They say we only have a couple of weeks left. I’m glad. I’ve gotten over the panic and helplessness that seems to have consumed everyone else. Now I’m just curious. They say we’ll only be alive for a while, once the Moon and Earth collide. They say the impact alone will destroy almost every living thing within the first hour, and that the rest will be wiped clean within the day. They say there is nothing we can do but wait.

More people have been taking their own lives as the days go on. I don’t blame them. It certainly has its appeal. When gravity ceased to exist, many people began to simply let go. They would release their grip on the ground below and float up into the sky like balloons. I’ve heard that the effect is like carbon monoxide poisoning, except that the freedom and weightlessness of flying is the last conscious sensation. They fly up until the air gets so thin that they drift off to sleep. I hope that’s true. I can’t stand the thought that you might have suffered.

It took a while to get used to having my bed on the ceiling. It was scary for a while, knowing that the only thing stopping me from floating up into oblivion was that thin layer of plaster and plywood. But I can see the Moon so well from here, if I hang my head off the side of the bed and look through our big glass skylight. It’s enormous by now, a translucent globe of pearl almost swallowing up the inky sky beyond, larger every day as it approaches. If I squint, I can see the shadows of the mountains and craters on the Moon’s surface, gray against the chalky white flat lands. There is no day anymore, only the Moon. You always loved the night better, anyway.

I keep our little red radio next to the bed. All that’s left on the stations is static, but for a while, it was the only way I got any news at all. Over and over they would relay the same message. The tides were getting too high, that was the first sign. They went on for months about possible explanations and dangers but nobody listened very seriously. The oceans were engulfing land all over the world and it was getting colder every day. The sun was dying and nothing could be done.

And then that night came when the world took you away. I saved myself. I grabbed the handrail on the stairs outside our house but you weren’t fast enough. You floated up with millions of others, filling the sky, helpless. I saw you over my shoulder against the Moon, your arms and legs outstretched and uncontrolled.

You got smaller and smaller amongst all those people and cars and things until you blended in with the crowd. Soon I couldn’t tell the difference between you or any of the others and the thousands of scattered stars behind you. Then you disappeared into the
night and all that was left behind were those tiny spots of bright light.

That was the first week the sun didn’t rise. The Earth stopped turning as the sun’s pull grew weaker and weaker. The night stretched on and on. I stopped going to work that week. Everybody did. We all knew the world wouldn’t be around much longer, so what was the point?

And what is the point now? All I have to look forward to is a slow, inevitable end to my existence. I will watch as that gargantuan orb nears ever closer to our surface, hour after hour, day after day, until it eventually meets our surface. That fateful kiss will destroy everything. But I cannot let go just yet. I can’t decide if it’s curiosity or cowardice—maybe both—but something keeps me here, staring up at the inky black of space, waiting.

You’ve been gone a month now and I miss you every day. I will meet you again soon. Until then, there’s always the Moon.

Always The Moon was originally published in Foliate Oak Magazine, Sept. 2010.

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Click.

“…Tall and tan and young and lovely, the girl from Ipanema goes walking-
And when she passes, each one she passes goes – ah…”

“Get in, sweetie, and tomorrow we’ll have more and more fun.”

Maddie grimaced, showing off the new gap between her front teeth. “I don’t like the Babybox.”

“Maddie, silly! You’re lucky we can afford twenty thousand dollars a month for this box.” As she spoke, she scooped up Maddie in her arms and lowered her into the box, laying her out on the white cushion. “Ooof! When did you get so heavy, baby?”

Maddie reached up out of the box and wrapped her arms tight around Carlotta’s neck.

“Don’t go, Mommy. You’re my best friend.”

“You’re my best friend, too,” Carlotta said, struggling to break Maddie’s grip. “Good night, now.”

“Okay,” Maddie sighed. “Bye-bye.”

Carlotta snapped the lid into place and the girl in the box went limp, her face draining to the color of skimmed milk, her eyelids reddening as she ceased to breathe—or very nearly ceased. Carlotta dragged the box into the home gym between their two bedrooms, sliding it over the smooth bamboo floor. With her shoes laced up, she stepped onto the treadmill and began to run, looking down at the unconscious child. From that angle, the bone structure of an older girl seemed to press up through the childish face. A trick of the light, perhaps.

Ten minutes later, Carlotta’s phone beeped and she answered without breaking pace, coming into the middle of a fuzzy conversation and drunken laughter, not directed into the phone, followed by an explosive, “Hey, Carlotta!”

Carlotta panted a greeting.

“I’m at Juvenescence with—Charlie,” she stressed the name carefully, as though to prove to the company around her that she knew it. “He has this friend, so—”

“I don’t leave Maddie in the box to go clubbing. That’s not what the box is for.”

“Oh, fine, Ms. Perfect. Just don’t pretend you don’t use it as much as the rest of us. If not more. Charlie, stop it.”

Carlotta beeped off, shaking her head. The box was a gift to children, not to their parents. It spared Maddie from dreary hours with a nanny, or a tired, distracted mommy. Of course, the box rewarded Carlotta, too, not because she used it selfishly, to go out with men, but because she could turn off the clock, look down at Maddie, hold on to this precious time.

And still, the girl grew older. Just that morning she’d lost a tooth, marking her baby smile—those two rows of even chicklets—with a black gap. The tooth looked tiny, spat out onto the breakfast plate. Hard to believe years had passed since that white serrated edge cut through Maddie’s clean, pink gum. The whole teething process seemed as recent as Carlotta’s last facial. Maddie had hardly fussed, was an easy baby, in general. Carlotta always had planned to have another, but time passed quickly, and now she was too old.

On the treadmill, she ran faster, though her thighs and buttocks burned.

The phone beeped again, loud in the quiet house, punctuating the hypnotic rhythm of the machine and Carlotta’s breathing.

“Opportunity calling.” It was her agent’s voice. “You’re set for the Daytime Emmys ceremony. It’s a milestone in your career to be presenting an award.”

“Thanks,” Carlotta said, though she’d rather be the young actress receiving it.

Motivated, now, to drop a few pounds, she forced herself to run even longer, envisioning herself on television, sleek in a clingy gown. Pearl-gray silk seemed appropriate; dignified yet sexy. She ran until her legs began to shake, then stepped off the machine and into the bathroom. After her shower, she stood in the dim, moody light that slanted through the steam, and gazed at her reflection with half-closed eyes: not bad. She’d buy a gown to show off her boob job, taking the audiences’ eyes off her neck, which was a tad ropey. The boobs, though, were perfect. She cupped them in her hands, leaning forward.

With her white terry robe lashed round her waist, Carlotta dragged Maddie’s box into the bedroom, where it lay like a bassinet beside the bed. There, reclining on throw pillows, Carlotta sipped water and looked through scripts. Theoretically, she’d like to do another film, though she wasn’t resigned yet to playing the mother-in-law. Acceptable offers came to her rarely, lately not at all.

When her eyes grew tired of reading, she pushed up her glasses and rested her head back on the yielding pillows. Across the room, a square of picture-glass reflected the opulent bed floating in the mellow lamplight, not Maddie, though, in semi-darkness on the floor. Feeling judgmental eyes upon her—so many people denounced the Babybox—Carlotta asked these imaginary critics what else the girl would be doing right now. Watching television? Playing on the computer? From an early age Carlotta had walked home from school to an empty house, hung out on the street with other unsupervised kids, watched her parents watch television at night, listened to them yell at her brother to come out of his room, ate carrot sticks and cottage cheese alone on her bed, Glamour or Cosmo spread on her knees. In contrast, she and Maddie sat down to a home cooked dinner every night. Though she could have afforded a personal chef, as well as a nanny and a driver, she adored doing all the jobs herself for her little baby doll. As a girl, she’d never played house; lucky her, lucky Maddie that they got to play now.

The next day, around ten, dressed and coiffed—no reason to scare the girl with bed-head mommy—Carlotta removed the lid and Maddie popped up, grinning her gap-toothed grin. “Park?”

Inexplicably, Maddie was fixated on the public park, a grungy place of metal, sand and dirty, cracked plastic. To Carlotta it simply was not on the map, but stood outside of the circuit she and her daughter made through their happy, cotton-candy colored world.

“No park today. But we’ll have fun.”

After lunch, they drove out, along graceful winding streets, past pink, and beige, and cream Mediterranean-style homes, toward the gate. As they passed under the stucco arch, Carlotta waved to the guard, but the young man stared back blankly, as though he had forgotten her. Foolishly, she smoothed her hair, then gripped the wheel again, looking at her hands. So many wrinkles ringed her wrists. If Babytech made boxes big enough for adults she’d get one, damn the cost, though she’d have to hire someone to haul her out of it, or she’d lie there forever.

A few blocks on, Maddie saw the tall gray Nordstrom building slide out from behind a row of eucalyptus trees and she began to pout. Carlotta drove into the mall, reassuring her, “We’ll have fun. We always do.”

After two loops round the parking lot, she found a place beneath a leathery leaved magnolia tree. Hand-in-hand, she and Maddie crossed the asphalt, walking toward the monumental glass facade of the PlayDaySpa. Inside, they left their shoes in cubbies and padded into the vast central room.

“You go play, while Mommy gets a manicure.”

Maddie walked away in her purple socks toward the enormous play structure, while Carlotta signed in with one of the uniformed play-associates. She left Maddie climbing the big green net, and strolled toward the manicure tables near the wall of mirrors. Once enthroned in a padded black leather chair, she checked back across the room. Maddie had reached the crow’s nest at the top of the structure and stood looking out toward the manicure stations. Carlotta waved. The little girl didn’t see, or pretended not to, turning away and crawling into a big red tube.

After her manicure, Carlotta started toward the consultation booth to reserve a chemical peel for the following week. On the way, she passed, the door to the massage room.

“Carlotta!”

Carlotta looked into her friend’s flushed face.

“You look…relaxed. Nice massage? Never understood the appeal myself.”

“You’re too tense, Carlotta. You should’ve come out with us last night. His friend was barely thirty—and hot.”

“Sorry.”

“I know, your little girl comes first.” The woman made a sour face as, at that moment, her own daughter ran up to her side.

“Can we go now, mom?”

“Don’t rush off yet.” Carlotta prolonged the conversation long enough to let drop that she was presenting an award later that month. “I’m glad I got that eyelid lift last spring. The lighting at those awards thingys isn’t as forgiving as on the set.”

“Christ!” her friend exclaimed, as though Carlotta had jogged her memory. “Have you seen my ‘soap husband’ this season?”

The impatient daughter, grimacing, braces glinting, tugged on her mother’s arm, pulling her in the direction of the shoe cubbies. The woman called back to Carlotta. “Check him out at frighteningplasticsurgery.com.”

Carlotta turned to the play-associate who’d silently appeared. “Ma’am, we have a situation.”

Carlotta’s smile grew fixed as she looked past him to the play area where two toddlers stood blubbering at the sides of the plastic ball pit, while Maddie sat in the middle, waist-deep in blue and red balls. All three mothers reached the scene within moments. The first, a squat woman in gray sweats, swooped out one of the sobbing toddlers and scowled at Carlotta.

“Is that big girl yours? She dived in and practically squashed my son.” Clutching the little boy to her freckled chest, she glared down at Maddie. “This place is for little kids.”

In the car, on the drive home, Carlotta asked, “Did you have fun? Before the problem?”

“I want to go to the park next time.”

