Closet
Everyone downstairs. Now.
He saw the streaks coming across the sky. Wide as pencil lead at arm’s length, orange like sunset. Very high up.
The young boy was stumbling down the stairs in front of him. There were 16 stairs in the house. He used to count them. Careful not to spill his coffee in the morning. The boy trips. He pushes him down the stairs. Moving, almost angry.
“Faster. GO!”
The older boy and the woman behind him. All are stumbling. A small, panicked troupe. There is screaming from her.
“What the fuck!”
“Don’t push him!”
She says, “Oh God,” and it doesn’t fit her voice.
Doesn’t fit anyone.
He recognized the contrails from an old film. A doomsday thing he watched on TV between making lunches at 6:30 a.m. and getting a raise last Friday. That narrow space in between. When the world ends, he’ll never go to work again. A pat on the back for the Peterson account. Quiet promotion talk around the office.
In the film, Strategic Air Command had arranged a contest between US ballistic missile batteries. Testing for accuracy. Engineers were called in. Launched some duds at a doomed sandy spot in the Pacific and filmed the reentry. Streaks coming down like a summer firework punk. Like the stick of sandalwood he burned in his office. Reminder of old times. Holes in his jeans on the Fourth of July. Wrangler jeans; Levi’s were too expensive. The film showed the bright, horrible bullets lighting the midnight clouds. Glowing reentry heat. In the sand, the palm trees sway and reach over the white sand eternal. Their souls born in some old dream. Man was never made to build or witness that kind of speed. No way to section it. Comprehend it.
Now he saw them moving at a clip, nauseous to the soul. Four of them. Screaming down over the city. The metropolitan area. Their mortgage was manageable, and the HOA was reasonable. Good schools. They moved here for the boys.
Four of them coming down fast. They had launched multiple devices. Half a world away. Behind the ever-receding horizon. Terrible columns of fire rising in the dark like campfire marshmallow burned just so. Boost phase. Other side of the world. Ignition. They know what they’re doing. Those clever men behind the buttons and computers and keys. Men with credential. Men wearing insignia. Educated men who in their hearts can only measure everything. Men bred to follow orders.
Halfway down the stairs, he heard the older boy crying. He hadn’t heard him cry for years. He didn’t cry when he went off his skateboard last summer. A curb in the cul-de-sac. He walked home stunned and drunk looking, like he’d been punched. The arm bent at an angle like a crayon monster drawing. Jungle green. Sunflower yellow. Magnet to the fridge. He opened the front door with his good hand.
“MOM?”
He was thinking he would pull the brown leatherette cushions off the couch once they were down the stairs. Cover everyone up. It was the most interior closet. The little one had started calling it the going low closet because of how it sloped down under the stairs. Alice in Wonderland doorway at the end. If only a door could be there now. It could be there. Let it be there.
Orange sunset. Red sky at night.
Four little fingers.
Everyone look right here.
Smile.
The older boy crying.
The bad, fast things will be here any moment.
Any second now.
Just last week,
“How tall are you now?”
Pencil line on the wall.
“Look how tall.”
“So proud of you, baby.”
As a child, he had nightmares about this. Other things too. But he had nightmares. Now they were really coming. He had seen them. Moving very high. Impossible and fast across the sky at ugly angles that were tricky, the way a genie moves shadows around to confuse you. Like chasing summer butterflies around the backyard clothesline. How the sheets used to pop dry, white in the sun. Even sometimes, hummingbirds came. Now what could be four stars falling. Forever. Star light, star bright. Wish I may…
Even on their way now, like a first-day kindergarten photo. Tiny fingers extended. Thumb across his tiny palm. Showing four.
“Look, mommy, this many.”
Right at the camera.
Big boy.
The sirens began somewhere now in the middle distance. The ones for tornadoes.
