“What about–”
“It’s fine, baby.” I reassured her. “We have plenty of time.”
After we spread the blanket across the shore facing the third buoy on the right, we kicked off our sandals and stacked them on the left and right corners to keep it from being blown away. When I laid down and motioned for her to join me, she scanned me like I were a car she wanted when she was a teenager.
“Come on, honey.”
She licked her cracked-white lips and stretched out beside of me. She curled herself inside the crick of my left arm, rested her hand on my shoulder and drew cryptic shapes across the front of my tee-shirt. Her skin felt warm, her hair fragrant with the smell of smoke and strawberries.
Most people thought that everything ended after the virus broke out but not us. All it did was make the world quiet and turn one street after the other into a junkyard hospital, a litter of disbanded cars and bloated gray bodies covered in jagged red cracks. In a time when the future looked as bright as the screen of an I-Pod, it’d become nothing more than fossils of a world that once was and never would be.
We’d combed too many broken cities in too many broken days. We’d fought with every fiber of our being to hold back tears whilst inhaling the stench of motor oil, decaying flesh and hot sticky blood just to get to here.
She fell asleep ten minutes later. I slid away from her and rolled her onto her left hip. I sat with my knees drawn up against my chest, wondering what she was dreaming about now that everyone was dead.
I waited until the sky had that bottle-gas blue glow of dusk before I started the fire. The houses on the other side of the lake looked as black and lifeless as everything else but still managed to be magical in their own little way. The flames danced in the darkness, throwing pools of incandescent orange light across the mirrored black surface of the water.
The flames reminded me of a time in my life I’ll never forget for as long as I live.
At least it’ll keep me company.
*****
Summer 2012
I’d never been so nervous before in my life; I didn’t think high school graduation was this bad.
I stood at the bottom of the hill below the parking lot and waited. We’d scheduled a picnic on two separate occasions, but with me working it was always hard for me to keep my promises. She respected that, never once held it against me whenever we argued, and I loved her even more because of that.
I felt the apprehension squeezing the back of my neck. My stomach twisted into tight coils of nervousness that churned the three-course breakfast my mother rammed down my stomach. A film of sweat broke out across my forehead, slid down my temples and cheeks and dampened the back of my head.
Michelle collected the picnic basket from the back of my truck and shuffled down the hill in her wicker-brown open-toed sandals. She wore a pair of blue-jean cutoffs that accentuated the little dimples on her ass; her dark-brown areolas strained against the front of her gauzy-white tee shirt. Her bright red hair fell from a part in the top of her head, cascaded down the crowns of her shoulders and billowed in the breeze.
I haven’t stopped smiling since we first met, and I don’t I want to. There wasn’t anything I could give her in return for all the joy and happiness she’d given me. She was the kind of woman who helped you wipe away the foolishness of your past like the steam after a hot shower and still love the person she saw in the mirror; today, as with all days, her bright affectionate smile nearly brought tears to my eyes.
When she finally caught up to me, I caught a whiff of her vanilla-scented perfume and felt my heart stutter inside of my chest. Her eyes sparkling like a church mosaic, she stepped out of the shade, her white skin beaming like moonbeams under the sun.
“Whatcha thinking about, cutie pie?”
“I’m thinking about how beautiful you are.”
“Are you hungry?”
“I’m starving.”
She winked, flashed her patent pearly-white smile and then jabbed me in the belly with her right fist. I grunted, wrapped my arms around my stomach and doubled over just enough to let her know I was going along with the joke. She giggled and ran across the shore, her tee-shirt fluttering in the breeze like a flag in a lazy current.
“Then you better come and get me, sexy man.” She screamed, her voice trailing out behind her.
I pawed at my right pocket and felt a slight jab in the middle of my hand. I didn’t want to tell her the truth about why I’d been working overtime at my father’s lumber yard for the past six months. The picnic had been planned for days but my next move would last me a lifetime.