After lunch, Maddie galloped around her bedroom, skidding over the smooth floor and crashing into her canopy bed so that the four posters shuddered, before lying down in the Babybox for her nap. Finally, Carlotta snapped the lid in place and sat back in the sudden quiet, breathing hard. She stood and wandered out of the bedroom, through the cool, dim house, passing the fireplace that smelled of cold ash, and ending up, not intentionally, before the computer on her desk.

Within seconds, she’d logged onto the plastic surgery website. First standing, then sitting, she scrolled down past poorly lit photographs of boob-jobs, collagen injections, and face-lifts. Some of these people she knew, most were in the entertainment industry. She had to laugh at the soap husband with his orange tan and raised eyebrows jutting to the corners of his forehead. Going down farther, sometimes wincing and moving on, sometimes pausing to stare, she suddenly caught her breath and touched her hand to her mouth.

Actually, and this was funny, she recognized the blue dress first. She’d worn it to the Vanity Fair party, where a tabloid photographer must have snapped this picture. But though the dress seemed familiar, the face was not. That could not be her.

It was, of course. Below her photograph, the caption read: “Sure, wrinkles are a bitch, but so is having a face made of wax.” She leaned closer to the screen. In such ghastly lighting even a teenager would look bad, especially shot from below. Still, her face did look tight and shiny, like a rubber doll’s.

Carlotta clicked off, stood up, and turned to the gilt mirror above the cold fireplace, brushing her fingers across her cheek. Her friend must have known the picture was there. Perhaps she’d even mentioned the soap husband deliberately to lead Carlotta to the website. Carlotta reached for her phone, started to punch in the number, but stopped herself in time, and threw the phone onto the chair. She wouldn’t vent. Although, mentally, she crossed her friend off her list. It was a shame.

Moving to the window, Carlotta looked out through the Venetian blinds at the sprinklers showering her emerald green front lawn. Then she turned to check the clock on the mantel, surprised to find the time still early. She walked to the door of the workout room, paused with her hand on the frame, and regarded the glinting metal machines with their weights and shin-bruising bars. Suddenly tired, she puffed out air between her lips and turned away. One day off wouldn’t hurt. The effort seemed somewhat pointless, now.

Having decided not to exercise, Carlotta felt at a loss, unsure how to fill her afternoon. Though she usually tried to clutch at every moment as it passed, the time seemed too long to her, now. She strayed back into Maddie’s bedroom, where her daughter lay stretched out, gangly, on the white cushion in her box. She was getting big. She’d towered over that pair of toddlers. Perhaps she’d finally outgrown the PlayDaySpa. Then Carlotta would have to do without its convenience. Maddie’s happiness mattered most.

Carlotta paced the living room, straightening cushions, her lips moving: what to do, what to do. Their lives were changing. Adjustments must be made, not just to this afternoon but to the next and the next. After staring into the refrigerator and at her computer, knowing they both offered diversions that could harm her, Carlotta restarted Maddie earlier than usual.

“Want to go to the park?”

“Yay!”

Twenty minutes later, Carlotta slid the car into a parking place parallel to the park’s chain link fence.

“I just worry so much about you,” she said, as she popped the door lock, releasing Maddie from the car. On the sidewalk, Carlotta squatted to rub sunblock on the little girl’s cheeks and nose. “No jumping off the swings, okay?”

Carlotta swung open the gate and followed Maddie into the park. For a moment, the little girl paused, looking from the monkey bars to the slide to the teeter-totter, before spotting a friend playing in the sand.

“Hi, Maddie.” The enormous giraffe of a girl, with knobby knees and elbows, waved a stick and grinned. Her two front teeth had grown in freakishly large for her face. The girl stabbed her stick into the sand and ran to the swings with Maddie. The two began pumping, building up higher and higher until their legs pointed straight out into the air and then even higher, flashing their underpants and the backs of their legs.

“Let’s jump!” Maddie hollered.

“I can jump farther.”

“No, I can.”

“I’m not sure that’s a good idea,” Carlotta called out. She looked around for support, but the girl seemed to be on her own.

The two girls bailed out at the same time, landing in the sand on their knees. At first, Maddie laughed wildly, thrilled by the danger she’d survived, then she noticed that the other girl had touched down three feet farther from the swings. Carlotta remembered those big front teeth. Maddie’s friend had passed her by at least six months, though she’d been born a year after Maddie. Maddie cheeks reddened. The friend, unaware, ran back to swings.

“Let’s do it again.”

Maddie climbed the slide, pretending not to hear. At the top of the ladder, she sat down with her legs splayed on the metal slope and gazed out at the playground.

“Carlotta?”

Carlotta turned toward the voice, placing the face, if not the body. She recalled this woman lying on a mat, breathing out through open lips like an angry gorilla.

“Lamaze class.” Carlotta stood and reached over the chain link fence to shake hands with the woman standing on the sidewalk. “It’s been awhile.”

The woman had put on weight, probably weighed more now than she had nine months pregnant.

“We were passing and I saw you here. Danny, say ‘Hi’.” She spoke to a teenage boy standing behind her.

“That’s Danny?”

For either financial or ethical reasons the woman had let the boy grow naturally.

“Where’s Maddie?”

Carlotta pointed to the little girl on top of the slide.

“Oh, honey.”

“I know. I’m trying to cut down.”

With her eyes still on Maddie, the woman raised her hand in a goodbye salute. “Nice to see you.”

“We should start doing coffee again,” Carlotta said, as the woman walked away.

On the playground, the tall girl squatted in the sand digging with her stick, while a new, smaller girl, Maddie’s size, knelt on the bottom of the slide, looking up at Maddie, who came whooshing down, using the rubber soles of her shoes to stop at the bottom, inches away from the new girl. Both of them giggled. Soon they were climbing on the play structure with their eyes closed, trying to catch each other. Though Carlotta winced whenever they neared the edge, they managed to stay on the structure, probably by peeking through their eyelashes.

Looking around, Carlotta found a bench in the shade of a big pine tree, where the air smelled resiny, like Christmas. She brushed away the rough needles before she sat down. Underfoot, more needles mixed with the sand. She slipped off her mules and poked her toes into the coolness, remembering through the soles of her feet something her mind had forgotten years ago.

She considered the day. Surprisingly, she really did want to have coffee with that woman, just as she actually did intend to cut down on Maddie’s hours inside the box. It was true; adjustments must be made.

Maddie was quiet in the car driving home.

“Whatcha thinking ‘bout?” Carlotta asked in a sing-song voice.

“Her. That girl.”

“Your new friend? I like the way you make friends, Maddie.”

“I don’t want to come back to the park next time and have her be bigger than me.”

This was new. Maddie never used to care who she played with. If one child passed her by, she settled for another.

At home, half a dozen envelopes stuck out of the brass box on the front porch. Carlotta flipped through them while Maddie jumped from the porch down to the flagstone walkway.

“Watch me! You’re not watching.”

Maddie stomped up the three steps to the porch and jumped again, while Carlotta considered the payslip from the modeling agency for a life insurance ad in which she smiled adoringly at her “daughter” in a bridal outfit. She wondered how she’d come to this. The money was hardly worth the humiliation. However, she and Maddie had an expensive lifestyle to maintain.

Carlotta looked up from the payslip as Maddie caught the toe of her shoe on the top step and fell into a nosedive, landing hard on her hands and knees. Carlotta leapt after her, hitting the sidewalk almost as quickly as her daughter. Maddie sat back on her bottom to examine her scraped palms and skinned knees. Blood welled out of an inch-long cut on her left knee.

“Ow.”

“Oh, baby doll, this is Mommy’s fault. Mommy wasn’t paying attention.”

Carlotta led the little girl into the house, to the powder room, where she washed the cut with a soapy washcloth.

“Now, we’ll get something for this boo-boo.” The medicine cabinet door reflected her face, a face of wax. She realized, then, that the awful picture was going to hurt for some time. In a way, though, the pain didn’t matter. She could ignore her private hurts, though perhaps not the deepening heartache of her life with Maddie.

She opened the cabinet. “Where are those band-aids?”

Carlotta’s thin hand riffled through the creams, lotions, and toothpaste in the cabinet, batting them about. There were no band-aids. She’d never bought them, though such an oversight seemed impossible.

“Oh, sweetie, I’m sorry.”

However, the cut had stopped bleeding.

That night, Maddie refused to brush her teeth and fought as Carlotta dragged her toward the box.

“Tomorrow, after your classes, we’ll go to the park again and your new friend might be there.”

“No. I don’t have any friends,” she objected. She stepped into the box, though, and sank down, defeated. As Carlotta reached for the lid, she pushed away the hope that the little girl would fight harder, the possibility that she would cave in to her daughter’s rebellion.

Alone again, she poured herself a tumbler of red wine and sat at the computer, returning to her photograph on the plastic surgery website. The wine soon washed heavily though her size-two body. Slowly, she scrolled down over the parade of freaks. What had they all been thinking? The same mistakes repeated, over and over. Carlotta laughed at the first young girl with boobs like cantaloupe halves glued in place, but after six examples, wondered what kind of body image problems those gorgeous young women had. Before and after pictures showed round-faced lovely girls changed, with the help of cheek implants and nose jobs, into chiseled beauties who, oddly, weren’t as pretty anymore; less fresh-faced, less innocent. Many of the before pictures dated to when the girls were local celebrities in places like Australia or Spain or England.

“Look what we’ve done to you,” Carlotta said to an Irish girl whose lovely mouth–with a delicately carved upper lip, and tender curving lower lip–had recently ballooned into a duck bill, a cartoon mouth, better to be seen from a distance on the red carpet.

The older women were worse, of course, even when the surgery worked. A smooth-faced actress of sixty had a cheek she could bounce a dime on, but when Carlotta, thinking of Maddie, tried to see the six year old in that face, she knew that this face had never been six years old. This face was a surgeon’s creation.

Carlotta slammed the laptop closed and cursed her friend. She hadn’t needed to see this website. She smashed her face into her hands, elbows on the desk, baggy skin be damned. Maybe she should get fat, like her friend from Lamaze class—the woman who would never call about going out for coffee. Carlotta wanted to yell, “I have no friends!” like her daughter.

Poor Maddie. If her new playmate passed her by like all the others, she’d be sad. No, she’d be angry. Angry at Carlotta. She wouldn’t see that her mommy had meant well, had only wanted to keep her young, give her a long, wonderful childhood.

Carlotta got up awkwardly, hand flat on the desk, and went to Maddie’s room. The lamp was on, glowing through the pink pleated shade. The light could not disturb the child’s unnatural sleep and besides, Carlotta had always liked to keep Maddie visible, close by. Perhaps, though, girl deserved some privacy now, since she seemed to have different desires, and new demands.

Through the glass, the reddish slug-mark stood out on Maddie’s pale knee. It would heal to become her first scar. Carlotta sat down on the carpet, with her knees drawn up to her chest, leaning against the box. She lay her hand on the cool glass, asking the universe for guidance. After a time, her unfocused gaze fixed itself on a shiny, aspirin-sized mark on her wrist. In another life, she’d burned herself baking a birthday cake for her mother. Scars. Everyone has them. On her manicured index finger, a silvery hyphen mark reminded her of Ginger, the guinea pig, who once mistook her finger for a carrot. On her elbow, a white crescent recorded a fall from a scooter thirty, thirty-five years ago. And she bore a long, thin, silvery scar on her shin from running through a rosebush during a neighborhood game of tag. Birthday cakes, guinea pigs, tag. A tumble off the front porch. These were the things that scarred young girls. Not so terrible, after all.

