The Night the Sky Came Down in a Fine, Black Powder

Audio version available from Morgan Scorpion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GaiJCbpAZ1M

I suppose we’ll all go blind eventually. And I don’t say blind to mean loss of eyesight. The old man, father, can see alright, but I don’t know what he’s looking at, staring, black-eyed, empty-eyed, across the room, through the walls, across the coal dusted lawn and streets and trees, off into an empty, deep, dark, night sky, patiently waiting for the constellations to come back. They won’t.

We, as a civilization, have wanted for eons to have it all come to us, in meaning and epiphany, the loose ends and entwinings…no…I mean…entwinements…turned straight and streamlined. Perfect in perception, perfect in memory, perfect in projection, because knowing what’s now is knowing what’s to come, I suppose.

Now it’s here, giving hardly more answers than it ever has, and it has decided to take us back with it, unfortunately.

The blindness creeps. It got to the old man, and he’s hardly moved since, sunk deep in his chair, no sound but raspy breaths, stifled by the fine, black powder smudging the rims of the holes in his head, ears, nose, mouth, eyes. It smushes…no…pushes…no…suffuses up his fingers and extremities like a fungus or frostbite might do. It is delicate and lissome like a hairy jungle spider, a tartangula…no…a tarantella. You’ll have to check my spelling on that. Keep a dictionary handy because the powder’s getting to me quickly.

I can’t see it, but I can feel it. It’s in me, coursing my veins, turning my blood to a viscous, dark slush. I can literally hear it shushing into the folds of my brain, taking fine details and memories, mostly the good ones, leaving me with the hate, spit, and anger. Leaving me with bitterness and jealousy and hurt and pain. I hear echoes of the old man saying “shut up” and “I don’t have time for you.” The quieter tones are “I love you” and “You did your best and that’s enough.” Muted. Tamped with silt.

This numbing, this forgetting, it is the blindness, as I’m calling it, for one, lack of a better word, and for two, lack of ability to recall a better word, as the fine, black powder seeps in, through, and up, taking its toll. So, I’m writing this down, maybe for me, maybe for one tenacious, immune survivor, someday stomping across a black-crusted landscape in search of a way to rebuild amidst the photo-negative desert our planet will eventually become, I suppose.

I want to say it came down like snow, in swirls and eddies, feather-light and floaty, magical and enthralling in its own way, a black Christmas. But it had more loft…lift. It was a finer stuff like a pollen or dander. It hung and held like the dust of a dirt road when a log truck passes through. It sucked at illumination, streetlamps mere pinpricks like the stars above them had previously been. Those stars had gone out completely. And the flood lights of our porch struggled to reveal a backyard and tree line gone gunmetal black under the enigmatic squalls of outer space dropping at a rate of several inches per hour, piling in drifts against the fences and houses. And it moved too, slightly…slowly…but surely. Our neighbors outside, knee-booted and high-stepping, saw us peeking at them. They threw black snowballs at our faces in the windows. I watched a splatter slide downward on the pane, like anything should, like anything would, though it also crawled outward. And it also crawled upward, alive and sporous?…spore-like?…spurious? I need a thesaurus so bad right now.

Thespurious?

The neighbors played, pushing and tussling like kids home from school. They roughhoused, they horse-played, arms blackened to the elbows, legs blackened to the knees, smearing each other’s faces in it, pushing and shoving until they both went down, spread wide and sunken in at least two feet of the peculiar stuff. It wouldn’t let them up. They writhed and suffocated while more and more black powder clung to their forms, round and lumpy, like flour on frying chicken. One of them sat up for a moment, the dust clumping in a caricature, smoothing and rounding the facial features beneath. Two fat, dark snowmen wallowed in black clouds. They noiselessly exploded leaving trace remnants behind. We’ll all go like that eventually, I suppose. Right after the blindness.

Our house is old, cracked, and odd-angled, wheeled toys and marbles travel across floors without pushes. Doors and windows show splinters of outside at their seams and bottoms. The black powder could follow the trails of the mice, the bugs. It could transit the rusty corners of plumbing and ductwork. However it went about it, it got my son first. When he coughed so loud, so excretely…no…excruciatingly, it woke me from the couch in the den; I snapped up, ran, and almost broke the doorknob while I shook and rattled my way into his room. Eight-years-old, he knew no better, marking up the walls, ancient glyphs from hidden Stone Age caves, hieroglyphics of kid show cartoons and stick monsters, he had used the powder to smudge a black mural across ten feet of plaster. His hands were covered, stains on his ears, cheeks, and forehead too. He turned, so proud of his work. His cute, crooked smile showed teeth that were slime-slicked black. He told me it didn’t taste very good. It made him cough, he said.

