Entropy in Bloom

by Jeremy Robert Johnson

  We are touching ourselves while these images glow before us. We have unbuckled and lowered our pants. The leather on our gloved hands is soaking through with seepage. We do not push aside our jacket, but know that the pulsing rose between our legs is emitting a light-red glow. A hissing noise slips from its center.

  We are as quiet as we can be. As expected, the audience uproar in the room buries our birthing sounds. The people in this room are laughing, breathing, smoking, fascinated and excited by a world that is not theirs.

  We can taste them on our tongues. Two of our heads have emerged, broken through the belly skin, hissing in the flavor of the room.

  We slide down to the swollen meat-sprout at our groin and wrap our long bodies around it. Our fanged mouths find each other and lock up, teeth biting into each other’s lower jaws. We are a sheath now, squeezing tight, sliding up and down, pulsing, with the blooming rose at our top, its folds filling with an oil-slick rainbow of wet color.

  There is now a desert on the screen. The cave full of revelers has collapsed. A lone man in a cowboy hat has emerged. He walks on crutches made of elephant ivory. He leaves no print in the sand.

  We are ready for the next cycle. Hissing at a higher pitch. Our human head lolls back, its now soft skull squelching against the rear wall of the theater, bits of gray garbage draining out.

  Our mouths unlatch from each other and we stop stroking between our legs. We bite into the rose-bloom and taste our old warm blood and the oils of our gestation and we pull back and then split the meat-sprout from tip to shaft.

  What is left of our I-brain thinks it has gone to a place called Heaven. It feels so good. So alive.

  It thinks a word. Enlightenment.

  Our abdomen muscles contract and push down and a thick, bloody sausage-shaped sac pushes out of the hole we’ve torn in our crotch, the old flaps of our meat-sprout shaking and slipping against its emergence.

  It is rare and lucky to reach this point in the cycle. We are blessed.

  We quickly grasp the tube with our man-hands and bring it to our mouth, licking it clean, the taste stirring an old sense memory of the day we swallowed a bug in the park.

  One of our new extensions crawls up through our man-throat and slides over the slick, swollen man-tongue. We bite into the sac, spreading it open.

  We smile.

  Their wings are already drying.

  The film on the screen is so strange that when the man in the desert is suddenly eclipsed by the shadow of thousands of tiny flying gnats, the audience gasps in awe, breathing in deep, smiling with surprise, stunned by spectacle.

  We ride in on the waves of their exhalation and find soft purchase.

  And the people sleep, and dream, and awake to a subtle hissing sound. It is familiar to them. They hear it in their blood.

  We are the waves of an ancient ocean crashing to shore, washing everything clean.

  Luminary

  My brother burned to death in the summer of 1967. The doctors never found any evidence of the fire on his flesh, any scar on his skin.

  I know the truth. I watched him burn.

  My brother’s name was Martin Tally.

  Marty was a young man prone to daydreaming, and had a distant quality that strangers mistook for carelessness. Those who spent any significant time with him could identify his drifting eyes and long moments of silence for what they really were—an intense thoughtfulness, the focused kind of calm needed to contain boundless energy. His deep brown eyes, often hidden below a furrowed brow, seemed permanently etched with question marks. At moments of understanding his eyes shone with blazing exclamation points.

  His eyes were full of light the day he tried to explain the human body to me. He rattled off Latin words and the names of bones and tissues and organs until he was almost breathless, concluding with, “You and me, Petey, we’re the most magnificent machines ever built.” Then he laughed, this deep laugh, and he seemed to marvel that the sound was coming from his own body.

  His eyes were on fire when he took me up to the roof of our one-story house to watch the stars fall. He ushered me up our rickety wooden ladder and climbed behind me, carrying three blankets, two cans of soda, and a pack of saltines. We sipped on our sodas and crunched our crackers until we were covered with crumbs and giddy from the sugar and we watched the night sky produce star after star. He had heard about an expected meteor shower, and laughed as he saw the first stone streak fire in a straight line towards the Earth. We watched for two hours as flaming rocks painted the sky with thin brushstrokes, our silence punctuated by the occasional sound of his laughter.

  Toward the end of the meteor shower I turned onto my side and watched him observing the sky, his eyes shining. As if he could sense my eyes on him he said, “Pete, I know Mom didn’t raise us churchy, but I want you to always remember what you saw tonight, okay, bud? ‘Cause that, that up there, what we just saw, is proof of God.”

  My brother’s eyes were ablaze the time I got caught skipping school with Percy Brewston and Mark Bowling, and tried to shift the blame to my friends. I said, “Well, it was Mark’s idea and I just thought . . . ”

  Marty didn’t give me time to finish the sentence. “If it was Mark’s idea then you didn’t think anything, you followed. At least Mark had an idea, and he acted on it. You had no idea what you were doing. You acted without the conviction of your own decision, and now you have to suffer the consequences. Lemmings follow, Pete, and men think.”

  At the time I didn’t even know what lemmings were, but from the sharp glint in his eyes I knew that it was far better to be a man.

