Where the Cloud Meets the Mountain and the Mountain Disappears

by James Comins

  * * *

  Maggie stood over her mother’s bed. Her young man, the one whom Janice had declined to give her approval to, stood in the periphery. He was faint and thin for so tall a man. Large hands clutched the little draw-pull fearfully, like a child with a lollipop in a town full of candy thieves. Randy still hadn’t arrived. They were waiting.

  "Dolores?" the old voice asked.

  "No," whispered Maggie.

  "Janice?" the old voice asked.

  Time passed. Chastened, Randy arrived. Maggie informed him that his mother was still living. He sat down beside the bed.

  "You must be Randy," the old voice called out. "She’s told me so much about you."

  The words caught in his throat: "Some of it good, I hope?"

  Blinking, the old woman nodded. "Where did Janice go?" the voice asked.

  "Maggie’s here, mom." Pressure tightened his eyes.

  "The woman from St. Peter. The one who was with me at the Mayo’s."

  "She’s right here, mom." Randy stood, mouthed "I can’t" to his sister, went to talk to the nurse in the hallway. Her bushy blonde hair shook through the frosted glass. They spoke at length. When he returned, Maggie’s fiancé caught Randy’s arm.

  "What did the nurse say?"

  "I don’t remember," Randy said.

  Maggie took his hand. "That’s the most she’s spoken in weeks. It’s like you brought her back." She stared at him, pleading.

  "That isn’t her. She’s already gone, Maggie."

  From behind them, a rattle: "That nurse."

  Randy spun. "Do you want me to get the nurse, mom?" He ran to her side. "Do you need something? Water? Anything?"

  "That’s what the IV’s for," mumbled Maggie.

  "Anything?" said Randy.

  "With the red hair." The woman lifted her head, examined the room. "That nurse took the screen away, too," she whispered. "You can see clear across."

  Randy nodded helplessly.

  "Could you ask her for that cell phone? Janice asked me to call Randy. Give him a few hard words." The old woman closed her eyes. "What else . . . something about I’m sorry."

  "Mom," Randy said. Maggie’s fiancé hugged Maggie.

  "Said sorry for being a bad mother." The old woman’s eyes closed and she went away. The red hair hung over her, taking things, pulling things away until there was nothing left but an old dead body.

  On the other side, Janice woke up and got out of bed.

  Four Seasons of a Man: Spring

  "M. F. P. V. L. R. V."

  The Navy optometrist, a grave, furrowed, honest bastard, turned his eyes to the sheer wall of the one-way mirror and shook his head slightly. A gesture of fear and solicitude.

  The commander broke in through a side door and cussed for a few minutes, a forefinger upraised, prepared to stab into the optometrist’s chest. Spittle flew from his dripping canines, a shower of jowls, a shower of violence. They could run more tests, whimpered the optometrist, standing his ground.

  In the end, though, it was decided. Spring would not be a pilot. It was his thyroid.

  The NROTC bunker was a concrete chasm dusted with snow. Two men in dress uniform and parkas leaned against the white wall, facing the campus, cigarettes glowing in intermittent red flares, dropping sparks. Spring emerged through the heavy floor-to-ceiling door and punched one of the men in the shoulder.

  "Did you get in?" the man asked.

  Spring hit the concrete beside him and hurt his hand. He explained.

  "You can snipe with glasses. Edmunds wears glasses."

  "Those are polarized lenses. They aren’t prescription."

  "Then what can he do?"

  "Papers. He has to take a desk job. Like a C-O."

  Spring was in a bar, a tangle of antlers and red cushioned French wallpaper, a padded room, lines of academic shot glasses scattered on unwashed tables, a flank steak and creamed spinach before him, a buzz of early American anger, all of it drawling across Spring’s consciousness. They were three men and a table, pickled, uniforms on the backs of chairs, cussing out the Navy optometrist.

  "Caught it too late," said Spring into his elbows.

  "Can’t kill anybody," said one of his friends. "God damned gooks."