The lake was located three miles northwest outside of Lancaster along Kenneth Road. A mixed stand of shaggy pines and leafy oaks ran parallel along a wide lip of soft-brown sand that could tell just as much stories as the walls of a person’s house. When people weren’t swimming her during the summer months, this had been a haven for bonfires and unplanned pregnancies.
I pivoted on my heels and ran after her. She got halfway across the shore, giggling like a schoolgirl as the contents shuffled softly around the inside of her picnic basket. I wrapped my arms around her waist, spun her in the air and set her back down.
I held her against me, the wind rising around us and slid the back of my hand down her right cheek. She purred, resting her head against my right shoulder and branched her left arm around my hip.
“I love you.”
“I love you more.” I brushed a strand of hair from her forehead.
“I don’t think so.”
“Oh, really?”
“Yeah.” She nodded, caressing my beard. “I’ll always love you more.”
“We’ll call it a draw.”
We kissed, our tongues swabbing inside the juicy-red caverns of our mouths and knelt onto the sand. My body flooding with both panic and desire, I slid my hands up her stomach and cupped her breasts; my thumbs slid across her stubby-brown nipples. When we broke the kiss, I slipped my arms back around her and gazed deeply in her eyes.
“I can’t begin to tell you what this year has meant to me.” I said, cupping her chin inside my thumb and forefinger. “I never knew happiness until I saw you. I’ve never been able to wear my heart on my sleeve so I could show you how much you make it beat and how much you make it glow. I never knew what real love was until I first laid eyes on you because no one else in this world will ever make me as happy-”
She pressed her finger against my mouth, cutting me off in mid-sentence. The wind caressed the back of my neck and traced the contours of my spine, rooting my knees to the sand.
“All you have to do is keep loving me like you are now.” She said, sliding the back of her right hand against my cheek. “That’s all you have to–”
She clamped her hands around her face and sighed. I slid my hand out of my right pocket, opened the small red-felt box with my free hand and held the ring out for her to see. A thin gold band with a double-sided diamond mashed together to resemble her favorite symbol: the infinity sign.
There wasn’t a day that hadn’t gone by where she wasn’t drawing that symbol. In the film of fog that covered my passenger window during a rainstorm two months ago when my truck broke down out on Red Possum Road; in the stacks of notebooks she kept inside of the cardboard box sitting under her desk in the far-left corner of her bedroom; on a few neatly painted canvases hanging on the walls of my little apartment above my parents’ garage.
Her face lit up and her eyes sparkled in the afternoon sunlight. She gave a strangled cry and clamped her hand over her mouth to stifle a second. Tears ran down her beet-red cheeks and dripped off the edges of her jawlines.
A spring of bright red hair fell across her forehead above her right eye. She slipped her trembling hands away from her face and pressed them against her chest in a mock prayer.
“Will you make me the–”
When she nodded, craned her head to the sky and shrieked a resounding “YES!”, a renewed energy burst through my body l
ike the first shot of caffeine. As she stared down at me, her face creased by a wide delightful smile, I jerked my head back, pumped my free hand at the air and wrapped her in my arms. After I slipped the ring onto her finger, she kept staring at it as if she thought it might fly away.
We sat beside of a gnarled oak tree and talked so much we’d forgotten about the picnic we’d meant to have. We didn’t have a bottle of champagne or anything fancy to mark the occasion, but it was still the greatest day of our lives.
******
Something snapped, stirring me out of a deep sleep. I sat up, my skin prickling with fear, and scanned the lake with wide panic-stricken eyes. My body stiffening, I gasped and clutched the blanket in two bony-white fists.
When I glanced back to my right, I saw the posts that supported the volleyball net lying shattered across the sand. The net wrapped around the dead blonde’s body as if she were drunkenly posing for a shot in an issue of Sports Illustrated. Her arms were lying across the sand in a mock surrender and her legs were bent at the knees; her tiny pale hands were curled at the knuckles, burying her nails deep into her palms.