Bottom of the stairs, he grabs the cushions off the couch and piles them in. Throws open the closet door. Fast, sober, moving. Ripping and throwing everything out of the closet into the living room. Everything spilled on the tile she cleaned only yesterday. Screaming faces. Mouths open, but he no longer hears them. Shoving the little one, then his wife in, then the older boy struggles. He doesn’t want to go into the closet. He doesn’t understand what’s happening. He’s noble. He’s always been proud. Born high as a king.
He grabs the boy’s neck, squeezes too hard pushing him, bent, into the closet headfirst, his hair hanging down. Metallic blond, the color of butterfly wings, growing it all summer. Grabs him too hard with his dry, strong hands. He throws the cushions in blind. They land, slippery from his sweat.
Cushions too thin to do any good.
As if anything could do any good.
Never be there good again.
Dark in the closet, the mixed smell of breath. Sweat T-shirt on someone.
Who?
Sobbing, but who?
Everyone.
Him.
What’s happening? They’re crying, breathless. He tries to explain, “Like the orange bottle rockets on July 4th, only coming this way.” July 4th, when he got too drunk and burned his hands holding the sticks over his head. Melted his BIC lighter. The stubborn beer-damp fuses. That ballistic whistle. Rocket-fire-lit eyes. Sparks in the night and joy. The sharp report up high among the stars. Laughter, tears. Abundance of joy weeps. Excess of sorrow laughs.
A thin bar of late afternoon light under the door comes like swept-in dust.
“I’m sorry, baby. I’m so sorry, baby,” is all. He’s talking to the little one he pushed down the stairs. The end of his short life, right now, anonymous in the dark. Apologizing to all of them for everything. To her especially.
“I’m sorry, baby.”
He reaches for the little one in the dark but finds just coats, arms, legs, sweat, tennis racquet, roller skate, bike helmet, crying, crying, moving, rolling, reaching, confused.
Please help.
Anyone.
Finally, even God.
Please help.
Now, under the door, three flashes, quickly, in the closet dark. Bright and mean under the door like a hunting animal. Hiding in his high school girlfriend’s closet. So quiet. They can’t see you with your eyes closed.
The last flash must have been two flashes. A nearly imperceptible strobe. A red-eye reduction flash. Happy birthday.
Everybody smile.
Ok, just one more.
Will there be cameras again?
Will the ones who come after be afraid?
Will there ever be ones again?
Then no sound.
The light being impossibly faster than the sound.
Then four. Finally, four cruel, low thumps.
This moment, just now. He could feel a small hand in his.
Down his body, a tangle of legs.
He smells deodorant. The older boy didn’t want to smell bad for his girlfriend…
Even sometimes, hummingbirds came.
Moments stitched together like the Indian blanket on an old chair in the garage. Smoking cigarettes in the morning. Hot, cheap coffee. Quiet mornings like now in his heart.
Lost, now, the sound of gulf surf.
Gone the summer cricket trees.
The frustration of fading radio stations.
The cool New Mexico mountains.
All the forests will burn.
There is spoiling cottage cheese in the fridge.
The warm, kind, immortal sun,
Will go out like a candle.
Just like a whisper.
He remembered the sound of the boy’s umbilical cord being cut. Like scissors through a package of frozen bacon. The baby didn’t cry. Only came the sound of a narrow bell-shaped moment forever dividing this from that. Present flesh from flesh past.
The baby did not cry, only looked everywhere with his new, bright brown eyes.
He felt he would faint.
The nurses smiled and told him, “Sit down.”
There was rain out the window that day. The air conditioners steamed on the roof one floor below. Steaming great machines working like powerful blind slaves. In the summer morning fog, they did not sing, but he wished they had. Then, and even now.
He held the little one’s hand in his.
For just a moment longer,
He heard the sirens cry.
• • •
Jon Fotch is the pen name of Jason Boling whose work has appeared in Avatar Review, Carbon Culture Review, Euphony Journal, Menda City Review, Mudlark, Whistling Shade, Green Hills Literary Lantern and is forthcoming in Litbreak Magazine. He lives in Austin TX is a member of the Writers’ League of Texas and dreams of a world where cowards are shamed, art is rewarded, and jobs are optional.