by David Arnold
Not the Kingdom of Manchester. Just Manchester. She could still hear her father’s voice: The Waters of Kairos are real. Manchester is a real place . . .
She knew Manchester (or what was left of it) existed. Outside of that, she wasn’t sure what to believe. Her father had seemed lucid enough, though the line between lucidity and opacity had blurred considerably these past weeks. The problem was, there was no protocol in place, no books on the shelf, nobody in the wide empty world to help her answer this question: What do you do when the person you most trust hands you a fiction and calls it fact?
On her back now, tucked into the sleeping bag, Nico looked up at the stars and thought of her parents. How quickly her memories of them had come to resemble a place more than a person: a permanent imprint in the armchair, a dusty seat at the dinner table, the empty mantel by the fireplace, her mother’s dog-eared Bible. So long as they lived in the Farmhouse, the Farmhouse lived. It was the body and they were the heart. But it was quickly becoming a ghost, every nook and cranny a whispered reminder that her mother was gone, her father wasn’t far behind, the beating heart was winding down.
The fire popped; beside her, Harry shimmied in his sleep, his front and back haunches lurching in a running motion, chasing the squirrel or rabbit of his dreams.
Winters in the Farmhouse were cold, but Nico found comfort in them: cozy spots, always a fire, an extra blanket or two. It was late October now, what her mother called pre-winter, when the year skipped fall altogether and the sun went to bed early. Out here, she felt she was seeing the true nature of cold, a bitter-bleak affair. At least once, probably twice in the night, she would wake up freezing and add wood to the fire. Still, bitter-bleak or not, here was the truth: part of her—a small part, buried under the threat of woods and Flies, the loss of her mother, the fear of reaching Manchester to find nothing at all—down there, burrowed in, was a part of Nico that was glad to be out here. That she’d made the unknowable horizon known, reached out and grabbed it, turned it like a glass doll in her hands.
Around her, the sounds of the wild undulated, rolled in loudly, flowed out softly; a circular pattern took shape in the sky, the stars themselves a cosmic connect-the-dots. Soon she would be asleep in Harry’s musky scent, dreaming of herself in a little boat at sea, being pulled by an orca, guided by a large bright eye in the sky.
For now she looked to the stars for answers. “How can I fight this darkness?”
The stars were cold and uncaring as ever.
Furies
“What do you get when your dog makes you breakfast?”
Having finished his strawberry granola, Harry looked up at her expectantly.
“Pooched eggs,” said Nico.
A single tail wag; it was the best she could hope for.
Breakfast today was the same as it had been yesterday: one serving of strawberry granola crunch and a strip of rabbit jerky apiece. It would be lunch and dinner, too.
Blood was the stuff of lore. A long lineage of logic she would never understand, but which her parents had locked on to in the early days of the Flies, when she was still a baby. They maintained live traps along the Farmhouse perimeter, mostly for rabbits, the occasional gopher, but never doing the killing outside. The cellar was for slaughter, skinning, dressing.
Whatever the logic, it had apparently imbedded itself in her.
She could not bring herself to hunt.
Luckily, her dad had been economical in his packing, raiding the food supply buckets for lightweight items. Most of the freeze-dried dinners were out; they required too much space, weight, preparation. There was no chili mac (her favorite), but plenty of strawberry granola (palatable), and a good amount of her dad’s homemade jerky. Aside from food, her backpack contained a water-filter bottle, sleeping bag and bedroll, two gallon-size ziplocks of lighters, a compass, folding knife, map, extra socks, a small first aid kit, and packs of ground cinnamon. So long as strict attention was paid to rations, their meals would be taken care of, and they had enough Fly repellent to last weeks.
Nico sat with her back against a tree, savoring the jerky. “Why aren’t koalas actual bears?”
