Idaho Winter

by Tony Burgess

  “The crazy person has fallen out of the sky. And he’s . . . he’s not crazy, really, but he’s bad. He floats in the air like a moth. And he has a heavy black hat, like a witch, but not pointed, more like a stovepipe. He has these enormous hands, white and meaty, and he talks to them as if they weren’t hands but people hanging out of his thick coat sleeves.”

  Billie Joe stood and gazed up at the full moon.

  “Anything can happen on a night like this. Things we can’t even picture, things we can’t imagine are out there. Waiting for us.”

  Alex grabbed a rock in her hand. “You’re right.”

  “Everything knows we’re here.”

  Eric stood suddenly, kicking debris from his shoes. “Everything?”

  We all looked up as stars began to appear. Tiny pin eyes. I must admit it looked amazing, this velvety sky, the deep yellow scoop of moon. I found myself wondering how many of these things sprang from Idaho. Was it his scenario that we were in? Or was it his neglect? Maybe he didn’t picture stars at all. Maybe they were being filled in automatically, zooming into being out of suggestion, out of lazy memory. Never intended to be beautiful, but there they were. A breathtaking night, certainly not of my making, and never meant to be seen.

  Erica had stepped beside me. She whispered as if in church.

  “We have to find Madison. How do we do that?”

  “We can’t move at night. We have to wait till morning.”

  “What if she’s . . . It’s dangerous out there. She’s just a little girl floating down a river on a bed.”

  “She’s more than that, Erica. She may be the most dangerous thing out here.”

  Erica studied my face for a moment. She wanted to know whether I meant that or whether I was just saying it for effect. I stared at the moon. Whether Madison was safe or in danger would not be changed by my thinking one way or another.

  Then I saw something that froze my flesh. Gasps all around me. Others could see it.

  A tiny black mark that had looked like something on the surface of the moon was getting larger. It appeared to be floating out from the moon. Not floating — speeding, shooting. Around it, a red halo. It was a figure, a person streaking off the moon. Soon we could make out the tall black hat. The batwing flaps of the fiery coat. He came so fast upon us. I could see his howling face and those calm, squinting eyes.

  A wind touched my shoulder and I looked. Erica’s hair. Shoulder. Leg. Feet. The bottoms of her feet kicking. Mr. Nightmare had her. He flew across the face of the moon: a shadow eye in the shape of a struggling girl. These are things I never planned to see. These are things I never wanted to see.

  We sit in a circle in the dark. Alix has been staring at his hands for the past hour. I admit that something enormous has happened to us, a very seismic shift has changed things that I was certain could not change. Instead of trying to convince you of this, something I would need a theory for, I will simply list the changes. Eric became Erica before being whisked to the moon by a nightmarish ghoul. I didn’t notice he had become a she. And Alex is now a he. I don’t know if I noticed this after it happened or if it happened because I noticed it. Everything that has happened, everyone I thought I knew has become unstable. I have begun to shut down myself. As far as I can tell, Billie Joe isn’t here anymore. The Ms. Joost/Oncet head/Tré Cool creature is no longer here. It’s just me and Alix. I am desperately sad to have lost Erica. It feels like I lost him twice. Once to another gender and then to a kidnapping specter. I have Alix here, but I don’t know who he is anymore. I think I misspelled his name before. Is that what happened?

  “I’m sorry.”

  Alix whispers this. Mom-bats bounce around between the trees.

  “Why are you sorry?”

  “This has never happened to you before, has it?” Alix is concerned for me. He has lost his sister. Is that really how I should put it?

  “I’m sorry for you.”

  The light is starting to shimmer, and it rings the world we can see, like lights glowing at the base of a vast planetarium. I stand and turn slowly. We are still in a forest. There are no Mom-bats. No dinosaurs. Nobody. Just a generic forest. Birch trees and cedar. It smells nice, like spring. Newness. I help Alix to his feet. The light has spread across the sky and has granted everything a ghostly texture. It’s hard to describe. It’s very beautiful. It’s taking my breath away. The present tense is always so spectacular. I’m grateful for now. I watch a leaf fall from a birch tree. It tumbles, lime and lemon, carried up and across the light until it rests. Lime. I turn to Alix.

