Japan

This flash fiction thing is becoming a welcome near-weekly habit. Busy as I am with my work as an editor, writing should never recede so far back I can no longer hear its plaintive call. So my usual thanks to Dan Mader for providing the venue and the hospitality, and to all the other writers who alight there and leave their shiny, shiny inspiration stuff, and with that I'll let my latest piece speak for its own self.

Japan

When the sounds come we're ill-prepared. We're drinking cheap sake and laughing at a Louis C.K. clip on YouTube. The horizon booms and something crumples or folds and a sky the hot shade of infection spreads above us while I stuff an old fleece, a first aid kit, a can opener, some rope, knives, fishing hooks, wire, soup cans, matches, underwear, panic things, into a backpack and we hiss and fuss over whose vehicle to take, finally settling uneasily on Maryann's 2006 Toyota 4Runner.  

We go north.

My aunt, who raised me, once told me I would never understand the true beating heart of people since I was deeply unlike most of them. Huh, even though I never forgot it, I have no real thoughts about that. Do you ever wonder why ghosts refuse to speak? Do you think it's because we make them self-conscious, treat them weird? 

The logging road's like crumbled brown sugar that's gotten wet and is now trying to get back to being dry. It also hides the teeth of ogres. 

"The things we got so used to doing we'll never do again," says Maryann, struggling with the wheel. 

"How so?" 

"We might never enter the cooking time in a microwave ever again." 

My answer is to turn on her radio, punch random buttons. A bunch of excited babble. They canceled some shit in Vancouver. We should stay in our homes until help arrives. A woman repeating, "The zealous castaways are roasting their organs in the root cellar." Some preacher, preaching. Katy Perry.

In a world we need to all be painters, can you describe the difference between burnt umber and raw sienna? Exactly.

"Luka, when do we stop?" Maryann squints at me, wrenches the wheel from a sheer drop, a split second from disaster. What is disaster amid catastrophe? Nothing. Nothing at all. We could fall right off the mountain and it would be like a drop of rain joining the coming tsunami. 

I literally can't answer her. Instead I sing to myself a song, some minor key Appalachian dirge, wondering if the last recorded music I'll ever hear will be by Katy fucking Perry, not that I even dislike her that much, but still…until I remember something.

"Fuck. We left the sake behind."

Maryann bursts into tears.

Close

As unclear dreams go, we gassed up a few miles back and are now pulling into town. Town. An untidy strew of decrepit and peeling clapboard buildings. Okay, a town. After paying for a room – off-white décor, sticky carpet – I step out behind M. into the main street.

“Wonder where’s the best place to eat.”

“May only be one place,” says M.

We gaze vaguely eastward over a sunburned field, absorbing the clear blue brilliance.

Without warning, the unthinkable. A thick column climbs like a tumorous limb above the horizon – squirming, turbulent reds, charcoals, yellows, deep infected orange – blooms impossibly high in the deep blue, before flattening itself like a roiling brain atop a crippled spine, an utterly broken thing.

“I guess it doesn’t matter now,” I say, my heart liquefying when I see M.’s haunted hopeless face. People are crying and someone retches in the street. I step forward and hold M.

“Where is that?”

“Uh-uh, I’m not even sure where we are. New York City, maybe? DC?”

“We’d better get inside.”

In the room, we search for shelter, for something solid, but the furniture is rickety. Even the sagging doorframes seem unworthy. Faithlessly, we force shut windows that barely fit in their frames.

Then we hear it.

An aberrant rumble swelling around the hint of a ruinous howl. Distant yet closing. We stand senseless, embracing. Awaiting the end (the end), an eventuality we couldn’t have remotely considered earlier that day, adrift yet untroubled on warm ribbons of Midwestern highway.

An already hot day grows hotter. The rumble soon a catastrophe, assaulting the ramshackle structure in a storm of screaming heat. A violent, bewitched twilight come early, wholly uninvited. We stand for a long time, clasped in that shuddering embrace, amid hot unholy gales, me feeling the most bewildering blend of pure love and abject sorrow I’ve ever felt, or will likely ever feel again.

Blessed mercy, it passes. I’ve no idea how long we remain there, shocked immobile, waiting for our stampeding hearts to return to us. Outside, fiery buildings crackle and dance. Thick coiling ropes of ash trail in the wake not only of gusts of wind but behind the gathering numbers of fleeing people; these latter gape-faced, blankly intent on outrunning the hurt in the air. The sound of cars being started and revved, of doors slamming. A few individuals are trying to direct these instant refugees, gesturing solemn at intersections, as if civic order were suddenly vital… albeit futile – with a lone artery feeding the Interstate, and an entire town attempting to simultaneously mainline, everything gridlocks.

In the motel, we tie cursory bandannas over our mouths – too numb yet for regret, but oh so lonely – and sit watching thwarted drivers scowl against the backdrop of a smoking town beneath the preternatural murk of a heartrending sky.

One of us, not sure which, says: “When it’s our turn to head back west, at least we’ll have a full tank of gas.”

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A version of this story appeared on BlergPop on May 21, 2012. David Antrobus also writes for Indies Unlimited and BlergPop. Be sure to check out his work there if you like what you read here.