Selections from a story about a fish who didn’t realize he was a fish until the TV screens went black, the radio hissed, the internet dissolved and The Fishers of Men were revealed in the stillness.

Written Feb 2014- Jul 2016

‘Everything was fine.’

I can’t get past what that man said. His sweating face glowed in the yellow light looking out past me, staring deep at the black curtain the road slipped under only a hundred yards away. And with with boyish naiveté his eyes peaked around the dark furls and I saw him see the city as it used to be at the same time as it burned in the dark and he could not reconcile.

There was a shooting, or an explosion almost every day for the past year. I remember one. It happened about eight months ago. Another young man at another college campus. Nine lives, then his own. No manifesto. No explanation—-everything was fine.

I don’t know why.

There were so many like him, before him, after him.

Machine gun. Government building.

How many guns did he carry into that elementary school? Five year olds. Seven.

In the park, just tossed it. Exploded. Children. Mother.

Everything was fine.

Everything was fine.

Just at the mall.

Army private. Home base.

Private.

Public.

Theater.

School.

One fish two fish…

Then the lights went out.

Fishers of Men.

…red fish blue fish.

I should have known.

—-everything is fine.

TV said government said—isolated.

Carry on.

Not me. Not you. Not us.

Them.

We were family in the light. Loved each other enough to nod, to pick up the paper that slipped from the creases of our hands, to swallow the gum, to look down as the elevator door closed, to brake in a school zone, in a speed trap, to walk above you and whisper next to you, to rake the leaves so the drains don’t choke.

But the lights went out. The lights went out and the leaves are falling. They are falling, right now, in the dark everywhere one by one releasing to fall to be received. It’s supposed to be a soft reception made by the fingertips of the grass in its final alacrity before the withering winter months upon the open palm of a fallen brethren before them in such a delicate sound that each individual leaf will be heard only beneath its tree like the prayers spoken in the room of a wake, the prayers whispered in the mind of the mourners.

But I can hear them all falling from everywhere, in every direction. They crash crash like buckshot through a snaredrum, pummel like mercury raindrops on a plastic raincoat,reverberate like brass bells falling from clock towers. I can feel their sound upon the skin of my ears like a million tiny fingers tapping.

We loved each other enough.

She’s still tapping.

Some used to burn the leaves, giant piles of the leaves mixed from different trees and it would smell like a ceremony to me and drains would stay clean. In the morning, everything will be on fire in red and orange and yellow, piling higher, choking the drains, smothering the grass, inking the sky. The leaves will burn where they have fallen and the flames will not die out until the trees are sketches against the distant blank sky then the ground turns to brown then white.

What are the Fishers of Men?

Who turned the lights out? Everything was fine.

To AINgela,

…a dream that would become nightmare that would become dream again.

Home.

I have found her.

The blood moon is swollen filling the entire sky like a circular movie screen while all around there are solemn pillars that used to be trees. Stripped, they stand naked, branchless and leafless stretching upward until they are pinioned to the sky.

Aingela’s shadowy figure is still running, she’s running at the moon.

She stops suddenly. She’s tiny amongst the towering pillars that cast long shadows about her. Shadows that roll slowly, roll silently over all their fallen leaves and all their fallen branches as indiscernibly as the drifting of the moon.

It’s moaning.

The ground we stand upon moans from all directions from the pillars. They grow into the sky and as they do their grooves are rising against the dead leaf shells, scratching and rattling at a frequency so low it’s almost nothing, but it’s there as Aingela reaches for the moon.

She whimpers from ahead of me as her little fingers grasp within the blood lit sphere, twirling and clutching the dust and red.

She whimpers again.

She is a shadow of the littlest girl I ever knew and her legs dangle below the widening rim of the moon as the field vibrates—moaning, and the blood moon consumes the sky.

I go to her.

The ground cracks as I walk upon the leaves as brittle as butterfly wings. With each crunching step in Saddery’s oversized shoes, I’m closer to her. The little hand she holds behind her is black. Dipped in her own shadow, it grasps for something as a red hand continues to grasp the face of the moon.

Her black hand is reaching out into the dark behind her, but I do not go to reach for it. I can only watch as it writhes and rolls about her wrist like a dead fish atop rolling sea. I watch it struggle with my hand in my pocket as her red hand begins to become frantic, corralling wisps in the moon with clawed and bony intensity.

She doesn’t seem like the little girl who road shotgun with me for so many miles. Her golden blonde hair is different. It’s parted and brushed down the precise middle of her head falling neatly at each of her shoulders and leaving a bold line of scalp that glows red beneath the moon. I look back down to her hand. It writhes quietly and I raise my hand out above her. I hold it out to her and to the moon, putting them between my thumb and forefinger.

They dangle together.

I step into her shadow, it is a mere stump next to the stretching shadows of the black pillars but I could lay down into it and it would consume me.

I place my hand into hers and she weeps. She sobs as her black hand squeezes mine, and her red hand grasps the blood moon. She squeezes tighter as she scratches at the moon with a ferocity that shakes her entire body and then mine. I feel my stomach tear open as she sobs and we shake together.

….and then they begin to flutter out of me, out of my gut—the butterflies. They rise, floating past our hands to the height of my heart and into the moon light. Silhouettes with tints of red, they flutter as leaves caught in the wind rising into the moonscape where her tiny hand continues to scratch and continues to claw, and then like thin cloud vapors they slip into nothing.

“Aingela.” I can only whisper at the end of a deep breath.

She squeezes my hand even tighter as she continues to scratch at the moon. I reach into my pocket and I feel the warm wood as an extension of my skin in my right palm. The weight from the bottom of Pete’s box, the weight that laid inside the white box with a red cross painted upon, it feels like nothing.

She is suddenly still.

“Is it blood?” she asks me softly sucking in her sobs and still squeezing my hand as she probes the moon with her little fingertips. I watch as she continues to try to grasp, her tiny fingers awash like pink hydrozoa in the red moon’s sea.

…just grasping

little fingers..

…“At the cemetery…”

A voice comes from behind and brings my finger to the trigger. It softly speaks in pace with considered, delicate foot falls.

“…you said something—do you remember that?”

I don’t look back.

I slip the gun deep back into my pocket. Trembling, I look out into the blood red light of the moon where Aingela’s hand has suddenly stilled.

A white dress begins to flicker into my periphery.

“I didn’t catch it but you said it with such…”

Stopping, she stands right beside me. “…halted dilation.”

After a pause, her hands at her hands held at her stomach, she approaches Aingela, “And you did such a good job with Aingela. Such a chivalrous duty keeping her— fed.”

She turns to face me, her fingers locked above her waist as sterile as latex gloves as they were at the cemetery.

“You’re a good man—aren’t you? You’d rather keep the light.” She says.

My whole body begins to tremble.

“Keep still, boy!” A familiar voice, the balck man, shouts from behind me.

“Such a good man. And you are trembling, now, knowing such a fall beneath you. But don’t worry. Don’t deny yourself for it. They all tremble. They all tremble before they fall.”

Her hands come undone to her sides as she turns her gaze to Aingela and then reaches out and corrals the little girl’s blonde hair to the side. I look out to the blood moon with wide eyes before I close them. I breathe in deep. I focus on the breath. The pain goes away just as it returns.

“Sling your rifles!” She shouts to the masses of men that have gathered in shadows and silhouettes amongst the pillars. “Sling your rifles and your skins! —-The fall is coming.”…

The Fishers of Men

Preface

61 THE FOOL’S KNOT O Fool! begetter of both I and Naught, resolve this Naught-y Knot! O! Ay! this I and O — IO! — IAO! For I owe “I” aye to Nibanna’s Oe.28 I Pay — Pé, the dissolution of the House of God — for Pé comes after O — after Ayin that triumphs over Aleph in Ain, that is O.29 OP-us, the Work! the OP-ening of THE EYE!30 Thou Naughty Boy, thou openest THE EYE OF HORUS to the Blind Eye that weeps!31 The Upright One in thine Uprightness rejoiceth — Death to all fishes! … the words of Aleister Crowley, as A Lie Stirs the Crow. A man of unfathomable evil, EGO and the embodiment of pure ANI-hilation. This is the secret religion of our utter ANI-hilation. The doctrine of our false elect. This is the religion of the powers of inequity, wars, injustice and fallen Wisdom. It is death to all fishes…

ANI 61 like a stone falls into the abyss…

and Pistis Sophia is cast into darkness.

343

…and God said, Let there be Light

and there was Light…–Genesis

AIN 61 is 7, the Covenant, the Holy Spirit…

…and Jesus, walking by the sea of Galilee, saw two brethren, Simon called Peter, and Andrew his brother, casting a net into the sea: for they were fishers. 19And he saith unto them, Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men. 20And they straightway left their nets, and followed him. 21And going on from thence, he saw other two brethren, James the son of Zebedee, and John his brother, in a ship with Zebedee their father, mending their nets; and he called them. 22And they immediately left the ship and their father, and followed him.

–Matthew, 4:18…

…and everyone that heareth these sayings of mine and doeth them not, shall be likened unto a foolish man which built his house upon the sand

and the rain descended and the floods came

and the winds blew and beat upon that house

and it fell. —Matthew 7:26…

…Wagner from Parsifal:

May your suffering be blessed

Which gave the timid fool

Pity’s highest power

And purest knowledge’s might…

…for Emily, the Blossom in the cafeteria who knew the light in me though I comprehended it not…

…and upon her mountain of salt she wept for all the good that would come

and when she became of light, her mountain became of moon

a promise in the suffering night

to heal the blessed wound…

…let your light so shine before men, that they may עין [Ayin, Hebrew for see] your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven. –Matthew 5:16…

Know this,

…fish cannot carry guns.–Valis, Philip K. Dick…

…and may the light of the Son shine in all His glory upon the little fish as they rise from the darkness toward the glimmering surface to find their rest upon the incomprehensible…

…these were The Fishers of Men…

…the highway is still pumping. It’s dusk, there are lights in both directions. The red ones aren’t for slowing. They maintain. Separation, speed. Feeling the nature, using the concrete and articulated lines for it’s final and most perfect purpose. I’m unconscious. The lights are glittering fish and we are the lights.Slow and rhythmic leans into the space ahead. Everything glows, even my heart, even my head. This is not love, it just feels like it.

