How To Go Back

[Trigger warning: gore, suicide, death/corpses]

Two years ago, I stared into the eyes of a little dead girl. She was sprawled on some highway, deep in what used to be the Midwest, her dead, fermenting eyes staring past me, and up, up, up, into the sun-bleached sky.

They didn’t leave many bodies behind when they left. Didn’t want to find skeletons when they came back, I assume. Her skin was dark and leathery. There was a hole growing in her cheek. Blue tendrils came twirling out of the rotted, bony mass, with those little orange tips. I wished they were green; I miss the trees, the grass. The closest thing to nature are the dead bodies with the synthetic viruses, eating themselves towards the clouds; puny, fingernail scratches on deep blue skin.

She might’ve been dead for three months, six at a stretch. The first thing I felt when I saw her was excitement. She was the closest thing I’d seen to another person in six years. My father’s body had been more pristine, less infected by the now, a perfect conservation of the then. There was only the tight, red little hole in his temple; the pool of dark, sticky blood pooling around bits of his brain, staring at me like a sick, foaming, red-furred dog. His eyes were stained red by blood, and they sat uncomfortably in their sockets, dislodged by the force of a bullet tearing it all up behind them. He was smiling, a slash of red teeth, red eyes popping. I half-expected them to flick towards me, half-expected the revolver, still lying loosely in his palm, to fire a matching shot through my own temple. I was relieved when he killed himself, as I was when I saw the dark hole in that little girl’s cheek. I took the gun, I took his shoes, I turned around and I left. As I reached the crest of the yellow hill, I looked back at him, lying like roadkill on the highway, in the dead, yellow grass, our truck lying upside-down, smoking, a few feet away. I wiped blood from my forehead and I pressed on, the sun belching like a toad white bubble of heat that burst around me periodically. There was a similar gunshot in the little girl’s calf that poked out from her purple nightgown. It was the nightgown that made me vomit. I heaved onto the tarmac. I heaved and I heaved. She was so young. The same age as me, probably, when I left my father’s corpse to rot in the fat, white sun that turned the sky grey from its heat.

 It happened in the night, I thought, sitting on the tarmac, staring at the little dead girl. There were faint, sun-baked faint tyre marks on the road. She had Gone, I thought. So young. She died, seething with red-hot pain, alone in the inky night, not an inkling of who she once might’ve been. The sun was rising, the sky was losing her blue. The pile of vomit to my side would begin to cook soon, like a stinking goose egg in a frying pan. I stood up. I looked at her once more, a China doll, cracked up and fading in the sun; I turned my head back to the road, the tarmac melting into a black puddle on the horizon.

It had been the last wink of winter, that day. Or what would’ve been winter. My diary says so: March third. It’s almost definitely wrong- the last time I was really sure of the day, the month, the year: I was nine. The day the school caught fire and burned down. The village burned for a week; the school was first, a black plume into the purply-grey midday sky. The grass was already threadbare, yellow; the buildings were lazy, wooden shacks, standing crooked; haphazard, peeling rows like a pile of matches. It’s difficult to build, gather materials- do anything at all- when you swelter all day under a rock, or in a shack, waiting for the Midnight Hours. The village burned and then Grandma picked up Bleach on the exodus, and soon everybody was Gone, my father on his way. That day, after seeing the dead girl, I had collected enough gas and food to wait out the summer in the Caves. They were damp, dripping places if you went down far enough. It stank of rotted bodies, those who had starved or Gone, but it was cool, it was dark, it was safer than third degree burns and snarling tumours all summer long.

 I remember, I’d left it so late that I knew to stop driving and lie in the grass under the car- I usually passed out from the heat after an hour or so. When the sun was lower in the sky, orange and red, the sky green and pink, I poured water over myself, guzzled it through my cracked, bleeding lips. And then I drove and I drove. I’d left it so late, so dangerously late, that towards the end of the journey they started appearing in the sky. Small, black dots at first, but they got bigger. Their ships. Full of, I don’t know. Probably scientists in grey coats. Watching. Waiting for everything to die so they could start again. They’re nothing but black pebbles in the sunset to me, and they disappear in the safety of the night. Black pebbles, no windows, no movement, no noise. They’ve no exhaust fumes, no visible sign of life. They just float calmly in the sky, black beads, watching as Earth eats itself like a coyote starving in the desert, picking at its own ribcage for morsels of its fleshy stomach; a stomach long gone. That little dead girl was a premonition, I suppose. It had been a silent, dissociative half-decade of white, silent heat. Each year dripped onto my lips like the last of the water in the hip flask I dangle, now, as I speak, above my head.

           I should’ve been gone for the Caves days ago. I stand on the roof of a gas station. It’s midday, the sky is clear and grey. The yellow-brown plains sprawl outwards, forever on all sides; the highway cuts a black line down the middle. There’s the occasional lone ranger, a telephone post in the distance, the hollow carcass of a tree. It’s silent. So, so silent. Silence as deafening as a red sea, crashing down on my shoulders and burrowing into my dry, blistered throat. There’s blood leaking from the blisters in my cheeks; it starts to boil, slowly, etching teary burns down my chin, down my neck. I don’t feel it. I don’t feel anything. I’m a pair of eyes. I forgot the Cave long ago. I’ve been waiting for this day. The last day of winter, the last wink. I hold my arms outstretched. From somewhere far away, much bluer and greener, much louder, if I squint, I can feel them burn like an old photograph on the campfire. The sensation starts to feel like rain, cold and relieving.

           I Bleached myself intentionally. I went to one of the rotted bodies deep in the Caves: a man. In the torchlight, his eyes were milky and half closed, his mouth slack. There was a bottle of something that had rolled away from his right hand. There were foamy remnants on his lips. He reminded me of my little brother, Geoffrey. Maybe if he had grown up in the green and blue world, then, he would have looked like that. I kissed his forehead. I began to forget not long after. It was sweet; it was like falling slowly asleep. From this nightmare. This fucking nightmare, I hear myself scream, from far away, in the blue and green. I start to turn away now, as my legs begin to give out on the roof of the gas station. I can feel Nothing holding out his hand. The blistered now is a universe away. Just before I turn, and walk down the hill, the rain pouring onto my neck, blurring my vision into a sweet, comfortable grey, expansive, eternal grey, I see that little dead girl, lying on the highway, sprawled out on the scorched Earth. 

 I smile as I slip away; I smile at her red, unblinking eyes.