Harry tilted his head as if to say, Go ahead then. It was a look inherited from his mother, Harriet, whose death would have been unbearable were it not for those same humanoid eyes she’d passed on to her pup. (As for the breed of Harry’s father, there was really no way to know, given Harriet’s propensity to disappear into the woods for days at a time.)
Harry was a medium-size two-year-old, perky ears, dark black fur. Like his mother, he was playful without being needy, more intuition than simple smarts.
“So now you say, ‘I don’t know, Nico, why aren’t koalas actual bears?’ And I say, ‘Because they don’t meet the koalafications.’”
Not even a wag this time.
Nico stood, kicked dirt on the remains of the fire. She wrapped herself in her coat, pulled on the backpack, and was about to set out when a deer appeared, and it began to snow, and it felt like the one had been waiting on the other.
Her mother had often complained how much of the wildlife had been wiped out by Flies. Squirrels had survived, and rabbits, all things rascally and quick, animals that knew how to live in claustrophobic places. Nico had seen a moose once: enormous, mythical, like something from a storybook. But that was years ago.
They stared at the deer, and it stared back, two dark orbs inside white eye rings, and time slowed to little wisps, gliding like one of these thousand snowflakes to the ground. Grayish-brown skin. Antlers. “A whitetail,” whispered Nico. A buck, though it had been in a fight or suffered some sickness, as the antlers on one side of its head were gone, and a back leg was bleeding.
Sunk in the animal’s glow, she didn’t hear it at first.
Then, in the distance, a low hum . . .
Swarms had a way of conjuring sounds she’d only imagined: a fleet of trains, a collapsing skyscraper from one of the old cities, the cyclone in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. From the Farmhouse cellar, it was hard to tell whether a swarm’s volume was due to size or proximity.
She put a hand on Harry’s head, felt him trembling. “Easy,” she whispered, scanning the area for places to hide. “Easy . . .”
The whitetail raised its lopsided head to the sky, its nostrils flared . . .
It happened fast: the humming burst from the trees, a deafening roar now, and the Flies came down like holy thunder, a celestial arm from the sky. She jumped behind a tree, yelled for Harry, but he’d run off somewhere, where, where, she couldn’t see him, and now she was on the ground, couldn’t remember falling, heart pounding against the quaking earth. From where she fell, she saw the whitetail covered in Flies, and for the first time in her life, she understood the fury of the swarm.
By the tens of thousands they worked as one until there was no visible grayish-brown fur, no broken antlers or red blood, no deer at all, only a deer-shaped thing, black and pulsing. The deer barked, a nightmarish screech, and as the Flies began lifting it off the ground, Nico buried her face, covered her ears, and did not move until she felt Harry’s warm breath and wet nose against the back of her neck. And even though it was quiet again, the thunder in her head lingered.
Optics
Underfoot, a mix of leaves and snow, fresh and old. After the swarm, the day seemed to go on forever, all the noises of the forest a potential threat.
Eventually they fell into an accidental game where Harry would run ahead, never too far, but far enough for them to feel the underlying suggestion of aloneness. They’d go like this for a minute, not biting into the solitude, just nibbling at it. Inevitably, Nico would break first. She’d whistle for Harry’s return, count to five under her breath, and he’d come bounding back. (It never took longer than a five-count.) When he returned, she would tell him what a good dog he was, and he would wag his tail, and she would tell a joke or two until he decided to
play the Game again—run ahead, nibble of solitude, whistle, five-count, triumphant return, verbal affirmation as to the quality of Harry’s petsmanship, and so on.
A few hours in, they found a narrow stream that hadn’t yet frozen; they stopped long enough for Nico to refill her filter bottle, and for a quick bite, and by the time they’d started the second leg, their moods had lifted a little.
“Mom used to say the only thing worse than not being educated about something was pretending not to be.” In addition to the paranoia of Flies around every rock and tree, the whitetail had stirred something unexpected in Nico. “In the interest of not pretending, I have to admit—I had not considered the possibility of other people. A deer? Fine. And we knew Flies were a danger. But people. That’s a whole other deal.”
