Mark Falkin - The Late Bloomer

I helped Kodie up off the floor and we took to the couch. “Right about now I’d be watching a horror movie,” Kodie sighed, staring at the flat-screen set within the hutch in the corner of the room behind Bass’s set-up. “Watching Michael Myers rise up behind a blubbering Jamie Lee Curtis who you simply cannot believe is still standing there with her back to him. I mean, you stuck him in the eye with a hanger. Now, run, bitch!”

We chortled. She wheeze-laughed. Insane serial killers had become nostalgic. Bass was scooping pumpkin with his hands and slapping the wet seeds and stringy goop on a spread newspaper— slap. slap.

Kodie said, “I’m really wondering if we’re not Jamie Lee, just sitting here. Maybe we should heed Chris in Utopia.” She looked the window. “I think we should definitely go out there.”

“I’m leaning that way. We need numbers. But, it’s too late tonight. Let’s go in the morning. Bass?”

Bass stopped carving, looked at all he’d set up, sighed, and nodded. “Yeah. We need to make a run for it and link up with those guys.” He punched an eye hole through the pumpkin with the knife handle. “First light, let’s start packing.”

It was settled.

I took comfort in that and, for tonight, the existence of the arsenal in this room. I felt fortified, ready. I wanted to lighten things so I brought back the old world with Halloween. “I’d probably be taking Johnny around trick-or-treating. Last year, Bass and I were just getting to know each other and we hit the cemetery for the first time. Remember that, Bass? I took Johnny out for a while and then you and I jumped the fence and did our cemetery dance.”

He bobbed his head, but was uninterested in reminiscing. Facing away from us, he hunkered and listened intently, called out into the present, “CQ CQ Chris you there? Anybody?”

slap. slap.

wheeze. wheeze.

(bark bark)

“Hello? Chris. Hello.”

The lights low in the house. We’d closed the blinds and curtains as if this were a normal Halloween night and we wanted to give the customary signal that we wouldn’t suffer trick-or-treaters, we don’t have any damned candy for you, go away.

Bass had set the jack-o’-lantern on the kitchen bar. I’m sure he meant it to be festive and comforting, but to me it was a reminder of what jack-o’-lanterns were all about which was to ward off the spirits of the damned come rap-rap-rapping on your door. Though the face wasn’t scary per se—it was childlike with its rounded eyes and nose and convex eyebrows—it was mawkish and seemed to be laughing at us, in on a joke we weren’t privy to, a joke that had real-life peril as a punch line, a byzantine joke that lost you in its labyrinth until it mattered, at the end, when you learned you were the brunt of it all along, its victim. Its ochre glow radiated, rendering incomplete shadows on the walls and ceilings.

“Cool, eh?” Bass had said when he first set it up. Kodie gave tepid applause through a stifled yawn. Kodie and I had started to doze, my eyes flying open when she coughed or when Bass spoke out into the abyss. My watch said eleven. Now Bass sat reading in a chair, I couldn’t tell what, but it was obvious to me he hadn’t been really reading but listening; to the night wind, to the gathered darkness, that dog barking. He went back to the ham. Bass had been at it for hours.

“I feel like if I don’t keep trying, that’s when I’ll miss someone.” I’d been asleep but his sonorous voice jerked me awake. I was still blinking my eyes and trying to figure out where I was, my life’s context—couch, Kodie on me, her smell in my nose and lungs, family gone, world gone, night. “What if this is it? Chris in Utopia? I’ve heard nothing from anyone on this thing for hours.”

Bass had placed the book he read facedown on an armrest. Lord of the Flies , my copy from my room where I kept it on a high shelf above my desk slotted in among many others, a decades-old forest-green cloth hardback. I could smell the decay in the yellowing pages from here.

When did he go in there? I’m confused in my sleepiness. I propped myself up on an elbow and looked at him. Bass said in a way-too-serene and measured voice, “Like Utopia Chris said. There are probably a bunch of people our age getting it together and doing just what I’m doing. It’s just a matter of time.”

I muttered with a tired croak in my voice, “Probably right.” I tapped Kodie on her hot head. “You,” I whispered to her, “pill time. Get that fever down.” She got herself up, looked at each of us through eye slits, and waggled her arm goodnight, flopping her hand like it wasn’t properly connected.

As she shuffled away, she turned her head to the jack-o’-lantern and started to say something to it, but demurred.

Bass seemed animated despite the hour and the day we’d had. He hopped back to the chair and lifted the book up again. His brow furrowed, eyes skirting along the lines. “I’m going to stay up. We need someone to stand watch. I’ll start. I’ll wake one of you guys up in a few hours. I’m into this book now. We were supposed to read this in, like, ninth grade? but I don’t really remember it.”

When he moved his elbow off the armrest, I noticed the pistol on the chair. He saw me looking at it and smiled. “Goodnight.” Looked back at the book. “Progress today, eh?”

“Mmmm,” I answered, too tired to care whether we had made progress or not and too tired to appreciate the need to stand watch. Such was the way of this new world. “Yeah. You got the conch tonight. Thanks.”

He lifted an eyebrow at that, but kept reading.

Kodie’s wheeze was there, but muted, the war buglers of her sickness trailing off and though I was falling into the tumult of dreams, I clung to my belief that I was right about her, that her illness was just that: an old-world one that ignited, flared its orange spikes but now was snuffed.

This offered some comfort through the night in which I dreamt I was a chrysalis in a diaphanous sac through which you see my knees and elbows rolling and twisting in gestation’s dull agony.

The chrysalis dreamed within the dream and it was this: Johnny standing in an open field wearing Man U’s red home kit, shin guards, cinched cleats. His arms are outstretched and his chin is lifted with pride and his eyes are closed in basking. The children pool around him, hug him and jostle him, but he maintains his messianic stance.

I’m seeing this scene as a flying thing, hovering just above, then I swerve off through brightness and come upon maroon raw meat centered on a white plate on a pine table in the house with the winter cowboys. The meat starts to shudder and jump and maggots burst from the middle and spill out like white lava from the puckered flesh. In the background I hear frantic Spanish being spoken but I can’t make it out. It’s as though the disembodied Spanish speaker is calling a tight soccer match yet I know he’s describing to an audience what I’m seeing.

I watch the maggots flow out, too many and too much for one piece of meat to hold. A magic clown car of maggots.

Again, I’m flying and now I’m whipping through the air high above Lake Austin. I’m darting down for the waving bald man. In the corners of my many eyes I see that wave coming. I skim the water. It’s coming on my left and just when it gets to me, I lift myself over it and it moves past. I’m still looking at him, feeling it roll under me. But it’s not just water. It entrains an unfathomable power with it. I feel heat come off it as it passes under me. The bald man is waving like a sugared-up kid. His smile is profane. I zoom to him and hover.

His face loses its smile. His waving hand falls to his side. His torso goes slack. His mouth drops open on a rusted hinge, and his eyes droop and I see red crescents under the corneas. Dark, viscous blood falls from his slackjawed mouth.