How the Days of Love and Diphtheria Read online

  How these hallways shimmered with the burst of a thousand, thousand sunrises. How we never saw a more beautiful light. How there was no line between the cities of our birth and the dust and embers thereafter.

  Always the husband now, returned, and how Henry leaned on the boy and pressed against the boy, smelling of leather and dust. How Henry smoked cigarettes in a chair, butts smoldering through the shag carpet. Always the husband now and how his eyes were all but devoured by beetles and worms and the conditions of time. Always the husband and how he moved his mouth to speak and how only a humming sounded. This husband now and how his lips become sodden and glistening at his daughter sunbathing on the lawn. How he lay alongside his daughter and how she had grown these years, how he fondled her hair, kissed at her neck. How the boy watched, his face red and numb. This husband now and how he smashed all the portraits hanging from his wife’s walls, how he spat dust into the food and urinated ash into the soup. This husband and how he sat at the foot of his wife’s bed while she masturbated and moaned the name of the boy. Always this husband from doorways and shadows, always this husband, speaking the language of humming and dust, and how his widow answered him by turning on fans, and by closing the windows.

  How the light bent along the horizon and—

  How your factories glowed, how they moaned and blossomed. How this boy held the daughter in the dead and tufted lawn of the hillside. How they refused to believe what you built below.

  This husband of the soil, Henry, and how he pressed a pillow against the boy’s face. How beneath the pressure the boy thrashed and moaned. How the husband tried on the boy’s shirts and pants and how none of them fit, how the seams burst apart and how they dripped with soil and mucus. How the woman touched the stains and asked the boy if he had been gardening. How the man slept in the boy’s bed and how the sheets, stained with dirt, mashed moss, and worms. How the husband read The Encyclopedia of Medicine from the boy’s shelf and how all words seemed smears of ink and clotted with the images of men shaved and pale, their ribs bulged and strained against impossible skin, their open black eyes and how they lay, piled and strewn. How the husband knew well what these men had become.

  How in those days men took it upon themselves to pull on masks and light torches, how they banded together, neighborhood by neighborhood, and they boarded up and burned those infected houses.

  How the boy sat on the back porch with the daughter while the mother wailed inside the house. How this world was no longer her own. How the woman wept and took pills and drank a bottle of vodka. How she masturbated and how she screamed out the window for the boy, “This is for you!” How the dead-husband leaned over his widow, how he blew on her ear, how he caressed her neck. How she giggled and sighed while, outside, the boy held the daughter. How frail she seemed now, how red her eyes, her lips of salt and thin hair, white and blue with moonlight, her brow rested against his apron. How the dead husband dragged his wife past where they sat, the moaning fatness of a canvas sack, and how the daughter pretended not to see. How the daughter said, “She’s jus—” and how she sputtered. “I just don’t—how she can—She’s always—” How the boy said, “Someday you will do the same. But all of this,” and the boy gestured to the town around them, “will be gone by then.”

  Now the humming faces of a thousand, thousand locusts and the horizon yawned a pure whiteness. How the air vibrated and grew new colors. How cities folded into dust. How time shaped and bent and dissolved. How you stood beneath the wave of the blasts, in your exterminator outfits, your bandanas. How you watched the end of all we had ever known. Now the flash of light and how from every forest buffalo stampeded and pummeled the street into rocks, how the vibrations shattered windows. How still living buffalo were skinned and their hides dropped like trousers, steaming and burning. How buffalo stampeded, pink, and how blue smoke coiled and fumed—How the skies rained husks of trees, evergreens stripped of needles, flaring and sparking—How elevators opened and there stood bears, sizzling and frying in their own grease while marmots and squirrels scratched and yelped within serving carts. Does skittered along hallways, fat with life, and does dropped to tiled floors, moaning, smoking and sizzling, while from their split bellies pink heads emerged.

  How the vibrations smiled and heaved and swallowed eagles, black and heavy. How eagles woke, thrashing and flapping and screeching in kitchenettes. How charcoaled eagles fell from windows and broke apart on walkways while cougars and leopards, white tufts splotched with oil and soot, matted brows, hunkered on counters with steady eyes. How wild cats washed the scorch with pink tongues gone ebony. How the buildings moaned and seethed and crumbled while within, deer trampled the elderly. How legs and hooves caught in the spokes of wheelchairs and smoldering deer thrashed against tiled floors. How their eyes—.