A roar of a motorcycle breaks the flowing calm. The driver wraps speedily around me and continues on a weave through cars. He is going fast. Purposely fast. Panic-fast. There’s a child clinging to the driver. Small. No more than six years old. Their helmets are shiny and deep black. They glow with the red and white lights that surround them and look like fishbowls with tiny quick fish.

Up ahead an off ramp looms, dark and empty. Everyone is getting on this highway. The motorcyclist is still speeding, still weaving and the child looks like a doll clinging precariously with plastic limbs. They are coming right up to the off ramp. The motorcycle’s break lights beam a brighter red and it fishtails leaving streaks of black on the ground streaks of red in the air. The plastic child loses grip and tumbles the driver ditches and the motorcycle skids horizontal twenty feet up the off ramp and stops. Slowly it leans its headlights back down the offramp and comes to a stop lighting up the driver and the plastic child.

The flow continues. The unfettered red lights maintain their paler red. I am pulling off. I don’t know why.

I should keep going. I’ve never loved a road so much.

But I’m leaning again, this time sharply off to the right. Right ahead where that motorcycle is beaming like a low spotlight on two crumpled figures with crumpled shadows that fall all the way to the bottom of the off ramp.

I stop right at the edge of their shadows, right at the bottom of the ramp. I look out at the figures from my windshield. The engine is off, I can hear my breathing. I have nothing for them and there’s nothing I could give; no medical training, not even a band aid. Why get out of the car? Why not just go?

Something she said:

‘Swimming. Constantly swimming; in giant schools, following, flowing. Always moving. Can’t stop. Won’t stop, might die. Might not feel anymore. I’ll have to keep moving or I won’t know what to be. Stay horizontal. I won’t look down, my eyes won’t let me.I won’t fall if I don’t look down. Just keep moving. Be a fish. Feel like a fish. I am fish. There is no bottom when I am a fish. And I want to stay a fish. But I can’t stop. I cannot stop or I’ll die and I’ll float upward and my dead eyes will see the sky above and the black below and I will not be a fish anymore.’

I’m not a fish.

I open the door slowly. A click and a wait before I swing it. One last chance to get back on the highway. Their shadows are gone now washed away by my headlights. I can see these two now, clearly. Sides on the concrete, flopping slowly. It’s hard to breathe now.

I walk up to the plastic child. It’s clothed all over in black leather, oversized, she’s drowning in it. Pale rubber fingers stick out from the long sleeves like tiny hydrozoa. The helmet is still on and it rolls back and forth on the concrete, mindlessly like something bloated on top of the waves. Reflections of the pale yellow light float limp and still upon it. I feel nothing. I bend down to one knee. My face is reflected in the helmet’s visor. I’m just as pale as the lights.

I pull my head back and lean back. Feeling the pull down the ramp. I could lean until I’m back in my car and back on the highway. But I pull my head forward and I pull the helmet off the plastic child. I look into her eyes and it’s my pain that I see, rolling over slowly.

***********************************

7:03pm

The glowing fallout green of the watch on my wrist just shifted its hand from a three to a four. I watched it happen. Through the windshield the road is a dead grey filament and my yellow lights do what they can; falling on the occasional sign. 55MPH and I’m going 84, I don’t think the cops mind anymore. She’s asleep, the little girl. She has golden blonde hair that is splayed about the dark passenger side window. It’s meant to be pretty, like a kaleidoscope but with a hand over the top. The black leather she wore on the motorcycle lays in the backseat; a man’s large size jacket and 32 length pants that were hastily cut off so the little girl could wear them—-and survive a crash.

The man she was clinging to is dead. His neck was broken when that motorcycle went down and there was blood; his bare skin like jellied toast on his pale skin. I saw his last breath fog the black of his helmet and dissipate. I never saw his eyes. This little girl survived and she survived remarkably well. She’s a plastic candy, girl and she sleeps in a pink shirt and yellow shorts.

We’ve been thinning out on this country road concrete since I left the highway and the city and the suburbs and that flow. The masses spilled in a wide rush out of the city in a tidal wave of foaming, chlorinated water surging and running out into the terrain. Then it separated into the hills and valleys and smaller roads, but still ran fast, in thick liquid lines too near to the city, to the source, to stop. But those lines are splitting and those lines are splitting into the narrowest of tiny, shining streams.

I feel we are needling right now, those who could run, through the blades off grass or atop a slab of concrete, trying to find a crack. But the sun is rising behind us and the wet and stretching hand print that we are leaving behind will fade as soon as it is shown. But I think, at least I hope, the needling streams will have made it. They will have found a crack before the sun comes up and there will be no trace of the path they took until this is over.

7:23pm

The road is so empty but I stay between the lines. Still going south. I was heading to New Orleans. I have hope for New Orleans and I was leaning into her before the fall. She’s a bastion and she’s a flower. A beautiful and strong orphan, kneeling and I see that her knees bleed into the mud and her prayers whisper through the streets, and they are answered. Her highest point is a dark line on a purple living room wall where the sea stood on its toes and relented.

It relented.

There is a feeling that going south is like going downhill from cold hard peaks, to the fertile, softer, ground by the ocean, back to sea level. Where the air is thick and green lay everywhere. The buildings are soft and rooted. The people wear sandals and muddy their feet in the sand and earth.

I feel this southward momentum gaining down and away from skyscraping peaks stretching too high, too cold and distant, touching the clouds. That giant city that touched the clouds, behind me. Where people walked on stilts and forgot what grass felt like. Where they no longer worked with the substance, but sat in big plastic chairs high up in the clouds touching nothing. Corralling wisps of the nebulous before it dissipated, going higher to seek more and always picking the dirt from their fingernails and polishing the dust from their shoe tips.

Wooden power-lines stand along these roads. The the wires are slack and I don’t need to stand beside one to know they’re not humming anymore at least not in tune to anything that I’ve known; not since the power went out.

I wish I wasn’t driving. I wish our roles were reversed; me and the little girl whose name I don’t even know, sleeping beside me. I could feel comfort then instead of this drawing dread. I could climb into the back and lay on the floor with my ear to the road and hear it whisper and thud and fall asleep and wake up to feel the final few turns and see the familiar tops of trees and signs as we pull into the driveway and with one last thud at the curb I’m back.

Home.

That word home has been cold for a long time now. It’s just an occasionally reheated thought. But I remember when it was a certain warmth. When I could put my nose in my jacket in the coat room at school and smell the word. Or when returning from family vacations, that smile through the front door, as big as the smile I had while I was away, I could feel the word. It was a forever kind of warmth, but forever is only for revelers and then there is the fall, then there is cold.

Where is she, right now as she sleeps? Home? I hope she’s far from here.

Where has she been and who is missing her?— if anyone anymore. She resonates a warmth as she sleeps. There’s an electricity about her that just may be sparking these derelict power lines as we pass. Juicing every little house, just for a moment, just enough to flash the last channel the TV was tuned to or rev a blow dryer in a darkened bathroom making the people hope the power’s coming back and everything is going to be just fine.

But for some reason there is some kind of assuredness in her tiny body. No clinging fear anymore, her little fists in an unclenched sleep and she’s comfortable right there in that seat, that seat that has been cold for so long. But it’s being warmed now

———-by someone else, a strange little girl.

The floor mat is voided, the girl has her feet cuddled up on the seat. That whole space under the glove compartment is a deep dark hole and its been that way for a long time now. Cold and nothing. I keep it that way. But there was someone who loved me, she kept her feet there. Such a part of her. Her lovely utility.

The shapes.

That she walked and ran, and climbed with them everyday, everywhere, through everything, in everything , on everything, and they still fluttered about me. They danced delicate with soft arches and sweet skin out of countless footsteps. Footsteps that I could have never seen where they fell and why and or how. I just saw that they never carried ground or burden with them. And whether she tried to make them lovely, whether she washed away the dirt and rough skin in secret bath, I don’t know. I never saw that. I only saw them floating in front of me. And they made me love her even more.

It’s just a black floor mat. I keep it that way.

I can’t breathe.

Who is this child cuddled into her seat? There can’t be anything.

She can’t be with me.

I am incapable. —Selfish?

Not selfish. —What was that story about a little girl who stowed away on a spaceship? She was found by the only other person on board and he had to jettison her into space because the ship was calibrated to such a precise equation—

The cold equation? Any more weight would crash the ship and kill them both.

There can be no one else. I don’t want anyone else. I can’t. She is just a plastic girl dreaming that she is not a stowaway, but she is. I will toss her back into the cold space. She has no home because that man on the motorcycle is dead. That seat is is not meant for her warmth. This is my cold equation.

She stirs and stretches her legs out a bit into the hollow space below the seat, but still remains in her peaceful sleep. She mumbles something softly; something about fruit punch and laughs.

…she laughs.

I open the window and let in the cool night air.

7:51pm

I’ve never been a good juggler. My mind wanders and I often hope that something will take the wheel. The road is hard enough to wrangle when I’m all the way present, all the way there. It’s always hard to stay between the lines and when it’s dark it’s even harder. Like a stream of consciousness it comes at you out of the darkness and only a short beam of an idea of where you are connects you to where you’ll be in the next second. I have a passenger now—again. I have to be here on the this dark road—right now but I can’t help but look back…

I can’t stop laughing and my eyes, they can’t stop falling over and over again as they roll down her body

Falling feeling as my eyes rise to meet her own

Peak then fall

and rise to meet her cheek I fall

and rise to meet her marble clavicle I fall

and rise to meet her breast I fall

this beautiful fall might never end

I will never be fallen,

for her

her hand her eyes again

I am falling

I am fallen

My gut flutters out of the reverie and it’s terrible how feeling can so readily return. The artificial twitching of the dead corpse that lay in my stomach as the mad scientist sends down bitter lightning from above.

Spark.

Twitch.

Fade….

8:01pm

I can’t get it out of my mind. It churned in the rearview mirror on that highway, my city’s tallest point. It struck through the grey wisps, billowing and surging black clouds from its soaring windows and churning slowly black with the grey until there was only black. I left the city burning, adorned in flame and heat from the anger that flooded over the content. It won’t stop until the chemicals burn out and the new day comes when everyone is sobered and everyone regrets. We are long past the moment after the sun sets where we have could sacrificed our night to have a brilliant morning. The sun will still rise after this burning and raging night, but it will rise to spite us and it will hurt; it will hurt for a long time.

A car blazes by.

The road comes back as it passes. The speed, the dangerous momentum I’ve been carrying—I breathe in through my nose to be present to not let go of this moment. I don’t know how many miles I traveled without knowing it. I don’t know how many breaths this little girl let out in confidence that she’d breathe them in again while I’ve driven on looking at the ceiling in my mind.