  “What should we do? What do we do now?”

  Alix doesn’t answer. He stands and smiles at me. It’s a very rich and strange smile. There is a terrible wisdom to this character. A wisdom I don’t possess. He knows we aren’t really here. I know that too, but I feel that if anything matters, anything at all, it has to be here. The people we’ve lost. The gray mountain sweeping up behind us. A mountain of sad. Alix is walking toward it, looking from side to side. He stops suddenly.

  “What is it?”

  Alix goes down on one knee and touches the ground. He scoops up sand and weighs it before letting it drift through his fingers. “I don’t know. Something strange.”

  Something strange? Something strange? Okay. I don’t even know where to start. If he thinks something is strange then I just don’t want to know. Alix stands and strides toward a white path at the base of the mountain. He gestures for me to follow. He is starting to run.

  “Hold on! Hold on! What’s wrong?”

  Dear Reader: The book you are currently reading does not have the resources required to resolve its own problems. Please turn to page 143.

  Warmest regards,

  The Editor

  Page 135.

  I reach him and he stops. There is alarm in his features.

  “Something different. Something new,” Alix says.

  “I thought this happened before.”

  “Okay. Listen to me. Listen carefully. I’m going to try to explain. Things change around here. What changes is you move. The you of you. Who you are changes place. Sometimes for a moment. Sometimes longer. But this is different. I think I am this now. And I may have been becoming this all along.”

  I don’t know what he means. Do you know what he means?

  “What do you mean?”

  “I am home. This is my body. This is who I am. I’m Alix. I can feel all the walls of me inside going up around me to keep me here. Follow me. Something’s going to happen.”

  Alix tears up the pathway on all fours, scurrying up like a critter. The ground in front of me seems to rear up over my head and curl over behind me. My stomach is starting to pitch up into my throat. I can see Alix’s feet turning and spinning like blender blades turning dust around us. When we reach the top, the sky opens and seems dangerously blue and close. I bend my head low, afraid that I might smash my face against the blue light. All the characteristics you associate with sky are canceled here. The sky is not wide nor open nor silent. The sky is narrow, pressing against my cheeks, and it sounds like blown speakers.

  Alix looks down at me. “This is the end.”

  “The end of what?”

  “Can’t you feel it?”

  “No. I can’t. Tell me.”

  Alix’s face moves closer. He’s sitting up. As he moves I swear the sky bends up to make room. He speaks inches from me. I am trying to tell you how this is happening. How big things are. How fast things are moving. But I confess that I am failing entirely. Nothing here is even remotely the way I am describing it.

  “We are food.”

  I don’t know if I heard that right.

  “We are what?”

  “Food. Look.”

  Alix holds up his arms and his hands have turned white. The fingers have fused together forming a point. He holds them up and watches th
em turn and twist.

  “I am white chocolate.”

  His eyes are now red. A horrible cherry red. When he speaks his words bubble in his mouth and black fluid runs off his lips in heavy sticky ropes.

  “We are food. Look.”

  He lifts his pointy white hand and shows me. I hadn’t noticed how high we are. The entire world, everything we climbed out of, lies hundreds or thousands of feet below and my eyes are like little passenger windows in a jet soaring above the clouds. The river is rainbow-colored. It is a thick ribbon lying in twists. The trees and forests are dripping bunches of sickening pinks and glossy purple. There is a long thin tube of black attached to the ground that runs up into the sky. I follow it and it soars past us. Caught in it are light orange shapes. Candies. A tall hat and gloves. I squint upwards to see where it goes, but the light is blinding. Alix’s pointy hand gestures again. Some kind of heavy silver ship is skidding across the ground. Its rounded front disappears under the yellow soil, then stops, then rises again. I can make out something moving on it. A person. Ms. Joost lies face down and Oncet wails from her back. The ship rises up with startling speed and passes us. It is headed toward the black rope. Past the hat and gloves. Then it moves in front of the light and I can see for a moment. A heavy pink cliff face. Not a cliff face. A face. Idaho. The ship is a spoon. The terrible mouth of Idaho Winter opens like a massive red canyon in the clouds and then seals itself over the spoon. Ms. Joost has been devoured. I freeze. I can’t breathe. The drop down is thousands of feet. I don’t know now if I am standing on something solid or simply floating here.