  How a light flashed and the horizon rumbled with animals. How the boy held this daughter on the back porch and how in that moment he knew what he had lost a thousand years before, and how only now did he ache for what had been. How the sky opened and hummed and the boy knew enough to say with his final sound, “I love you” rather than what he knew, “I should have killed them.” How she could not hear within the sky, broken into lights and impossible colors. How their ears popped and clogged with pus and they were forced to imagine the impossible roar. How the street yawned and expanded with vibrations. How a doe, lost and smoking, skittered past on the street before them. How the girl’s chest bloomed with the life to come. How the boy held this daughter within the smoke and light of a thousand, thousand candles, as the smoldering remains of feathers and trees fell about them.

  How deer, skittish and blind, ran through shop windows and into cars while goats, half-burned, and herds of black sheep once white, lay smoking and blind. How coyotes seemed the hunched figures of bears, and how bears sweltered into deer, and how deer fell with tongues pink and burning, men tripping over them, lamenting the terror visited upon moose. How scorched kittens licked the charcoal bodies of dogs, beavers, goats. How these animals mewed into the vibrations, moaning and melting. How they wailed. How the vibrations caught all within and how those from this city woke in that city and how all cities burned and fumed into one. How withered men who had not walked in years dove out seventh-story windows, crisped to charcoal. How the few remaining survivors fled the towns and cities, blind and smoking, against the tide of a thousand, thousand burning animals. How women found themselves beneath the figures of brown bears yawning and moaning with steam. Brown bears cooked in their own juices and brown bears split open and these women, somewhere crushed beneath. How the hallways of offices and hospitals filled with gusts and moans and animals toppled into charcoal and debris. How the hallways and valleys, the cemeteries and taverns, lit up now with the burst of white light from along the horizon and how none could see your approach.

  How there is no fear in the moment before you disappear. How this daughter, fled now into the particles within.

  I don’t believe in innocence, the man said. I believe in what happens when the sky yawns wide and blue with light. I believe the sounds your fires make when they swallow the forests.

  Now you arrived along the horizon, a dim line of seven figures, vibrating against an open chasm.

  How—

  Finally, in your boots and your exterminator clothes, you surveyed what you wrought. How you swished your boots into the—

  You drew lines in the mounds and how you searched for the last of the women, if only husks of women, if only the charcoal of women, and what you would do with these women if you found them, yet—

  How your horses, their skin and veins—

  How your horses trotted through the soot and burning embers of cities and towns and animals and forests and mothers and children and hospitals and the boy, or you prayed the boy amongst them—

  How there were no women to find.

  How you wandered the ashes of what remained although nothing remained. How the world you constructed hummed with a thousand, thousand
silent vibrations.

  How their hair, gone to smoke. Their eyes molted—

  How the only light you saw was the first light you kindled. How you held no new colors in your conception but what power they contained.

  IV.

  How within the yawning of the light, the final figments of this boy and girl, the particles of soot and debris, the house they constructed in the mound of dirt and rock along a hillside. How the long green grasses, irises and daisies, bent now and how, as the light broke into a thousand, thousand new colors, the boy dug out the hillside with a pickaxe and spade and the girl dried mud for bricks, and the girl gathered eagles’ eggs and caught marmots and prairie dogs with traps of twine and sticks. How in the flash that meant the end of all, they lay before the hearth within this wide belly of soil. How they made love and sang while the sky loomed open and silent save the long off hum of what they called crickets. How they played badminton, how their chests throbbed as they fell into each other, how the man held his hand to the woman’s bulged belly and how, a dim remembered pain. How the child within kicked and mewed, how it hungered for more than boiled roots and sourdough. How the horizon rose clotted with the smoke and detritus of a thousand skins and, within the light of this evaporated world, how the man held his son, writhing and red. How he begged the child to breathe and, once its lungs filled and expanded, how he prayed the child would never stop.

  How—

  How the father held his newborn son in their cavern and how the infant dozed, so terribly light and frail. Now this ache, within, this knowledge of what burned along the edges.