“I’m hungry.” She says, eyes closed.

They are her first words to me; said without fear, without pretension. Just as if I pulled the string on her back and waited to hear the doll speak. I could have made it all the way to New Orleans without saying anything, without needing anything. That was the plan. There wouldn’t even have been thought that I would need anything. I don’t want to say anything. I don’t want anything. Not until I get there. Then I might smell the city like a great banquet with it’s aromas leaking from steaming pots and lifting from heavy plates. And it will awaken the starvation I’ve had within me and I will finally feel hungry again. And I’ll eat so purely out of lust that I won’t stop going through the motions even when I don’t feel them anymore. But she needs now, though she thinks that she wants. She doesn’t even know what it means to need and she’s not supposed to know, not yet and neither do I.

My useless hands rest on the steering wheel; so milquetoast. I’ve looked at them too often, studied them too much waiting for them to grow, to harden, to callous. They never did. Too much soaking thought, not enough action. If they were calloused already I could have worked with them in sturdy blistered confidence. I could have made things my own. I could have been the observed and not the observer. I could have wrapped this steering wheel in a stone-knuckle steady grip and held these tires to the road, for her. I could have been a man.

But I’m not a man.

I am not your father.

I am not your brother.

I’m just a boy and my hands are no bigger than yours. I remember my dad’s hands. He was a man. They were never unsure, never out of place, his hands were strong always in action. They controlled space like a sturdy milk glass. He was a milk glass.

Pound it on the table.

I am the milk. So easily chilled and too easily soured. When they fall, it’s not the glass that breaks. It’s not the glass that splatters and runs—-

My foot hammers onto the brake. The milk crashes right out of mind and onto the road molding midway into a figure in a in a white shirt waving and glowing in the beam of my headlights. Dark panted legs stand spread in the middle of the road, arms stretched; palms like reflectors into my headlights. The seat belt locks holding my chest as the tires scream to clutch the still road. Immediately, I look to the little girl; she is wide awake, maybe on the verge of smiling. In the rearview the road is vibrant red.

There is a pounding on the window, my foot is still on the brake leaning to hammer on the gas. The white dress shirt fills my window, sleeves rolled up, palms slapping the glass. The girl waves at the man with a smile on her face. I look to the man as he motions to roll down the window. The window rolls down with my foot still on the brake, the car still in drive.

“Thank God!,” the man says, his milky white shirt stilled and voice muffled behind the dropping window. As the window falls and lets the outside air in, the intense aroma of after shave and sweat intrudes. He steps back a bit from the window as it disappears into the door then returns and places his hands over the down window, his fingers grip hard and long down the interior side of the door and I am still pressing the button.

It hums.

“Thank God!” His voice is strained and out of breath as he leans almost into the car and dances awkwardly from leg to leg. He looks over to the girl and his face clenches just beneath the sweating surface.

“Hello!” She says leaning into her seat belt waving and smiling.

He does not acknowledge her, he leans back and looks to me and his breath has caught up with him. “Is that your daughter?” One of his gripping hands leaves the window and holds by his side; his entire body, but his eyes, have succumbed to something, the something that is the reason why the car is still in drive.

I pause.

I pause too long.

“Yes. Yes, she is.”

“Am not!” She says with a giggle.

He looks to the girl again with and his arm reaches into his pocket. There’s a heavy thud onto the concrete. He bends down to pick up hat he dropped and for a moment the window is clear, the fingers are gone, nothing but aftershave remains, but my foot doesn’t leave the brake. The girl yawns and smiles at me.

Maybe he just dropped his cellphone.

As the man rises from the road, the door clicks and swings open. “Can I have a word with you?”

It’s not a question and it’s not a cellphone that he dropped.

“Stay here.” I say to the little girl putting the car in park. The seat belt clicks and zips half heartedly up the door frame as I step out onto the road.

My yellow headlights shine on as the only light on the road. The two of us stand hardly illuminated off to the side of my car door. In the path of my headlights is his car, a late model, sharp and slippery vehicle celebrity, parked halfway onto the edge of the road. There’s a silhouette of of alluring shape and hair. It’s the smooth edges of a woman sitting patiently in the passenger seat; well postured and attractive. I think she’s putting on lipstick.

“Crazy world, right?” He asks of me, but isn’t really asking. Both of his hands are in his pockets.

“It is.”

“Man, I barely got out of the city,” He says and his voice is now lower almost grizzly. “I knew it was getting bad, but when the power went, man, it was up for grabs. That looting, shooting, .. those explosions. ..Jesus.” He shakes his head into the street all while dancing, one leg to the next.

Foreplay, and I know it.

“You see the skyline today?”

“Yeah, I saw it.” I look back to the woman in his car, she’s still applying something.

“Unreal.” A pause and he dances.

“Is that your wife?” I ask nodding towards the woman.

“Yeah, the old ball and chain,” he forces a laugh then pauses. “Is that your daughter?” He stares intently into me almost searching for something.

“Does it matter?” I ask. He has stopped dancing. He doesn’t reply to my question.

“Just leaving so much behind, man. My whole life.” He turns toward his car, “We could only fit so much in the car, ended being a bunch of her shit anyway.” He looks back to me and I can see his eyes grow small in the edge of the light. “They were almost to the top, where we live, we had to slip out emergency stairs, carrying everything in our arms.” He pauses. “Fishers of Men, or whoever the hell they are or have been.” He looks out past me, behind me into the dark, back to they city. “Fuck them. Fuck them!,” He shouts and then says in a diminished voice out into the quiet black horizon: “Everything was fine.”

His shirt is tucked in above a glossy black belt and his face looks like he shaved to today as it is equally glossy. His aftershave is now lost to the wide outside air and all I can smell is the metallic exhaust out of my hot running car mixing with the frigid tips of clawing fall air. A car passes, the headlights reflect off the black belt making it look as if a snake is slowly slithering around his waist, tightening its grip over his bloated stomach. The car’s whoosh fades as briefly taken leaves on the road fall back to the concrete scratching and crawling, bitterly teased in its wake.

His wife’s hands are now down. She must have long, red, sharp fingernails. She’s still sitting there as straight as a board looking ahead as if they’re driving, as if he’s back in the car driving her—tapping her long,red, sharp fingernails on tight leather trim.

Tapping.

I hear the leaves tapping, scratching, hissing, scraping along the road still trying to catch up to that long gone car. It’s the only thing I can hear as he dips his hand into his pocket and pulls out the gun that he had dropped, the one that I knew I had heard fall to the road. Pointing it at me across an arm and across a mind that was made up long ago he says, “I need your gas.”

He steps toward me, “We can’t sit here anymore. We need to move. I need your gas.”

The leaves have gone silent. There is no wind. The leaves have stopped crawling. I turn to look for them down the road as she taps, so gently on the leather inside that car. One of her fingers weighs more than the rest. It weighs more than most.

“Hey, buddy. Did you hear me?”

The leaves can’t be seen in this red, brake lit dark. They’ve stopped crawling and they’ve scurried to hide into the dark silently to wait for another car that might take them along. She’ still tapping.

“I think—I need my gas,” I say, the words just fall off turning back to the gun.

“Listen. Okay. Listen— Don’t fuck around and no one will get hurt here.” He takes another step. “Just be cool, just cool.” He moves the gun horizontally over the air in front of him like he’s spreading mayonnaise. “The gas stations in the city were jammed and looted, you know that.” He looks back to her, as she taps in that car, on the leather, the second tap from the left is the loudest. “We couldn’t even fill. All we could do was drive out. —-Please—-,” He’s desperate, not himself. “Just let us have your gas.”

The wife turns towards us, I can’t see her eyes but it feels like a cold, black light stare and then she turns back; straight up and down, straight ahead. Swan necked. Still tapping.

Faster.

Louder.

In my car the little girl rolls about the back seat, digging in pockets, probably discovering my CD collection. I think about the nearly full tank of gas I have, the one I filled a week ago at the overpriced Citgo off the highway. The one that was never really crowded or important to anyone including me until now.

TAPPING.

Ellipsis.

Her ellipsis from the leather trim and red paint. This is just a fleeting pause. No-thought-waiting. Moving-still-tapping.

dot. DOT! Dot. dot .

This is not for her.

Ellipsis, I know her.

She tears the corners off of every single page that she will not read. Paper dots pile. Paper dots pile as she waits as she taps as she suffocates slowly. She is afraid of the paper dots, of her own tapping. But she won’t stop tapping. She will never stop tapping.

I wish the leaves would rustle again.

“Okay,” I say putting my hands half way into the air, “Take it.”

A car zooms by going the wrong direction; fast; doesn’t even slow. I wonder if they saw the gun. The leaves have flown out of hiding again and they follow and fall in shallow whirls as the red tail lights disappear into the long dark. The scratching begins again.

“Don’t do anything dumb,” He says tucking the gun into his waist. “I’m just going to take the gas and get out of here, that’s it. No worries.”

He stops on his way to my gas tank. “You wouldn’t have a hose or something?”

“No.”

He’s out of his mind and she stopped tapping. The leaves are laughing. Scratchy laughter. I smile wryly. He pulls the gun from his waist and points it back at me.

“Don’t move.”

Walking backwards into the yellow light of my headlights, still pointing the gun, he makes his way to his car. Swinging the door open he has a conversation with his silhouetted wife. I can’t hear a word she says, she moves almost indiscernibly and keeps facing forward whispering at him from a starched pose as if her lips are balancing like tea saucers on the edge of her nose. The conversation ends as the man shouts “Okay!” and slams the door. Her immaculate form doesn’t ripple.

He walks back to me, gun at his side. He stops right at the tip of the driver’s side headlight where he is starkly illuminated in places, mainly his left side; his belt and rolled up white sleeve and half a well shaven face. The gun is on the dark side; twisting below his arm. The leaves have gone quiet again, but I’m still smiling just a bit.

“Well,” he says” “We forgot to pack the hose. But we do have sixteen pairs of shoes.” He shakes his head. I can see him, half in yellow light, half in shadow;his silhouetted wife in a single depth of field staring straight ahead.

I smile like thick gravy.

…my ellipsis.

I could stand here all night, in the middle of the road where the weight from above and the weight from below rest and press in perfect balance upon me, within me. I don’t want to move. I’m cuddling with inertia.

