Mark Falkin - The Late Bloomer

I wrapped my fingers around his ankles and pulled. His head thumped to the floor from the wall. I didn’t look at his face as I dragged him through the house. There was no way I was going to get him up into the Bronco alone.

This made things real, the weight of the dead. The earth pulling the flesh back whence it came. His wet suit and hair left a trail on his wood floor. I kept saying I’m sorry, Dr. Fleming, I’m so sorry . On the porch I paused and looked across to see Bass and Kodie standing in my yard. They didn’t offer help at first, just stared, not understanding what it was that had gotten into me.

They asked themselves, I knew: Why did it matter? Who cares? Not in a crass way, just matter-of-fact.

It mattered. Mr. Fleming’s note said so and I believed him.

It matters. How we bury the dead, what we do from here. We can’t just throw up our hands and give up. This has happened and yet we remain. We continue. You’re here, dear reader, yes?

I dragged him farther and was almost crying with the effort and frustration, not understanding why he was so heavy, this slight, intellectual man.

Midway down the cement walk to the Bronco, Bass called out and they came jogging over.

They stood and stared at him, the abstraction becoming real. We’d seen bodies. Bass had watched his parents both die. Yet this stranger’s corpse, that I was pulling it and wanting to bury it, came down on them. The fact that the old world had to be buried somehow. We couldn’t just leave it to rot. But how? The children… they were changed, they wouldn’t do it.

“Help me,” I said through gritted teeth, pulling on him, putting my back into it. Bass took the feet. I went around and picked him up by the shoulders. His head lolled, his eyelids folded and I saw the death in them, the marbleized flesh of the man’s cold eyeball. Kodie supported in the middle and we managed to lay him in the back of the Bronco.

“If we do this, what’s to keep us from doing others?” asked Kodie. It was the first time I’d heard distance and coldness in her voice. “Where does it stop? My parents? Your parents, Bass? What about them?”

Bass looked at the street. “Yeah. Maybe later. Right now, I don’t know if I can even…”

“I know. Me too. I’m sorry.” Pause and quiet. The silence of the world. “But that’s what I’m saying. We can’t bury them all. And don’t be melodramatic and tell me ‘but, we’ve got to try, dammit.’ I say no we do not.” She sniffed and coughed. “When I go, I won’t expect it of you.”

We looked at her and froze, speechless.

“You’re not going to die, Kodie, okay?” I said, still sucking a little wind.

“No time soon,” said Bass with a wan smile.

Her eyes cutting to Bass, then me. “You’re my guarantors, eh?” she said with a dangerous laugh. “Screw you guys. Don’t soft-handle me. Don’t pretend.” She met and held each of our eyes on each word.“I’m. Dead. You’re. Dead.”

“Help me get Mrs. Fleming? Please?” I asked Kodie this directly.

“We haven’t been spared!” she bawled. Her voice echoed. “We’ve been passed over, but it’s… it’s circling back to take us. You know it’s true.” She flapped her arms out and slapped her hands back onto her legs. “No. No, we haven’t been spared. We are not the lucky ones. We are the ones who get to suffer the most, that’s all. We get to watch it all crumble, think about it, feel it, mourn, then die.”

Kodie refused to help more and walked back into my house. I heard her crying as she reached the porch. She closed the door and we began with Mrs. Fleming.

This was the first body I’d removed stones from, so its shock value was high though I tried hard to gird myself.

I started with the head. Bass picked off stones from her body and legs. Lifting that second rock, I saw her eye. It bored through me with a fear in it unlike her husband’s. Once I cleared away the others from her face, the total expression wasn’t fearful. It’s just that her eyes were open.

“Want to close those?” Bass asked. “It’s creeping me out.”

Now I felt the prickles on my skin, thinking she could sit up any second, gawking at us like we’re ghouls disturbing her place of rest. I saw that image in my head—Mrs. Fleming sitting up board-straight, her mud-caked, leafy hair sticking out in all directions, her greening skin loose and purple-veiny, then swiveling her head to me, blinking sluggishly one time and then letting loose a cry of the damned. A cry sounding just like the whalesounds at dawn on the day of.

Christ.

I made a V of my fingers and touched her eyelids. The chill of her flesh, cold as the stone I just pulled off her, ran through my fingertips and coursed all the way to a place behind my ear. The lids wouldn’t go down. Kept flapping back up like cheap window shades. I tried several times, pushing down and then pulling with my fingers.

“No go,” I said. “They won’t move.”

“Guess she’s just going to have to watch us,” said Bass. We didn’t laugh at this but the attempt at humor made this bearable.

No go , I thought, harkening back to the title of the extra credit essay on Lord of the Flies written for you, Mr. E. The words came to mind and got applied to the stiffened status of Mrs. Fleming’s eyelids. But there was more to those words; and the dark smiling teeth in my head—the ones spreading so wide within the mouth housing them that the glistening purple-black gums show too—and they say to me matter-of-factly: things are what they are. That quote, psionically-uttered by the head of a pig on a stick in the green island jungle as heard by the at-that-point disturbed character Simon—

Simon.

Christ.

Settle down, I thought. Lots of males named Simon in the world. You’re losing it again, seeing patterns and coincidences that aren’t there.

But Grandma Lucille said there were no coincidences.

Nausea flourished within and threatened to overtake me as I looked down at Mrs. Fleming. Her face seemed to say, too, that there weren’t any coincidences, and that chaos and chance, like institutionalized gods, were conveniences we the living made up.

Mrs. Fleming’s face saying: I knew, didn’t I? The reason. That it was close, close, close.

I even heard her voice saying it to me—her voice coming in that neighborly tone of hers. From across the street while putting away groceries, just as she had the other day when she called out to me about the Macy’s parade. That voice now reciting to me the exact epigraph to my essay in full, a quote culled from the heart of Golding’s novel: You knew, didn’t you? I’m part of you? Close, close, close! I’m the reason why it’s no go? Why things are what they are?

I was nodding yes to her and she asked it again, louder. This time I saw her standing next to her politically stickered Subaru, hands on her hips, waving at me in a way eerily similar to the way of the bald man after the water rolled by his feet. You knew didn’t you? Incredulity in her voice, almost shock. Cerca, cerca, cerca .

She was yelling it at me now, the tone this third time flatly accusatory: You knew, didn’t you!? Her voice permeating the awful quiet, its waves funneling down into my mind’s maw.

That third time, in my vision, she slammed her Subaru door, stood and looked at me, shaking her head in disapproval, as if what has happened was my fault.

Mr. E had commented on it, writing in the margin: To choose this title for your essay and this quote to tie it together… Well done. You really saw what this book was about, didn’t you?

I damn near said yes out loud to her as if she had asked me, but kept it in. I was probably nodding yes. Bass asked if I was all right. I had stared at her face not believing, like the boy in the jungle had at the flyblown pig head with the lidded eyes of a Thai Buddha.