Steve Katz - Kissssss - A Miscellany

Clouds covered the moon that evening, and Tignee slipped away undetected. He avoided the road and climbed over the cliffs. He sank to his hips in the snow, plunged on over the summit, and when dawn came he was still moving. He heard the machines grinding slowly behind him, and a huge sound from those enlisted on the march, like the yowling of a cosmic dog. He dragged his shadow down through the plateau where he had stayed before. The surviving trees showed some foliage, and a few skeletons remained scattered here and there in the realm of ghosts. He remembered the location of the tree where Sylva had been. The tree was badly charred, but had managed a few new leaves. A skeletal figure stepped from behind the tree, and he shuddered. What is life? thought Tignee. The specter approached Tignee, bony arms outstretched as if it wanted to embrace him. The sandals with their blue stones undamaged allowed him to recognize her. Marti's sandals were still attached, hooked to Sylva's feet. The feet were reduced to little more than their small bones.

“I knew you would come back,” rasped the voice, with no trace of the lilt that Tignee had once enjoyed in Sylva's voice. In his arms she felt like a bundle of twigs. She leaned back and looked at him through sunken eyes rimmed with yellow scabs. Lesions festered in the skin stretched across the bones of her face. When she puckered to kiss him a clear thick fluid oozed from the cracks in her lips. As she drew close he shuddered and resisted. He closed his eyes and battled the nausea, as he smelled her putrefying face. But they kissed and the kiss was shockingly sweet. His arms and shoulders relaxed at the taste that reminded him of his Marti's mouth. A squawk from above turned them both to look up at the small figure dangling from a blackened branch. It was a diminutive bag of bones.

“Tewly?”

“He wants to tell you something.”

Tignee looked up to listen, but could hardly hear above the noise growing around him. He shrugged at Sylva, and she understood, and rose as she had done before, but with more effort, as if a weak collaborator was turning a crank to help her rise. There was so little left of the poor boy up there. Tignee recognized now what sounds he was hearing around himself from the charred forest. “He is happy to see you,” Sylva said when she rattled back down. “'Have at it,' is what he wants to say to you.”

They were embedded in the sound of babies crying, a crying that went brutally to the heart of Tignee, as it would to the heart of any man who has been a father, a father who has lost his children. Tignee felt the need to do something, but he also felt helpless to do anything. He could hear babies who cried because they were hungry, and babies who cried because they were weak. Some babies cried because they were hurting. There were those who cried because they had been abandoned, and those who cried because they were lost, or woke to strange people touching them. There were those who cried because something tasted bad, because something burned their tongues. Some cried because they were left to chill in their own feces. Some cried for lack of milk. Some because they were swollen. Some cried because they were so small, some because what they saw coming was too big. But the loudest of them, and most pitiful of cries, came from those who didn't know why they cried. They had no reason to cry. They cried for no reason at all.

Tignee was now even more determined to do what he had to do. In the morning, he gathered around himself all the remnants of what had once been a thriving empire of ghosts. All of them had abandoned their hauntings of the flesh and what remained was the thinnest residue of skin clinging to some phantom bones. He didn't know if, collectively, they would have enough strength to do what he needed done. He stayed with them therefore for one hundred and thirty-six days, designing and laying out traps and snares made of the nets he had previously taught them to braid. From the line of rock that crossed the plateau and emitted a gas smelling of iodine and hyacinth, he filled bladders made from the intestines of panthers — visible now because they were recently dead — and using these lifts he floated his lightest nets from the tallest trees left, so they rose out of sight to spread as a trap for airborne armaments. And they spread the heaviest nets along the ground far and wide, square miles of net, attached to the snares he devised that would devour the heaviest of the vehicles, and entangle whole armies tumbled into a pouch where they had to submit. This is ready , Tignee thought. On the one hundred and thirty-seventh day, he looked out at what the remains of his specters had accomplished, and said, “This is good.”

He looked to the road, towards where he had escaped the assault, and saw the black line of disaster that swelled and brimmed along the ridge. From there an uncomfortable silence rolled down like noxious gas.

Tignee stood up and raised his arms. “Have at it, you sons of bitches. Have at it now,” he shouted, and his cohorts rattled in echo.

And then, on this one hundred and thirty-seventh day, Tignee turned. He picked up one of the sandals, buckled it to his wrist, and set out. Tignee returned to the sea.