“You know what,” I suddenly say, “Take my car.” in a cast of loosely attached words.

There’s a long pause between us as I see his face contort like he’s sucking in spaghetti. Something hoots from the darkness along the road. Holding his lips tightly together above his inflated chest the man suddenly erupts in laughter. The yellow light dances about his convulsing body as his limbs and facial features rotate in and out of shadow and the gun seems to spin around his wrist.

“You’re serious?” He stops laughing and takes a step back from the headlight. “He’s serious,” he remarks to himself. “My God, this man is serious!.” He shouts back to the hooter, the owl, in the dark and then from the dark steps back into to the light.

“You want me to take your 1998 American made Ford Taurus P.O.S. with tits knows how many miles and grandma’s cloth interior,” Turning he bends low framing his car with his arms stretched, “For my brand new, cash-payed, still wet, probably more than a whole year’s worth of your salary, luxury, foreign sports machine,” He stands back up, “HA! You’re a a joker.” He points at me amused, with his gun. “A real wild card.”

Silence.

“And the girl.” I say smiling my lips like a dead curling leaf.

Silence.

Silence.

Silence.

WHAM!

A doors slams. The little girl pitter patters around the front of my car. She passes through the yellow stream headlights, her golden hair riding the wake of her prancing just like the leaves. The bright colors she wears of pink and yellow are even brighter against the headlights; blazoning out of the the dark. She passes the man with gun as he stands still his head on a swivel watching her with a bit of humanity in one glowing eye.

She pulls on my arm. “What are you doing,” She begs dancing a bit on her little legs, “I have to pee!”

Out of the top of my brow I see the man put his gun away into his back and tuck it into his belt. The dry smile I’ve had blows away.

“Well,” I say astounded, “What do you want me to do about it?”

“I don’t know.” She says straining her little face still hanging onto my arm. “I just need to pee!”

“Okay, then go.” I reply without an idea of what to say or do for her.

“Wh-he-he-re?” She sputters out in anguish; knuckling her knees.

“Out there,” I point to the dark side of the road. “Just walk out a bit and go.”

“But it’s too dark and it’ll be too scary.” She continues to twist my arm. I look up to the man in the light of my headlights and he nods his head and waves in understanding; the strangest nod of understanding I’ve ever seen.

“Okay,” I grab her little hand. “Come on.” I lead her to the dark field beside the car. We walk hand in hand off the road onto the fall night’s refrigerated grass. After a good twenty feet I stop, still holding her hand. “Okay, go ahead.” She releases my hand and walks ahead a bit into the darker field.

“Don’t look.” She says turning back.

“I won’t.” I turn back to the road. The man is back at his car. His arms are outstretched onto the hood as he leans amid the headlights looking like a giant white dove sailing into the windshield. The black shadow in the passenger seat is shouting from her bowing throat, but I can’ t hear her. The man bobs his head over and over. I hear little footsteps on the grass.

“I can’t pee without falling down.” She says.

I laugh out loud.

“It’s not funny.” She says sourly.

“What do you want me to do?” I ask still looking at the man at his the hood of his car. His head hangs below his shoulders, his arms still out stretched, his head no longer bobbing.

“Can you hold my hand?” I look down to her obscured face and without giving time for my reply she grabs my hand. “Don’t look.” She says again.

“I won’t.” She puts her full weight onto my arm, but it’s barley anything.

The grass whispers pee and soon her hand releases and I hear a zip.

“All done.” She slips her hand back into mine.

“Are you going to wash your hands?” I ask.

She looks up to me with concern, “But—.”

We walk.

The man leans on the back of his car waiting, his head hanging pensively. His wife is looking forward again. The girl and I walk hand and hand towards the road. Her footsteps seem to be four to one of mine. Her as her blonde hair gets brighter as we approach the headlights.

“What’s your name?” I ask.

“Angela.” She says.

“Angela. That’s a pret—-”

The man, off his perch swoops in a rush right at us. My grip on Angela’s hand grows tighter as he closes with tremendous wind. He halts right in front of us, right as we reach the edge of the road. A heated gust of after shave steams by as his eyes rattle loose in their sockets as his breath steams from his mouth.

His wife is putting is putting on lipstick again.

“Hit me!” He says with his chin hanging over the space between us.

“What?” I ask perplexed.

“Just hit me!” He leans low and put his chin further out on ledge. I can smell his humid aftershave again and I still can’t fathom what is happening, but out of my inaction comes a swinging right fist. With power from the hinge of our joined hands, Angela socks the man right on his dangling chin and he stumbles.

“Good!” He says falling dramatically to his knees. Then motioning his head to my car he says solemnly looking down to the road, “Get the hell out of here.”

I quickly open the door for Angela and let her in making sure she is buckled. Then I swing around the front of the car across the stream of headlights and see the woman, her silhouette is twisted for the first time as she follows my movement around the car like a cat perched on a tree limb in the dark.

I slam the door.

Park to drive.

Gas.

As we pass the black luxury automobile, in the rearview I see the man still on his knees shaking his head. In his car, his wife is rotating her black head. Her silhouette untwists as she watches our taillights disappear into the dark in front of her.

8:29pm

“Nice punch, Angela.” I say as we ride the headlights into the dark road ahead of us.

“He told us to hit him,” She says proudly with a tinge of contrition, but only a tinge. She rides high on the seat next to me, awake, looking out onto the road ahead catching passing trees with her eyes. Her feet don’t touch the floor mat.

“That he did,” I nod to her, “Well done.”

“Thanks.” She nods back.

“Do you have to pee?” I ask dryly.

“No!,” She spurts, “I just did, don’t you remember?” She giggles.

“Oh, yeah—Sorry I forgot.” I say grinning, knowing I’ll probably never forget.

8:40pm

My hands are cold.

I flick on the heat. It’s pleasant but it will get annoying and become that heat that makes me nauseous and claustrophobic, especially when the windows are closed.

I hate not being able to control the windows.

Soon when the heat begins to assert itself, I’ll crack open the window just a bit, then more, then maybe a little less, then maybe more, so they can appropriately mix.

There always needs to be a balance.

Especially now in these overlapping months. The heat cannot stay on for an entire trip without opening a window nor can a window be open without turning on the heat. Unfortunately, the cold screeches along side the window when going at such speeds making the entire situation difficult to manage, but it is doable and necessary.

Necessary as a zipper.

Zippers on coats need not be is all the way up for too long or you’d get that winter- steam feeling which is worse than being too hot in the summertime. You have to use the window like a zipper. There’s probably some psychology about real weather verses forced climate.

The red at the right of the heat dial glows like a coil from an electric stove.

I never liked the pace electric stoves heat at, they start too slowly and end up heating too officiously.

The heat from the dash is beginning to smell like claustrophobia in an aluminum can. I crack open the window and let the cold fall air in. The smell of soil stained leaves begins to take over the nauseating stench of heated cloth interior as cold wisps swirl and dip soothing the entire atmosphere of the car.

Gracefully I rise my nose to accept the dance and yield to the romance of the fall air and I—

“Close the window— I’m cold.” Angela wraps her arms around her body and wiggles.

“Okay.”

TUNK.

The window shuts. The heat resumes.

8:47pm

My stomach rumbles as I sweat; the sound is lost in the rumbling of the engine but I feel the basal plucking and sucking, a reminder; Angela must be starving.

“After that sock job, you gotta be starving,” I say through a line of a smile. “How about some food?”

“Okay!” She exclaims and she bounces on the seat and I feel good; reset.

“Alright, next stop: food.”

Food would be great. I would love to see a floating row of neon fast food ornaments hanging out over the road out in the distance, but that seems to be a fallen luxury, like everything else. There is no more convenience, or fast-food or frozen dinners. It’s all melting, and there’s only fire and things that will burn or cook, but I don’t know how to make fire.

Right now, there is only the necessity for necessity, and that’s something new to me. I don’t know what to do. I only know that there is hunger, and there will be hunger, but there will be nothing else. Nothing that I know how to do, only things that I know I will need; and she will need. When I’m tired, I need sleep and so I fall asleep, without even thinking about it and the times that I do, I’m stuck in bed rubbing sticks together and the sleep never comes. This will be a long night of searching, struggling and needing more than I’ve ever needed, and I hope I can do more than rub two sticks together, for my sake and hers.

Maybe there’s a farm somewhere of the edge of the road where there are apples growing in the dark, or corn. We could fill the trunk with apples and corn and be good for a long time. But it’s took dark outside and strange and unpredictable. I should just keep driving and maybe something will show itself and it will be good and needed and deserved because she’s hungry and this has been a terrible day.

‘Everything was fine.’

I can’t get past what that man said. His sweating face glowed in the yellow light looking out past me, staring deep at the black curtain the road slipped under only a hundred yards away. And with with boyish naiveté his eyes peaked around the dark furls and I saw him see the city as it used to be at the same time as it burned in the dark and he could not reconcile.

There was a shooting, or an explosion almost every day for the past year. I remember one. It happened about eight months ago. Another young man at another college campus. Nine lives, then his own. No manifesto. No explanation—-everything was fine.

I don’t know why.

There were so many like him, before him, after him.

Machine gun. Government building.

How many guns did he carry into that elementary school? Five year olds. Seven.

In the park, just tossed it. Exploded. Children. Mother.

Everything was fine.

Everything was fine.

Just at the mall.

Army private. Home base.

Private.

Public.

Theater.

School.

One fish two fish…

Then the lights went out.

Fishers of Men.

…red fish blue fish.

I should have known.

—-everything is fine.

TV said government said—isolated.

Carry on.

Not me. Not you. Not us.

Them.

We were family in the light. Loved each other enough to nod, to pick up the paper that slipped from the creases of our hands, to swallow the gum, to look down as the elevator door closed, to brake in a school zone, in a speed trap, to walk above you and whisper next to you, to rake the leaves so the drains don’t choke.

But the lights went out. The lights went out and the leaves are falling. They are falling, right now, in the dark everywhere one by one releasing to fall to be received. It’s supposed to be a soft reception made by the fingertips of the grass in its final alacrity before the withering winter months upon the open palm of a fallen brethren before them in such a delicate sound that each individual leaf will be heard only beneath its tree like the prayers spoken in the room of a wake, the prayers whispered in the mind of the mourners.

But I can hear them all falling from everywhere, in every direction. They crash crash like buckshot through a snaredrum, pummel like mercury raindrops on a plastic raincoat,reverberate like brass bells falling from clock towers. I can feel their sound upon the skin of my ears like a million tiny fingers tapping.