I yawned, worked the edge of my hands against my eyes until they were clear and then stretched until my limbs hurt. I winced at the film of cotton coating my tongue, rolled onto my stomach and pushed myself up on my feet. I scanned the forest we’d come out of nine hours ago and inhaled the rich scent of pine sap deep into my lungs.
The wind sighed through the trees like a frustrated child. A bird shrieked and flew across my line of sight, its crucifix shadow floating across the surface of the lake.
Michelle was still asleep, the corner of her mouth glistening under a fresh coat of saliva sliding out from between her lips. I skulked away from the blanket and padded across shore. Limp arms of glistening green seaweed clung to a few sporadic patches of sand, soaking it under their grasp; a sunfish flopped crazily along the shoreline, its gray-yellow scales glinting under the diminishing sunlight.
I slid the collar of my tee-shirt up and across my nose and knelt down beside the dead girl’s body. My heart twitched under a mix of dread and disgust. I couldn’t stand to see her lying here, baking under the sun’s once harsh-white hundred-degree heat, smelling like something that’d just...well died.
I bet her friends didn’t even help her.
I bet she couldn’t even call her parents to tell them that she loved them because they’d probably died long before she did.
So young and yet so dead.
I tucked her hands together and rested them gently against her inner thigh and then wrapped the rest of the net around her entire body. I buried my heels into the sand, pressed my hands against her waist to roll her into the water when something shifted inside the net. I jerked back and squeezed my fists together, pushing my fingernails deep into the middle of my palms until my knuckles turned white.
I rolled the dead girl onto her back and began to pat her down. When I reached the waistband of her shorts, a pale thin-fingered hand rose up through the net and snatched my wrist out of the air. An icy chill sliced across my hand and coiled around my arm, prickling my skin with cold unbiased fear.
I snatched a quick breath, beads of sweat cascading down my temples and cheeks, and tried to jerk my wrist free. Something shifted in the corner of my right eye, drawing my attention away from its unearthly grasp. The blonde woman was sitting straight up, her lips drawn up into a lopsided grin exposing two rows of jagged black teeth; her eyes had a milky-white pallor and her skin was teeming with tiny red cracks.
Her face creased by eerie fascination, she gave a hearty chuckle and tipped her head back. Her grin spread wider now, exposing rotting gums to go with her still-rotting teeth.
“It’s still suicide, baby.” She said in a slow gravelly voice.
I wasn’t sure what she’d said so I waited for her to repeat it again.
When she did, I said, “No it isn’t.”
“What the fuck was I thinking? I couldn’t serve food at The Quaker Benefit back home in Chauncey so then why the fuck am I playing volleyball?” She said, staring down at herself.
I didn’t have an answer to that and I never would.
She leaned back on her right elbow, planting her hip into the sand and bent her left leg before sliding it up against her inner thigh. She brought her left hand up to her mouth, curled her palm together into a half-fist and bit down on the middle of her pinky. The hungry erotic expression on her face was pure evidence that in all of this confusion, under all these extreme temperatures, my mind had taken the train to Crazy Town; it was probably the goddamn conductor.
“Don’t you want a slice?” She said, baring that same black grin. “Just for old time’s sake.”
I ignored her demonic pleas for necrophilia, dug my heels deep into the sand and rolled her across the water’s edge and into the lake, kicking peals of sand out from behind me. I lost my footing, cursed under my breath, held my arms up and across my face and fell onto the sand.
“I would’ve been the best thing you ever had.” She growled. “The best thing you ever–”
I stood, brushed the sand off of my shorts and watched her body float across the lake, her tightly-wound cocoon cleaving a V-shaped tail across the water’s murky brown surface. Three minutes later, she sank out of sight, spreading a reflective scatter of tiny crystalline bubbles in her wake. An ear one minute, her hair the next and then nothing.