Carlotta looked again at her daughter’s cut knee, still glistening red, not yet darkening into a scab. Of course, not. Carlotta hadn’t realized it till now, but if Maddie did not age in the box, then she also would not heal. If she did not heal, she would not scar. Carlotta rose to her knees and leaned over the box, reaching for the latch. Carlotta raised the lid. She lifted out the little girl, one arm under her knees, the other around her shoulders. Carlotta’s daughter would age, heal, and scar.

Maddie woke at once when Carlotta set her down, but wavered woozily on her feet.

“Stay here.” Carlotta hurried into the living room and stood a moment, looking around, until she settled on the andiron in the fireplace and lugged it back to the bedroom.

“Stand back.” She raised the andiron, so heavy that her biceps shuddered and her wrists buckled under the strain, as she brought it up and let it fall, swinging down, cracking into the side of the box, destroying further temptation.

Maddie yawned.

“No more box,” Carlotta told her.

“Yay.”

No box, no financial burden, no foolish advertisements, no frightening red carpet photographs, all good; an alternate future eluded her, though. Imagining tomorrow, or the next day, an old-timey home movie began to play in her mind, a flickering image of Maddie climbing up the slide at the public park while Carlotta sat under a pine tree with her bare feet in a messy mixture of cool sand and prickly, half-rotten pine needles; she heard happy laughter in the distance and saw decay at her feet.

Simone Martel has published a book of creative nonfiction, The Expectant Gardener, and short pieces in Greenprints and other magazines. Her stories have appeared in publications including The Long Story, Fogged Clarity, WomenArts Quarterly Journal, Magnolia, and Fantastique Unfettered. She lives in Berkeley, California.

Sometimes I wonder if my staring buddy is thinking the same things as me. Does he share my concerns? Does his inaction burden him as it does me? I would like to know if he is happy. I am not. I stare, and I think, and I yearn for change. Still, I am not unhappy either. From the vacant look on his pale face, I imagine his experience is the same. We are like two peas in separate pods.
If only we possessed the ability to articulate our thoughts, time would pass much quicker. We could relate. I would tell him about how much I dislike the liquid we live in, and that I wish someone would dust the glass so I could see clearly. He might tell me about his past, or recite an amusing tale. We would be friends, and life would be easier for us both.

While I think about the things I would tell him, I realize I wouldn’t have much to offer. My knowledge is limited to him and his appearance. His face floats in a jar filled with a clear, viscous liquid. He has no hair, and his gray eyes echo with loneliness. His skin appears distended, ready to float off the skull, which I dearly dread happening. His nose is unique. It reminds me of a cancerous white plum with contusions disfiguring the bulbous end. He may think this funny, and we may laugh together. Lastly, I would tell him about the pink tail coming from the base of his head that curls in a small bundle at the bottom of his jar.

I do know one other thing about him—his grotesque face is like looking directly into hell. But maybe for fun, I wouldn’t tell him, just to have a secret.
The room we occupy is a dark, cramped closet. During what I assume is the day, a fractured light filters in—maybe through a grime-encrusted window, or from the cracks of a door leading to a more exciting room. In my peripherals I see the faint outline of other jars and other faces. They stoically line steel shelving, never speaking, never caring.
I wish I had more to say in the hypothetical conversation with my staring buddy. I’d hate for him to think me a bore. I can’t say how long we’ve been here. Time is a slippery eel, writhing from my grasp. This place is all I’ve ever known, but a sense of something more lingers.

I recall another voice—a voice that shares my mind and calls himself The Memory Keeper. He told me once, maybe long ago, maybe sooner, that I was not born this way and that existence is grander. For some reason, I have chosen to ignore him all this time, so I’m not sure if I should believe him. He might be tricking me. But what he says sounds pleasant. I like the idea of more. What if I had a previous life, one where I could speak and move and connect with others? That would be nice. At least I would have more memories to occupy these endless hours.

I decide to indulge The Memory Keeper. What harm could it do? Perhaps his perspective is greater than mine. I call for him, my voice echoing in the great gulf of my head. He doesn’t respond.

Wake up, I think, trying to rouse him. I’m sorry for cauterizing you all this time. Please forgive me. I’m ready to listen.

No, a child’s voice returns. The Memory Keeper is angry with me, so I must gently coo and soothe him.

Please, I respond. You were right all along. I’ve been foolish. Naive. If you give me another chance, I pledge to you, I will listen.

What more is there to say? The child’s voice is gone, replaced by the crackling of adolescence. I’m getting through to him.

You are wise, much wiser than I. Allow me to redeem my faults. Enlighten me to your knowledge of the world. Make me whole again.

Pandering will get you nowhere. The crackling voice has smoothed with age, transmitting maturity. He will cave, for he must be as lonely as I.

Of course not. My words only reinforce how foolish I have become without you. My intelligence has atrophied; my memories deleted. Allow me to appeal to your sense of reason. You and I are in the same vessel—a vessel lost at sea, drifting farther and farther away from land. I believe together we can paddle back to safety. Together we can regain our sanity. What do you say?

The Memory Keeper does not respond. My spirit—assuming I have one—dissipates. Returned to emptiness, I discover a deeper void of sorrow than I thought possible. Once again, I am alone. All that remains is me, my staring buddy, and the bleak room imprisoning us.

A creeping tingle surfaces inside me, followed by a single word.

Harold.

It reverberates inside me like ripples bouncing off the edges of a pond, gentle and smooth.

Your name is Harold, The Memory Keeper says in a voice like leather, and you are a head.

I rejoice in his return. He has given me something I never knew I missed. He has given me my name back. Harold. Harold the head.

Thank you, I say. Why am I but a head?

Things are as you wanted them.

How could that be? I do not wish this. I want to escape this dusty jar. There is a fingerprint on the glass right in front of my eye, and the smudge eats at my sanity. I want to escape the smudge, and this room. Most of all, I want to escape the gaze of the other head. I can’t bear to stare into his gray eyes and saturated skin any longer. Why would I put myself in a perpetual hell such as this?

Because life is more valuable than death, he says with the authoritarian doom of a televangelist prophesying the coming apocalypse. Because the unknown awaits the eternal sleeper. Because heaven and hell may be the same place. You were afraid. You wanted to cheat.

Cheat what?

What does anyone want to cheat? The inevitable coming of the shroud. The paranoid creature with sharp teeth stirring in the back of our heads. The gloom which awaits us on the other side of the closed door. Death, Harold. You wanted to cheat Death. And you have, in a way. Death stalks you. It desperately aches for your soul, but Death can not find you in this place.

Vivid images begin to flash. The Memory Keeper is showing me my past. I was a young boy once—parted hair, blameless face, bruised knees. I’m playing baseball in a yard with a man who shares the glint of joy in my eyes. The image blurs, fast-forwards, and I see myself as a young man. I’m getting married. A beautiful woman in a flowing white gown hangs on my arm as the man from my childhood, aged and wrinkled, takes a picture.

Why are you showing me this? I ask, but the flashes of a forgotten life continue.

I’m older, closer to my current age. The beautiful girl from my wedding is pacing around a hospital waiting room. She shivers and I drape my coat over her shoulders. A doctor enters, his eyes announcing bad news. “Your father has passed,” he tells me. “He fought all the way, never giving up on life.”

Stop! I yell.

Years pass, but the scene remains the same. I’m in the same hospital waiting room; the same doctor with the same news in his eyes is there. The beautiful woman is not. “Your wife has passed,” he tells me. “She fought all the way, never giving up on life.”

A vague sense of truth surfaces, and I realize why I shunned The Memory Keeper in the first place. He reminds me I was happy once, and that hope is a mirage, drawing me deeper into desolation.
What is this place? I ask, afraid to hear the answer.

You thought you would find happiness again, given enough time, so you set out to cheat death, but you never intended to end up here. The plan had been simple. You purchased a new body—one of wires and gears and plastic skin. You hired a doctor. Money was tight, so you found a surgeon to do the work cheap. You had your head and brain removed from your dying body, and when the time came for the budget-doc to remove your brain from its head, something interfered. You ended up here, on a shelf among many others. And it is here we wait.

What interfered? What are we waiting for?

The images return, and I see a man in a white lab coat as he places my severed head in a jar full of gooey liquid. His hair is white, and his hands shake as he lowers me in. He smiles, revealing three angled teeth. Shadows move behind him. A light breaks. The doctor turns, raises his hands, falls. Men in masks grab my jar. I’m sloshing as they run.

I was stolen? I ask, knowing.

More images blink in and out of focus like a blurry slideshow. I’m in the shadowed back of a van. The van is replaced by a glass building with a sign reading ‘Personal Kinetic Droids.’ I see money change hands. Next, I’m in a white room drenched in white light. A row of identical plastic men sit in identical plastic chairs along a wall. Each man has a white beard framing a black goatee and a satisfied grin. They all wear tuxedos and white gloves. The final image is the room I now occupy.

Dark.

Silent.

Haunted.

I am you, Harold, he says. The trauma split us apart, but together we form a single consciousness. I am your memories, your knowledge, your wants, needs, desires, emotions, spirit, everything human. You are the naked instincts–the nerve endings. You are the impulses–fear, hunger, pain … survival. They will leave you intact. They need you. You will become the processor for one of their servant droids. But me…me they will erase. I am of no use to them.

That can’t be, I protest.

Survival, Harold. You wished to escape the end. Wish granted. With a new rust-resistant body, the end will never come. Enjoy your name, Harold. When I’m gone, you won’t remember you had one.

I push him away, and he doesn’t speak again.

I’m returned to loneliness and my staring buddy’s bloated face. The brainstem coiled beneath him scares me. It looks like an oversized rat tail.

A white radiance fills the room. The overhead light shocks my relaxed pupils, blinding me. I move. The sound of footsteps goes with me. We stop. I’m set on a table, I hear a pop above me, and the pressure in my head changes. Hazy outlines encircle me. They’re dark and menacing, like monsters circling a sleeping child. A sharp pinch on each side of my face startles me. I try to see what is clamped to my skin, biting, but they’re too far back. The clamps pull up, tearing my soggy flesh. If I could scream, I would. I’m lifted out of the comforting liquid into the air. The oxygen refreshes me, but already I sense my consciousness fading. My eyes are open, but my vision is gone. Sleep lulls me to its embrace with promises of tranquility.

When my vision returns, warmer light greets me. I am pleased to be out of the bright white room. Time has passed. Shadows still encircle me, but they no longer appear cruel. I call out to The Memory Keeper, hoping for his knowledge to enlighten my situation, but he is gone.

My vision clears, and details come into focus. The fingerprint smudge and liquid is gone. Instead, I have a body and arms and legs and feet. I’m wearing a tuxedo and white gloves. Each figure around me has golden hair which shimmers in the warm light—one man, one woman, one boy and two girls. They smile and laugh and clap. They are happy to see me. I am happy to see them.

I wonder if they think the same things I do. Do they share my concerns? Does their inaction burden them as it does me? The smaller girl, with dimples at the edges of her smile like exclamation points, turns to the woman. “Mommy, will he clean my room?”

“Of course, Honey,” Mommy replies.

“And my bathroom, too?” Honey asks.

“The salesman said PKD-7 can clean anything.”