We loved each other enough.

She’s still tapping.

Some used to burn the leaves, giant piles of the leaves mixed from different trees and it would smell like a ceremony to me and drains would stay clean. In the morning, everything will be on fire in red and orange and yellow, piling higher, choking the drains, smothering the grass, inking the sky. The leaves will burn where they have fallen and the flames will not die out until the trees are sketches against the distant blank sky then the ground turns to brown then white.

What are the Fishers of Men?

Who turned the lights out? Everything was fine.

9:11pm

A quarter of a gas tank has dropped since that man and his wife. Angela lost her spark, falling into the seat now. We haven’t spoken in what feels like too long. I don’t know what to say to her. I don’t know how to talk to a child.

I stare out into the road, trying to lose myself again. A car comes on fast from the opposite direction. The first in a long time. Another one of those peculiar against the current passersby. It grows out of the horizon and shines headlights on bright. It flies by in a black ribbon whoosh that rattles the car. I think we made eye contact. I look in the rearview as the red lights fall off the dark horizon.

I know we made eye contact.

I remember the eye contact with the guy at the end of my hall. A week ago. One week exactly before the lights went out. A peculiar man, well kempt: those trendy black rim glasses, that throwback jeans look, bottoms cuffed. Despite his together outwardness, there was a mess of tangled chord within him. There were too many awkward times when we shared the same moment and space in the hall where I sensed a tension in the hallway as if the world tightened around him. Always holding off my glance until the last moment as if I was surprised to see him, hoping to allay that incredible tension he exuded. I would pass with a ‘hello’ and he with a begrudging nod and the hallway would expand again as we went our separate ways.

Always emerging from the dark, adjusting his eyes, there were screens in his apartment. I saw them once when his door got caught on his rug when he was bringing in another box, I think it was another screen. There were screens on every wall at every height. His black rimmed glasses were in exact proportion to every screen on his walls, that wide screen ratio. Those tremendous wide angles. Screens no longer square, no longer a box but landscapes, wide, capturing, hypnotic, his screens, they were beautiful, real, everywhere on every wall.

But there was something about that last time I saw him. There wasn’t that awkward, nod. There was a long stare from the end of the hallway, it connected as soon as I exited the elevator. He was already walking from his apartment in stride.The hallway felt larger rather than narrower and his eyes found mine immediately from doors and doors away. His thick rimmed glasses pinned me down as he strode forward hands in his pockets as if he were hiding giddy fingers and my walk was meek as the hallway felt stretched. When we came to that point of crossing paths, I saw his eyes encased behind the black rims: narrow and vectored as if he could only watch as I passed tiny and insignificant out his window. There may have been the edge of a smile at the very edge of his mouth.

I remember I shut the door to the hall, set my keys on the table, turned on the TV. Turned on the news, that wide screen. Everything was fine. Later that night I reached for my keys, a bag of garbage in my other hand, they were not there, they were on the floor. I bent over beneath the table, reaching for the keys—- I still didn’t know if there was a smile on his face.

I returned to the empty hall, garbage disposed of, I walked quickly, shut my door, held onto the keys and turned on the TV.

Live.

Red, bold, scrolling.

Shootings.

Evacuation.

Major cities.

Explosions.

The Fishers of Men.

The first time I saw that name. Like a press release.

What are The Fishers of Men?

I knew he was smiling. I felt like I stepped into his black frames and at that moment my screen became one of his.

9:22pm

In the rearview the film spool memory of my neighbor and of that car passing roll upon the road. As my eyes fall ahead, a tall dark signs looms pierced down from the night sky. It’s overly tall for the modest road it stands upon, and as my lights shine upon it’s metal, the rust all up the root reveals itself and the undersized lettering perched upon the top says, “Bin’s Full Stop: Anything You Need!”. There are cars like pennies glistening in the parking lot, more than expected, more than I’d like.

“Look’s like we’re in luck, Angela. I think this place is open.” I pop on the turn signal. “Looks crowded.”

“I don’t even care, I am soooo hungry.”

Me too.

The turn signal clicks and the orange lights up the side of the road, we are both too hungry to say another word. I slow and begin to turn. The smooth road turns into rumbling gravel. The rocks pop and scatter and I search for a place to park in the dark lot.

My headlights catch the building as I rumble down the lot. Bin’s is wood of deep red that reflects as if freshly painted. It has a tall second floor with two square windows set back from the first floor roof. There are carvings and decorations silhouetted and hanging all about the buildings exterior; folk art, Native American, maybe both. It looks like a rocking chair, and eerily, it seems to be rocking calmly back and forth.

Drive to park.

Engine off.

We sit silently in the dark, my headlights shine yellow out into a grassy expanse where there are trees and then field. There’s a commotion about the place that I can sense in the stillness of the car, I look for it. The trees, tall and wide with their branches nearly touching the ground are all over the place, rattling in the wind. They stand crooked and black in the field outside of the parking lot. Their fallen leaves rustle, some of them mixing in with the rocks of the parking lot. If it were day they would be orange and yellow and the building would be a welcoming bright red, and I would think of hayrides and apple cider,but its night and everything is like dark decaying jack-o-lantern. Angela unbuckles her seatbelt; it clicks and swings up to the door. My seatbelt remains locked in place.

“Do you think they have chocolate doughnuts?” She asks.

I turn and look past Angela, past her question about chocolate doughnuts that hangs there on her face, through her window, and I look at Bin’s blackish-redness, it rocks. Wood creaking sounds back and forth whether from the trees or the building, I can no longer tell.

I’m drawn to a vacuum silence and I turn, it pulls my eyes through my window. Off the edge of the parking lot a few trees in the distance there is a darker tree that barley catches the edge of my headlights. It’s the largest tree visible from the lot with two large branches cracked and hanging like dead arms dug into to the ground. The limbs are too large to be rattled by the wind. They hold powerful and muted.

The tree looms in its massive silence, and slowly it seems to pull the earth between us like a rug. Slow pull by slow pull I am transfixed and I am closer.

Pull.

Pull.

Pull.

I hear Angela, but the tree is getting closer—

They form out of the darkness as my eyes float right in the midst of all the silence and shadow. They are raked together. On their backs. Their stomachs. Dirt and blood on forearms, black blood and dirt in their hair lying on top of leaves lying on top of leaves. Leaves tattered and ground into the bodies, pasted with blood, caught in their sweaters and hair. The owners of the cars from different towns and different homes, piled, in between the giant limbs of this one tree.

On the trunk, hardly illuminated by my headlights something is drawn in white chalk, a symbol:

“What are you dooo-ing?” The rug pulls right from under me and my pupils shrink back into my eyeballs and I see my window again, it has a smudge on it. There was never a commotion here; just creaking and silence and the pop and scatter of the gravel.

“Seat belt, back on.” I look around in all directions for movement, there is nothing but leaves and limbs and the rocking.

“But what about the chocolate doughnut?,” she begs as I tear the engine on.

“I’ll find you something.”

Park, reverse, drive, gone. The rocks scatter and pop.

Both of my hands clamp to the wheel as my heart pounds. 78 mph. 85 mph. The rear view mirror shows nothing behind us except tailing road and cornfield shadows. In front of us there is nothing and I hope it stays that way. I don’t know what direction I’m going anymore. It’s not safe. Nowhere is safe.

“W-Why? What was wrong? Why did we leave?” Angela begs of me.

“There were too many…people. We’ll get something to eat. Something better than Bin’s”

“What’s Bin’s?”

“I don’t know,” I look over at her. Chin up, she has inquisitive innocence. “I really don’t know.”

9:51pm

The sign, Bin’s sign, does not leave my mind as if its taken the place of my spinal chord as I speed through the dark road straight and stiff. That dark vertical mass of that sign, that tree. The effect things like that can have on the environment around it. So profoundly heavy, so impactful they bend the horizontal. They have their own gravity like a bowling ball on a trampoline or the whirling water above the drain sucking down the glimmering soap bubbles. Stuff like that can pull you in and you stay there—you die there. We could have died there, like those others under the tree. They all rolled around and down into it in their soap bubble cars.

My neighbor, those wide black rims like grid lines, bending the tiles in the hallway, capturing everything. I felt sick.

I feel sick.

The drive is harder when it seems as though you are on the edge of falling back into something, but this road is flat.

This road is flat.

It’s farmland.

10:05pm

“Where are we going now?” She asks.

South.

10:19pm

Cold noodles; stuck together and molded into the bottom of the bowl. Warm sauce. Lunch. Seems like days ago.

The moon is beginning to cuddle itself into clouds high up in the sky. I’m tired. My stomach is still empty. Angela, I can only imagine.

“What was the last thing you ate?” I ask.

“I had Spagettios and a apple.”

“When?”

“For breakfast.”

Jesus.

10:31pm

The road is easier now, Bin’s is long gone The is farmland seems to be leading into something. The speed limits are decreasing; 55 to 45 to 35. I still go 60 as the houses multiply and begin shouldering each other. There are cars. They speed by, the headlights look worried.

There must be something near to eat. Something that could still be functioning, available. We are far enough away from the city that the winds of panic may not have swept through yet. We may be ahead of the storm. People may not know out here. The radio and TVs went out only a day ago and the city burned only today. They may not know. They might just think that the power is out and they have to buy their milk and eggs and bread then wait a day, a week and the power will come back on and the kids will hop back on the bus the next day.

The next day. Ha. They may not know that there is only today.

“What town are we in?” Angela asks, her forehead rolls against my window as she looks at the houses and modest buildings passing by. She’ll leave a smudge. I used to leave smudges on my parents windows. The sign of a well looked-out window. It makes me smile.

“I don’t know,” I reply, “I haven’t seen a sign. Have you?”

“Don’t think so.”

10:38pm

The houses have given way to commercial buildings so I know we’ve made are way into the heart of a town. Everything is familiar except it’s turned off. This town would have lit up my windshield like a television screen only a day ago. It would have been a seamless stretch of commercial blocks glowing with familiar fonts and trademarks of fast food and auto care in a flow so comforting I might have found myself humming a jingle like I did sometimes at home, on my couch. Instead, I bite my lip and rapidly bounce my eyes back and forth across the dark distance ahead like a lunatic feverishly watching a dead screen in a dark room.

