Daniel Cline
VIGNETTE ONE
They kept their god in a large basement supply closet. Half a dozen crucifixes hung from the walls alongside icons and banners. A prayer shawl shared space with an autographed poster. Row of pictures rested on shelves – some framed in chipped glass and others unframed and curling. Books and rings were held upon the wall by nails. There was no judgment here – whatever the residents loved or missed or believed was here. This was their repository, their sanctum, their altar. But these relics were not mine my friends’ or my kin’s. So I left after a quick prayer.
As it was not yet dark the settlement’s garage was still open. Beyond the pots, bottles, blankets, guns and other handy amenities were the luxuries. These little trinkets were either brought from long ago homes or salvaged from ruins. A boy’s card collection, never to be complete, a woman’s jewelry in a small glass box, a pair of skis and a foam-framed television – these were the things that interested me. But with nothing left but my clothes, matches, cans, rifle, and hatchet – I could not barter. Well I could have parted with some canned peaches but it would have been pointless. Clinberg was a cooperative settlement where food was shared between all and so, it was worthless. A pale narrow boy in corduroy and sackcloth who claimed to be an Ardrew Methars was insistent in his attempts to secure my shoes. “They wouldn’t even fit you,” I exclaimed looking at the pretty white tennis shoes.
“Well they would be worth waiting for,” he replied, eyes locked on their laces. Unfortunately for the boy I had no interest in his life preservers or fine china.
Sitting on a wooden crate beside my self-appointed guide Roland I saw something scurry from out the edge of the light.
The thick brown streak of fur snaked about my feet. “Isn’t it funny Roland,” I began, “So long we thought of rat’s as a pest living off the leavings of the civilized but now we too must join them, as hairless cannibals.” And after a pause, “And we are losing.”
A thin white arm flew in front of him: little Ardrew on one side, kitchen knife on the other. The boy looked in at him with his little blue eyes, “Don’t just look at them – catch them. We all need to eat you know.” And off he went holding his prize high, leaving a thin trail of blood in his wake.
VIGNETTE TWO
The broad field was stacked with bodies its furrow red and fetid. Beneath the layers of legs and arms and torsos and heads some yet stirred. There would be no planting here for a long time. About five feet away from the edge of the great pile was the owner of the fields, the orchard to the north and the sheds just to the east. His name was Jones.
Short and heavyset with a slight paunch and stubby legs, Jones was no athlete. In fact, he had been turned down by the army when he volunteered because of his breathing problem. His thin lips were chapped all year and curled into a caustic smirk, always seeming to find amusement in some unheard sarcastic joke. All his features seemed to fold into the scars and wrinkles in his sundrenched skin, almost concealing his eyes. Although his sight had been good for a mile in his younger years, nowadays he needed to wear a thin set of glasses with big circular lenses to see more than five feet in front of him.
He wore a plastic yellow bloodstained smock on top of his overalls and flannel and on each of his hands were thick cowhide gloves. Rusted, ominous and heavy in his left hand was a gas can and in his right, a narrow light rifle with a splintered stock. Planted, blade-first, in the ground behind him was an axe.
Jones let his gaze drift off into the distance beyond the tree line. He let his eyes focus on the dusking of the night sky. It was not yet dark out in fact the air was queerly bright for the hour as though a pocket of sunlight had been caught in the morning and, for some inexplicable reason, chosen to burst itself open now. Sprinkling kerosene on the pile, Jones envisioned the searing light such a blaze would produce. The logs and other wooden detritus beneath them seemed to groan. But maybe it was just one that was still alive. He laughed at the word as he thought it. He had built pyres before for kin but never for so many. It seemed somewhat wrong to burn them all like this, wrong like an unmarked mass grave. But he did not have the time, the wood or the energy to make each one a pyre.
The flames ascended to match the matchsticks descent. After a few hours of management it began to burn smoothly, evenly, happily. Pausing, he took one look at the faces between flickers – the face of a barber and of a son and of a sister and of a friend and of a rival and of a mother and of a grocer. He suddenly felt ill and turned aside to keep from retching. Turning around the picked up the axe and walked east.
The clean autumn air, spiced with the aroma of charred flesh, was murky with tufts of smoke. It added a palpable quality to the otherwise imperceptible ether and for this Jones resented it.