They are nice. They have given me something I never knew I missed–a name. I am PKD-7, and I can clean anything.

#

“Come on up to bed,” the new Mrs. Franklin Dobbs whispered into the stairwell. Little Destiny had just nodded off in her crib.

It had been a delicious October Friday. Frank had called in sick to the tire shop, and Jessica was still on the closest thing to a maternity leave her boss was ever going to offer. After breakfast, the trio had gone yard saling; something they had done often since Jessica found out she was pregnant. There was never going to be a baby shower, or a wedding shower for that matter; not for two high school dropouts whose parents were all either dead or MIA.

They found yet another treasure at that junky place up in Sulphur Springs. Frank had bought a seventies model CB radio there a week before. “Breaker, breaker,” he had said into the corroded mic, trying to entertain his wife. She had smiled, and he had pleaded, “I’m pretty sure I can get it working again, babe. It’s only a buck.” Jessica had no doubt that he could get it working again. Her husband had aced AP Physics in the ninth grade, AP Calc in the tenth, and was aimed dead on at Electrical Engineering in college when his heartless and toothless family stepped in and changed his plans.

It was late-afternoon, and as they moved among the sawhorse tables, trying to determine where the yard sale ended and the yard trash began, Jessica spotted it. Sitting in a Budweiser box full of eight-track tapes was a baby monitor. It was one of those high-end Gracys. They had seen one just like it the day they went to buy formula with their WIC vouchers and as a joke—as a way of mocking their empty pockets—asked if they could fill out a gift registry form. “Everything’s digital nowadays,” the clerk had replied as he handed them a scan gun. And for the next few hours they had pushed Destiny around Target in a Ferrari-shaped stroller while they zapped every wonderful thing they knew they would never have.

Despite the box’s curled edges, it looked brand new. Jessica wiped the dust off the homemade price tag: $25. She gave Frank a disappointed frown. There was no one in the yard to haggle, and they were about to leave when a gnarled old man descended the rickety porch steps. The look of him made Jessica’s mouth go suddenly dry and coppery. “Just take it,” he said flashing his gums at the baby. “Do you more good than me.”

They sped toward home with the spoils of the day piled next to Destiny’s car seat. “You know,” Frank said. “With a big kite and a skateboard we could actually go yard sailing.” Jessica didn’t think it was funny. In fact, she hardly ever got his jokes. But she always laughed, and would do anything to get him to laugh too. Her husband’s laugh was a choir of angels.

Her husband.

“Never git married when you’re poor,” Gramma Dobbs had said on the day Frank brought Jessica around to meet the closest thing he had to a parent. Gramma was halfway through her daily tea tumbler of gin and had three cigarettes going at once, each burning away in a different room. “Neither one of you has a pot to piss in ner a window to throw it outa’. Mark my words… When the wolf comes knockin’ at the front door, love’ll go sneakin’ out the back.”

They were poor. They would always be poor. But while this same fate had seen fit to beat down nearly everyone else in their lives, it had somehow only deepened the well of their courage. So they had gotten married anyway. There were no gifts, or cards, or even words of wisdom; there was just the two of them standing utterly alone before the JP. The beautiful vows Jessica had written proved impossible to remember, so they recited them to each other in their simplest form, “Forever, no matter what,” as the backhanded advice of a sour old woman seemed to echo around the room.

Her husband.

She admired her little ring for the thousandth time as she whispered a little louder, “You comin’ up or not? Them cabinet doors can wait ‘til tomorrow.”

#

“Just a minute, babe,” Frank replied. “Almost done.”

He had come to the painful realization that moving into an abandoned house was not like it was in the movies. You did not pull away canvas dust covers to reveal tasteful antique furniture. And the process was not condensed down to a one-minute montage set to music by Katrina and The Waves. There had been vandalism and graffiti, and every room smelled like wet dog.

Yes, the cabinet doors could wait until tomorrow. But even tomorrow they wouldn’t paint themselves. Frank was a married man now; married and living in a house where the bathroom floor had rotted so completely that the fetid earth underneath was clearly visible through a hole where the toilet had been, and a heavy piece of plywood was all that kept the raccoons out. There was work to be done, and Frank was a married man now.

Yet Frank had been in the grip of the Whitaker house since long before the wedding, since even before ‘Frank-n-Jessie’ started appearing in red spray paint on nearby overpasses and water towers. In fact, he took his first hard look at the place when he was just a kid on the school bus. It had a second story, a porch, and even a chimney. To ten-year-old Frank Dobbs, the Whitaker house was ‘The White Mansion on The Hill.’

Old Georgie and Maxine lived in the house back then. They ran a Grade C dairy operation and kept the whole farm neat as a pin. But they died sometime in the nineties and left it all to their deadbeat puke of a son—a man Frank had taken to calling ‘Whitaker The Younger.’

Jason Whitaker’s double-wide was buried somewhere in the mountain of crap on the other side of the dirt road. Back in the summer, when Jessie was really starting to show, Frank had parked the pickup in the ditch and waded through a field of jimson weed to ask him about renting the farmhouse. Whitaker The Younger said he could use a supplement to his Social Security check and considered Frank’s offer for all of ten seconds. “We’ll call it rent-to-own,” he said and wiped a gobbet of barbecue sauce onto his NASCAR shirt before holding his hand out for Frank to shake.

“Pay me steady for ten years, and I’ll give ya the deed.”

Frank was overjoyed, but he knew better than to think that he would ever actually own the house. By the end of the decade, this guy would be a ward of the state, or would have succumbed to any one of a number of evils that plague his ilk—likely the same addiction that burned down Frank’s own father if the state of Young Whitaker’s teeth was any indication. Either way, the house would go into probate, and a greasy handshake would mean precisely diddly squirt.

But none of that mattered. There was a baby girl now. And she would live in the house of her father’s dreams… at least for a while. Frank lidded the paint, killed the lights, and climbed the steps. The cabinet doors would wait until tomorrow.

#

They settled into bed, too tired for anything but sleep. It had been a long day. It had been a day of laughter; of sapphire skies and gently rotting leaves, and of nostalgia so beautiful and painful as to defy all understanding or description. But Frank needed to understand it. As he lay there, staring through heavy eyelids at the way the moon lit their chipped plaster wall, he found the word he was looking for: exalted. That was it. That was how he felt. His little family was still among the lowliest of the peasants of Cedar Hill, Arkansas; but, by sticking it out and staying together, by proving everybody wrong, they had somehow transcended.

He was about to nudge Jessie and share his idea with her, but she was already out; the cadence of her breathing was deep and slow. Besides, these were nothing more than weird half-dream thoughts, and he knew she must be feeling them too. Words just weren’t her thing. Time for sleep. Then the howling started, and Frank’s highly evolved emotion dissolved at once into primal terror.

#

They both sat up. The warmth of the bed vanished as a flock of geese went waltzing over their graves.“What was that?” Jessica asked. She was already whimpering.

“I…” But the howling came again and cut Frank’s words from the air.

It was a cry of unimaginable agony, but there was a sick giggle of delight hidden underneath. It’s hell, Frank thought. My God, that’s what hell must sound like! But the worst thing of all—the thing that squeezed the adrenal glands with brute force—was that the howling was coming from the baby monitor.

Frank could hear his wife bawling their daughter’s name as if from across a chasm. Were there words in the howling? Like foul curses in an ancient tongue? Frank was sure of it.

The voices in his own head seemed to jostle for control of the wheel, and for a moment he stood dumbfounded, his feet glued to the floor. ‘Survival Frank’ spoke from deep within the alligator portion of his brain. It coddled him with reason: “Just get out of the house, Frank,” it said. “Get as far away from the danger as you can. Quickly, Frank. It’s ok to leave them to their fate.”

He looked at Jessica. She stood trembling by the window, staring at the monitor. It sat on her nightstand howling away. Her hands covered her ears, her mouth an absurd parody of that Edvard Munch painting.

‘Frank The Father’ suddenly seized the wheel and was prepared—even eager—to drive the bus over the cliff. His feet broke loose into a dead run. He flung open the door to Destiny’s room and switched on the light.

The howling stopped.

He looked around the room. Each pound of his heart delivered a stabbing flash of white blindness to his eyes. He looked around the room, poised to pounce on someone— something. Again, he looked around the room. But there was no demon…

Destiny lay asleep in her crib, sporting her awesome new onesie. It was stained, but it had only cost a quarter, and the front read, ‘My Heart Belongs to Merle Haggard!’ Jessica had joked that she would’ve paid ten bucks for it.

Frank’s heartbeat still pounded in his ears, but the baby’s breathing was steady. Her feet and hands gave the occasional wiggle. She was dreaming the alien dreams that are the secrets of infants; the dreams in which all things and all languages are known; the dreams we all forget as time drags us further and further from the bliss of amniotic soup. In tonight’s secret dream, the gummy old yard sale man looked at Destiny and threw down his gauntlet.

#

Frank and Jessica Dobbs winced and yawned as the first rays of morning sun pierced the pickup’s cracked windshield. They had scooped up the baby and darted out of the house without discussion. But once in the truck, it had come to them that there was nowhere to go. So the truck is where they had stayed. “There’s…a…family-in-a-truck-in-the-yard-of-the-house-in-the-hole-in-the-bottom of the sea,” Frank sang as the baby wailed. Jessica did not attempt to laugh.

Around midnight, Frank had gone back into the house to fetch blankets and a bottle of formula, trying all the while to remember how to pray. Now Destiny was asleep again in mother’s arms after a nearly eternal fit of colic.

“I’m cold,” Jessica said snuggling closer. “Can we waste just a little more gas?”

Frank turned the key, and as the old Dodge roared to life, the howling flooded the cab. Jessica, too terrified to scream, sucked air with deep hitching gasps. She reached for the door handle, but Frank held her wrist. “Wait!” he said. He leaned forward and fiddled with the knob marked ‘SQUELCH’ on his prized vintage CB radio. The howling faded and returned as he rotated the knob. The grin spreading across Frank’s face made his wife pull away, prepared to bolt. “Just listen!” he said.

There were voices again; strange and distant, yet benign in the ochre light of dawn. And as Frank adjusted the dial, coherent words seemed to form out of the din:

‘…n’ ain’t no smokies down err’ on I-five-forty s’mornin’ so ya better…’

The voice, more colloquial than what had sounded to Frank like druidic grunts in the watches of the night, was swallowed as the hiss and whine swelled into the foreground. Then someone else seemed to sing along with a far away AM radio:

‘…eighteen wheeeeeels and a dozen ro…’

Frank slapped his forehead laughing. “Wait here,” he said. He got out of the truck and ran toward the house. Jessica leapt out on the passenger side. “Frank!” she yelled. But the screen door had already slammed behind him. She backed a few paces deeper into the growing light of the shaggy autumn yard. The rusty Dodge kept on screaming and hissing and singing Country and Western songs at her.

As she waited, she kept an eye on both truck and house, and nervously patted a baby who was fast asleep and in no need of comforting. The front door opened again. Frank reappeared and sprinted to the truck. He yanked the key to silence the Dodge’s devil and then sprinted to Jessica, still laughing. “We are a couple of Grade A suckers!” he said, puffing racehorse bursts of steam into the chilly air. “I don’t know why I didn’t think of it last night… The monitor… It has no adjacent channel rejection! I bet none of them do! It’s demodulating the second harmonics that are around fifty-four megahertz!”