  A shadow darkens us. I look up to see an area the size of a city block floating through the sky. A hand. The massive hand of Idaho Winter.

  “You wrote this!” says Alix, or rather an Alix that looks like a bizarre Pinocchio made of ice cream.

  “No! I didn’t!” I didn’t! I didn’t write this! I can’t even describe it now.

  “When he eats me am I still alive?”

  “What?”

  “Are we going to live inside Idaho? Does this story keep going inside his stomach or does it end in him?”

  I don’t know. I don’t know. The question is crazy. The ground far below groans with a terrible sucking noise. Idaho has driven his fingers deep into the ground. I can see things running, fleeing. The T. Rex lies in his palm.

  “Look!”

  Alix points again — at Erica. She is dangling from a licorice whip. She is stretched inside a wheel. Her hands and feet are fused to the circle. Her face is silver and her features unclear. Not quite formed. She is a charm.

  Alix turns to me.

  “We are all here. We are all going to the same place. Everything will be okay.”

  I don’t believe this for a moment. Alix bends his knees up. His legs are joined together and he has to twist to stand. He looks down once and winks.

  “The right thing is going to happen.”

  Alix turns his striped face up just as his head is pinched by the monster fingers of Idaho Winter. He leaves the ground and disappears up into the thin colors around Idaho’s impossible head. And he is gone.

  I am alone. Below me the world is scooped clean of life. The air is an unbreathable blur of candy stars. I feel an awful weight pull my heart down. There is a heavy price to pay for writing a bad book. Be careful what you picture. Be careful. If you think you know, then think again. A sickeningly sweet draft covers me. Idaho is here. Idaho will eat me.

  I look up. His eye is beside me. It rolls like a clear blue manatee curled in a cold pool. Around the bottom lid in the corner is a pink spigot, a duct. And it is here that the tear forms. I see it take shape and expand, a thick warm skin that holds a globe of tear until it breaks and then runs quickly down over the cheek and turns once or twice before disappearing below. Idaho is crying. I can feel it. I can feel it. The eye focuses on me and I can see a great room of sadness lit up inside it. This eye is the place that changes everything in this world and now, after all the cruelty and madness, it has suddenly arrived at a great sadness. The eye rolls over and looks down, pushing a long splash of tears that tumble toward the earth. I follow these as they shrink with distance and land. Not on the earth, but on a little girl. A little girl that lies motionless on a bed in the palm of Idaho’s massive hand. Idaho, I think you’ve met Miss Madison before. He raises the hand to his face and blinks once then throws the girl, bed and all, down his throat.

  I had wanted him to do something else. To save her. To free her. To free all of us. Now that he feels and he feels so deeply all of the unhappiness he has caused. Isn’t that what we wanted? Is that how my book should have ended?

  The head of Idaho leaves me and moves up into the outer sky. I can see the blackness of space and its tiny pricks of distant light in his hair. He is looking up. I wonder what he thinks now. Is he a thing that can think? His body rises further still as he stands, his knees swinging over me, and I can only see as far as his hands. I hear a noise. It’s a distant sound. A rumble. A tossing of things. Tumbling and falling. A muffled groan gurgles low then whines into a high-pitched squawk. Idaho’s mighty fists tighten. Suddenly his face flies down from the planets straight toward me. It arrives in front of me like a great green moon. His eyes are wide and yellow and rolling. His lips are pulled in. Idaho Winter is going to throw up.

  The world is about to return.

