Morgan Nyberg - Since Tomorrow

Frost folded slowly forward and came to rest with his forehead against the earth.

One of Langley’s eyes was ruined. He squinted out of the other one at the man bowed at his feet and at the woman lying near him and at the wide pool of blood sinking slowly into the hardened earth. He coughed and gave a long exclamation of pain. He said “Frost, you son of a bitch.” He looked down at the piece of cordwood burning in his lap and set the blade of the knife against it and began to push it away.

There was a sound. Running footsteps. Langley looked up. He said “Not you.”

She came at full speed around the corner from the first addition. The flames of the Christmas candles fluttered as she passed. She had a long spear and was holding it like a lance. Langley sat and watched as Noor leapt the hunched form of her grandfather.

The wide blade and the thick end of the shaft passed through the base of Langley’s throat and through the leather and stuffing of the chair as well. But even as the chair toppled backward Noor held the spear tightly, and her weight drove it down into the earth, and her momentum propelled her over Langley and into the heaped commodities, which tumbled upon and around her. A case burst open and silver cutlery spilled over her dark hair and lay there for a moment like a fool’s crown, sparkling in the firelight, knives and forks and spoons, until she rose and went to her grandfather.

She turned him gently onto his back. The fronts of his poncho and his trousers were soaked with blood. He looked at her. He was as pale as a sheet. She said. “It’s finished, Grampa.”

Frost said “Noor.” Or perhaps it was only a gasp.

“You’ll be fine now. I’ll get you home.”

But he was dead even before she managed to load him onto Beauty, who stood waiting in the rain.

“It’s in there.”

Snow nodded toward a door and then turned away, as if there were some shame involved in witnessing what she knew would emerge.

Jessica carried the black garbage bag slung over a shoulder, and she and Snow and Boundary and Oak descended the stairs of the big building and walked in silence along the south end of Town trail and up onto Frost’s Bridge.

It was a mild day, with high clouds coasting from the southwest. They stopped at the crest of the bridge. Without ceremony Jessica held the black bag over the eastern railing and let the contents slip free. The breeze took the finer powder, but most of the skag plummeted like a ragged mass of ash.

Jessica and Boundary and Oak moved to the other side of the bridge and looked down. But all they saw was grey-green water surging westward past the railroad swing bridge that stood eternally open.

Oak said “What did we expect? Don’t make no difference to the river.”

Behind them, in the middle of the roadway, Snow sat on the lane divider, weeping.

Tyrell and Daniel Charlie carried the airtight heating stove out to a wagon. It was still warm, a fact which seemed to deepen the desolation that made their faces resemble awkwardly carved masks of shadow and tired skin. Tyrell said “Let’s drop this off at Wing’s. He should be home with his crew by now.” Then he went back in and collected the silverware that had spilled near Langley, who was still in the upended chair, his blemished face now additionally gnawed by rodents. He was pinned to the earth like an insect by Noor’s spear. Tyrell set the knives and forks and spoons carefully into their case and brought it out to the wagon.

Down the path, beside the pile of skag dross Marpole, Newton and Richmond managed to struggle the ancient wood stove out of the A-frame and onto the big wagon, while Beauty stood watching nervously.

They all went into the main house, where they found books and medicine and matches and plastic jerricans of oil and gasoline. Tyrell and Daniel Charlie stood at open kitchen cupboards and squinted at decades-old print and said to one another the words ibuprofen and Lipitor and Immodium and Benylin and Prozac and tetracycline and Pure Milk Thistle Extract and Gravol and filled their grocery bags. Tyrell found a box of slug bait. He opened it and held the box to his nose and let Daniel Charlie sniff it as well. Daniel Charlie nodded and said “Yeah, that’s what he gave Grace to kill the dogs.”

In the main room there was a brick fireplace. On the slate hearth boxes of matches were stacked. Books were lined on the wood mantel-piece. Except for one they were hardcover. Building Construction Cost Data 2008. Nontechnical Guide To Petroleum Geology, Exploration, Drilling and Production. The Collected Works of Shakespeare. Encyclopaedia Americana Volume 4. Mike Huckabee — Do the Right Thing. Digital Photography Masterclass — the men stood around Daniel Charlie while he flipped through this one — Revenge of the Sith. A Manual of Style. Except for The Collected Works of Shakespeare, the pages of which were brown and brittle and smelled stale, and Emotionomics, whose paper cover of healthy and smiling faces seemed to offend him, Daniel Charlie put all the books into his bag. He took the matches too.

When the wagons were loaded Newton and Richmond brought Grace’s body out and found a place for it in the wagon pulled by Beauty, and covered it with a plastic tarp.

Tyrell and Daniel Charlie walked among the mildewed and rotting furniture, among the nameless electronic wonders, among labour-saving devices as beautiful and useless as modernist sculptures, among chrome-plated objects that reflected and distorted the forms of the men as they spilled gasoline and oil from the jerricans.

They stood at the top of the driveway for a long time, watching the place burn. The roofs of the several additions and the makeshift house down the path collapsed even before the glass in the windows of the main house shattered and hands of flame clawed out into the drab daylight. Emaciated men and women dressed in shreds of plastic came from somewhere and stood nearby and without expression watched the fire rage. When the wagons pulled out they followed a hundred yards back, like timid and desperate dogs.

There were daffodils blooming all among the graves, even among the dozen new mounds of bare earth, and there was a honey smell of cottonwood and alder buds from some distant place where trees still grew. Noor stood looking over the river toward the mountains. Her hair hung loose and dirty, the eyes were stricken in her drawn face, and her cheeks were marked with the dried salt of tears.

It was warm and oppressively still. A high sheet of cloud the colour of oyster shell lay over the day. But against the mountains a lower stratum had flowed and gathered. It was as if a pair of hands had wrapped the peaks tightly in a thin white quilt. Noor pushed a veil of hair from her eyes. She rubbed at the salt on her cheeks. Then she turned and walked to the domicile. She washed her face and tied her hair back.

Will lay where she had left him, on the mattress below the big window. King lay on the floor beside him. Will’s thin body, half covered by a throw of rabbit skins, was locked into a posture of struggle. His face was as grey as concrete except for a red patch on each cheek. He did not look like Will now but like a tortured and cadaverous twin. His lips gaped in a snarl of strangulation as he wheezed a filament of air into his lungs.

Noor gave a ragged sigh and wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. She set her lips and squatted beside him. King lifted his head and licked her hand once, then laid his head on his paws again. Noor stroked Will’s forehead and said “Do you want to see something?”

Will opened his eyes and seized her wrists and looked wildly around. In a few seconds he managed to say, between rapid, rasping breaths “Noor?”