David Dalglish: A Land of Ash

Please, God, don’t be what I think it is. Anything but that.

He shoved open the door. He looked inside. He closed the door.

“Fuck you, God,” he said.

Jason layered all four sides with duct tape, using an entire roll. The whole while, he coughed and punched the wood. He knew he must be scaring Melissa, but he didn’t care. Nothing mattered. The ceiling had collapsed, broken under the weight of the heavy ash. His fists pounded the door, and he flung the empty roll toward the overflowing trash bin. As he sobbed, he saw a beam of light from the living room circling about. Wiping his face, he followed it, feeling like a lost ship tracking a lighthouse.

Navigating the rocky course of toys, game boards, and table, Jason fell to his knees and wrapped Melissa in his arms. He felt her pat his head as if he were one of her dolls.

“You okay, daddy?” she asked. “You okay?”

He held her tighter.

“Don’t we need to save food?” she asked. Jason only smiled. He’d cracked open a can of ravioli, the sauce thick and cold. They took turns dipping in their spoons and slurping the stuff down. The living room had taken on a gray hue from the dim light piercing the windows.

“Think Spongebob has room for us in his pineapple?” he asked her.

“Stop being silly.”

Outside, glass shattered, coupled with a sound of bending metal. Melissa jumped.

“What was that?” she asked.

“Just the car,” Jason said, dipping his spoon into the can and scooping out the bottom. “Just the dumb old car. You packed?”

Melissa nodded.

“I have everything,” she said.

“Let me see.”

Beside her lay a pink backpack she’d taken with her to first grade. He unzipped it and reached in his hand. He pulled out a Barbie doll, the checkerboard and its pieces, a box of cookies, two flashlights, and a teddy bear.

“Yup,” Jason said, kissing her nose. “That’s everything.”

They both wore layers of shirts and pants, plus ski caps and winter coats. Jason hoisted his own backpack, filled with food, flashlights, bottles of water, and a gun. He set it down on the couch and went to the kitchen, returning holding several washcloths.

“Now this is very important,” Jason said. “Probably the most important thing ever, alright? You keep this across your face at all times, and never breathe through anything other than the cloth. You understand, sweetie?”

“Yeah.”

He tied a yellow cloth around her face, double-knotting it behind her head. When he stood, she looked up at him, her eyes sparkling with wonder. While she watched, he tied one around his own face.

“We’re going out there, aren’t we?” Melissa asked. “Into the warm snow?”

Jason chuckled.

“We are.”

He ripped the tape off the sides of the front door, curling it up into a giant sticky wad. Once enough was gone, he grabbed the door knob and pulled. Biting air swirled in, angry in its cold. Ash stung their eyes, and already Jason fought a cough.

“You ready?” he asked. Melissa nodded.

Hand in hand, they abandoned their shelter.

They sat on the beach, beers in hands, on the night their island ended.

“There goes another one,” Sean whispered, gazing into the sky where a jet plane, headlights cutting through the darkness, airlifted another five hundred refugees to safety. “Seventy-third since we got here.”

Harvey watched his friend. Sean was a small man, rail thin, a man whose round glasses and goatee made him look like a fiery intellectual--an island Trotsky, if you will--but Harvey still remembered him as that scrawny kid the bullies picked on. Sean had always loved numbers, as a child prodigy and now as a professor of number theory, and today he was the only one counting.

In fact, Harvey thought, he was the only one watching at all. He had always been the nervous one, Sean.

Jess and Mike, now, they were your happy couple. Yes, they stretched out on their futons, ran their toes through the sand, and laughed between bottles of beer. Mike had his shirt off, revealing a tattoo of the Cheshire Cat climbing his arm. Jess wore jean shorts and a bikini top, sporting tattoos of ten dark roses, her flower of the night. She punched Mike, who laughed and took another swig of beer. She lit a joint, passed it to him, and their laughter grew.

Looking at them, Harvey thought, you’d never know the fire was coming. Or maybe you would know. Maybe that was exactly how you should look on the night you, your friends, your entire island died.

“Hell,” Jess said and tossed an empty bottle into the waves ahead, those waves whispering in the darkness, only their foamy crests visible in the night. “We gonna die tonight, right? So we die laughing, eh?”

“Damn right!” Mike said, raising a bottle for this Pacific jewel, this dying land. He emptied it, tried to throw it into the water, but hit his foot instead. Jess howled with laughter. Around them puppies scampered, pets abandoned by their owners, those owners airlifted overhead. The pups were happy too, unaware that they were sacrificed to fire; ignorance, like booze, was bliss.

Harvey envied Mike and Jess, as he’d always envied their spirit, their carelessness, their ability to stare the world in the face and tell it to go to hell. They did that now too, just instead of giving the world the finger, they thrust it up at death. For them, life had always been a party. Death was just its final bash.

And there, behind this laughing couple, sat David. He was smiling softly. His hair was long, his face unshaven. Watercolors stained his pants, for David was the artist among them, their seeker of colors and life. He raised his eyes to the full moon, and his smile widened as he saw the birds that fled.

“Doves,” he said. “I haven’t seen doves in so long.”

Yes, for David, this last night was for beauty. In his eyes, he saw only the moonlight on the water, the seashells glinting on the sand, the puppies that played around them.

Harvey envied them all: David, for finding these last glimmers of beauty; Jess and Mike, for being so happy or shallow; Sean, for his intelligence, his perfect understanding of their place in history, the significance of these planes that keep roaring overhead.

Because, Harvey thought, I feel nothing.

“Eighty-four,” Sean whispered, watching from behind those round glasses, and Harvey watched the plane too. It was low enough to see clearly, even in the dark, and Harvey thought of the people inside, the people who’d won the raffle. The people who’d won life.

He looked at his friends. The unfortunate. The lottery losers. The dying.

For the first time that evening, Harvey smiled, because he loved them and even though his insides quivered, he knew there was no better way to die.

He had always held them together, hadn’t he? Not quite their leader, no, but... maybe their glue. Harvey reached into his pocket and felt the paper there. His winning ticket. His plane ticket out. The possibility of life in the remnants of the freezing world.

Harvey closed his eyes. Not without them. He crumbled the paper in his fist, pulled it from his pocket, and tossed it to the water. In the darkness, he couldn’t see it disappear in the ocean. It was better that way.

“One hundred,” Sean soon said, barely audible over the joking and singing of the happy, drunk couple. “I think that’s the last one.”

Harvey took a swig of beer when he noticed that not only planes blotted the stars. A darkness spread in the east, moving fast, like tar spilled across the sky.

“Hey, I heard a good one the other night,” Jess said, bottle in hand. “A rabbi and a priest walk into a bar, and....”