Jessica slapped her own forehead. “That’s just what I was thinkin’. It’s so obvious.” The sarcastic look she threw him needed no translation.

“Sorry, babe,” he said, regaining his breath. “It’s the CBs out on the highway… The baby monitor is just picking up trucker talk. There was nothing evil in Destiny’s room last night.”

#

The day was getting on, and Frank had gone to the hardware store to pick up a new paintbrush. Destiny cooed in her battery powered swing while mommy cleared away the lunchtime dishes. Frank and Jessica had sat mesmerized as they watched their child transform into a tomato soup and cracker volcano. Now Jessica soaked a towel in the sink, preparing to tackle the collateral damage.

By the time she finished her chores the baby was quiet. Asleep at last. She eased her out of the swing and tiptoed her up the stairs. She laid her in the crib, went into the other bedroom, and plugged in the baby monitor. She was not afraid of it. If Frank Dobbs said something was safe, it was safe. You did not question it.

She went to the back window to have a smoke. She knew Frank didn’t approve, but he never complained. She looked out. A blanket of sullen clouds had spread nearly to the horizon. The color pallet of the maple leaves had changed from jack-o’-lantern fire this morning to a dismal gunmetal this afternoon. Earlier, the humidity had been thick as pond water, but now the air was bone dry. A late-summer jar fly stirred in the grass below. It’ll rain, Jessica thought. Has too.

For a while, nothing unusual came out of the little speaker; no demons, no truckers… just sleeping baby noises. But then a man began to speak, and his words were easy to understand. There was no squalling accompaniment.

‘Gloria, you copy?’ he said.

Was that Frank’s voice? Jessica flicked her butt into the back yard and moved across the room to the front window. The Dodge was still in its spot. Did he never even leave?

‘Loud and clear honey,’ a darkly familiar voice replied.

Jessica’s knees buckled. Gloria Assencio was a cheerleader back in high school with penchant for slumming. She had been Frank’s part-time lover throughout the tenth and eleventh grades. The blood drained from Jessica’s face as she listened to the conversation unfold.

‘We still on for tonight? Over.’ Frank asked.

‘That’s a big ten-four.’

‘You all packed up and ready to move in?’

‘Hell yah! But what about the little wifey? Over.’

Frank paused and then keyed the CB’s mic so that Gloria Assencio could hear his coy chuckle.

‘What? What are you up to?’ Gloria Assencio prodded.

‘I poisoned her soup today.’

‘Are you serious?’

‘Yep.’

‘Did she eat it? I mean, do you think she noticed? Over.’

‘No way. She’s dumb as a sack of hair. You know that. Besides, if she’s not dead in a little while, I’ll just bash the bitch’s head in with a hammer. I’ve already got a hole dug in the woods behind the house.’

‘That’s my big strong man!’

‘Be by your radio at nineteen hundred. This shouldn’t take more than an hour.’

‘Sweet! Love you,’ said Gloria Assencio.

‘Love you, too. Over and out.’ said Frank Dobbs.

Jessica made an easy transition from numbing depression to paralyzing fear. She could not think on her feet; nature had not equipped her with that particular talent. She knew that she should at least try to take the baby and escape; to run to the highway, to flag down a car and get to a hospital before the poison set in. These thoughts were right on the surface. But she could not move. The shock of such ruthless betrayal had filled her muscles with broken glass, and she could not move.

‘Hello, Mrs. Dobbs,’ said the monitor. It was a thick, putrid sound. The sudden image of a face came to her: an old man’s suntan, years of outdoor labor, summer layered upon summer, skin like elephant hide… a maw filled with bloody gums and a few tobacco-stained stumps… “Do you more good than me,” he had said yesterday… Was he looking at Destiny when he said it…?

‘He’s going to kill you, you know… you and your baby,’ the gravelly old voice said. ‘You must kill him first if you want to live. You know that don’t you?’ The voice was sovereign. Its will could not be denied.

The pickup door slammed out in the yard and Jessica flew into action. She raced down to the kitchen and selected the biggest carving knife from the utensil drawer. She climbed the stairs again and went into Destiny’s room. She picked up her daughter and held her tightly.

“Shhhhhh, shh, shh, shh,” she said through her tears. She bounced the baby and waited. But the baby, who was turning out to be a lousy innocent bystander, was still asleep.

The front door exploded inward. “Jessie!” Frank bellowed. He took a step forward, and his sneakers crunched the poor old remains of the Whitaker’s beveled door glass. “Jessie! I’m coming to get him! I’m coming to get the scum!”

Jessica felt as if she were caught in the undertow of madness, yet one rational question bobbed on the surface: Who is Frank talking about? Up the stairs Frank came stomping. “You just couldn’t be faithful could you?” he spat in the echoing stairwell. “Your kind never is! I’m gonna thin the herd today, Jessie! First him, then you.” He was dragging something heavy, something metal.

And I’m going to die today, Jessica thought and let her bladder go. But when Frank got to the top, he turned right and went into their bedroom. Now his back was to her. He took a few more steps, and she started down the stairs. She tried to be silent, but in this house, there was only one stair tread that did not squeak.

“JESSICAAA!!” Frank screamed, and a chorus of fell laughter blasted from the monitor as if it were wired to a tower of speakers. He spun around to chase her, but only plodded along at zombie speed.

She moved down the hall to the ruined bathroom on legs of rubber. She wedged the toe of her shoe under the sheet of plywood and kicked it aside, revealing the hole underneath. “Everything’s gonna be alright, sweetie. Momma’s gonna take care of everything,” she whispered as she lowered the baby down onto the stinking dirt. “Moses in a basket… Moses in a basket,” she repeated as she covered the hole. “Please, Jesus, don’t let there really be a raccoon down there.”

“Where is he, Jessie?” Frank called when he arrived at the bottom landing. “He’s gotta go first. Those are the rules.”

Jessica walked calmly up the hall. She gripped the knife just the way her father had taught her.

They simultaneously entered opposite sides of the kitchen. At that moment, the sun sank below the low line of clouds and filled the room with the blood orange light of hell’s furnace. A cacophony of devils roared from the baby monitor.

“Where is he?” Frank asked. His eye’s were like swollen plums. In one hand he held the big tire iron that normally rattled around the bed of his truck.

“Where is who?” Jessica replied coldly. The devils laughed and cursed and sang and howled.

“Where is who…” Frank said tapping his chin. “Well let’s see… How do I put this? Apparently the monitor works both ways, BABE! No sooner do I get into the goddamn truck than the CB starts broadcasting a couple of people getting it on. So, I listen. And what do you know? Turns out its my dear wife and some other man going at it in my daughter’s room!” Frank paused, and seemed to savor his wife’s look of dismay.

“I heard all of it, Jessie. Right down to the bit where you and Mr. Right began to plot my demise. But here’s the best part… I know I got in here before he had time to leave. So, I’ll ask you one more time… Where is this swinging dick?”

Jessica’s lips twisted in disgust. “You’re crazy,” she hissed.

“Fine,” Frank said taking a step forward. “You first then.”

Jessica raised the knife and rushed at him. In the room above, the paint began to peel.

#

The raccoon awoke and breathed the cool rank air of the crawl space. Its eyes glowed like phosphor as it approached the baby human.

“I have summoned you for a purpose,” said the manling in the raccoon’s tongue. “Along the flat stones behind you runs a thick yellow vine. You will chew through it. Quickly. The vine will bite you. But you mustn’t stop. Go now.” The raccoon growled and shuffled away to do her bidding.

#

Frank leaned to the right, and the knife plunged into the door jam behind him. It missed his eye by less than an inch. A portion of his ear still clung to its blade. As Jessica tried to free her weapon, he swung around and caught her mid-back with the tire iron. She crumpled to the floor and uttered a breathless scream. Another wave of raucous yowling shook the kitchen ceiling. Frank went to the sink. His hand cupped the remains of his mangled ear. A rivulet of blood ran down his arm and dripped onto the battered linoleum.

The pain in Jessica’s back blazed and held her down like a heavy weight. She managed to pull herself up onto her elbows, and though her spine was surely damaged, it was not broken. She could move her legs just enough to crawl toward Frank, knife in hand. The crowd of demons now cheering through the monitor was so large that it sounded like a swarm of locusts. ‘Stick the pig! Stick the pig!’ some of them chanted.

With the last of her strength she thrust the knife at the back of Frank’s leg, opening a deep gash in the meat of his calf. Frank cried out and pivoted. Jessica lost her grip on the knife, and it clattered out of reach. He slipped on the bloody floor and tumbled onto her, pinning her arms beneath his knees. He raised the tire iron above his head.

‘Go for the kill! Go for the kill!’

I filled my bucket from the creek and climbed back up the ridge to my camp. I opened a can of something I’d taken from the Food Lion in Front Royal, the town down in the valley, and ate it without bothering to see what it was. I was too much concerned about that wolf to do anything but spoon it in and swallow. The local bears I could deal with; they had no interest in eating me, anyway. When they got too familiar I’d just moved another two or three miles up or down the ridge, set up a new camp where there were new bears and the old ones wouldn’t intrude. Now, I thought, I might have to move down into the valley for good, where I’d be able to deal with animals that hunt in packs and would, indeed, enjoy killing and eating me. Solid houses with real doors would keep them out, instead of the crude lean-tos I’d managed to build out of the crappy second- and third-growth forest around here.

It wasn’t seeing the human remains that bothered me so much about Front Royal, or the fact that ten thousand people had died there in their sleep, just died with no sign of struggle and gently dried up like autumn leaves; it was the quiet that got to me. Now the wonderful thing about the mountains, that I’d loved so much in the years before, was their own kind of quiet, the distance from the nearest human voice. So I guess that’s why I headed for the mountains a while after it happened. I’d be where the quiet felt natural and comfortable, didn’t creep me out, and didn’t remind me of all those people… all those dead people.

#

New Year’s Eve in Northern Virginia’s vast suburbia; 2011 going on 2012. Kathy told me she was going to a party, but not with me. Jane said the same thing, didn’t even pretend to have a cold. And Sandy, who never returned my calls, and my friends—friends! Even the guys made excuses. I hadn’t been invited to join anyone on that special night, when you’re supposed to be exuberantly happy, get drunk, and hug people. No invitations, I mean, except from CBS and NBC and ABC and Fox and two dozen cable channels all wanting me to tune in and have a happy—happy!—New Year. So, I turned on the TV and watched all the celebrants, mobs and hordes of them, all over the world, yapping and yammering humanity desperately celebrating the old year’s death. Everybody was high or drunk. Time zone by time zone, balls dropped and red rockets glared and bombs burst in air and speeches were orated and pundits pontificated and noise-makers blatted their dreary calls.

Seven billion people and counting, overwhelming the planet with their greed, their stink, their noise. Something had gone wrong with the world about the time we stopped picking lice off each other and began making tools. Damn all humans everywhere, those wretched mistakes of evolution! I wished I could never hear or see another one of them again! I daydreamed about buying an armload of AK-47s and blowing away as many people as I could, before I was shot or stopped. But no, that wasn’t me. I might have happy thoughts about getting rid of people, but I knew myself too well to think I’d ever really do it. Besides, others would just get born, more than ever. Always more than ever.

But there it was, New Year’s Eve. I stayed home and turned out the lights. Anyone passing by would think I was at one of those raucous parties, or in the town square having a wonderful time. I got good and drunk on bad wine and worse whiskey, watched the TV balls drop and the rockets glare, collapsed into bed with my clothes on, had one of those pass-out sleeps where you might still be awake but it just didn’t matter.

