’s limbless and headless torso—I was holding to it tight as though my life depended on it. Papa grabbed Momma’s shoulder, pulled her back, then reached down and yanked the desecrated body from me. It rolled, lopsided, toward the edge of Dante’s Inferno where I had cooked her legs and arms.

  I didn’t understand. I thought I’d done good. I was sure this was what Momma wanted me to do. I had rid us of a fucking Out-of-Towner, for crying out loud!

  “She was just a girl! Just a little girl,” Momma wailed, slapping me. “She was just a kid! Like you! Like you!” She kept screaming and hitting me. She hit me over and over until I blacked out, smiling with bloodied teeth.

  5

  The rain went on all night last night, just clattering against the roof of my hotrod like an endless supply of pennies I’d never collect. I found the cacophonous clatter kind of hypnotizing after a while and managed to fall asleep. This morning I woke to the sun rising over the eastern ranges. I saw the sun, all orange and scorching just before it slipped up into the ever-present cloak of grey cloud. It was a beautiful thing to see. I put my hands together and thanked God and prayed that she let that fiery mass rise again tomorrow. I know it’s a stupid thought to have—that the sun won’t rise tomorrow—but, you know what? One day it won’t.

  I also like to think about the Earth’s rotation—how it keeps spinning. It seems strange to me that it just keeps spinning. I mean, there’s no such thing as perpetual motion—I read about that. People tried to invent non-motorized perpetual motion machines and they just couldn’t do it. So why is Earth so special? Why does it get to have perpetual motion? And then I realized it doesn’t, not really. No, every once in a while God must stick her big finger through all the blackness of space to give the planet a quick flick whenever it starts to show any sign of slowing.

  Because you know what happens when the world stops spinning, right? We all just fly off it, like bodies through windshields in all those Drivers Education Manuals I keep in The Library. Why do I keep those? You never know, maybe one day I will need to learn how to drive.

  That’s my point: You never know.

  So, we could all just fly off up into the clouds, past the clouds and fucking birds, and into space until we tumble right into the boiling flames of the sun. Now that I think about it, perhaps the sun is Hell. Perhaps that’s where God tosses you to spend an eternity getting your nuts roasted and eyeballs melted. It makes sense. The sun is so beautiful and there was once a time when this planet was full of Sun Worshippers. And what better way to entice the sinful into Hades than make it a desirable thing, a thing worth worshipping? That’s what temptation is, after all. Not only that, you can’t really look at the sun—not directly. What a cunning trick! If you can’t really look at it then you don’t really know what it’s up to! You can never truly see its evil! But the not-looking makes you desire it even more! You just bask in its light and its heat and you want to look at it, to know it, but you can’t!

  I don’t know. I have thoughts. I have lots of them. And the more thoughts I have the more conceivable things become.

  So I pray. I pray to God that the sun comes up tomorrow and that the world keeps spinning.

  You should, too.

  I’m at The Library now. I paid Momma a visit first and she was not being very nice so I kicked some dirt against her grave marker and headed straight here, determined to find escape in words. The Library’s not so far from The Memory Palace and, like most places, it’s settled between two massive rubbish ranges. In between these ranges I’ve arranged rows of bookshelves, which I rescued from the garbage heaps and repaired meticulously. Well, as best I could, anyway. A lot of shelves are crooked or missing. But they hold books, right? And that’s the main point of bookshelves. Besides, I like their askew aesthetic. I think they appear artful. On the south side of the rows of books and magazines I’ve placed the checkout desk. The desk is dutifully womanned by Rosa and Petunia. Rosa keeps record of each book I’ve checked out, read, and returned, while Petunia keeps records of all the books and periodicals The Library holds. They keep their trusty ledgers and pencils in front of them at all times.

  Rosa and Petunia are skeletons and they always greet me very warmly upon arrival. Today Rosa greeted me with, “My, look how big your brain is getting, Clyde! What bit of wisdom will you eagerly absorb today?” and I told her I didn’t know but I was looking forward to whatever I might find in these shelves. Rosa and Petunia know I’m a scholar at heart, even though in another life I might have been a hotshot Hollywood stunt car driver.

  Where’d I get skeletons, you ask? I found them in the garbage, of course. People used to throw away just about everything. Even other people, I guess. But, it’s of course very possible they were members of Momma’s and Papa’s commune. They might even be my two long-dead aunts. Who knows. To me, they’re the sentry’s of The Library. Rosa and Petunia. Petunia and Rosa.

  Before entering The Library today, I stopped and put my hand on Petunia’s and asked her how her granddaughter is. Her granddaughter was recently attacked by dragons and the outlook was grim the last time I checked in, but, good news! Petunia tells me she’s made a full recovery and has begun training to become the world’s greatest dragon hunter. I said that was wonderful and hoped that she’d write a book about her craft one day so I, too, could learn how to fend off fearsome dragons.

  The Library’s one of my very favorite places. It’s so easy to walk between these shelves, surrounded by all these bound pages, and forget the outside world exists. I’ve been collecting these books for years, finding them half-buried here and there throughout the dump, nursing their torn pages and covers and cracked spines back to good health as best I could. Some books and magazines were Momma’s and Papa’s, of course. I believe I’ve collected well over three thousand at this point. I’ve heard that old speculative question: If you could only have one book with you on a desert island…. Fortunately I�
�m not on a desert island but in a dump! The Library has everything from classic literature by America’s greatest wordsmith Stephen King to books published right before the world went to shit. For instance, I have the bestselling self-help book, How to Survive Without Resorting to Cannibalism by Maurice Pendleton II, The University of Pittsburgh Press. It has many good tips, such as: eat cockroaches instead. Momma used to read that to me when I was a kid.

  Eating people is bad, I know. You should always strive to be the best you you can be, and that book probably bettered more lives than there are stars in the sky.

  Not my cloudy sky. But the sky before.

  Anyway, today I knew all along exactly what I was checking out. I remembered its title from when I dug it out from under a scattering of old, used, decayed diapers at Borders Mountain. I’ve never read it, figuring it didn’t have much to offer me in my particularly particular set of circumstances. But today I’m pulling The Art of War by Sun Tzu from the bookshelves. It’s this ancient book that was written before God was born, which is a complicated idea to even go into, so I won’t. And I know Sun Tzu wasn’t a sun or the sun, of course. But that’s a pretty tough name, right? It could be giver or life, or taker. It could mean Heaven or Hell. Right now, it finally seems ready for my eager eyes.