Apex Book Company

SHORT FICTION: These Days

April is pure rot. Most days I don’t drag myself out of bed, and when I do? Posters with body parts are wheat-pasted up and down our block. Radio stations are mid-theory about why women get the wild, men get the crack, and kids get the numb, when the signal just bleeds out into howls. No one works at the grocery store anymore, and you can take what you want, but all that is left is unlabeled canned goods.

Our band only leaves the house as a pack. We carry tin foil balls, tasers, and baseball bats. No one we see is normal. Only a couple of people show up to our gigs, and they throw bricks and bottles at us.

At the end of April we get evicted for the fourth time in three months. Our landlord, who is at least half with it, lets us know by nailing demolition signs to our front door. At least he doesn’t blow it up while we’re inside.

We stir-fry the last of our veggies, eat them with undercooked rice, and pour gasoline over the living-room floor. We torch it and leave.

Outside on the concrete we watch the house turn from wood into fire. Flame fingers dance up and down the walls of the living room. The windows crack and shatter. We take a step back.

“Where do we go now? Any ideas, Tom?” Zaki One asks.

“Nada,” I say.

“At least we’ve got lots of options,” Miranda says. She knuckle-rubs the shadows under her eyes. “At least there’s nothing to be scared of.”

We watch fire climb up the stairs of the house.

“Let’s get out of here.”

“Think it will be different anywhere else?” Zaki Two asks.

“It has to be. There has to be somewhere….” I pull down my sleeves and check to make sure they hide my arm-cuts–little ones to let out some of my pain. I never look at Zaki and Miranda too closely. I don’t know what they have been doing to get through April. I don’t want to know.

We have to hitch out of our neighborhood because the roads have been blocked off for days. National guardsmen with flat faces and big guns have locked it down. They pretend they don’t have the crack but shoot people all the time for no reason.

A big rig stops for us a couple miles out from the bridge. If you can drive and are rich enough to own a car, they’ll let you out. We walk toward the trucker’s cab, but he opens up the empty cargo container in back instead.

His shirt has an old patch that reads, Bob.

“What do you call a man with no arms and no legs who swims in the ocean?” I ask, as I step into the container. The smell of rotten vegetables, trash, and rough-cut steel sours my mouth.

Bob throws the door shut and locks us in.

That’s how we get out of the south side three hours before the riots start and five hours before the carpet-bombing. We learn about it from Zaki’s radio, tuned to a station that has news some of the time.

We sit in the pitch black and eat our cans of food one by one, guessing what they are from the taste: peeled mandarin oranges, refried beans, and metallic tuna, maybe. After that we play music.

We were lucky to get out before the riots.

Rewind to five years ago and press play. Imagine any given day at any boring high school. I sat out behind the portables, smoking stale cigarettes stolen from my dad. Three kids walked toward me. I knew everyone at school, but I’d never seen them before. There was one cute girl and two smaller twins. A senior and two freshmen? The girl stopped a couple feet away from me and looked me up and down.

“We’ve been searching for you,” she said. “I’m Miranda. This is Zaki. Zaki’s twins, but just one, get it?”

Zaki One spat. Zaki Two glared at me.

I didn’t get it. “Do you even go here? I’m Tom.”

Miranda didn’t answer. She started singing instead. She wailed.

The sound hit me like water flooding into the desert.

She sang and I believed.

Her voice drowned out my fogginess. I could breathe even though I hadn’t noticed I’d been holding my breath. Zaki One started playing his flute. Zaki Two played the harp. Animals and desert flowers woke up from a hot, dry summer. Frogs slipped into the water and started swimming.

When they stopped, Zaki One said, “That’s your song. We wrote it for you because we need a guitar player.”

“I’m not musical,” I said with regret. Piggybacked on my words was shock that I felt regret. That I felt anything.

“Come on.” Miranda led us to the boarded up band room. We broke in. Teachers never left their classrooms, so it was easy. Miranda let me choose and the second I saw my dreadnought fender sitting all lonesome in a dusty corner, there was no other.

“Things are going to get a lot worse soon. We need a tight band. You with us?” Miranda asked.

“Sure. Why not?”

I started eating lunch with them, just like real friends.

I started practicing my guitar all the time. When I wasn’t playing, I thought of chords and moved my fingers. I hummed constantly. I got blood blisters, then sores, and then half-inch calluses on my fingertips. It took me two months, and then I could play any sound I could think of.

“We’ll need to start playing a lot of gigs. We’ll need a band name,” Miranda said.

“Well there are four–” Zaki glared at me, “–I mean three of us.”

“I like dragons,” Zaki One said. “They’re fierce.”

“I like carnies,” Zaki Two said.

“Three Ring Dragon,” Miranda said.

So that’s who we are.

The cargo container grows hot and bounces us all over. Roads suck these days, and even if Bob is just headed to the north end, it takes us hours to get there. Days, maybe. Who knows? Everything lasts longer in the dark.

“There’s an enclave I’ve heard of. Full of kids. They have a resistance ‘zine,” Zaki One says.

“Have you seen it?” Miranda asks.

“No.”

Of course he hasn’t. I scratch a scab running along my shoulder blade. I dig my nails into it. There’s always that place people talk about–Eugene, Doswallops, Glacier–where it’s better. Where the food is safe and no one’s sick with any of the diseases. Yeah, right.