  "Have you signed for your hitch?" said the other. "You could stay home."

  Spring’s fist landed on the table, sending shot glasses to the floor.

  From a far table, strains of "Alice’s Restaurant." Nods of heads. The coded chorus spread like Naval syphilis. Spring at his table felt hemmed in. An anti-war ring of fire sprang up around him. Eyes with needles focused on the three cadets. Even the bartendress joined in. "Walk right in, it’s around the back." The voices unified. Including Alice.

  "Nuke the gooks," shouted one of Spring’s friends. This caught on, too, and the bar was a war, the song and the slurs dividing the branch-nursing fiends down the middle.

  Spring took his flank steak by the corner and sent it across the room, up toward the incandescent bulbs. The room caught its breath at the perfect beauty of the steak’s spiral, the gridiron elegance, the way it seemed to hover, godless, deathless, a UFO, an alien presence, rising above the melee and descending in a whirl of glory into the eye of a protest singer, thin and bearded, wearing Hendrix scarves and a four-pocketed denim leisure suit.

  From that passing glint of perfection, the night disintegrated into broken glass.

  Spring and the commander, deep in thought. The windsock of the Navy airfield, motionless out the window. A pile of red tags reading "REMOVE BEFORE FLIGHT" on a bench. A chart of faces in uniform up on the wall. The scent of training Jennies. Barometers. A parachute pack the size of an automobile airbag. The sleeve of "Big Hits (High Tide and Green Grass)."

  "I hate to say it," said the commander.

  "You’re going to let me in?" said Spring.

  "I know a man who can do something for you. Owes me."

  In the darkness, in a room, in a file folder, papers were falsified.

  Spring was in Texas, now.

  "Look at you. Pathetic. You’re pathetic. You’ll never be a Marine. Get out of my sight, Skinny." It was the fifth hour of patter. Spring had not moved. His stomach gurgled. A pair of eyeglasses sat unnoticed in a dorm room in Georgetown.

  The mess hall. "You came over from Navy."

  Spring nodded imperceptibly.

  "You musta been a real asshole for them to send you here."

  "Do you want to be a sniper?" someone asked him.

  Spring shook his head.

  "Everyone wants to be a sniper."

  "I don’t want to do paperwork," said Spring.

  "You want to shoot the gooks?"

  "You want to make Daddy proud?"

  "I want to get into the shit," said Spring.

  "Son," said a man, "you gonna be a Marine."

  An M14 along Spring’s arm. The iron sights a deadened blur, the black and white target a deader blur, the muzzle bobbing in a slow circle.

  He closed his eyes.

  He opened them.

  Outer ring.

  Outer ring.

  Inner ring.

  Again and again, for long hours, pockets full of brass, until even the Marine optometrist was fooled.

  An exemption, punched through with the Marine Corps seal.

  A ticket to violence.

  Palm trees. Tuk tuks. Tamarind candy. Ho Chi Minh’s face full of darts.

  The last helicopter into Saigon.

  Four Seasons of a Man: Summer

  Summer was taking his time in the hinterland of the Bahamas, well away from the shadow-box shacks with black locals carving and sewing and selling cornhusk dolls and banana-tree furniture as they sat in shade. Beyond the purview of the expatriate Americans in their long beachside hotels and grim, well-lit dive bars in Nassau. No tourists carrying Junkanoo masks and pineapple daiquiris. All that sat behind him.

  In his pocket was nearly a thousand dollars in hundreds and small bills. His wedding ring was n
estled against his index toe. A now-soggy wad of fives and singles squelched under his insole. On his head was a stringy straw hat, itchy, keeping the biting star off of him. Summer waited for chicken, and it was coming, but until then he had someone worth talking to.

  "Let me get dis straight," the short, mustachioed black man said to Summer in a careful voice. "I getcha set up. You take care of somebody." He tapped the table twice with a middle finger. "No money exchanges."

  "It’s no problem." There was young steel in Summer’s eyes.