  Idaho Summer

  The onset of summer comes early in Idaho Falls and here on the west side, across Snake River, the dust has already risen out of the fields. Every year around about this time the Skyline Grizzlies and the Idaho Falls Tigers draw a big high school crowd down at Ravsten Stadium to play an annual football game known locally as the Emotion Bowl. The winner of this particular sporting event is allowed to paint the other team’s goalposts in their school colors. If Skyline wins then Idaho Falls have to spend the entire next year with orange uprights; if they lose, well, then the good kids at Skyline take a trip to Joost’s Hardware and buy a good five quarts of pale blue paint. As befits the great event the dry land around the Areva Uranium Enrichment Plant has tossed a thick orange cloud across the river and the good Lord, as if picking a side, has been pushing it down off his best summer sky all morning long.

  Last year the Tigers had it easy. Those sons of guns had a ringer in Kyle who technically wasn’t attending Idaho Falls at the time. Nope, he was interning over at the Museum of Mountain Bike Art and Technology until he could get called up to Madison U in Wisconsin on a football scholarship. This year it’s going be Skyline Grizzlies all the way. This is going be the best Idaho summer of all time.

  Page 143.

  Erik stretches as he wakes, pointing his toes down and his arms out until they hurt a little, then he slumps, his eyes finally open.

  “Erik! Last call!”

  Erik has not heard the first five times his mother called. He sits up and rubs his face.

  “Erik! Right now, mister! This is not fair!”

  Erik barks out a noise and slouches over the clothes folded and stacked as neat as printer paper on the chair. New clothes. First day of school clothes. Corduroy and plaid and dark brown socks. He plucks the pins and cardboard from the shirt and decides he will never, ever, wear these things again. The first day of school.

  “Ouch! Ow!”

  A pin still in the pants pricks Erik’s calf. He floats his hand across the fabric, searching for the pinhead. Then he freezes. He stares at the wall. He stands like this, in a trance, a spell, thinking. He turns his head to the door and looks, his eyes wide. He reaches down and draws the pin from his pant leg then slowly winds the blinds open. Sunlight fills his room and he leans back, anxious, as if something threatening might enter.

  “Erik! Are you getting dressed? Erik!”

  Erik turns and takes in his room, as if it were a strange place, then his eyes rest on his bed. Covers rolled to one side. The pillow pushed in
to the corner. He holds a hand over the mattress then cautiously lowers it. Warmth.

  Alix is almost finished her French toast by the time Erik sits.

  “Well, thank you for showing up. Let’s not do this all year. Okay?”

  Erik studies Alix’s face. Her eyes haven’t lifted. She slowly chews the last piece of French toast then carefully lifts a glass of orange juice to her lips.

  “Erik!”

  Alix looks up and sees her brother watching her. They stop moving for a moment, suspended by each other’s glare.

  “I am talking to a wall. I can’t do this. It’s not fair.”

  Erik and Alix’s mother closes a cupboard loudly, flops her keys into her purse and leaves. Alix breaks eye contact with her brother and he breathes.

  “Mom! Mom!”

  Their mother returns, but only as far as the doorway.

  “Oh, look at this. How strange. You call me and I come. Isn’t that odd?”

  She is nearly in tears. Erik turns to his mother.

  “I’m sorry, Mom. Just woke up feeling weird. I’m sorry.”

  Erik turns briefly to catch Alix’s reaction to what he has said. Her eyebrows rise. Feeling weird.

  “Okay. Okay. I get that.” Their mother is relieved to hear her son’s voice. She wipes her eye with the back of her hand. “It’s the first day. These are going to be busy mornings. Let’s just try to . . .”

  Alix and Erik, in unison, say, “Okay, Mom.”

  Their mother nods deeply, accepting that she will say nothing more.

  “Okay. I have to go.”

  “Sorry, Mom. I love you.”

  She holds up a hand to wave then kisses her palm and lays it on Erik’s head.

  Alix and Erik walk along the sidewalk without speaking. They stare at the ground ahead of them and march in step with each other. Alix coughs and sniffs and pulls at her sleeves. She is trying to talk.