Mark Falkin - The Late Bloomer

Fury fills his features. He looks out at the dark and says, “You’re gonna make it, Kev.” Outside, they roar in a burst. This time the roar is polyphonic, terrible, wholly belonging to the new world. I’d even say it’s inhuman if I didn’t know it was new-human.

Taking it as a battle cry, Bass jumps over us and dashes through the collapsed doorframe, yelling rebellious. Kodie and I turn away bracing against the next deluge and Bass voicing what it means to be pummeled. But all we hear are his footfalls on the wooden deck and then his yell falling into the distance like he’s pitched himself into a ravine.

Kodie and I lay on the floor. They were gone. You could feel that. Bass was gone, too. You could feel that.

Kodie and I pulled ourselves up. I kissed her and asked if she was okay. She sniffed and bobbed her head that she was but said she wasn’t sure about her back. “I’ll have some sexy yellow-and-purple bruises.” Then she said, “He’s gone, isn’t he?”

“Yeah.”

“It’s you and me now.”

I grabbed her hand. “Flashlights.”

We picked our way through stones in the dark, each one casting its own moonshadow on the floor. The windows gaped with treacherous blades of glass. We went out the hole in the dining room where the back door had been, stepping over the rent screen Bass had leapt through.

Middle-night still, the quiet immense. We aimed our beams around the yard, the trees, back at the house. The house looked shot-through. We searched the front and back yards. My beam fell on a large nest in the trees. A perch for them, I thought, a slapdash treehouse.

No Bass, no body, and no cairn either. We had to get out of the dark.

I heard Maggie whining somewhere outside. I called out to her which stopped her whining but she didn’t come and I didn’t want to wait.

The cold told us the house was no longer a house, but it took the predawn to show us. My home was bones now. The floor looked like the end zone of a landslide. Stones blanketed the wood. Drifts of them rose in the corners. You couldn’t take a step for kicking one. We didn’t touch them. The brown ones, the pumiced, the river rocks, the limestone, all the size throwable by small hands. The floor an anthology of earth tones now, Martin’s proud pine gouged and hiding.

The sky started to color. Kodie and I hunkered on my bed with our flashlights and waited for daylight before doing anything else. I had my high-powered beam pointed up so that the light radiated out on the remains of the ceiling. Kodie lay in my lap. I petted her forehead. What had been done to the walls and windows had not been done as much to the roof. Light rain came and with it wet breezes.

We shivered and listened to it come down so much louder now without windows and walls which looked like the cannon-shot hull of a wooden frigate. But we weren’t sinking, not yet, and that was good. We’d survived a battle and had suffered a dire casualty in Bastian, but they’d failed. We were still here, hangers-on of the old world.

My mind raced with the rainsounds. At first light, what would we do? The shock of the night wore off and the future had to be considered again. There was a future to consider. There were moments last night when that didn’t seem possible. That there still was a future buoyed me, as did Maggie trotting in all wet, panting like mad and shaking off all over my room. She jumped up onto the bed, peaceable thunder rolled in the firmament, and the three of us sat there and let sleep find us.

Her growl woke us.

My flashlight had fallen over. A white spot on the bed. Kodie lifted her head from my lap and I sat up from the headboard. Violet filled the skyward house holes. I had fallen asleep with my palm on Maggie, and now she bristled. “What?” I whispered to Maggie. The dog reflexively turned her head to look at me and then right back to the door to the hall. Morning brewed along the horizon, but the house was still dim, the wet air making it feel more like a cave we’d bivouacked in.

I grabbed the flashlight and aimed the beam at the door. The light caught the swirling mist in the air. Maggie stood up in the bed and perked her ears.

“Come on, let’s go look,” I said.

Kodie’s voice creaked. “There’s too many, Kevin. You know that.” I spoke to her silhouette against the purple veined with tree branches. I couldn’t see her eyes. Her head moved up and down. “Okay,” she said, her throat halting and mucosal. “Okay.”

I stood from the bed and took her hand. “C’mon, Maggie.” Maggie padded in front of us.

We went down the hall a few steps, Kodie stooped and limping, clutching the knife. A stout breeze funneled through it, and in it Maggie found something. She barked and bolted. Our flashlights tried to find her but she was gone and outside before we knew it.

Then I heard it, sounding faraway.

Help.

A voice. Not far. Just outside.

Kevin, help me…

Bass’s muffled, pained voice.

Maggie’s bark said something’s treed. Maybe Bass was up in that nest thing I saw. It’s all my mind would consider, Bass hanging in some sort of cocoon.

“Bastian!” I yelled. We started to run. The rocks on the floor troubled us, our ankles straining, the flashlights shooting all over the house walls, the holes, the ceiling.

I make a struggling sound and Kodie, finding herself ahead of me a few steps, pauses to look back over her shoulder at me.

My beam finds the boy’s face looming right behind her.

His face in the bright light has a ghastly pallor and red-rimmed eyes.

I try to keep my light on him. My throat freezes but my jaw starts to move and when Kodie asks what is it, I am finally able to yell out at her, “A boy! There’s a boy! Right there!”

She turns. Her light finds him. Adds to my light. Kodie screams. He’s an arm’s length from her. She falls, drops her knife, starts to scramble backward over the stones. Her light fell off him, but mine’s still on him and his face does something.

It moves, it blurs. A wave flashes through it, under his skin, muscle and bone.

That’s when I feel small cold hands on my ankles. I’m yanked hard backwards with monstrous strength, falling on my front, bashing my face onto the stones covering the floor.

I fade, hearing Kodie. At first, though there was heady fear in it, the voice of the teacher she wanted to be said to them, “Now boys and girls, let’s all calm down. Let’s each take a turn, tell each other what we’re feeling, okay?” They responded with shuffling, gathering quiet.

Fading more now, I hear her voice devolving from articulated speech into a repetition of a hysterical monotone that echoes through this house of holes, “No! No! No!”

I crane my neck up to follow my flashlight’s beam which has fallen to the floor next to me but which still aims in the direction of her voice.

The last thing I see in the off-centered shaft of light is a group of children surrounding her with workman-like demeanor. They wear jeans and branded T-shirts and Velcroed sequined tennies, one-piece knit dresses, denim skirts and pigtails swirling.

They put their hands on her skin, run their grubby fingers through her hair.

One has her knife.

The last thing I hear is her silence.

Bright day streamed through the hole. I’d been looking at it there and again for the last several hours but my head wouldn’t yet let me wake up. Finally I roused, my head aching, my jaw sore from how I landed. I worked it, rubbed my hand over it.

They’d pulled me back into my bedroom. The rain left and the smell of smoke had grown pungent. Maggie the dog lay beside me. First thing I did was feed her. She inhaled the bread and bananas, the first things I could find.