  "Don’ wanna know where you been, don’ even wanna know what t’ tings you done ‘a’ been. Don’ know your reasons for dis." The man swung his head, squinted at the sun. "Alla dis, dat’s the ting bothers me. Youse motivation. Eh? Uman beans a big ting to wash away. Certain kind a mon. Eh?" He peered heavily at the door where the jerk pot was hissing.

  "Big thing," Summer agreed.

  The roof above them was three small, brightly-colored celluloid umbrellas duct-taped together on the top of a five-foot dowel hammered into the ground. The gouged card table rocked when they set their beers down.

  "An’ I ask moself, who is dis? Who’s he running from? What’s da one coming after you gonna do if he gets to me? What happen den?"

  Summer’s steeleyes faltered. He looked back, across the Bahamas, at a cruise ship. He stretched the tendons of a hand. "You wouldn’t believe it."

  "Mon, I’ve heard crazy tings. Seen crazy tings. Maybe even done a crazy ting once an’ again. You see? If you don’ tell me a story, den dere’s no trust between us. ‘Sa big ting we talking about." The man hit his palm with an open hand. "No trust den dere’s no deal."

  "Gonna believe me?"

  "Sure, sure, fit’s close enough to the real ting."

  The smell of fried cherries and ginger and lime peel and oil thickened. A woven basket of hot-brown drumsticks and gizzards appeared in the huge hand of the cook, who also brought another sixpack of Red Stripe. A churchkey and fallen bottles were on the table already. Sweeping the glass to the ground with an arm, the cook deposited the food. "Good as it gets." He returned to the prefab.

  Summer took a gizzard, bit, let the intensity strike him. "It’s a woman," he said.

  "You joking? Ain’t no woman killer." The man pulled a drumstick apart, watched it steam.

  "Not a killer," Summer whispered through a chewy mouthful. "Wife."

  "Oh. Crazy bitch, den?"

  Summer shook his head.

  The man appraised him, then laughed deeply. "Dat’s the shortest story anybody has ever told anybody in the whole Caribbean. So. Let me tell all dat back at you, ya? You do some tings getcha into trouble. Either d’wife finds out or you try an’ get away to protect her from finding out." He stared into Summer’s face. "Dat’s d’one, huh? You’re here protecting her from someting."

  "Maybe."

  Summer, feeling his arms reddening, shifted his folding chair to the shade of the umbrellas, out of the turning sun’s view.

  "I’m-a believe you, bote remember. I’ll know right where you be if somebody comes after me."

  "Yeah."

  The man slid a hand into a satchel beside him and pulled out a photograph. It was an oversized print of a surprised-looking Dominican in a pinstripe suit walking along a row of shops. Summer examined it in the sunlight beside him, gave it back. "Draw a map."

  The man took out a fountain pen and sketched.

  "And I’ll get everything I asked for?" Summer asked.

  The man’s eyes flicked up. "Dis worth a lot to me. Lot more’n you askin’. You get everyting you ask for."

  When he had finished and returned Summer the photo, Summer rose and reached for his wallet. The man waved him off.

  "I'll even take care of de tip."

  Summer felt the straw of his hat cut into him. The hot wash electrified it. Each step was measured, stomping, his eyes before him only. He left more and more things behind him, put away this man, the food, everything. Briefly it occurred to him that there would be no gun this time. Not here. Not with this one. Fingers were all.

  Summer needed nothing.

  Picket fences, plants too short to be palm trees, dogs and stucco and thatch and push lawn mowers and stretches of shanty. Sand in the road and the very occasional car, driving hard as an appetite and no sidewalk. Dodging casually.

  A toddler ran across the street, chased by a woman in orange. Orange, like the ship’s berth he had come across in. That ship and the people on it, they smashed across his head. Onward. Forward. Everything behind him. There was too much time. He watched the orange lady scoop up the child. Fear of time hung heavily upon Summer. Not the future, only time. The arc.