The signs along the road are as dark as the black poles they sit upon, just like Bin’s, but unlike Bin’s, the parking lots are empty, moon swept tar pits with their great buildings stuck upon them, sinking slowly, quietly, to be great lost skeletons. And it’s an odd feeling because it’s all so familiar. On the right we pass the name of the sub shop down the road from my apartment, a place that stayed open well passed 3AM offering a trough of ingredients slapped between a foot of bread for the sloppy drunks stumbling hungry from the bars across the street; it’s here in this dark, sinking, it’s insides cold and bare as hollowed rib cage. And further on is the name of the pizza place right below my building, voted America’s favorite, I never liked it, tasted like frozen pizza, it’s here in this dark, sinking slowly.

“Do you even know where we are yet?” Asks Angela annoyed with me.

There’s the sign of the gas station I last filled up at, on the corner, in this dark, in this town. A car rolls through, probably patrolling for gas, illuminating the scene. The hoses are unhooked from their pumps and flung to the ground looking like there was a gun battle at a poker table leaving the rubbery arms of dead men clutching their pistols from their seats.

There is no comfort in this familiarity. There is no light.

“Yes. I know exactly where we are,” I reply.

“Then, where are we?” She snips.

I’m wearing a stranger’s sweater inside out.

“Where are even going?” She snips again.

“Everything’s fine.”

I take a right at the gas station following the car that had just illuminated the raided pumps. The road we were on didn’t seem like it was going to offer anything. If it had anything to offer there would have been more cars, more people. Where are the people? These people in this car ahead of us need, I know they need, they wouldn’t have gone to that gas station if they didn’t need, that’s why I’m following them. Maybe they’re locals. They have to be locals, I think me and Angela are the only ones from the city.

The car picks up its speed. My car accelerates as I stare into their glowing red tail lights. I didn’t see one super market on that road, not one hardware store or pharmacy. There was nothing. Nothing to live on, nothing to survive on.

58mph, rising.

HA! This is farm country. I just didn’t realize it, the night has been so dark. They all grow their own food and they have cattle and hogs to slaughter. They knit sweaters and the children chase chickens.

65mph.

The leaves are blasting from under their car, lighting up and cascading like fireworks in their red tail lights. It’s beautiful. They’re leading us to their farm where we can stay until all of this is over. Where we can creak up the old stairs and sleep beneath quilts until dawn and then wake up and go hunting in the morning mist. They can teach me how to shoot. I’ve never shot a gun. I’ve never hunted anything, or killed anything for that matter—I wonder if I could.

Jesus, roads are narrow.

I could. I would.

Yellow lights from the opposite direction. Roads are narrow.

Keep up.

I can’t kill anything.

“I’m scared.”

The firework leaves change suddenly, like a school of fish, they dart off all at once and in an instant, scattered, terrified.

Screaming.

The oncoming lights mold into my quiet space like an energy bubble. It permeates, combines and stretches with me in slow motion. Out of the silent lights metal creaks as I fall into the lights wrenching as one. Suddenly, the steering wheel yanks through my hands like a fishing line, I yank back.

CRACK!

The side view mirror is gone. As quick as we came together we pull off each other in a viscous separation that leaves everything vibrating to find its center. On the steering wheel my hands move on their own in quick vacillations like they are attached to settling springs.

Angela might be crying somewhere, far in the corner of her passenger seat.

My foot falls off the gas and the car rolls as I watch the brake lights of the car I’ve been following since the gas station slip away; an asteroid burning out, the red light trail shrinking into the distance.

Angela is crying.

The car hardly moves as my foot is neither on the gas nor the brake. I’ll say I’m sorry but there’s a pounding on the window.

I speed off. I won’t say anything to anyone. The words rattle briefly inside of me like glass jars behind a slammed refrigerator door.

10:59pm

Ahead there is an embankment, but but there is no river. On the nearest corner of the embankment where two long walls of grassy earth meet, an enormous sign tears into the silky purple sheen of the night sky. The letters glow of electricity and come off the sign dark and cloudy looking as if they are water colors lifting away into the black clouds in the sky. Behind the sign, the top most part of a great structure juts its right angles and straight lines out from the soft backdrop like a tractor pushing out from under a curtain. From my vantage point, I can’t see over the the grass walls but there is a steady stream of cars rounding into and out of the place where the great bulwark breaks and that is where I am heading.

The road we were on, the road where I lost a rearview mirror, it went on for a long time, narrow and full of flickering energy. I saw a doe bound across the headlights and then the road tore out of the trees and leaves to a sudden void that brought upon a sudden change in atmosphere. I popped my ears though there was no need. It felt like we were shot into space and all around us was nothingness and a feeling that there was either nothing right next to me or nothing forever and beyond myself. There was nothing until now, this glowing sign in the darkness.

The cars speeding in and out of this place look loose and unhinged like they’re all rattling off the tracks or tilting around a dead man’s curve. As we come up, what was hidden behind the walls begins to reveal itself as a giant warehouse of a building pushing up from the ground and stealing the sky in its expanse.

“My god.” I try to whisper.

“What, ‘my god’?” Angela asks as she sits up straight in her seat.

“I think the entire town is here.”

The parking lot is nearly full. From the sidewalk lining the wall of the building to the very back of the lot where the embankment and the sign stand, there are cars, idling cars with their headlights beaming pointing at the entrance of the store. They were panic-driven, panic-parked at sharp angles creating crooked spaces. The neat yellow lines of the lot lay beneath the messy, angular cross-stitching of the automobiles, ignored; a trend that was probably begun by one person. Horns blast ceaselessly at one another and engines rev and suddenly brake releasing loud screeches into the sky while doors slam shut and swing open often banging into the car next to them as people continue to run into and out of the building.

“Where are you going?,” Angela says looking back toward the mess of cars, “The entrance is back there.”

“We’re going to park as far away as possible.”

“That’s dumb, you know you can park wherever you want.”

We park under the glow of the sign far from the entrance, far from any car. In daylight the letters would be less bold in their corn-kernel-yellow against cornflower blue and the endless blue sky. The mess of break lights rumbling and glowing red in front of the entrance ahead looks like a drive in movie screen stuck on a single frame, vibrating that scene, that moment from The Shining when the blood spills out of the elevator.

**********************************************************

The front end of the store is softly lit by the light from the headlights coming through the large glass entry way, it reaches just passed the checkout lanes then gets cut off by thick dark from the interior of the store. Flood lights shine in scattered places harshly illuminating bare shelves and empty coolers throughout the darkness. In places there are lights that have fallen, or have been knocked over shining in vibrant pools of white tile, but past them there is nothing but blackness and people running out of it and then even people running into it. Everything is stripped to cold layer of dust on metal.

They know…and Nationalmart is sinking.

On the floor apples, tomatoes and other things that rolled along are smashed and clinging to the tiles while the body of an old man lays outstretched, clinging to nothing. I clutch Angela’s hand unable to move forward. Just at the edge of where the soft illumination from the headlights ends, beside one of the standing floodlights, there’s a man bent low to the ground, scraping up the flattened fruit with what looks like a little garden shovel. He drops the fruit into a plastic bag as he maneuvers rather remarkably within the rush of frantic people keeping his head down and sights taught, looking determined to scrape up every last bit of the trampled fruit. Within feet of him, a large woman on her back appears to be sucking into the floor. She is wearing tearing grey spandex that turn grayer as she struggles. Light, frizzy blonde hair cascades from the back of her head over her forehead, covering her eyes, pasting to her face in darker shades, dyed from the beads of sweat and saliva that continue to leak and spray from her as she spits out cries of anguish and twists of hair. Her full arms and bloated fingers reach and grasp blindly at legs and feet that continually step over her, but they find nothing.

I rack my focus into the darker background ahead, the woman’s thick fingers still grasp in the hazy foreground, a figure from out of the dark center of the store emerges, a man carrying an arm load of what looks to be cans against his chest up to almost his forehead. He is running towards the exit as fast as the cans will allow. His naked and narrow knees pump high off the floor as wayward cans dive off his chest, but he continues his run, undeterred leaving backs to bend behind him snatching up his lost cans.

Racking my focus into the darker background ahead, the woman’s thick fingers still grasping in the hazy foreground, I see, from out of the dark center of the store, a man carrying an arm load of what looks to be cans against his chest up to almost his forehead, running towards the exit as fast as the cans will allow. His naked and narrow knees pump high off the floor as wayward cans dive off his chest continually, but he continues his run, undeterred as backs bend behind him snatching up his lost cans— (she moans and her fingers grasp and her arms roll rhythmically like chubby theatrical waves.) He is blind to everything that lies ahead of him, his cans piled high enough that he doesn’t need to stop for the fallen, his cans piled high enough that he cannot see the floor. He’s right on top of her and he does not see her. Another can falls and another back bends behind him as his left knee rises confidently and her right arm reaches blindly, and his left foot is caught. It is caught in midair, so neatly, by her padded right palm. Her fingers delicately roll one by one over his shoe and stop, freezing the two of them, the moment, so perfectly that it looks as though we are merely present for the unveiling of a momentous statue, the singular moment that defines Nationalmart.

He falls. His right knees comes down on the woman’s protruding stomach and she lets out a gassy wretch as the cans jump from the mans chest, crash to the floor and roll in semicircles. All the backs bend around the newly fallen man and the interminably fallen woman, all except the man whose already been bending, scraping fruit off the floor with a little shovel, for the first time he is standing, satisfied, holding the bag to his beaming eyes and squeezing the contents to measure his harvest. And as the backs continue to jostle and rummage like waves, I watch one of the bending backs behind the smiling man with the bag full of fruit slowly rise from the floor and straighten. In a winding semi circle that seems to dip into the dark center of the store, a wooden bat crashes back into the light and through the back of the fruit scavenger’s head with an earthy thud. The shovel falls with a metallic ping upon the tile and the bag drops with a plop. The man’s cheek strikes the floor first as he joins the bending backs below still fumbling over cans. The bag of collected fruit is quickly snatched by the straightened man with the bat. Blood begins to stream out of the face of the formerly risen man, it streams out out onto the floor where it goes from black to red depending on the shadow play from the jittering mass behind the floodlight.

A woman screams.

Why?

The man with the bat has disappeared, probably back into that sinking, dark center of the store. I tighten my grip on Angela’s hand as she tightens hers and leading her passed the blood and the people writhing on the floor.

I feel a pull.

Need.

Need to find, to come away with something…anything. For her. I hope for her.