“We’ll find it,” Miranda says.

Even in the darkness, I can’t conjure up belief in a safe place. I don’t ask if Miranda and Zaki believe. I need them to have more faith than me.

The truck stops and Bob opens up the rig. He holds an axe in one hand. Rope lies draped over his shoulder.

“There’s no more cargo. I have to sell you,” he says. His voice is flat. His eyes are angry. He has the crack–maybe he isn’t that far gone yet, but he is traveling on that road.

He raises his axe and steps up onto the rig. The axe catches the sun and reflects light into the cargo container. It blinds us for a moment.

Then the Three Ring Dragon smile at each other.

Did Bob think we couldn’t see him coming from a hundred miles off? These days you always have to have a plan.

Zaki plucks his harp and plays his flute. Miranda lets sound grow in her throat. I drop notes around everything. I strum an E minor and a B flat.

Bob unfurls lengths of rope.

As we start to play Bob’s song, I hope we’d at least some of it right.

Where does music come from? Nowhere. It’s something out of nothing. All we know about Bob is he looks old, tired, and like he used to have fun, but that was twenty-thousand miles and two decades gone.

So we make shit up. We play like there isn’t property, or crack men, or hard times. Our song says there is just a nice guy named Bob having a hard time.

Miranda stretches upward like a cat and dances in front of his axe. She throws her body into her voice. She sings higher than an angel, lower than Tom Waits.

I play faster, strumming the strings and pressing the wood. Just for that moment, just for then, I don’t have to feel scared and rotten. I feel gigantic.

Bob’s song wanes to a trickle of notes. He tilts from side to side before Miranda and then falls onto the metal floor. He curls up baby-style.

We jump out of the rig and down onto a root-buckled street. Zaki One takes Bob’s axe; Zaki Two takes his rope. The air smells different at this end of town. Not better: less slime mold and paint fumes, more rotting meat and burning tires.

Miranda turns around in a slow circle. “That way.” She points. “Due north. That’s where we’ll find the enclave.”

I want someone to know where we’re going, so I don’t question her as we start walking.

“It’s the music that keeps us safe. We should have turned a long time ago,” Miranda says.

“Or because we have each other,” Zaki One says. “We have love.”

“It’s because we’re still virgins and the magic unicorn light protects us,” I say.

“I’m not a virgin.” Zaki smiles at each other.

“It’s because we’re too wimpy to let go,” I say. I want them to stop talking. It hurts to think about it.

“No. It hurts more to notice,” Zaki Two says. “We’re brave warriors.”

Miranda nods and starts to say something else, but I interrupt her. I don’t like thinking about being whole and trapped in the brokenness. It makes me itchy. “I’m working on a new song,” I lie. Lying is the best way to start a song.

I make up something and teach them the chords. I mean to make it light and fun, but by the time we figure out the chorus, it’s goth times ten.

“These days the gray bleeds into me like water. These days of praise and promise fall away.”

Miranda walks beside me. I try not to notice she wears bruises underneath the collar of her shirt like a necklace. She rubs the bruises as we walk.

Rats run across the road from one overgrown lawn to another. The grass could be hiding things, I think, a moment before—

“Lock them in the basement!”

“Kill the music! Kill them! Hurt!”

Women run at us. They pour out of the houses. They leap up from the grass, carrying sewing needles and kitchen knives. They run on skinny legs encased in ragged pantyhose.

“Kill them! Bad!”

“The basement! The basement!”

Each of Zaki throws tin foil balls up into the air. Wilds love foil. Some women stop and watch the balls ascend and then fall down. When the balls hit the ground they fight for them. Some wilds keep coming though.

Miranda starts running. We follow her.

“Fuck this. Fuck this,” Miranda says with every stride. I look back and a woman is right behind me. I smell her–unwashed and musky. Her mouth is open and her face is blank with an emptiness I could fall into, should fall into. It could be over. What’s wrong with over?

“Tom!” Miranda yells.

I look forward and see the road coming to an end. A dead end sign looms to my right, and I laugh because isn’t that the truth? I jump over the thigh-high metal median and then see Zaki and Miranda floating out in front of me. They fall into nothing. We’ve run off a cliff and it takes us a while to land. I like the way down but then—

Crunch.

Ow.

Everything pops with pain.

The women on the cliff top above us howl. They could climb down, but this looks to be the edge of their territory.

“Fuck wilds!” I yell up at them.

“The basement,” one yells. “The basement!”

I spit blood on the ground and ask, “Are you guys okay?”

“Fine,” Miranda says.

“Wonderful,” Zaki One says.

“I heard a snap–a bone break. It wasn’t mine,” I say.

Miranda looks distant.

“Wasn’t me,” the Zakis say.

“A twig?” Miranda says.

“No. Bone.”

“A branch?”

“Don’t be a masochist. We can go to the library and check out books on bones. I can make you a cast or something.”

“Tom,” Miranda says.

“What?”

“Pain helps. Let it help,” she says. “Don’t worry.”

“Fine. Whatever. But if I see bone I’m going to be pissed.”

“Uh….” Zaki Two grins.

“Oh, ha ha ha,” I say, and then laugh for real.

Everyone loves a boner joke. At least we do. It feels good to laugh and not think about pain and breaking apart. When we start walking, Miranda hunches over and both of Zaki limps.

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