  I learned most of the lessons I still consider valuable from Marty, who, although only seven years older than me, was the closest thing I had to a father.

  The real deal, the biological Pops, was a door-to-door salesman who Mom said became a door-to-door husband, performing the service for women in need. After spending days looping through microfiche at the library, I discovered that Pops’ final sale was closed at a house in Cronston, Ohio where he was caught rendering his husbandry service with the wife of an infuriated carpenter. It turned out that the carpenter had enough energy for a little overtime, and a hammer to the face ended my father’s illustrious career.

  I didn’t need my dad. Mom kept me warm and kept food in my belly. My sister Vanessa made me laugh. Marty taught me about science, and math, and writing, and during the summer of 1967 he taught me about miracles.

  Marty was seventeen years old, I was ten, and Vanessa was five. We were all old enough to know something was seriously wrong with our cat, Teddy. Teddy had taken to pissing freely anywhere he felt like losing some fluids. He also maintained a Rip Van Winkle-esque sleep schedule, surprising for a cat that used to spend all hours chasing invisible antagonists and terrorizing birds in the acreage near our house.

  One afternoon I found Teddy resting on his side in the front yard. He was mewling just loud enough for me to hear through the screen door. His furry chest was matted and was barely rising with his breath. His head was resting in a small, dark pink pool of his own vomit.

  I didn’t expect Mom home from her job at the cannery for another three hours, and I couldn’t leave Teddy lying there in that condition, so I went and knocked on Marty’s door.

  I never knocked on Marty’s door, especially after school. Marty tended to cloister himself away for long periods of time, focused on his books and his beloved chemistry set, and he didn’t take well to interruptions. The last time I had interrupted him it had taken me two minutes to un-lodge the resultant wedgie. Still, Teddy appeared to be knocking on death’s door with both paws.

  Marty appeared at the door. “Aw, for Christ’s sake, Petey, don’t bother me. Go play with Vanessa or something. I have reading to do!”

  I peeked past him and scoped out his alway-tidy room, the small bed, the neatly kept wooden desk and desk lamp, the toddler-size stack of text books by his bed stand.

  Tears welled to the surface. I sobbed, “Marty, you got
ta see Teddy!”

  Moments later we were in the front yard, crouched over the gaunt and barely breathing cat.

  The question marks had entered Marty’s eyes, and I watched him watch Teddy, breathing calm as he softly stroked the cat’s head. He turned to me and said, “Bring me a blanket from your room, one you don’t mind not getting back.”

  I ran to my room and grabbed an old ratty yellow blanket that made my skin itch upon contact. I ran back and presented it to Marty, who was whispering something to the cat that sounded like, “It could work, Teddy. It could really work.”

  Marty used the blanket to clean the vomit away from Teddy and then pressed the fabric across his palms and scooped his hands softly under the cat’s neck and hindquarters. He wrapped the rest of the blanket around the body of the cat, who had stopped his sad mewling.

  Marty carried the cat to his room and shut the door. I heard the lock tumble. I panicked and ran to Marty’s door and was about to yell, “What the hell are you doing to our cat?” when his voice came calmly from the other side. He said, “Pete, listen very closely. I am going to fix Teddy, but it’s going to take me a few days, and I’ll need your help. We can’t tell Mom about this because she’ll want to take Teddy to the vet, and they will want to kill him. They don’t know what I know, or at least what I think I know, and I think I might be Teddy’s only chance to live. Petey, will you swear, on Teddy, and God, and everything, that you won’t tell Mom?”

  “Yes, I swear.”

  For the next few days I played coy, suggesting to Mom that Teddy might have run away. She seemed less concerned than I expected. I guessed that three kids and a full-time job was enough responsibility without having to worry about the disappearance of our incontinent cat.

  Each night I asked Marty what was happening and each night he offered no answers, instead insisting that Vanessa and I follow him out into the rolling fields near our house.

  Each night, for six nights in a row, the three of us walked into the field during the soft light of dusk and caught fireflies. Marty supplied us with bug catching nets and jars with metal lids that had holes punched in the top. We swung our nets through the air and captured the little flickers of light that buzzed around us. We coerced the glowing luminescent beetles into our jars, where they grew frantic and flickered even faster.

  While we were in the field Marty taught us about our tiny prey. We learned that the males flashed every five seconds, the females every two. Vanessa laughed and devoted herself to catching only the fastest flickering of the bugs. We learned the fireflies came from the family Lampyridae, which I remember only because it has the word “lamp” in it. Marty said the beetles made light out of two chemicals, luciferin and luciferase, both named after Lucifer, the angel of fallen light.

  Each night Marty took the bug-filled jars from us and locked himself away in his room, occasionally appearing in the kitchen to grab a bag of cat food or some ice. Every once in awhile I would see a light green glow coming from beneath Marty’s locked door.

  Things disappeared from around the house.

  The fourth day after Teddy collapsed I noticed the absence of several items, most notably a card table, a small wooden chair, my mother’s razor from the bathroom, and my father’s old insulin injection kit from the medicine cabinet. It made no sense at the time, and I began to doubt Marty.