  The house was a mansion. Plantation-style, in bright white like falling snow, columns and a brick gate that might fit inside the Georgetown of his memory. It took two tries to vault the gate, the bars knocking into the lock as he clutched them. Summer went straight up the walk and opened the front door.

  Inside was a thin entryway dressed in Italianate splendor. Painted plates, mahogany buffets, leather wallpaper, and at the far end, a man holding a gun with his back to the wall. One. In moments he had the Sterling trained on Summer.

  "Hey!" he shouted behind him. "Someone ‘ere!"

  "Woss he here for?"

  "Looks pretty strung out!"

  "Ah-h-h." A black man in white came down the stairs, his hands open wide. He was not the Dominican. "Welcome, my friend. Miguel! Bring our guest in. My friend. What is it we can getcha?"

  The man Miguel took Summer by the shoulder and they entered a baroque foyer. The ceiling was not tall. Stairs led up to a mezzanine. Palladian windows illuminated the space.

  "Cocaine," said Summer.

  The man in white grinned. "Dis we can provide for you." The man in white tapped a forefinger against his palm. "Dollar a gram, cash only. Eh?"

  "Let me see it."

  "Take him."

  Miguel frisked Summer, then led him back out the front door and around the kumquat shrubs. The grass was only mown to the edge of what was visible from the road. It faded quickly from overgrown wildflowers to gravel covered with loose thin leaves and fallen twigs. An old, slanted concrete outhouse sat incongruously behind the mansion, hidden from the beach by a dense line of palms.

  "Rememba de Bikini Atoll?" Miguel asked.

  "Heard about it."

  "Dey built dis jos’ in case, coppla years ago." He grinned. "Dey ever bomb de Bahamas, we here be de only ones alive." From his belt he took a key and removed the padlock from the metal door, which had a radiation mark in old yellow paint. Concrete led underground in steep steps. A knife switch brought the dangling light bulbs online.

  As Summer took Miguel’s chin and the back of his head and tipped it back and twisted, he felt the fragmentation mines of Gia Dinh break around him in steady concussion. His leg was torn by two wooden pikes, and a shaft of light far above the inward-facing pit was the only thing he could see.

  The Sterling came loose in Miguel’s dead hand. There may have been someone else deeper inside the bunker, VC maybe, but they might not have heard. No use pushing his luck.

  He left the key on the corpse, but replaced the padlock on the way back to the light.

  The far half of the mansion became sandstone, longer and taller. An open window, there. Slinging the short rifle around him, Summer vaulted, took himself up, checked for rope hauls or deathtraps, checked for occupants.

  A woman, sleeping. Summer clicked the gun to single shot and went in the short window headfirst with the gun on her, rolled silently and stood, stepped through with the gun on her, watched with eagle eyes to hit before she screamed, left with the gun ahead.

  The corridor was straight and empty, light gray and beige. Odd end tables held wondrous conch shells. Blessedly the floors didn’t squeak. Rooms he passed were empty, some not even furnished, some filled with piles of water tanks, gas tanks, empty plywood crates, toilet paper, necessities. Ending the corridor were unlocked double doors
leading to the bright balcony of the mezzanine.

  The man in white was not there.

  Summer crouched and advanced. These narrow tunnels held the enemy, tunnels full of simple death in traps and Kalashnikovs. Charlie waited, behind and above and below.

  The white banister around the balcony led up on either side to the piano nobile. Summer took the left side, caught the corner at the landing, stormed ahead. Switching to burst, he found the sitting room empty. Two doors. Silently he came to the first door and opened it. A bedroom. He found the man in white, now wearing nothing at all. He lay in bed with the Dominican.

  In blindness Summer fired, the last price for his escape from that old America he threw away, the two-year-old and the beautiful pregnant woman who were, even now, coming after him or letting him go or who might still be searching the cruise ship for him. The ship that had docked in Nassau a week ago. This was his wife he shot. This was his child.

  This was his heart in Time, the merry clock. This vegetable glass of nature.

  Summer took the ear to the short black man with the mustache. He waited on the deserted beach, where a large dory bobbed. Someone was beside them.