I sat up in bed suddenly at 10 a.m., New Year’s Day 2011, wide awake and holding my breath, trying to figure out what was wrong. Then I realized: there were no sounds other than a bird or two. No rumble of distant traffic on I-66, no trains, no cars passing by on my street. Even on a holiday morning there should have been cars, trucks, delivery vans, and the occasional airplane.

I put water on the stove for coffee and opened the door. No newspaper. I drank two cups, trying to overpower my hangover and failing. Opened the door again. Still no paper. Shit. I phoned the Post’s “Missing Delivery” number, got a recording saying I should call back after 8. Well, by that time it was almost noon. Turned on the TV. A few channels had old movies on, recycled wildlife features, that sort of thing. Most of the channels were showing blink and hiss.

I bundled up, walked over to the main drag. An old man was sitting on a bench in the bus kiosk, his back against the glass, an empty whiskey bottle beside him. On any other day I would have walked by without a word, but not then, not as strange as things had been getting.

“Ah – good morning!”

No answer. I touched his shoulder, shook him gently. He toppled over into the street. Another damn drunken reveler, I thought. Thinking he might be hit by a bus if I left him there, I dragged him onto the sidewalk, noticed that he was cold to the touch. And not breathing. No blood, no obvious wounds. Well, I thought, I’d walk down the street to the drug store. The clerk could call the police or something.

That was the last time, for a long time, I ever spoke to anyone. The last time I thought I might get an answer, anyway. When I got to the Rite-Aid, it was dark and locked.

I turned and walked into a residential section. I could hear whining and scratching from behind doors. Dogs and cats, hungry. I went up to one house where the barking was loudest, knocked on the door, pounded. No answer. I went around back, found a wooden post, broke a window. An alarm sounded. No police showed up. I climbed in, found a man and a woman just peacefully dead in bed. I let the dog out, continued on. I went from house to house breaking windows, peering in, trying to find survivors, until all the dogs and cats were outside in the street, looking as bewildered I must have looked, had there been anyone around to see what I was doing.

After the first week I stopped looking for bodies, and the houses I hadn’t checked were silent. I tried all the ways I could think of to find someone else alive, back in January. I found a shortwave radio and figured out how it worked. I’d heard that those things could broadcast for hundreds of miles, maybe more. No one answered my calls, but all the time I knew it was pointless, because there were no airplanes. That was the tip-off. Machines could still run, cars could still drive. I found a Cessna at the local general aviation field and started it up by trial and error, just to see if it would catch. I didn’t dare take off, since I’d never learned to fly. But I knew that no countries had escaped the devastation or someone would be flying—someone! I’d see contrails, or military jets, or drones, or helicopters, or missiles. But the skies were clear and quiet. Very quiet.

But what would I do if I found anyone alive? Why was I looking? Wasn’t this the world I’d always wanted? Well, yes. But it would be nice to have people around to maintain the Internet, drive the buses, keep my house warm, deliver veggies to the corner grocery.

Why me? Why was I the only one spared? Because of my New Year’s Eve wish? The world’s people surely hadn’t all died just to teach me a lesson, had they? I couldn’t believe that. But perhaps there were other people still alive. Just a few, maybe, like me. And if I found them, then what? Celebrate with bells and bright lights? Procreate and start the cycle all over again? I could call myself Adam, instead of Philip Nolan, my real name. No thanks.

Toward the end of January I made my decision to leave. The power and water hadn’t been on in a couple of weeks, anyway. And I was having bad dreams about the bodies I was seeing. Why weren’t they covered in worms and maggots, like dead deer in the woods? Why didn’t they… stink, instead of just drying out like the apple slices mom used to put in the cookie jar? The place reminded me of a funeral parlor. I’d rather have seen maggots. Scientists might be able to explain it, but there were no scientists now.

So I piled my camping gear into my car, raided the local Giant Food, took enough canned goods and supplies to fill my car, checked the gas gauge, and took off for the mountains. I was feeling cocky enough to take the I-66 inbound lanes all the way to the Blue Ridge.

#

Well, heading for the hills was a good idea at the time. But now in July, because of that wolf, and because of all the other wolves I thought might be coming to join him, I had to rethink my plan. I’d made enough trips into Front Royal that I was pretty familiar with the place, learned where to find canned goods, bottled water (although the creeks were running clear now), matches, ammo, whiskey, batteries. Gasoline for the car was the toughest to find, since the station pumps had stopped working. But I discovered that farmers outside town had above-ground gas tanks for their tractors, and I was able to tap those whenever I needed a fill-up.

I picked out a big white house where I could get in without shattering a door or window, moved my stuff in and two bodies out. I figured I was safe from wolves behind four walls. But I never did see a wolf in town; they had plenty of deer to chase on the ridge, I guessed, especially now with no hunting season. I could hear them from my new home, their nightly serenade.

But then, when I’d set myself up pretty well, time started dragging. What was there to do? I found the local library, read a novel every two or three days. I’d read aloud just to hear the sound of a voice. But that got old. All that human drama, all that emotion. Emotion! There was no emotion any more. There were no plots, or schemes, or ambitions, or conflicts, or happy endings. Nothing to look forward to but the day I’d catch a bad disease or break a leg I couldn’t splint, and then I’d die.

To have something to do, I started going door to door, block by block, breaking into houses and carrying the dried corpses out. The babies were the most difficult for me, but the grownups, too. Turned out, I needed someone to yell at, to bitch and moan to, to hear them tell their own troubles. Maybe not all humans were so bad, after all. Just in the mass, maybe. One by one they seemed OK, at least now that they were quiet. I carried the dead ones outside, loaded them on a flatbed, drove them to the center of town. Should be with their own kind, right? And dressed, not in pajamas or nightgowns, but in their own clothes, from their own closets. I dressed them up as best I could, gave them as much dignity as I could, although it wasn’t much.

And then, just as the weather was getting cold—I think it must have been October but I’d long since lost track of the date—that’s when I found Laura.
I was working the east side of town, clearing out the homes, making notes as to what supplies I might be able to use later. Just off a little street called Laura Virginia Hale Place I broke into a modest Cape Cod, walked into the living room. There she was, a beautiful woman in a sequined gown and a gauzy wrap. I thought she must have just returned from a New Year’s Eve party when the Great Quiet hit her. But then I saw the slippers, the bottles, the stack of books, a plate of food long since turned to dust. She’d been celebrating alone, just dozed off like I had. But she never woke up.

I asked her name. I didn’t catch it, so I started calling her Laura, after the street. I cleared off the dishes, straightened up the room. I told her she was truly gorgeous. I started telling her about how I’d come to be there, why I’d broken into her house, why I wasn’t living on the ridge anymore. I didn’t carry her out to the truck like I did the others. I sat with her until long after dark, promised to come back the next day. I did come back, the next day, and the next, and the next. I spent time every day with Laura, a couple of hours anyway.

November came (well, I thought it might have been November), and then December. It snowed two or three times. I brought in wood and stoked the fireplace so Laura and I could be warm. I asked her about her childhood, where she’d grown up, all that stuff I used to think stupid and boring. I told her about me, about Kathy who might have gotten to like me, about Jane and Sandy, about going to meetings and parties and being treated like I wasn’t there, like I had some awful disease no one would tell me about. I told her I thought she might have had the same kind of life—life! But life was all over for us now, the grim loneliness of that world.

I didn’t tell Laura what I’d been doing with the bodies.

#

Christmas came, at least approximately. I gave Laura a red and green shawl I’d found in one of the second-hand shops I’d been haunting, all nicely wrapped and ribboned, and with a spangly Hallmark card on top. I’d signed it “With all my love, Philip.” Laura didn’t have presents to give me, since she couldn’t get out and shop, but she had a sweet smile for me that was better than any present. The same sweet smile she always had.

She must have wondered what I was doing all day when I wasn’t with her. I explained that I was taking bodies out of the houses, but she didn’t understand. Why not just let them be? I almost told her two or three times, but this was going to be the big surprise I’d spent weeks preparing.

New Year’s Eve came, at least a day I called New Year’s Eve. I got everything ready. Just about nine p.m. I came calling for Laura, put her shawl on her, carried her outside. She wondered about the car, but I told her we were going only two blocks, so I’d just carry her. She guessed where we were headed. I felt her body shift a little as we approached our destination. She rested her head on my neck.

We turned the corner and there it was, shining in the headlights of six cars and four trucks: the town gazebo with five hundred party-goers, all dressed in fancy outfits, glasses of wine or whiskey at their sides. I carried her up the steps and put her down right in the middle, near the people I called Kathy and Jane and Sandy, more beautiful than any of them. Everyone greeted me, called me by name, smiled, asked how I was doing, gave me hugs, told me how much they liked and respected me, how I’d been spared, chosen, to make the world’s last New Year’s Eve the best one ever. Kathy and Jane and Sandy asked me to call them any time, any time! But I said no, thank you, I had a steady girlfriend these days, and I loved her.

And now, no more quiet! I ran around the circle of cars and trucks and sounded their horns again and again until their headlights began to dim. I rang the bells of the nearest church until the sounds reverberated all through the town. From the ridge I could hear the echoing howls of the wolves, disturbed by the sounds. I couldn’t come up with a swing band playing the old nostalgic tunes like they used to do Before, but after weeks of searching I’d found an old wind-up record player, and records to play on it. I turned the crank and put the needle down carefully.

Livin’ alone
I think of all the friends I’ve known
When I dial the telephone
Nobody’s home

All by myself
Don’t wanna be
All by myself, by myself
Anymore

Not exactly a New Year’s Eve song, certainly not Auld Lang Syne which I couldn’t find in any of the shops, but it would do.

Laura was beaming with joy. I lifted her to her feet. “Will you dance with me?” I asked. While we were dancing I asked her if she could love me even though I wasn’t dead yet. Yes, she said, yes I will. Forever.

Travis hoisted his trophy proudly for Jarrod to see. The miniature football player gleamed as headlights filled the back window.

“So, now that you’re a big star,” Jarrod continued, “how about lending Uncle Jarrod a few—” Tires squealed. Metal crunched. Glass shattered.

Someone hit them from behind and they went into a spin. Jarrod grabbed at the sleeve of his screaming nephew; it was all he could manage in the chaos.

A second car plowed into them, and his head hit the parcel shelf. They lunged across two lanes of traffic, missing another car by a coat of paint before mounting the curb. A telephone pole ended their momentum.

Jarrod’s reeling senses settled to find cracks streaked down the nose of the car. He barely registered the surreal view before the car broke apart, tearing along those lines as though it were made of cardboard. He fell out the bottom, and hit asphalt that was tearing along the same fault lines.
As reality tore asunder, a black chasm appeared below.

Jarrod couldn’t even process what was happening, let alone formulate a response. Travis, seat and all, stared back at him in terror, as a crack snaked its way underneath him. Jarrod’s hand caught only air as Travis fell into the abyss. The boy’s scream was cut off the instant he disappeared.

Jarrod turned to find the driver’s seat, holding his brother Ash, but that was gone, too. All around, the world was collapsing into the dark.

“Ash!” Jarrod cried. “Travis!”

Only the thunder replied. Its vibration shook the piece of asphalt he was clinging to. He leaped onto what was remained of the sidewalk as it too disappeared.
There was no sign of his brother or his nephew. There was no rain now, only thunder, echoing in the endless black.