  How the father took his son fishing along the stream and the son, interested only in the texture of the stones, the moss, in the ants along the strands of grass, the water bugs darting and flickering. The son’s pale freckled face, his wisps of red hair. How the father brushed the son’s bangs from his eyes while the son pretended not to smile. How the man and his son ate what they called mayonnaise sandwiches but were mostly goats’ milk cheese and sourdough. How the son sat on his father’s lap and the heat of the boy through his layers of denim and cotton. How the father felt the burn of light in his cornea and the boundaries wilted and blackened. How the father wiped his eyes with a handkerchief while the little boy dozed, slouched and drooling against his father’s side.

  Now the boy asked his mother and father how they met and his parents could not answer. Later, as the father and mother lay in their bed of straw and cotton, how they recalled only the conception of their son, the moment of waking into the light of this prairie, the long green grass and daisies, and if they strained enough, how they knew only an ache, and the sudden flash of a thousand suns.

  How the walls inside the hillside curled and puckered like a burning Polaroid. How fruit jars warped and twisted into flutes while the fluids clouded and blackened. How the parents noticed but pretended these blots were simply shadows. Now always this smell of smoldering and smoke, of meat cooking and burned, no matter how long the door was open, the windows, no matter if they cooked outside or in. How the husband and wife sat in lawn chairs along the hillside, admiring the prairie grasses, the sway of brown and green, the long off bounce of prairie dogs, their chattering. How the light of the falling sun seemed born of new colors and textures and how the landscape seemed to wilt before these red and gold eyes. How the air gusted in a crimson breath and the wife said “it must be a tornado.” How somewhere, dimly remembered, the truth moaned, and how she prayed her husband had forgotten. How the sky opened and the father called the son into the house again. How the boy’s head, his red hair, barely over the tips of the grass.

  How the walls corroded and blackened as if charred. How the father and his son scrubbed with scouring pads and bleach, their hands raw and red. How the father and mother made a game of it, those who cleaned the most won a piece of pie, a raise in allowance. How the boy peeked out the door and how the prairie entire seemed flooded with ash and soot. How they scrubbed.

  How the father wandered the black and flattened fields, as the sky folded and unfolded into new colors, how it vibrated and scorched the perimeter. How the father, his shirt unbuttoned and flapping, his chest and belly, his hairs bleached white for the horizon.

  How they woke to a roaring and crackling. How the boy screamed and how he lay within the arms of his mother and father. How the roaring seemed larger than all sound. How a thousand planes dealt into the hillside would seem a murmur by comparison. In the place beneath all knowledge, the mother and father knew how quickly something disappears and so they held each other all the tighter to know the moment the other was no more. How the boy hiccupped and feared he could not breathe. How his neck swelled and his skin turned blue. How the boy, through the roaring and crackling, on these bed sheets, and somewhere the eyes of a cat, slivered and yellowed. How the boy said, “mama, I’m going to die,” and how she knew enough to say, “No you aren’t, honey, no, you never will.” How this boy could only stare back at his father and mother and why they lied.

  How the boy lay swollen and blue. How the father tore apart chairs and boxes, how he hammered together a tiny casket. How he wandered those hillsides, black and molted. How it seemed he could climb within, and how he felt he once had. How this son lay in his bed, cold and unmoving save to wheeze. How the air around them burst. How the mother laid the boy’s favorite toy truck in the crook of his arm, and how the horizon opened.

  How the father hugged his son in his casket and whispered to the child of wax how this suffering would end soon. How the boy’s ears leaked for the moaning. How the walls opened and there was white light. How the mother patched these with the boy’s spare overalls. How the overalls flickered into light and flames while she beat them with a broom. How husband and wife finally lay with each other amongst the crackling, coughing for the soot and smoke of the walls and the hillsides, and the entire world obliterated around them. How the funeral of the world they had always known burned into their minds now and how they forced themselves to kiss each other, to wet each other, to remind each of this life they would yet lead, and, how this mother said, if only her voice, lost in the humming, how this glow, all around them, was only the glow of the falling sun, and soon—

  ROBERT KLOSS has recent fiction in The Collagist, Caketrain, Gargoyle, & Everyday Genius among others. This is his first book.

  NEPHEW an imprint of Mud Luscious Press, publishes linguistically jagged, pocket-sized titles that demand a redefining of language.

  MUD LUSCIOUS PRESS features raw & aggressive works in an online quarterly & a novel(la) series. Chew on our open faces at: www.mudlusciouspress.com

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