  The mustachioed man whistled. "’Fie go to the house, who’s alive? Totally empty?"

  "There’s a woman. Maybe others. Big house."

  "Understand you not killin’ a woman. Ok. Now. Betchu tink I’m-a double cross you, mon. Bote I’m not."

  Summer waited.

  "Look at dis. Everyting you ask for. Eh? All dere. Right dere. See in d’ distance? Uninhabited island." The man tapped a forefinger on his palm. "Year of food, plus all d’ bananas and coconuts and fish on de island. Jerome will row you to de lagoon, help you get set up."

  "I don’t need any help."

  "De agreement was, we keep de boat. Eh? Come back in a year."

  "You also said it was worth more than I was asking."

  The man’s eyebrows rose. "You changing the terms of de deal?" A threat lingered.

  "Fine. Let’s go, Jerome."

  The mustache spread wide in a grin. "Good man. Good doing business wid ya." He ushered Summer onto the long boat. Jerome followed.

  The water was the strange cerulean of a brand-new Volkswagen, before the paint fades. As Jerome manned the oarlocks, the sun brought deep, unimaginable colors to the sky. Summer examined the water tanks, charcoal briquettes, and crates of food that weighed the dory down to the brim. The sea-leg lull brought his family back to him.

  When Jerome stopped halfway there and the man in the mustache watched, and Jerome reached for his gun, Summer snapped the neck without any emotions at all. The future lay ahead, a world of life and wonder.

  Four Seasons of a Man: Autumn

  Autumn came clamoring. On his shoulder was a strap. From the strap hung frypans, teakettles in blue, messkits, birdcages, spare walkingsticks, hats, tissue boxes full of long-defunct circus pasteups, a bag full of bric-a-brac, another bag of a size and shape to hold nothing but Autumn’s harmonica, and a hock of processed ham on a string. The bridge under his feet clanked, the things on the strap clinked, but his walkingstick stayed silent. When a car full of kids slid over the line of the bridge, the bridge lit up with sound. Melody. Jazz. From.

  There was a spot along the river. No one came, not even kissers in June, not this June. It wasn’t a park, but once there might have been industry there. There. A concrete chunk of pipe, abandoned by all but nesting birds. That’d be a night’s rest on a bedroll. It had been years since he had passed this way.

  The sky tipped gently from blue to red as he stomped through, stomped down, right along the river. Autumn’s sharp eye found a clam, two clams, and a baby, a feast. Briefly he wondered where his kids were and what they did. Kicking a stone, he led himself along to the pipe, hoping there wasn’t a snake or a skunk inside.

  Round the side there was a flash, sparkwise. The river grumbled, knocking away any small sound, but the sky had darkened and there again, an oval of cast light, really too small to be anything.

  Clink, clank, clunk, and Autumn came astride, came around, his walkingstick whipping along the not-quite-fallen riverside. Inside the pipe segment, a pile of wet grass and a book of matches in his lap, was a young man. A boy, actually, more like a tyke. The sort who couldn’t buy Molson at a Canadian bar with a fake ID.

  Autumn’s cheeks pinched as he squinted. Tyke froze, all adeer. Good long look between them.

  There are things you say to a hobo: how weather changes, where you’ve been last and whether it paid. There are things you say to a thief on a beef: the home team, the cost of a Baby Ruth bar, the lay of your life.

  What do you say to a tyke shivering in the evening?

  Nothing. First, Autumn took a dry slat from his bag and lit it. Not on the concrete, but just beside, with a dollar camp lighter. A few handfuls of orange needles, the short, soft kind from up the bank, under the protecting spruce. A sprig of dead maple. The whole thing on a flat stone firmly in place, without stray grass.

  "Dry," husked Autumn. "That’s important."

  The tyke hadn’t moved.

  So Autumn lay the two and a half clams in, took out a penknife and cut himself a chunk of ham, chawed.

  "I’m not a creep, son." He went down to the river, filled a kettle, set it to boil. "Tea or coffee?" Autumn rubbed awkwardly at his whiskers.