Even the sky was gone.

Where the top half of the telephone pole had fallen, the horizon world beyond had fallen with it, a chunk of it removed as though it was simply painted canvas. In its wake, an archway of light now burned in the endless black.

The sidewalk tilted, beginning its own slide into oblivion. Jarrod dashed blindly into the glare. His hands found a thin metal gate. He clung to it, fearing the ground here too would be gone in seconds.

The bright light hid whatever lay beyond, but from somewhere ahead, the squeals of playing children drifted to his ears. The fracturing sidewalk collapsed. He threw his weight against the gate. It swung open, and he stumbled into the light.

The glare retreated into a rich blue sky. A midday sun cast a golden sheen over play equipment, basketball courts and classrooms.
Jarrod could only stare. This wasn’t just any schoolyard; this was Brooks Elementary. A place he hadn’t set foot in since he was twelve years old.

He’d emerged from the groundskeeper’s shed. The simple red barn was nestled in a wall of high shrubbery, which had marked the boundary of the children’s play area. Above, the sky ended abruptly above the bushes, like a sheet of blue paper. Beyond that line, there was more darkness. Nearby voices drew his attention from that terrifying sight.

“Go on, I dare ya!”

“Aww, gross!”

“He did it!”

A group of boys, all wide eyes and grins, were gathered around an upright stick — one end of which had been stabbed into a dead rat.
“Here,” one of them forced his way to the front. “Check this out.” Jarrod recognized the boy’s dusty blonde hair and acne blossoms. Rashy, they’d called him.

He wasn’t the only familiar face. All of these boys had been fixtures in the neighborhood when Jarrod was growing up.

Rashy grabbed the stick and swung it overhead, rat impaled atop like a Roman standard. The others laughed, ducking and weaving. The rat came loose, hitting Jarrod square in the chest. A large coagulated smear marked the point of impact.

“Eww!” sounded the chorus.

“Look!” One pointed at a quivering glob in the mess. “Yuck! AIDS!”

The boys fixed Jarrod with the stare reserved for the schoolyard condemned: a mix of morbid pleasure and concern for their own proximity.

“AIDs!” Rashy concurred, waving the stick in Jarrod’s face. “You’ve got AIDS now!” The school bell rang. The boys shuffled away, laughing.

Rashy had been the school’s worst bully. One year in particular, he’d made Ash’s life a misery. When it was brought to Jarrod’s attention, he’d offered Rashy some assistance with that acne — by flushing the punk’s head in the boys’ toilets.

But that was over twenty years ago. Rashy had grown up like the rest of them, moved off into the world. He might even be dead by now.

Maybe he is, Jarrod thought. Maybe we all are. Every child was headed for the main hall. Jarrod moved that way too. The rat remains covering his shirt parted the sea of students like he was Moses. Every other face that recoiled in horror was another blast from the past.

As he entered the building, thick aromas rushed to greet him like old friends. He stopped to savor them: the chalk; the glue; the clay cooking in the kiln. The spell broke right there. He was too far from the art room to smell the kiln.

All the smells, in fact, were too strong. They were all gross exaggerations. The first classroom erupted with his arrival, the children inside reacting to his shirt. And at the head of a class, was a sight that made Jarrod sure he was dead.

The disapproving face of Mr. Walker — a man who’d died before Jarrod was old enough to drive — was the proverbial straw. Someone launched a pencil eraser from the back of the classroom. It hit Jarrod in the face, knocking him off-balance. The damn thing had been the size of a tennis ball. Booming laughter shook the walls.

He fled the room. In the classroom opposite, every student was out of their seats, leering faces trained on him as he made his escape. Their delight was so bright they were shining. He steadied himself on the stair rail outside.

On the far side of the schoolyard, the calm blue sky ended in another wall of black. Despite the clear weather, thunder still barked somewhere in the distance.
Were doctors, at this moment, fighting to save his life? Or was he still in the back of Ash’s car, bleeding to death while the storm raged on?
Either way, where the hell was he now?

Brooks Elementary grew more suspicious under closer scrutiny. The buildings were at subtly weird angles: widest at their base, narrowing as they rose. Their scale was ridiculous, too. They looked over a hundred feet high. Beyond the school grounds, there was nothing but the empty black. The school’s library looked like it balanced on the edge of a cliff. He headed there next.

The doors wouldn’t open. They weren’t locked — there weren’t any locks, in fact — they just wouldn’t open. They couldn’t be forced, either. He pressed his face to the glass. Inside, the library was bare. No desks, no shelves…not even a back wall.

He crept around the corner. The library was little more than a front wall, a few feet deep, like a prop on a movie set. Beyond the fused doors, there was only a sheer drop.
He retreated with careful steps, lest the ground beneath him prove just as false.

He found more of the same on the other side of the main building. It too was only half there, just wide enough for the two classrooms inside; beyond it, another cliff-face overlooking the abyss.
Excluding the way he’d come, there was only one other option: the old fence behind the bicycle shed.

He could see it from here, its high palings like a row of crooked dinosaur teeth. Everyone had been terrified of that fence. The head-high grass obscuring the property beyond had fueled countless schoolyard rumors about the horrors lurking on the other side. Any ball lost over that fence was one you just learned to live without.

Standing at its base, he found its size as exaggerated as everything else. At first glance, it was a faithful re-creation of the original. But this fence was really just one large piece of wood, sculpted to look like many. The grass on the other side was still as tall as cornfield stalks.

He could hear something beyond that grass: more children laughing; electronic blips and beeps. He slipped through, wading carefully into the grass. He felt more confident about the ground underfoot as the sounds drew closer.

He emerged into a large, gloomy hall filled with arcade gaming machines. Dull lighting cast a muted-gold ambiance. Electronic sound effects and the buzz of excited kids swirled around him. Coins clinked in slots. Flippers banged in pinball machines. Explosions burst from speakers.

He recognized the hall immediately: Pepperoni Pete’s Pizza Parlor.

Two boys mashed the buttons on the nearest game. He recognized them, too — Corey and David, his best friends until separate high schools had steered them all into new lives.

“Damn!” David hit the machine.

“Hurry up and get back in!” Corey said. “I can’t finish it on my own!”

“Can’t,” David pointed at another game. “Those guys finally got off Double Dragon. I gotta get on it before someone else comes.”

“Come on! Just one more life!”

David skipped anxiously, torn between the two. The vacant Double Dragon won.

“Ah, shit!” Corey growled. “I died!”

More of Jarrod’s childhood friends weaved in and out of the rows of games. They were all in freshly ironed pants and tees; hair neatly parted or gelled up in spikes.

“Hey, dude,” Corey winked at Jarrod. “You wanna play Altered Beast with me?”

The air was heavy with a weight Jarrod could feel. The lights, the smells and sounds, were all so thick his skin prickled from their physical touch.

He’d fled one past only to stumble into another — his tenth birthday party. Corey stared with an expectant smile.

“Sure,” Jarrod muttered, falling in beside him.

Corey thumbed some tokens into the slot. “I got it,” he winked again. “Get ready!”

Jarrod made a show of working the controls while eying his surroundings. “Corey?” he whispered. “Are you okay? What’s going on here?”

Aside from Double Dragon, where David now stood motionless, none of the other machines were actual games. The designs on their sides were incoherent splashes of color. The video screens Jarrod could see from here were just flickering white light. Other boys stared at those blank screens with vacant eyes, working the joysticks in random jerks. Boys even further away were catatonic, their limp hands inactive at the controls.

“Rad!” Corey yelled.

Jarrod’s in-game character had apparently achieved a power-up. Aside from that animation, this game was only slightly more functional than the others. It was caught in a loop. Their characters traveled only a few frames before starting back at the same spot. Jarrod’s player dispatched the same two zombies continuously, whether he worked the controls or not. Every time he claimed the power-up, Corey gave another ‘Rad!’

“Corey?” Jarrod hissed. “Do you know where you are?”

The boy gave him a cursory glance, but no indication he’d even understood the question. He remained engrossed in the game. Corey — if this was Corey — was too tall. His head reached just above Jarrod’s shoulder — impossible for a boy of nine or ten. The other kids were the same. Their adolescent faces strange atop exaggerated bodies.

Even the game machines were too tall. The controls were above Jarrod’s waist; he could never have reached them as a ten-year-old.

Jarrod backed slowly away from the machine. Corey paid no attention.

Jarrod scanned the rest of the hall. Like the school, there were omissions in some aspects, and exaggerations in others. At the far end, a large archway opened onto the adjoining restaurant. Where, if this replica were complete, his family would be right now.

The restaurant area was also ridiculously huge. There were at least one hundred tables. Rows of them stretched to walls so far away they were hidden in shadow. People as lifeless as the zombies in the game area, filled the seats. The gloom obscured their features, for which Jarrod was thankful — from here their faces looked like incomplete clay sculptures. Like the game machines, their clothes were a vague blur of color, as though glimpsed from the corner of the eye.

The stage was lit. Pepperoni Pete and Friends, the animatronic band, were in full swing. Each stood over seven feet tall, as intimidating now as they’d been in childhood.

The monkey on keyboard — the scariest of the group — had center stage. His mouth flapped randomly, while his arms jerked in robotic spasms above the instrument. As children, he and Ash had been convinced that monkey was alive.

Its plastic stare fell on him now.

Jarrod put more distance between himself and it, feeling silly as he did. The empty eyes stayed with him, the head turning to follow as he weaved between the tables.
He didn’t feel so silly now as he hurried along.

One table was lit up, as though by spotlight, though there was only darkness above. The people seated at it glowed in the golden light, their streamers and party-hats as bright as rainbows.
Beaming brightest of all was his mother.

She was young and vibrant: untouched by the disease lying in wait just a few years away.

The birthday boy had his back to him, but the denim jacket confirmed who it was. There was a time when Jarrod had worn it every day, everywhere. Mom used to joke that it was actually painted on.
Little Jarrod wrestled wrapping from a birthday gift. The cellophane caught the light, casting rich hues across the table. Everyone edged closer with electric anticipation.

Jarrod already knew what was inside: Optimus Prime and Megatron, the Transformers action figures that went down in family history as the greatest present he’d ever received. “Awwweesome!” Little Jarrod cheered.

Mom pointed at Optimus. “That’s from Mom and Dad.” She looked beyond the table to where Jarrod stood, smiled right at him. “And Megatron is from Ashley. He used his own allowance!”

“Unreal!” Little Jarrod held the action figures up. They glimmered with a light of their own. This younger version of Jarrod was, thankfully, too taken with his gifts to notice anyone else.
Jarrod stepped around the table to his mother. “Mom?” He took her hand. “Do you know where you are?”

Her plastered smile remained unbroken. “That’s from Mom and Dad,” she pointed again. “And Megatron is…”

“No,” he shook her gently. “This already happened. A long time ago. Don’t you remember?”

Confusion flashed behind her eyes. She glanced at the other parents. They had similarly confused stares.

“Mom, try to think! How did you get here? Do you remember?”

The kids at the table cheered. A man had appeared in a Pepperoni Pete outfit, a plush pig costume with a full-head rubber mask sporting a large snout and grin.
Chris, the class clown in his day, threw a couple of fries at Pete. One landed on the small felt hat stitched to the top of the mask and stayed there, much to the children’s delight.

“Chris!” the parents scolded.

Pepperoni Pete shrugged good-naturedly and danced a jig.