Nothing more than a casualty of a biochemical whoopsie-daisy created by Uncle Sam.
I walked back to the blanket and stared out at the same spot where the girl had sunk and fought back against the ball of sadness swirling inside of my chest. A fresh set of tears obscured my vision and my cheeks grew hot. I heard a soft groaning sound from behind me and quickly swiped the back of my hand across my eyes to wipe the tears away before Michelle could see.
“Take a picture it’ll last longer.”
She looked up at me from the blanket, drew a sly smile across the corner of her lips and cocked an eyebrow at me. She yawned, pushed herself up and crawled toward me like a frisky feline, her apple-bottom ass emphasized by the blood-orange sun. We kissed each other with lips as dry and cracked as an old sidewalk and gazed deeply into each other’s eyes.
“Are you hungry?”
“The last time you asked me that you poked me in the gut and took off.”
“I don’t think I’ll be going anywhere this time.”
She brushed a strand of hair from her face and leaned in for another kiss. I broke the kiss, cupped her left cheek in an L that I’d fashioned out of my right hand and brushed my thumb across the tip of her chin; her skin felt cool and waxy in the sunlight.
“I couldn’t pass up the chance for one last kiss.”
“It’s not your last.” I reminded her. “We’ll have plenty more where we’re going.”
My watch beeped. We stood up, shed our clothes save for our underpants and placed them in a pile in the middle of the blanket. We glanced awkwardly at each other and scanned the tiny red blotches spreading across our skin.
At first, they’d started along her inner thigh and spread down across her knees. In the time I’d take for us to reach Kenneth Lake, they’d crawled up my arms and across my chest.
“How do you want to do it?”
“Just like we said we would.” I nodded. “Did you have another idea?”
“Not really.”
“I’m always open to–”
Needles of pain jabbed deep into the pit of my stomach and doubled me over. I cradled my gut in both arms and, my throat and lungs burning, spewed a tiny puddle of blood onto the sand. Through the film of hot tears blurring my vision, I raised my hand, fingers spaced evenly apart and motioned for her to stay away.
When I was finished, I wiped the tears from my eyes with the back of my hand and brushed a mound of sand over the puddle. She’d been wiping her own tears away by the time I’d finished composing myself.
I sat back down on the blanket, the f
ire in my throat losing its sharpness, and gazed up at my soon-to-be dead wife. She sat next to me Indian-style, slipped her right arm around the back of my neck and placed her hand on my right shoulder. When she rested her head on my left shoulder, I slipped my left arm across her lower back and cradled her left hip.
I caught a whiff of her strawberry perfume and felt my skin prickle with joy. It filled my nostrils, reminding me of all the “stops” we’d made along the metaphorical road of Life that made us stronger like it always would considering what we’d endured: two miscarriages, three unexpected deaths, a house we would never own and seven anniversaries.
We could’ve died anywhere we wanted to, but we chose to die here where our love flourished and our life began. Where we’d ripped our hearts out from our chests and handed them to one another, knowing they would care for it as if it were their own.
Although it wouldn’t end the way we would’ve liked, I hope this letter reminds us that in our last moments of living, love always triumphs over death.
IN LAUDAMUS JACK
I’d never written a Halloween story, although it is my favorite time of the year.
I was browsing through the Internet for a good wallpaper for my computer when I came across an image that stayed with me for a long time-well, two months is a long time.
I wanted to express how much Halloween means to us “Halloweenites”. I think I’ll do a Christmas story next time.
HIS boots clopping along the rough gray asphalt, Chad Hanson wiped a film of sweat from his brow with his left forearm when he saw the bleached-wooden church sign standing along the shoulder of the road. The words WELCOME TO WALPURGIS had been scrawled across the middle in a spangly golden font; the phrase JACK IN LAUDAMUS was scrawled three inches below. He snorted, praying that he wasn’t about to venture into the same town from the movie Footloose, massaged his chin with his left hand and gave it a dismissive shrug.
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