  The tyke said nothing.

  Clams had opened, two of them. He pulled the beards off the big one and the baby. Was the last one dead? Ought to hold a funeral for the lady. But slowly, slowly, that one bloomed as well. All three, alive together before him.

  A scratch and a spark. The wet grass caught and thinned orange to an empty garden.

  Oh fer crying out loud.

  Autumn took the end of a branch, pickupsticksed it from the fire, took it to the front of the concrete pipe, laid it over the wet green grass. "Get the red flower." Autumn chuckled. "By the Broken Lock that freed me." The second fire caught.

  The tyke withdrew.

  Shrugging, Autumn withdrew as well. Withdrew to make tea from a big tin he had bought for a song in some far-off Chinatown, in another state. The mottled blue of the kettle contrasted wonderfully with the aching-gone of the river, barely too dark to see. The sky smelled plain, moist, thunderous distant. Wonderful.

  As the clear water warmed, Autumn laid back and sang.

  I hail from back in Texas

  My name I cannot tell

  For I’m a-running from the law

  Where the cattle-drivers dwell.

  The tyke, miraculously, joined in the chorus. That old Monticello song.

  Music, of course. That’s what. How you reach a young gun.

  Now the tyke sat along the hissing grassfire that was petering away. He was looking far from skinny and far from happy, but maybe a little warmer than before.

  "Now how you come by that old song?" Autumn asked him, taking a second slat and filling the fire out a little.

  "Gordon Bok. He’s local."

  "Have you heard of Stan Rogers?"

  "The Lock-Keeper!"

  Autumn rumbled his baritone to life and the boy tremulously chimed in. And then he caught on fire.

  Slipping, kicking, panicking, the tyke jostled his way to a stopdroproll across the dirt and stones, flapping ineffectually at the orange blur near his green windbreaker’s zipper.

  Autumn stood. He took a frypan to the river, filled it, threw the water as if it was a baseball bat. The tyke got smacked across the gut and the fire was out.

  "Thanks." He shivered.

  "Gonna need more fire to dry you. Be back." Autumn lumbered, clumbered, stumbered, lifting each foot as if he might slip. But he didn’t. He faded into the darkness, silent as the end of a ghost story, replaced by empty nighttime and treetops. Crashing and bumbling and crunching. Emerging from the empty, he brought a limb longer than the cab of a Mack. He sat beside the fire, pulled a crooked little saw from a leather sleeve, made firewood in moments.

  "W
arm up, son. Hungry?"

  Nod.

  "If I been rolling in dough, I’d take you to Dysart’s. Been?"

  Shake. Shiver.

  "Scoot up, son. Got this fella." Autumn swung the hock into view. "Ain’t clean, but I’ll cutcha piece from th’ middle."

  "No thanks."

  Autumn shrugged, slid his knife into the hamskin, ate it off the knife. "Are you going to tell me why you’re out here?"

  "No."

  "Well." Autumn took a narrow look at the tyke across the fire. "I think you should head home now."

  Tyke stood. Scuffing, he left.

  The river ran, it pulled and dragged and spat. Autumn chewed, chewed over his honeymoon, chewed over his daughter’s birthday in a far-off place, over his son’s first step and first fall. Mulled where they were as he took his tea, listening to a chickadee who had lost its way. Autumn looked at the place where the night had taken the boy, knew where he was headed, wondered why he had left. The bedroll fit the concrete pipe like a glove, and Autumn dreamed to the sound of the river.

  "Blue Mountain" originally written by Judge F. W. Keller. Variant lyrics used under fair use.