“He wants more!” Chris yelled.

The boys launched more fries. Mom and the other parents frowned, but did nothing.

“Mom, look at me.” Jarrod had to force her to turn. “Do you know how you got here? What were you doing, before the party?”

The same confusion fell across her face. There was painful discomfort in her eyes. He let her go.

The guilt he felt at distressing her quickly gave way to anger. Someone, or something, was responsible for this. His eyes scanned the group, and settled on the only stranger at the table: the one in the costume.

He grabbed Pete by the suspenders. “Who are you?” The pig turned his plastic smile on him, but said nothing.

“What is this place?” He shoved the pig. Pete offered no resistance, made no effort to break his fall. The mask tilted up to regard the fist Jarrod brandished over him.

“Speak!” Jarrod threatened. Nothing.

Jarrod kicked Pete, a good shot that should’ve hit the kidneys. The pig regarded the site of the impact with silent calm. Jarrod hauled him to his feet. “Tell me! Now!” He yanked at the mask. It came away easily. The headless costume froze. The mask was empty.

He reached a trembling hand for the pig’s shoulder. The body teetered like a knocked statue before hitting the floor. The stage show ended instantly, like piano music in a Western.

The robotic band and the party’s guests all stared at him. Most looked more confused than scared. Some, including Mom, were staring at Pete’s empty suit in terror. The storm was closer now. In the sudden silence it was apparent. The thunder sent slight tremors through the building. Mom’s wide eyes shifted to the back wall of the stage. It wobbled as the tremors increased.

“Wh—what’s happening?” she stammered.

“Mom!” Jarrod took her arm, encouraged by this development.

“Who are you?” She recoiled, as if only now seeing him for the first time.

“There’s no time,” he said, keeping hold of her. “But I think we need to get out of here. Now.”

“Get your hands off me!”

“Mom, please, you’ve got to trust me.”

“I’m not your mother!” she squirmed in his grip, entreating the other partygoers for assistance. “Get away from me!”

“It’s me, Mom! Jarrod!”

Her eyes hardened, the mother sensing a threat to her child. She broke free, pulling Little Jarrod to her side. “Leave us alone!”

Jarrod wanted nothing to do with his eerie replica, but turning his back on Mom wouldn’t be so easy. He couldn’t be sure she even was his mother — but the possibility, and the fear in her eyes, made leaving her behind not an option.

There was another consideration strengthening that resolve: he hadn’t seen her like this in years. She’d withered away in an armchair, separated from her family by a body ignoring her brain’s commands.

But here she was, in her prime, restored by some power. Whatever brought them all here had given him a shot at the ultimate do-over. This time he wasn’t helpless. This time he could reach her. He took a step toward her. “Please, look really close. Aren’t I familiar? Don’t you recognize me, not even a little?”

“No.” She almost spat the word, but the frown that followed suggested she wasn’t so sure.

Thunder exploded overhead like a shotgun blast. The entire building was rocked to its foundations. A chorus of screams sounded beyond the stage’s back wall.
Mom had Little Jarrod tucked behind her, forgetting the older one in the ensuing panic. Her terrified eyes ricocheted between the screams and the invisible storm growling in the utter black overhead. She rushed off, hoisting Little Jarrod over her shoulder. “Ashley!” she screamed. “Ashley, where are you?”

“What’s wrong with those people?” one mother shrieked, pointing at the nearest of the blank-faced patrons. Its face was a basic sketch of humanity, as blurred as the clothes it wore.

The thunder seemed to have snapped the birthday guests out of their asinine states. Their frightened eyes devoured their surroundings, as if only now they realized how strange this place was. The next clap of thunder came from somewhere beneath the restaurant. A thick crack sliced across the stage, cleaving the band in half. Torsos and instruments rolled.

The tear fractured the stage’s back wall, too. The upper half collapsed and crushed what was left of the band. As the second half fell, the scene beyond was revealed: a grand ballroom, filled with screaming wedding guests.

It, too, was collapsing. A widening crevice in the floor had split the venue in two. The halves were tilted a broken, sinking ship, sending tables, chairs and people into the chasm. The wedding guests were climbing each other to escape, many turning their efforts in the direction of the hole that had just appeared between the ballroom and restaurant.

Generic, incomplete people like those filling the restaurant filled the ballroom too. They seemed oblivious to what was happening, tumbling like crash-test dummies into the rift.

The large fractures consuming the ballroom snaked into the restaurant. Jarrod looked back for his mother, but she’d disappeared among the crowd spilling in from the ballroom. As he sought her among the faces whizzing by, a fresh panic seized him.

There were familiar faces here, too: old neighbors, family friends.

Even his father rushed by. Twice.

First, the barrel-chested man Jarrod remembered from his earliest years stormed by. Not far behind him came the older, frailer Dad he now visited every Sunday. He looked just as scared and confused as Jarrod.

Before Jarrod could even consider getting across to him, he was bowled over by another version of himself. This Jarrod, circa his junior or senior year at college (he had that god-awful haircut), lingered just long enough to mirror Jarrod’s horrified stare. Then the younger man was gone, joining the stream of bodies fleeing the earthquake.

Where the ballroom had stood moments before, there was only black. Now the restaurant floor, bit by bit, was disappearing over the side of the precipice. The crowd was rushing headlong to the furthest wall. There was light in that direction; faint cracks of it were appearing as the wall surrendered. It wasn’t the only way out. Cracks were appearing in every wall now, as the restaurant shook to the tune of the rolling thunder. There was fresh scenery beyond those walls. And people were escaping into it.

Jarrod glanced back for his father. The crowd was full of ‘Dads’ now, as well as ‘Moms’. And Jarrods — scores of them, all different ages, peppered throughout the stampede. One Dad fell nearby. He struggled to get up while others trampled over him. Jarrod moved to help him, but thought better of it after colliding with another version of Dad almost identical to the one underfoot.

Which one was really his father? Was anyone in this whole damn nightmare real?

No, he decided. They’re all fakes. Just like this place. It’s all one big lie. And I have to get out. He slipped into the rushing tide and fought his way to the nearest crack. He could see a living room on the other side, lit by the warm glow of a Christmas tree in the far corner. Even with its strange angles he recognized this room, too. He and Ash had rushed into it every Christmas morning. He fought his way over the tangle of bodies squeezing through the crack. Every face he pawed at was another Mom, another Dad. Grandma and Grandpa. And even more doppelgangers of him.
He fell into the living room. He could see the top of the kitchen entrance, but he knew he’d never reach it. The crowd’s weight pressed down on him like a trash compactor. And judging by the heads filling that doorway, the kitchen was just as full.

Nearby, a younger Dad stood on a sofa, clutching a very young Jarrod in his arms, his wide eyes sweeping over the eerie parade. Unable even to turn his shoulders, Jarrod exploded with claustrophobic panic. “Fuck off, you freaks! Let me out! This isn’t real! None of you are real!”

“We’re as real as you are!” a gruff voice scoffed to his right. The speaker was an elderly version of Jarrod. The cane he clutched was unnecessary here, with the mass of bodies keeping him upright.

“No…” Jarrod shook his head. “No. This is all some sort of… this — it all started with the crash! I must’ve… something has happened to me…” He couldn’t muster any conviction in his words.

Pinned in by so many bodies — many of which were identical to his own — he was, for the first time, unsure of himself.

“Crash?” Old Jarrod frowned. “What… on the way back from Travis’ game?” Old Jarrod appraised him, nodded. “Yes, the pileup. No, that’s old news, I’m afraid. We all walked away from that. Though, I never did get rid of the whiplash.”

“What… you’re the real… me?”

“I thought so, at first,” Old Jarrod sighed. “But there was another, even older than me. Several others, actually. And then I stumbled across my — our — funeral.”

“What’s happening?”

“It’s all coming to an end,” Old Jarrod said grimly, casting his eyes up at the emptiness. “All of it. Because there’s no one left to remember.”

“Remember what?”

“This!” Old Jarrod traced an arc with his chin, indicating everything around him. “Us! We’re all memories, kid.”

“What? No. That’s…” Jarrod tried to deflect the old man’s words with a shake of the head. His unsettled gaze absorbed the sea of faces around him: the many he recognized; the many he didn’t…

And the absence of one face among them all. The one he hadn’t seen anywhere, not in the entire ordeal. He looked back at Old Jarrod, the cold realization slipping like ice down the back of his neck. “Where is Ash?”

“When the world came crashing down, the first place I stumbled into was a room in a nursing home. There was a woman there, sitting beside an empty bed. She just kept soothing me, promising she’d be there when the end came. Then that room fell, too. I escaped again, and again, finding only more of these half-built stages, each of them filled with people treating me like I was Ash. That is, until their particular thread started to come apart.”

Jarrod opened his mouth, but had no more words for protest. He saw it now: the way he’d been greeted, the roles he’d been expected to play; the way these places were built, with their off-kilter, imperfect dimensions.The way they’d been remembered.

“We’re just the things at the end of memory lane,” Old Jarrod continued, as though confirming the thought. “The place Ash visited during reverie. But now he’s dead. Or dying. So we must, too.”

“Why?”

A series of thunderous claps sent concussion waves through the house. Cracks spread like spider-legs across the walls.

“Because he created all of this!” Old Jarrod yelled over the fresh screams. “Without him, there’s no one keeping us alive!”

A quarter of the living room fell away, taking all the people on that side with it. The remaining walls toppled like sheets of cardboard.

The floor broke next. It separated into a handful of islands, those people caught between plummeting into darkness.

Jarrod clutched the arms either side of him as his own island see-sawed. All but one of the other islands tilted and sank. Across the way, Old Jarrod was among a handful of people to go overboard
as a dozen or more tried to fit on a piece of carpet wide enough for three. Their screams cut off the instant their heads went into the black, like a television muted.

There were other islands visible beyond the fragments of the living room, a handful of ravaged structures bobbing out there in the endless dark. Like the one Jarrod clung to, each was lit by some inner glow — a dull, fading golden light.

One of the closest was a flight of stairs leading nowhere. A pair of teenagers clung to its rail. Jarrod fancied he recognized the male, who shot a terrified glance his way. It was Travis. He’d grown into a handsome young man, Jarrod noted with regret. There was much of Ash in that face. The staircase toppled sideways. The light went out before a cry had fully formed on the young woman’s lips.

It was Jarrod’s island that lurched next. He made for the center as a chunk broke off the side, fighting off a pair of men each trying to claim that safety for himself. They fell over the side and winked out of existence. He and the only remaining person fell to their knees and clutched the edges of the carpeted raft. They watched as another chunk of scenery expired in the distance, the dark swallowing all aboard.

“What happens to us?” the one beside him squeaked.

It was another teenage Jarrod. Holding the youth’s terrified gaze was like staring into a mirror across time. The younger was wearing the tattered football jersey he’d clung to even longer than the denim jacket of his childhood. His first kiss had been in that jersey. No. Someone else’s first kiss. A man who had already lived and died. Where was that man now? Did his spirit live on, in some other realm?

And what of he and his companion here, clinging to these last shards of light, this imprint of a moment long since passed? Where were they to go? The carpet began to split, surrendering in snapping fibers.

“No!” Jarrod begged the fabric, trying to pinch the fibers back together. “No-no-no-no-no-no-no…” He was vaguely aware of the teenager beside him making similar pleas. The floor groaned, shifting slowly but surely apart. The sound was like a cannon firing in the relative silence.

The light went out.