Honestly, the thought of seeing another person scared Nico less than the thought of another person seeing her first. She was stronger than she looked but couldn’t help wondering if this wasn’t a bit counterintuitive. Appear strong and you never have to prove it. Appear weak and you’re constantly disproving it.
Harry ran ahead (all hail the Game!); watching him go, Nico played a different sort of game. She found a tree in the distance and imagined a stranger’s eye peeking out from behind it.
What would this person see?
Two outliers headed east, little dots on a map inching toward the Merrimack River: a dog, medium-size, breed unknown; a teenage girl with watery white skin, hair yellow as the sun, blue hoodie, long black coat, backpack.
Maybe they wouldn’t even see a girl and a dog. Maybe they would see only meat.
Ahead, Harry stopped dead in his tracks, stared up into a tree. As Nico neared, she followed his gaze, and at first she wasn’t sure what she was looking at. Some droopy animal hanging from the branches, furry but flat, strangely indefinable, something that belonged in the ocean, if anywhere. Whatever it was, its colors blended into a tree whose leaves waffled between shades of fall and winter. Then, slowly, a shape took form: twiggy legs, a belly ripped open like a too-full sack, the absence of insides, of eyes, of life. The antlers—a single set only, its beam and tines camouflaged among the branches.
“The whitetail,” she said. Hollowed out now, not a carcass so much as a sagging hide and bones. This morning the deer had commanded their attention with nothing but its theatrical presence; it commanded attention now, too, though this was a different kind of theater.
Nico had always possessed a natural capacity to feel what others felt. She could close her eyes and live there, be them, feel this, do that. Now, eyes closed, she tasted lead and panic, felt the wave of Flies behind her like a tracking tsunami as thousands of feverish nips burrowed into the innermost Nico, her body slowly filling as she lifted off the ground, emptied of muscle and organ until, nothing left, the Flies dropped her back to the earth a discarded shell, the saddest of fallen stars.
At her feet, Harry dug a hole. Nico couldn’t help being proud of her dog’s aptitude, how quickly he had learned what follows death.
KIT
spacedog & computer #611
In the beginning, there was nothing.
Then the world.
Then people, but no art.
Then people made art.
Then people died.
Now there is art, but no people.
Kit set down the chalk, wiped his hands, and turned to the empty classroom. “And that’s how it went. A brief history of art in the world. By Kit Sherouse. Your professor. Amen. Goodbye, or whatever.”
Even at twelve, Kit felt a many-reasoned sadness at his little playact. Not because he was the one teaching, but because no one was there to learn.
Which was a shame.
Because Kit knew a lot.
Oil paints, for example. He knew all about those. How they were made of natural pigments from heavy metals, e.g., cadmium red, titanium white, et cetera and so forth. It was for this reason, Kit knew, that oil paints could last decades without going bad.
(Also, he knew about e.g., which was an abbreviation for the Latin phrase exempli gratia, which meant “for example,” for example.)
Kit stood alone in the art classroom of William H. Taft Elementary School, staring at the blank page on the easel in front of him, stewing in the adrenaline of artistic possibility.
“I could make anything,” he said aloud, knowing full well what he would paint, having painted the same exact thing the last 610 mornings.
He stepped forward, put brush to paper, and out it came. First the moon, big and bright. He painted that moon, bigger and brighter than he’d painted it yesterday, and around it, a swirling navy night sky. Now, at the bottom, the dog. He started with the head: snout up, looking toward the moon, perky ears, and now the body, which he outlined first, and then filled in with black. Once the dog was done, he turned his attention to the blank space in the middle of the paper where the giant key would go.
The key was similar to the one his Dakota wore around her neck.
Maybe it was the exact one, who could say.
Yesterday it had occurred to him too late that if he mixed a little glitter into the gray paint, he could make the key shimmer. He did that now and felt a rush of excitement when it worked: a shimmering key in the sky, like cosmic space dust. Whatever it was, this was the closest he’d gotten to an accurate rendering of the vision in his head.