  Four Seasons of a Man: Winter

  The footpaths were the fallen leaves of the tall trees, wending in mossy grades up the hillside, lined by violets already past flower and fiddlehead ferns, past the bony rocks that the grass wouldn’t grow on. The tall trees gave their leaves to the forest ground each year. They loomed beyond the sun, bowed and shaking in the rainclouds above sight. The leaves were sharp, golden, hurtling in windy flurries, caught in the evergreens just above the path, pulling free, landing and skidding in flocks of thousands before coming at last to rest upon taproots and acorns. Winter watched every year from his home on the mountain. He knew when the downward migration would begin, knew when the trees would be empty and gray in the distance. He was alone, his beard was coarse, and he saw nothing new in the world, nothing at all. The tall trees seemed taller every year, while the calling birds that flocked beneath them seemed fewer. Nothing that he saw on the mountain trails mattered much to Winter as he trudged the same mile every day to the gas station to buy a loaf of bread and some cigarettes.

  Mr. Edmunds, the owner of the gas station, hated him. Halfway up a mountain clogged with rock, above rotted plank roads and potholes on the hill below, there was one gas station: his. He sold just enough gas to make ends meet, much of it to hikers and snowmobilers. The only regular customer was Winter, who had no car. For his part, Mr. Edmunds was comfortable with steady events, with foggy sunrises and pale, cloudless sunsets, but to hear the torn screen door jangle every day, see the same boots and brown fur-lined coat, the same worn features . . . Mr. Edmunds couldn’t even trouble himself to put the bread out front or to have a carton waiting. Winter came every morning, more reliable than the post office.

  Winter didn’t carry a walking-stick. Years on the mountain kept his legs strong. Though he had a canoe and cross-country skis, he walked most everywhere he went, all year, to keep himself moving. On the track leading up from the store, the road was rough, mottled, and not too wide between the trees. It ended a ways before his home, a narrow yard tapering away to the steadily-encroaching moss carpet and a thick clot of pine, the sort that always has a maple sapling or two inside it, reaching out. Today, like always, he gripped his loaf of bread wrapped in its rough plastic, ducked along the side of the pine, along the two big rocks, across the two-by-four he had laid along the muddy stream bed, sometimes bending the odd switch or branch away from his head. Past the wide, dying sugar maple, past the old fallen one beside it, Winter trod upon scattered, simple leaves, fresh leaves that folded easily, brightly, but never tore. He swept past burrows of animals, decades old and derelict, past the two tall stones that were propped up above his two dogs, Daisy and Lily, and clumped up the steps of the bare porch he had built last year--mostly to keep the skunks and raccoons at a distance, the unfinished lumber being inhospitable--and pushed on the old glass panels of the door, the small rectangles set like windows and topped by a wicker sunburst, pushed hard until it opened into his house.

  The smell of smoky burnt firewood, hornbeam this year, lingered. Winter took a knife and slid it across the wood in the fireplace, lifting away the old ash to reveal fresher wood. Hornbeam, gently ruffled branches and eiderdown bark, made a nice fire. He left the firewood in the hearth and moved to a drawer nearby, set in the wall. It was that time of year again. Time for pilgrimage.

  Pulling on the handle, rocking the uneven slats till they allowed the pitch-sticky drawer to slide open, Winter let his fingers fall into the blanket inside, let the grip of his hands unsettle the cloth, feeling the grain, letting that old familiar scent drift up. The blanket was dark and smooth, with pieces cut from it along one edge. He lay his thumb along the fold, squaring it neatly and brushing it until it was even, starting again when his ragged nail caught a thread.

  After closing the drawer, he knelt and lit a fire with old matches taken from a bar in another town, long ago. The hornbeam bark lit up as fast as dried grass, and the rippling bark’s edges bent inward and blackened. Warmth would take awhile, but it was bright and there were shadows where he wanted them. Winter sat, cleaned his fingernails, and thought awhile as the sun crept up above the trees. It was still morning.

  At noon he made a carrying-lunch, wrapped it and put it in his rucksack. He put out the fire for the moment and again opened the drawer beside the hearth.

  After cleaning his knife on his sleeve, he cut a square from the blanket a few inches across and held it. He smoothed the folds of the blanket down with his thumb. Heavily the drawer slid back. Winter turned from it.