We walk in the the main artery of the store; the wide isle of insect movement where black legs run into and out from the middle darkness. The first isle stands to the right and a guide Angela into it. A single flood light at the opposite end shines crookedly making the isle appear narrow and slanted. Walking, I cant help but feel like I’m stumbling down the middle of railroad tracks as I stare at the crooked light. I can smell bread but its gone. The shelves are bare and leaning into the bottomless center of the store like dead trees along a cliff. There isn’t anything on the floor, it’s all rolled away. Everything is gone—

———No.

It’s deeper.

Deeper into that dark.

The light flickers and jars about as the isle begins to shutter and lose its light. Three shadows at the end of the isle have picked up the giant flood light and are moving it, taking it. The isle goes black. I can still smell the ghosts of bread.

“What are they doing with the lights?”

I hear Angela’s voice in the narrow darkness as the fidgeting flow goes on outside the isle like creatures rushing by a cave. I don’t reply. I continue to listen to the concerted flawless rush of panic, holding her hand, tilting my head ever so slightly, leaning.

When we get back to the main isle, I feel as if I am being drawn through it. Everything runs and disappears before me, sneakers and white socks fade into the black and come out different carrying things, bringing wind with them. A pair of dull black eyes from out of the darkness catches the light, its wind touching my face as it passes. Like moths.

I place Angela in front of me, my hands on her shoulders, shielding myself from the winds flying out of the darkness.

Keep going.

Get in there. There are things we will need in the dark.

…cans and meat and fruit and chips and soup and paper and plastic and…

` She’ll thank me, she’ll smile as she chews the meat from the can and I’ll have grown beautiful white wings with flinty eyes and we will hide behind them when danger comes. And it will come.

…and nuts and sodium and yellow and sweet and soft and ammonium and fructose…

We continue to crawl down the precious ground that seems to be sloping into the middle of the store. One step then the next, my hands still on her shoulders, no longer just a two legged creature.

A fallen floodlight lays collapsed on the white tile to my right. I stare into the haloed linoleum as we pass. I feel the light puncture my eyes, it transfixes me. When I can look no longer look at the light, I turn back to the black path ahead and a red artifact hangs in the dead darkness of the store.

Pulsating.

Shining.

Spinning.

Beautiful red, overlaying the black.

The darkness.

Warmth, overlaying the cold.

Dangling there.

I walk toward it, on our four legs. In suspension.

There is comfort in the dark. There is sustenance.

The dangling red rips open.The biggest moth I’ve ever seen emerges , a baseball bat and a bag of flattened fruit dangle from its pumping wings. It storms upon me and Angela. I feel its wind as it passes. I take one more step closer and so does Angela.

POP! POP! POP!

—Fire works?

—-gunfire?

The sounds ring out of the black center of the store. From where we were going. From where we needed to be.

Then like foam out of a dead mouth they rush upon us from the dark obscured by the fading red artifact still hanging in front of my eyes. Carrying things, dropping things, falling—screaming, interrupted, half moth, half man, their legs churn out of the black sludge as their inchoate wings struggle to take flight.

Wind sucks from behind me as the red artifact fades.

POP! POP!

“What’s happening?!” Angela screams.

With all my strength I pull her from the tile and throw her over my shoulder— I am two legs once more. Turning to the checkout lanes that are no longer lit, I churn my legs up the slope. I pull our bodies away from the inertia and feel as though we are hardly moving. Wind and legs and backs fly by into the shining glass doors ahead of us turning into silhouettes.

From the purple light of the sky outside and the soft yellow headlights shining through, the doors look serene in their distance. But the light is blacked out as clouds of people storm the doors. Speed never comes as I churn and I burn. Some of the people ahead trip and fall as I finally make it to the place where the man with little shovel and bag of fruit was and see that it is his body being tripped over. I hear his little shovel kicked across the floor, it smashes into the glass door while others fall over the newly fallen then more fall upon them, them more upon them.

Don’t step on anyone—alive or dead.

The exits jam as bodies pile up and writhe in shadow reaching with their crooked fingers and straining their necks into the moonlight and headlight beams that cast across their desperate eyes as the beaming headlights of cars flee the lot.

The people that have made it out flutter out into the open and into the yellow headlights. They don’t look back. It is so few of them making it out as more and more people pile into the stalled exits.

There is nowhere left to go.

POP! POP!

The gunfire is close, muffled just beyond the throng of panicked bodies behind us.

…picking off the ones on the edge.

I forgot Angela…

….on my shoulders.

How can I forget about someone I carry on my shoulders?

Bang!

The figure of a large man hurls something into the glass on the edge of the doors away from the pile up.

Bang!

Bang!

On his third thrust the glass looks like a spiderweb against the night sky—then it gives on the fourth and its pure velvet sky through the frame. New wind rushes upon us and it gives me strength.

I make for the new exit. Angela is up there, wrapping herself to me tight with her little hands on my head and little legs crossed at my chest, for some reason I feel faster and lighter. Arms stretch and hands reach at us from below; I leave them to the slurping void.

My shoes strike the concrete as I run through the panic of the parking lot, insatiably breathing in the fall air that whispers of burning wood, amplified in the expanding theater of the oncoming winter, heating, right now pairs of hands and a bubbling pot of relief as Angela bounces lightly upon my shoulders.

11:45pm

Most people are scared. Scared and gone. They are scared and leaving, or scared and locked inside. I think everyone got the idea, the gist of what was happening before everything went wholly black and the radios went silent. It’s up to them what they do with this dark right now, then the light tomorrow. But I think everyone who listened or watched, or just heard that name “Fishers of Men” once, abandoned tomorrow for tonight days ago. I know what I saw at Nationalmart. There is no choice when you are put up against suffocating pitch black in a silent room that breathes like cotton balls up your nose and rings like sirens, you can’t think of tomorrow because if you do, when that morning comes up over the road, you’ll be a deer and the sun and those who ride ahead of it, the headlights.

I don’t know where I am. I know we are still heading south. I’m taking that road, that same road, even further past Nationalmart and back into nothing. I can swallow the nothing, slurp it up like a dark chocolate milk shake through this bitter straw.

Something she said:

‘Did you know you make a sound like a chipmunk every time you sip on something through a straw? Adorable.’

Ha! Those eyes of hers.

Angela coughs.

She is still starving; terrified and starving. Once the chemical fear, the adrenaline, fades within her she’ll have nothing but hunger and that emptiness pain. I can get past it, I can go on a fast right now, a hunger strike, a cleanse until the acids have all been reset, the ph balanced, the white blood cells remade, repurposed, sun burning pale new skin while the dead cells fall and blow away from soft limbs to find acid baths.

Forget food.

Forget them.

Ahead, an intersection, a something after miles and miles of nothing. I slow almost to a stop to pass though it. The blank traffic lights hang on wires with sleepy sways from a gentle wind like giant fruit bats with their wings huddled close into their bodies. Angela has perked up, as if she thinks that we will be stopping soon to get a hot meal and an ice-cream cone. She has a child’s myopia. A sightline that goes as far as my headlights reach, and in that light she dances and plays and smiles right in the middle of this intersection stage below the swaying traffic lights on top of the the turn piles of road detritus. And I wish I could stay within that reach and dance with her, but I look out ahead beyond the headlights, beyond the intersection and the darkness continually buries me and I suffocate and struggle and dig and dig and I will keep digging.

11:57pm

We are somewhere again. Angela was right and she still is, she’s been perked in her seat since that intersection. Recognizable silhouettes of hanging rustic signage hang out side the windows as it seems we have come upon a small drag in another small town. There have been a few cars passing through, passing by, going at a reasonable pace, almost a comforting pace as if they are on their way to the nine thirty show or coming back from a soccer game. But the lots we pass are for the most part empty. The cars in them seem abandoned, or purposeless.

In the distance a steady stream of lights runs along the horizon; cars on the highway, the highway I abandoned when I picked up this little girl, and I don’t know why. They twinkle in a constant stream as I roll down the window and stop the car by a curb. I can hear them, fanning the space, the still air between, filling the silence with their purpose.

“Look!” Angela shouts. “A Mackenzie’s!”

Out ahead on the right, between the yellow gaze of my headlights and the twinkling lights on the highway looms a nightmare. It’s a vision that suddenly terrifies me and rattles what was left of comfort and hope from right off my bones. Perched high on a black pole is that nightmare like a giant black vulture with it’s wings partially out from its body making the black silhouette of an “M” against the night sky. I put the car back in drive. It grows as we approach it. It is the inescapable reality, the truth that didn’t hit amongst all the darkness and nothingness between the city and now. That didn’t hit when I saw the bodies piled under that tree. That didn’t even hit when that man who scooped up all that flattened fruit’s cheek struck the floor and began to bleed out into the floodlight lit tile at Nationalmart. It didn’t hit, not like this, not until right now. And with a sudden air bag smile, I think of the end of “Planet of the Apes”, as I pull up and stop right below the sign; and in the moonlight I can barely read, but I know what it says: “Billions and Billions Sold.”

My throat stretches to the limits of awe as I look up at it. I don’t know whether to laugh hysterically, weep uncontrollably or get out and collapse beneath the great sign and do a Heston shouting out the acidic crumbs of my empty stomach into the fall night my screams filling this this darkened diorama from the hanging bat traffic lights behind us to the highway lights ahead of us where they will be chopped up and lost to the flow.

“Yay!,” Angela squirts untarnished enthusiasm out of her little mouth. “I love this place!”

Pulling my throat back in, I look over to her as she smiles up at the darkened arches, I’ll save my Heston for another time. It doesn’t hit her like it hits me and for that maybe I’m just being irrational. Maybe it is what it is and nothing more. Maybe the lights are out and that’s it. They might come back tomorrow.

Ha.

In the black pavement of the parking lot I search for an inconspicuous place to park. I find one on the other side of a fenced in dumpster. There are no cars in the lot, expect my own. I shut off the engine. In the rearview mirror there are cold reflections, backwardness, that silent ringing, that suffocating feeling in a still car. There is caustic black cloud where there should be a soft golden light and the smell of rotting garbage when there should be the smell of hot grease. It’s something I thought I’d never see; America’s lighthouse, outhouse, its pantry, is a giant decaying Jack-o-lantern, crumpling under the heavy night sky. It sits with darkened windows like black glass eyes, broken here and there, and a hum to it emanating from a crooked and deranged smile of abandonment. The world is truly off center. I hang my head.

