The Corner

It’s still March; the sun doesn’t climb high, yet the trees try to lift it. Testing thermals, an eagle strains to pull it skyward with its wing draft, to reciprocate. They reach a kind of equilibrium no one is sure they want.

Which is but one way to tell of our world now. Forces pulling, even friendly ones, others pushing, anxious of upsetting an unacknowledged balance, of tipping some unseen fulcrum. Like bison on the plains, leaning top heavy and narrow-eyed into horizontal snowfall, bracing for the calamity we only dimly discern.

The people of the village tell us not to go past the Corner, Marla and me. Never venture beyond where the road curves, that grey loop turning up the side of the hill, a ghost’s cursive. How can they not know such beseechments only make transgression more beguiling?

“What lies past the Corner?” we ask.

“A thing spawned by mischance,” they say and cross themselves. 

All stockpiled quicksilver valour, uncontainable as a reactor core, Marla will go past the Corner. The inevitability of this dark, compact girl I love. Have loved since we were measured by weight not height and first touched fingertips and laughed like springwater, before we grew into language and even became human. The question is, will I ever dare follow?

***

“I’m a crone now, a dry slate headland buffeted by too many tides. You ask me why I’m angry? This isn’t anger; it’s bafflement. How about this? I used to believe there was someone counting all the insects, ready at some allotted time to sound the great alarm, to urge us to some agreed upon response when thresholds were crossed. Action. Coordinated effort. I mean, there are people watching the corals bleach, and they’re distraught, they cry onscreen as they tell us with voices shook full of woe, but we watch until the end and the credits roll. And the credits roll. And the credits fucking roll. Until the great irony of the real ending dawns on us, when we realize there are no credits, just this infinite debit. Not even a theme song. Only silence. Silence. Like the universe didn’t pay its Netflix fees.”

***

The answer now; here it is, all these years later: Marla might have led, but we have all begun—some of us trembling, others sorrowful, a few even smiling and stepping light of foot and without care—to round the Corner, no one able to say or even know if this is sayonara or a strange and even hopeful kind of hello.

A World Abandoned

Everything inside my head is small and enclosed and everything outside is huge and muffled. There are sounds within the woods at night, terrible sourceless sounds, screeches from unseen throats, and we awake to a sun like a penny glued to a fawn-gray board. A coin fixed to a sand-dusted slate. Brassy light falls amid the shadows all day.

Things are going wrong, have gone wrong. I wonder if I mean within or without, and discover I can't answer either way.

Gerhardt left three days ago and hasn't returned. 

I clutch our old retriever Lola at night, my arms encircling the pitiful trellis of her ribs, and she whines quietly at the shrieks from the woods. Come daylight she doesn't investigate.

And come daylight I pull up the ghosts of carrots and beets, translucent things like alien pods spawned in our friable dirt. Dirt that looks and feels but will never taste like the crumble topping my Aunt Caterina used to bake over Tuscan apples and sweet red grapes.

Must stop remembering. Too dry. Too drained of faith. Even yesterday is beyond the pale now.

Gerhardt took the crossbow; I have the old Winchester pump-action and the last two shells. 

I can't help myself. I think back to a time when the worst thing I thought could happen was losing my children. Laughter now would be legitimate, yet I don't laugh. Irony is as stupid as nostalgia.

Right before he left, Gerhardt laughed.

"What is funny?" I asked him.

"Nothing, my dear."

"Fine."

"Not fine. Not funny. And yet…"

"What?" I could never resist his artful pauses.

"A dream is an unfinished life, so maybe they were all dreams."

"The children?"

"All of them. Taken before their time. Maybe the life they're meant to live hasn't yet begun."

"But how is that funny?"

"Oh, outside of the cosmic scale, it isn't."

"And also, what then are we?"

"Midwives, perhaps? Or morticians."

His fragile smile left the cartography of his face like a misremembered shallows and he winked and kissed the air by my cheeks and he shouldered the crossbow over his day pack and stepped on the loose boards as if to release a pent and groaning sendoff—secretly ordained by impish music-loving satirists—and he never turned his unkempt head the whole time his wiry frame hitched itself down the long gravel lane.

Irked as I was by his cryptic foolishness then, how I miss him now. Stabbed by loneliness, I call Lola, who happens like a specter out of the strange quiet air. I bury my sorrowing face in her patchy fur, but when I pull away, her fur is dry. Perhaps I am the wraith, not her.

Perhaps my grief leaves no stain on this world.

Gerhardt and I once spoke of Christ and redemption. He was once a Lutheran and I a Catholic. We might as well have conjured Anubis or Krishna. Kali or the Morrigan. Cthulhu. Isis. A thousand echoing rooms and hallways spiral beyond the vacant futile atrium of unanswered human prayer. 

The night is too generic for copyright, and as it passes once more, stamped by the usual screams of the arrested trees, by the endless moonless hours, my insomniac eyes become the only things in this world that are large. They keep growing—while morning enters like an intruder pissing weakly in a corner—expanding like fungus or a thing far worse, daring the fawn-gray sky to blink in toxic fellowship, tempting the universe to tremble in abject defeat.

What is this now? Men? With guns and lust and deadened eyes?

O woe.

When Gerhardt returns, our last shells will be spent, I will be a strand of spider silk shimmering with rosy dewdrops and stretched between splintered fenceposts, and holy Lola's howls will fill the whole valley.

The End of the World Playlist

At first glance, Dan O'Brien's The End of the World Playlist is yet another short, sharp, vicious zombie tale packed with everything you expect from the genre; perhaps short on depth, but a fun carnival ride of post-apocalyptic gore. Yet look closer and there's more. There's plenty of slick and frankly hilarious dialogue, for example, fleshing out (sorry) characters who also reveal more depth than initial impressions might suggest. Which is essential, because the reader needs to feel empathy for the handful of human characters up against an increasingly frantic and numerous undead horde they've previously coexisted with, albeit anxiously.

As a huge music fan, I have to confess to being disappointed in the cursory nod this novella gives toward the title. I am admittedly being quite literal, but it's alluded to fairly early on then pretty much abandoned as a concept thereafter, which feels like a missed opportunity to tie this fast-paced story into a potentially rewarding conceptual framework. But that's a small quibble. The story moves fast, as do these zombies (yes, the slow/fast zombie dichotomy is once again highlighted by the speed of these dead folks, which I only mention as a warning to those purists who oppose this more recent, accelerated branch of the mythology). O'Brien provides just enough detail to allow the reader to care for the handful of well-drawn characters before unleashing the inevitable mayhem. The rare moments of reflection, flashes of what we've lost, mere sparks in a dark cellar, are all the more poignant for that.

Minor kudos and criticism aside, this is above all a well-written, fun(ny) and engaging novella with (it's becoming increasingly important to note) less of the editing issues of many independently published contributions to this overcrowded genre.

More 3 and a half stars, really, but that's not a bad thing. I'd read more of this type of stuff from O'Brien.

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David Antrobus also writes for Indies Unlimited and BlergPop. Be sure to check out his work there if you like what you read here.