When my mother came up from checking the canned food supply in the basement, the black sprinkles in her perm and the gray spider veins tracking across her forehead was more than enough to know where it would go from there. She quarantined to her bedroom, both her and my little boy, huddled together in the big bed, only one lamp on in the room, enough to show the black motes dancing in the air—tarantella?—each time they coughed, long and hackle?…no, hacky, hacking, like patients in a ward. Patience in award. My mother hung in. I watched from the cracked door, surgical mask on my face. She screamed and threw things if I tried to come in. My God, at the filth and swears she directed at me as the schmutz took her mind. Still, she held my child for me. She clung. She cried, though the tears evaporated on her desiccating cheeks. Both fell apart like ashen vampires under noonday sun. It was slow-motion. It was silent. And it was beautiful in its own God forsaken way.

Like I said, my father took to his chair not long after exposure. The old man thought he could outsmart it, be better, survive the plague with the same stern stubbornness that kept him alive in war torn jungles half a world away, way back when, when men were men, he’d say. He glazed over quickly, keeping it in as he’d always done, horror flushing his cheeks in pale purple while good thoughts and firewalls melted, leaving him with the skull faces and hollow eyes of enemy soldiers, broken and shattered while twitching in the mud and undergrowth. He had stood there, rattled…no…addled, while his gun barrel smoked. I could almost see the scenes playing out over and again like silent movies in the slickness of his deadening eyes. That was before the whites went black, leaving only the hazel rings of his thinning irises almost eclipsed by dilating pupils.

How are you still breathing? Don’t leave me, asshole!

Goddammit, I hate you, you fucking motherfucker.

No, I don’t. I really don’t. But, yeah, fuck him. No. Piece of shit. He slapped me once, among other things, many other things, but he slapped me and I feel it on my face now, right now, years later. I’m wanting to remember his patients…his patience, his tough love. Each time I start to see a smile though, the lips pull back in a wolfen…no…wolfish…vulpine…pinecone snarl and I’m slapped again, excessive, redoubt…no…redundant, okay I get it, Dad, okay, okay…slap. Slap, slap, slap….

He just sits there, immobile, gut-shot…guts hot?…across the womb…no…room.

Still, my hand works this pen anonymously…no…autonomically, speaking my mind using only what’s left of it, unable to grasp…something…sometimes…a sweeter sense.

I just want to punch him in the face, cave in his dead…deadened head with this inexplicable…excitable?…rain…no…rage. It’s a mercy kill…skill?…at this point. I’ll probably draw my hand back only to find his skull’s already a spore filled balloon, a jack-o-lantern full of demoniac…no…devil’s pixie dust.

Jesus H. It’s getting to me a lot faster than I thought it would. I’m going to wait it out. Sit it out. Shut…up…out. The old man’s done anyway. He might as well be dinging like an oven timer. Old timer.

Hell…no…he’ll…combust too, in a dry, arid, evaporation, leaving rags of clothes, teeth, and toenails in a pile on the floor. It’ll all go up, cinematically, elegantly, in a mini mushroom cloud, like newsreel footage of Bikini Atoll. Left in the chair, just a cracked rib cage, barely clinging to pencil straight vertebrae, soot-blackened…ensooted…insouciant, I suppose. I suppose. Repose. Prosaic.

I suppose someone might find this and wonder where the writer went, and I’d like to think I might still be around, and I might just be, I suppose. Covered, drowning in the fine, black powder, from the corner, all they might see are two wide, crazed eyes, staring vacant and lost, that scene where the cartoon character goes into a bat-filled cave without a flashlight.

I won’t…wouldn’t be…weren’t be…good company. I suppose. I sucrose. Lachrymose. Bellicose.

Bellicose.

I can see them coming now. I can see farther than I’ve ever seen, past sentinel-guarded galaxies, gates leading to more golden gates, and horizons stacked double like inverted chins. They are older than time, elemental, foundational, yet dysfunctional…dystopian…dysenterial? They are older than the old man. I can hear him now, what he might say, what he might…suppose…about the whole sticky situation. Something like getting it wrong about heavens and about hells, not in concept but in location. Up or down? We inadvertently…theoretically…reversed the directions. Bastard, that…old…man. Knew nothing all along. All alone. Insouciant. Tarantella. Suffused, I suppose.

©2022 J. Brian Reed