“Please, can I have chicken nuggets meal,” Angela says with such joy. “Oh, and a girl toy.”

My hanging head can’t help but yield to a smile as I rotate my gaze to her to find her legs dangling and scissoring back and forth off the seat; something I’ve seen before; a pleasant memory, but I can only nod my head.

Only a week ago at this same place but somewhere else I would have walked in there, felt the golden warmth of greasy machines and fryers, basked in the glow of the bright menu, ordered what I always order (two hamburgers, ketchup only, small fries and a large coke), pumped out three of those miniature chef hats worth of ketchup, grabbed a straw, plucked three napkins and returned to the car, this same car, where I ate my food listening to AM radio because I never could listen to music and eat; it just didn’t mix well for me.

“What are you waiting for?” She asks.

I look back up to the rearview mirror, “Nothing. Just thinking.”

“About what? Are you scared to go in there?”

Yes.

This may be our only option for the moment and for who knows how long. It’s abandoned and dark but I know it well. I’ll know where everything will be from the bathrooms to the fryer; there will be no surprises. There has to be food in there, whether dry and left about or in a big cooler. There will be something. And if the cooler has remained shut since the power outage, the perishable items, the chicken nuggets, may still be good. Or else it’ll be buns for dinner and buns for breakfast. If there are any buns to be found.

“No. I’m not scared,” I say pressing the release on my seatbelt still looking at the reflection. “I was just thinking about what kind of toy I want.” I say edging out a smile.

She laughs, “I think you are too old for a toy.”

“Do you really think so?”

“I don’t know,” She giggles into a, “yes”.

“You’re right.” I pull the door handle and the door cracks open. “I’m going in. You stay right here. Don’t get out of the car, okay?” She nods. “I’ll be back in a flash.”

I step out and the smell of garbage is almost sweet in the cool fall night. Shutting the door as soft as I can, I peer out over the car and take the sight in straight,it’s no longer an abstract reflection in my rearview mirror to contemplate and perhaps drive away from; it’s a big real moment. I can’t help but feel like a teenager in the park at 3am, way past curfew when nothing good is left to happen until the sun comes back up, and the only thing that is meant to happen is trouble, dark, fumbling trouble.

The black arches, the wings, they rustle and watch as the night luminescent sky glows that purple from behind as I make my way across the black pavement to the door with the silver handles that will say “Pull”.

I pull— locked. I look back to the car, to Angela, knowing that there are shattered windows to climb through, wondering why I didn’t go through one of those in the first place. Off to my left they wait like gaping holes not reflecting the moon light, but sucking in sound and black air. My footsteps crunch upon the pieces of glass that scattered on the outside. Again, I look back to Angela, and realize that I am on edge, that I haven’t wholly considered the potentialities of this attempt at food. The black hole window socket stares right back at me, the gaping result of a robbery, or looting, or maybe just the very same thing I am doing—survival?—More will come, more people looking to survive, or to loot, or even worse.

Maybe the ‘even worse’ has reached this town, wherever we are, or maybe its always been here, waiting, just like all those other “fishers” seemed to be always waiting. Maybe somebody’s waiting in here, the person who broke these windows, or maybe they’re watching. I turn back to Angela. The car is not far. It’s a quick sprint and then a turn of ready hanging keys and we’re gone. We’re gone but we have no food. She has no food. I turn back to the inhaling window frames and I breathe out into them, then back in. Everything is so still. I can hear the absence from within as I pull my leg out over and through the broken window frame and place it on the floor. The rubber sole of my shoe crunches glass into tile and it pops and churns and scrapes then settles as I am halfway in. Still a chance to go, just one extra movement to pull my leg back out and over then sprint. But I find a balance in both my body and the moment and my other half swings over and my other shoe finds the tile; all too loudly.

Silence.

There is only my breath as I wait to be walked in on; breath through my nostrils that are opened wide below my eyes that are opened wider.

Nothing.

No one but me, my rubber soles, the glass and the tile. I make a slow first step into the dining area, the glass crunches and I cringe walking more, stepping on hot coals would be quieter. Crunch by crunch I tiptoe until I clear the field of glass. I brush off the clinging shards from the bottom of my shoes, they fall onto the tile. I’m free. Through the window the night carries on outside just as I had left it. I carry on myself.

The restaurant smells of cooled grease; inactive, hardened. It isn’t curling loosely in warm and busy air, it’s tucked somewhere like an unlit candle. There’s a cold shine to everything as it sits empty, unlit, unused for the first time, probably ever and like the notes left on a chalkboard from a class the night before, the menu hangs completely out of context and in obsolescence. I would expect it to carry prices of a bygone era, but they’re the ones I recognize, an already dusty image from just days ago. The registers lay in pieces on the floor. The scattered black pieces of plastic and wiring tell me that the scattered glass on the tile was probably for the money.

Why money?

Tucked against the wall from the left edge of the front counter the small swinging drive thru windows are shut, tight. Painted with strokes of grease, the moonlight hardly filters through the windows making them look frozen and forgotten like the last two clouded cubes in an icetray. The stagnant machinery that surround the little windows sits equally as clouded, muted metal under the oily moonlight. The automatic soda fillers are dried and sticky from the unwashed syrups that have frozen in their drip like amber while straws, still and forever to be in their clean white wrapping, lay scattered all over.

There aren’t any people out there waiting in line to be fed, to guzzle a burger down their throat like storks and I fly off and never stop or slow down, join the flow of lights out their on the horizon. There’s no one in here to feed them. Never again. There’s just slow constant hunger at the bottom of my gut amidst the cold and broken machinery.

On the other side of the counter I see they got to the money. The registers are slammed onto the floor and there are coins everywhere, but no bills, not even a dollar.

What are they going to do with the money?

Deeper into the back of the restaurant , into the kitchen, it’s still familiar to me. I watched it in lines, saw the simplicity of it; the quick hands, the heat, the stacking, the wrapping, the sliding to the front, then into the bag. Such efficiency: small for the volume it handled, modest for the necessity it fulfilled. I’d bet every citizen in this town ate here at least once, but the majority ate here more than they can remember.

Further into the back there should be a cooler, every restaurant has a giant cooler with a large steel door and a latch. The food will be in there. It has to be. It’s the only place where those shipments of brown boxes that rolled off semis ended up before they hit the fryers. The food should be in there, in those boxes, nearly ready to eat; a thousand chicken nuggets for the taking.

The kitchen is windowless. Light glides in from the front and from the moon reflecting off stainless steel and plastic giving the dark a murky distortion that my eyes struggle with. I walk cautiously expecting a nudge from a sharp corner or a kick at the shins from a fallen box . Darkness lays its hundreds of pointing fingers upon me and I can’t help but wince and feel as though I’m about to fall or be tackled by a shadow.

My instinct tells me to go to the back and up to the right, that the cooler has to be there. I feel attached to nothing, out and loose into the dark, I look back towards the moonlit front to find my bearings and continue back and to the right.

The subtle moonlight reaches into a recess against the wall, a hallway. When I get there, I walk ahead slow reaching out into the clothy dark. My stretching fingers hit something before I expected they would and they crumple. I flatten my palm against the obstruction and feel its cool steel.

The cooler.

The massive door pulls open slow and tugs against the floor letting out a smell of warm plastic ice trays and soggy boxes. The air is cool and wet. It hits my nostrils like the wind carrying the raided shore at low tide. I open the door as wide as it will go hoping that the distant moonlight light will find some reflection. It rests in tiny little motes in plastic upon the floor as I feel staling air ebb and flow around my ankles, rocking the plastic, stirring the motes. I walk a in a few steps and the plastic drifts about my ankles. I stop as the cool air recedes leaving still washed up reflections.

With its thick and sound proof walls the cooler begins to amplify the staling smell into a resonating void that forces a feeling of claustrophobia upon me. Impending hopelessness squeezes. I cannot breathe. I cannot remain one second longer. I wade out through the thick dark. The plastic wrappings clinging to my ankles until I pass through the wide door into the hall where the air thins. I breathe in and I can see the moonlight through the front counter.

Plastic is wrapped to my leg, brighter now outside the cooler it catches more of the moon light looking like a clinging jellyfish. I pick it off, holding it in my hand I stare into it’s clouded glimmer. I lean back into the dark, the cooler, and crumple the plastic into my palm and toss it to the floor watching it grow slowly back to form in the moonlight. One of the last trailing gusts of dead refrigeration passes through me, my eyes flicker to a distant gaze that looks upon Angela, sitting there waiting in my passenger seat, dangling her legs.

I’m back into the cooler. Empty plastic is washed up like silvery dead fish onto a humid night’s breathless shore. Again I smell the boxes and the staling refrigeration feeling easy waves about me, inside of me. Waves that I could fall into letting them carry me away out of the this cooler, out of this kitchen, out of this restaurant. And I would not fight them—I would not fight. I would not be suffocated and I would not be angry. I would lay atop them and be awash to the impending—-the detritus that I am, the drifter I’ve been.

…dangling her legs—-

Tear it all down

I grasp a shelf.

I pull.

It doesn’t want to fall.

I twist and pull and my muscles tear out of my skin and my legs tighten and lock at the edge of pain until the shelf comes loose from the wall and crashes onto the empty plastic on the floor. In a breathless steam I head into the waves that churn inside of me, against me, and I grasp and pull another shelf from the opposite the wall until it crashes onto the other fallen shelf and they lay in the dark.

Sucking air I heave, inhaling in the dying fridge air as darkness vibrates around me and off my steaming head and wet skin. My hands and arms hang feeling three times the size they were before as my heart beats loud into my head hard above the subdued, dark waves.

My foot strikes dully onto a box as I begin to walk out. I bring the box out into the light. A solid stream of tape reflects all the way across, unbroken, it speaks of the secure weight the box holds, my heart flutters. Further into the kitchen, into the light, I tilt the box to catch just enough of the moon light. It says: “Chicken Nuggets,” and I breath heavily still, and the box feels like nothing in my swollen hands.

CRUNCH

Glass on tile.

CRUNCH

Another crunch. I’ve stopped breathing and suddenly I feel the weight of the box. It can’t be Angela. I told her to wait in the car. More crunching. Walking, the sound I made when I was just climbed in through the broken window.

The breathing comes back, the only soundtrack to my panic. There has to be a way out; an emergency exit. Maybe I can climb through the drive thru window. I walk on tip toe then there is laughter. It’s not Angela and they’re coming.

“Whoah, crap man