  THE SEVENTH NIGHT AFTER Teddy fell ill, my sister disappeared.

  My mom had set out dinner, meat loaf with onions and mashed potatoes, and she called for us. Marty and I arrived at the table, but Vanessa was nowhere to be found. We walked the perimeter of our small residence. Marty noticed that the fireflies were out early that night. The exclamation points sparkled in his eyes. He ran to our tool shed, with me trailing behind.

  Marty threw open the doors of the shed and gasped. Only two insect nets were on the rack.

  “Oh, shit, Petey, she went firefly hunting without us.”

  We ran back to the house and grabbed Mom, explaining to her about our nightly trips to the field to gather the glowing insects. She asked “Why?” and Marty offered no answer. He was too intent on getting to the field and finding Vanessa.

  We trudged through the field as the sky grew ever blacker. I felt my heart drop into my toes and my stomach rise to my throat when I heard Vanessa’s voice, screaming somewhere far away. We followed the sound, the three of us now running, and I skinned my knees when I tripped on a downward slope in the field.

  I looked behind me and saw the third insect net lying on the ground. Where the hell was Vanessa and why would she drop her net? My body was instantly soaked in sweat and my mouth dry as a tomb. I felt sick to my stomach but held the gorge back as Marty and my mom rushed towards the sound of my sister’s faint screams.

  We found Vanessa on the far southeast end of the field, in the area just before a jutting line of trees at the edge of the thick and boggy marsh. She was trapped under a collapsed deadfall of old, heavy whisper oaks. We could see her little arm sticking out, torn with scratches. What I could see of her body was either incredibly pale or bleeding. Worse than that, she had stopped screaming as we reached her. There was no comfort in that quiet.

  As my mom reached forward to grasp Vanessa’s hand she pushed aside a thick branch and the deadfall shifted. Trees crackled and smashed through each other, pinning Vanessa deeper and pulling a desperate scream from my mother’s throat.

  In the growing darkness I saw the metal in Marty’s eyes, the calm and the wisdom beyond his years. He said, “It’s going to be okay. No one move. Any motion and those trees could collapse further. I am going back to the house, and when I return things are going to be okay.”

  My mom and I stood silent. I felt a sudden calm as I watched Marty run up the field, his legs graceful beneath him.

  The blanket of darkness dropped over the sky.

  I agonized over each second that passed without Marty’s return. Each moment slammed into me, heavy and punctuated like the heartbeat of a giant.

  I saw Marty first, out of my peripheral vision, and then my Mom saw him. “Look,” she said. Light filled our senses. Marty ran toward us at incredible speed, streaking sharp green light behind him. As he got closer to us, about halfway across the field, I could tell it was no illusion. He was glowing, bioluminescent. Tiny fireflies rose from the floor of the field and circled him, like planets orbiting the sun.

  Marty’s veins were on fire, glowing bright green. Every artery, every twist and turn of his body through which blood flowed was emanating a blinding light, and his eyes were saturated with it. The whole field within thirty feet of my brother glowed like daylight. The left side of his chest was shimmering, too bright to look into where his heart was circulating the liquid fire of his blood, so filled with light that his chest had become translucent.

  We watched him then, stunned.

  We watched as he lifted the mass of shattered trees that hung over my sister.

  We watched as he reached one glowing arm into the deadfall and gingerly eased my sister’s broken body out and placed her at my mother’s feet.

  We watched as the deadfall finally crashed in on itself, splintering, sending shards of old wood flying around us.

  We watched as my brother, his flesh on fire, pulled one of my father’s old insulin syringes from his pants pocket and slid it into his femoral artery, drawing blood. The blood shone so bright in the glass syringe that I couldn’t look at it directly. He carefully placed the needle in Vanessa’s left arm, at the bend, and depressed the plunger. Her breathing became steady, her color returned, and a faint glow came from her veins.

  Marty spoke to us. He said, in a voice amplified with a strange, buzzing undercurrent, “Vanessa’s going to be all right. I must rest here for a moment, but you need to get Vanessa to a doctor right away. I think she’s bleeding on the inside. I love you so much, and I know you love me the same, so you have to trust me, and go now.”

  My mom and I rushed Vanessa back to the house. I ran inside and
grabbed a thick blanket off the back of the couch, which we used to keep Vanessa warm on the way to the hospital.

  Mom and I remained silent the whole time Vanessa was with the doctors, both of us floating in a strange sort of daze, knowing we’d just witnessed something incredible, maybe impossible.

  Later, when Vanessa had stabilized and we returned from the hospital, I ran around the house looking for Marty, searching for that bright glow. I found him in his bedroom, lying under his covers.

  His chest did not rise or fall. His light, which hours before had burnt itself into my retinas, was now extinguished.

  As I walked over to Marty and crouched down by his body I felt the first of a torrent of tears stream down my face, and hardly noticed the soft glow that had entered the room. It was Teddy, padding softly towards me and purring, his eyes glowing green.

  I held onto Marty’s body and cried until my Mom pulled me away and we called an ambulance. The medical technicians arrived and placed him on a stretcher to take him away. To them Marty looked like a boy, barely a man.