  From a cupboard he took one of the rosemary sprigs that lay drying. From the backyard he snapped a parsley leaf and brought it inside. Winter shut his eyes and silently cradled the cloth around the two herbs. Twine tied it shut, and the sachet tumbled into his rucksack as well. Shouldering the bag, he counted his footfalls out the door, down the path, past the old rock wall, and finally lost count as he found the way down the mountain.

  Soon each tree he left behind seemed the same, the orange needles blurring along the side of the steep path downwards, and gravity led him through the sandy inclines and sunlit streambed valleys that coursed down the mountain towards the hill, each step the same as the last. Near the bottom of the mountain a quarry still remained from years ago. Winter pulled himself up onto a cut stone and ate lunch. From the stone he could see the tall trees just beyond the ridge of the hill. Leaping the broken seam in the stone and the holes drilled in those stark quarrying lines across it, Winter swung his rucksack down and walked on.

  Each time Winter climbed down the mountain to the hill, each year when the fallen leaves made footpaths and he made his pilgrimage to the tall trees, he would shut his eyes and feel the thick, fibrous, rough spring in the grass, so different from the moss and ferns of the mountain. It was early in the year and cool, although the breeze was warmer today. The scattered junipers and shrub cedars were pleasant after so much bare rock.

  Winter began to lose the harsh gravity that hung behind his eyes as he followed the hill toward the tall trees, which were no longer far away, and slowly climbed down the shallow cliffs that marked the end of the journey down. The paths shone yellow in the early afternoon. Winter smiled. Everything was the same, and perhaps that was good. Taking the familiar path, hidden but for his memory, he sought the tall trees, glad to be on soft, even ground at last. On this day he was glad to be on this footpath, glad to walk along it. The ash and oak were gold, the bluejays laughed, his arthritis was not too bad, and the sun kept the brisk wind pleasant. Ahead, the clearing was the same, the tall trees grand and frightening, and Winter no longer needed to watch the ground as he walked.

  Crying, Winter knelt at the tall stone that stood before the tallest tree, opened his rucksack, and lay the smooth, dark sachet on the soil. He did not leave that place for a long time, a slow, endless time. He wept bitter
ly without thoughts. He let the sight of the tattered remnents of another square of cloth, laying untied and faded far from the stone, pass through his mind without letting it rest there. Winter stood, turned around, and walked back along the hidden path, yesterday’s gold shining in the sunset.

  A Guide to the Apocalypse, by Henrietta Stevensen Age 46

  [Everything is intentional]

  When the world comes to an end, the only people left standing will be the ones who have read this guide. When the fires start, you can bet they will stop eventually. Where will you be? When the eagles fall hard upon the mountaintops and flowers of evil spring fully-formed from their guts, where will you be? When you’re knocking the brains out of the zombies with the reports presented by the guns of the rampants, where you’ll be so gallantly streaming, Where Will You Be? What will you do? Have you stockpiled batteries?

  Are you a hot-blooded American?

  So hear this, America: the Devil is coming, and his revelations are encroaching on our freedoms! Our American freedoms to not be murdered by the Angel of Babylon!

  My name is Henrietta Stevensen, but you can call me Henny and you can just follow me into the future! Where I live and who I am is no business of yours, thank you, and anyway by the time you need this book I’ll hopefully be dead. God, what a morbid thought. At least if God is my witness, I’ll be in the Kingdom by the time all this happens. But you probably won’t, or you wouldn’t need this guide. I guess I’m writing this for the sinners, then, because Lord God would have punched the rest of us out of the whole program by the time the zombies come. I suppose I still ought to write this down, because the Bible teaches us to love the sinner and you’ll all want to live as long as you can, because once the zombies have got you, you have got to be going to hell. Jesus the Lord wouldn’t want zombies in heaven.

  Anyway, my name is Henny Stevensen and I’ll be your guide to this exciting adventure.

  The first thing to talk about is the ocean. Big sign in front, Keep Out! Let me tell you, folks, when the Martians and the red tide and the Jaws and all the Bible monsters are after you -> At The Same Time