He stepped back, took in the painting. The dog, the moon, the shimmering key.
“Okay,” he said, wondering if today was the day. Maybe he could stop here. Maybe he could be done. The three images worked well together; there was no space on the page begging to be filled.
And yet . . .
Stepping forward, as always, he allowed the brush to take over. In the sky, around the moon, where stars might have been, Kit painted a computer from the olden days. Big and boxy. Now a keyboard with a cable. Now a computer mouse, like the one he’d found tucked in the back corner of the maintenance closet, beige and ugly and hanging in the sky as if that were its most natural habitat.
This time, when he stepped back to take it in, the piece didn’t just look done—it felt done.
Strange, how a person could create something they didn’t understand. But maybe that was what made art great: Who cares where it comes from, so long as it comes from you?
The walls and ceiling of the classroom were plastered in various versions of this same painting. Covered and recovered, as Kit had run out of space long ago. He signed the bottom of this one, and beside the signature, a title: Spacedog & Computer #611.
After removing his smock, Kit crossed the hall to the library.
Because William H. Taft had once been an “elementary school,” and because, in the olden days, “elementary schools” were populated by younger children, the library was mostly filled with kids’ books. Kit was twelve, which, according to Monty, meant he would soon be spending more time in the old person library down the road.
And look. It wasn’t that Kit didn’t like the old person library. It was the insinuation that a library for old people had more wisdom than a library for children.
It only took a few afternoons in the old person library for Kit to debunk this theory. (Debunk being a word he knew that meant “remove the bunk.”) The stories were different, yes. Most of the covers were bigger, and some even had print so large, Kit could have read the pages from across the street. There were “books on tape” and “audiobooks,” which, so far as Kit could tell, had been nothing more than very long grown-up versions of bedtime stories. But there was no more or less wisdom to be found in the old person library.
Plus, the William H. Taft Elementary School library was way cozier.
Here, his books were arranged by genre, and then alphabetically by author, because Kit had a brain in his head.
He’d finished reading the nonfiction shelves years ago, and was currently in fiction, halfwa
y through the Ls. Not bad considering he usually only had about an hour before he had to be back at the Paradise Twin for high sun curfew.
Kit curled into the orange beanbag chair, opened The Call of the Wild, which was about a bunch of snow dogs who wanted to be boss, and picked up in a chapter called “The Dominant Primordial Beast.”
This was where Kit waited for his paintings to dry.
This was where he became a Knower of Things.
oh sarcophagi, cacophonies of catastrophe!
William H. Taft Elementary School belonged to Kit, just as Pharmacy belonged to Monty, Sherriff’s Office belonged to Lakie, and Garden on the Roof belonged to his Dakota.
It was just the four of them in all of Town, so they got to do things like that, pick out their own buildings.
When picking a building, one had to take into account two things: that building’s proximity to home (the Paradise Twin Cinema), and the amount of hollow bones and leftover people-bits that would need removing. Schools and businesses were a safe bet, as they’d mostly been evacuated before things got really bad.
Houses were tricky. In the olden days, houses were where people had lived, according to his Dakota. People would save up their cash-bucks to buy a house. They would spend a bunch of time picking one out. What people in the olden days didn’t know was that no amount of time or cash-bucks could keep a house from becoming a sarcophagus (which was a fancy word he knew that meant “tomb”).
Houses were cacophonies of catastrophe.
He’d been inside a few, during scavenges. They were dark and smelled like a woodstove casserole of death and farts. The worst cases were the ones where the Flies hadn’t gotten in to clean up the job. These houses had people-bits galore, rotten skin, cartilage, and, everywhere, the crumbs of humans.
You knew where the Flies had been. Flies left nothing but hollowed-out bones. Little piles all over the place, once people, now a heap of strange flutes around an empty skull.
