Out and About

Black-berries bleed into the air, pungent, ripe, and ready for harvest. They prick her nose, and it bleeds, too, in pleasure of the sweet, almost romantic aroma. Is the window open? From afar an owl voices its own question: who? Wonder where it is. “Who,” it voices again. You. The smoke detector in the hallway blips in regular intervals – a soothing, yet also distant sort-of sound, and a fan far-off whirs on its pedestal, blowing cold air with black mechanical blades. A bee buzzes somewhere close by. Television static? Is it on? Other sounds begin to merge with the buzzing, creating a sort-of audible soup. Black-berries. She sees one, goes to pick it, then hears the owl again and halts. For a moment, all that is visible to her is dark purple. Then a cloud. Dusk? Dawn? “Who,” the question, now an island away, beckons once more in a determined breath drawn long from the lungs of the bird. “Who’s that,” she makes out, and it sounds like a boy’s voice. Maybe seven or eight. She stares up at a purplish atmosphere, unable to decipher the time of day. Pallid polka-dots twinkle in her vision, and to her they’re stars, falling from the sky and rendering into an array of amorphous objects around her: maples and elms, buckthorn bushes and bees which glide away timidly. This sudden environmental metamorphosis is not odd at all to her, however, and she regards it with as much attention as a young child does a bruise on a knee, or scab on an elbow: next to none while lost in a gleeful stupor. She grins haphazardly and takes a seat on the grass. A sparse patch of spruces stretches onward for as far as she can see to her left. To the right of those are other conifers – ones she cannot name offhand. They stand tall and confident in their own distant confinement, limbs stretching upward as if hung by strings. A mockingbird imitates the mating call of a blue jay. Of course none of these details would matter in a few hours after she awoke, however, as she would not remember them. Nor would they matter after her death the next morning.

           Claudel Summers stands under a trellis now, oblivious to her dream, a drapery of black-berries above her. She picks one and chews it. After swallowing, she notices something strange. Where she’d stood before, gazing up at a purplish, rendering sky, there sits a play-dome chock-full of children. Was that there before? She frowns. Bees bluster by her as she takes another black-berry and begins toward the dome.

           The grass is a brilliant emerald color, flush with chlorophyll. It’s beautiful. All of it. In fact, she feels guilty even walking on it.

On her trek toward the dome, she reaches into her pocket and finds a yo-yo as well as a packet of unlabeled seeds. Odd. She’s almost there.

Pausing, she examines the yo-yo. It’s an old Duncan one with a few scuffs on it, and the “u” is hardly visible. After toying with it for a moment, she stuffs it back into her jeans and notes that there are fewer children than before at the dome. Or were there? She hadn’t counted – was too far away, but it seemed like it. Four…Five…Six? There were six now. Before it seemed that a dozen or more swarmed the dome like little locusts, riled-up and piled around it. Also, she notices at a glance, the children no longer move as they once did, playful and energetic-like. They shamble around in a somnambulistic manner, more like ants infected with some parasite than locusts. Except one: a girl with blonde, nearly sun-bleached hair. She wears a black-red flannel shirt tucked-in, brown tennis shoes, and appears younger than the rest, if only by a couple years. This girl, seated outside of the dome, head resting on one navy blue bar, doesn’t move. Claudel calls to her.

“Hey!”

Two boys, both pale and skinny within the dome are peeled from their trance at once. They peer up at the sky with curious eyes. “Purple?” one mouths, a glint of sunlight on his cap, and he looks confused. The other scratches his scrawny, reclined neck. Then he sees the girl, and –

And where had the other children gone? They’d managed to slip from her gaze somehow, and she had only averted it once – to view the sky when the boys had also peered up.

The capless boy’s lips begin to tremble, his body seems to writhe, and he nearly capers over, fumbling backward with out-stretched arms. What is this about? Steel against steel. No – bone against steel. It’s her face – she’s hitting her face.

Warping clouds. They go, first from fluffy, white cumulonimbus to ominous thunder heads calling for a grave. Then to something more bizarre-looking: rings of them, all interconnected and black, circumscribe a vacuum in the sky, which has become an ever deepening vermillion color. Everything seems to open up, and she can’t breathe – the air is too thick.

Crack. The sound of the girl’s face on metal.

“Stop!” Then, she is almost sucked away entirely, examining the scene in third-person. The scream she let out feels as if it wasn’t even her. It wasn’t – not her, but the boy with a cap. His friend’s face is red slush, and this is the final image she sees before awakening. Dark. Forest. Claudel’s mind begins to form words by itself again. Cougar. A scream. From the girl? From –

She wakes up to an echo nearing silence from the woods. Next, her alarm goes-off. She hits the snooze button. Already, the dream has faded, and is but a feather in her pillow, tucked-away for next evening.

Her stomach feels like she chugged a two-liter of cold seltzer. It growls. Coffee – that’ll help. Rising to her feet becomes more difficult each morning. It’s 5:03 AM, and she feels already as if her calves are splitting. She lets out a yawn, then falls backward onto a pile of pillows on her bed, from light-headedness. Lucky catch.

For the next ten minutes she sits here, propped against pillows, hoping her grandson might wake up and lend her a hand. Though he was never up this early – unless he’d been up all night writing, which, still, wasn’t often. No sign of him; only light on is the one the boy referred to as the “titty light,” which shines, dim-lit, above the kitchen sink. Fortunately, her head finishes swimming. She gets up, and begins toward the open door of her room. After making it through the door, her morning ritual: use the bathroom, turn off the boob light in the kitchen, have a cup of Joe with the boy, then laundry. That’s how it would go. She takes another step, palm to heel, and her knee gives-out, twisting her ankle.

“Shit!” She falls hard, hitting her head on the arm of the chair beside her bed.

Fifteen minutes and she regains consciousness.

“Gabe!” she calls-out to her grandson. “Gabriel!” she shouts louder. No response.

What Claudel didn’t know was, Gabriel had snuck-out during the night as she slept, dreaming of absurd things, and he’d left the window open. Another matter she was unaware of was, that the thing that woke her up wasn’t a scream from within the dream, but a scream from –

Footsteps. Oh, good.

Gabriel always slept with his door open. A brick wrapped in felt made sure of this.

“Gabriel, I fell, and twisted my ankle. Hit my head pretty bad, too. I might need to go to the hospital, if you’ll –

Grab the phone, is what she had wanted to say, but now could not. The words went sideways down her throat, choking her up.

A cougar. It emerges from Gabriel’s room, taut, shoulders shrugging as it walks. Then it stops. Its eyes are glossy, catching the light from the kitchen. Calmly, it starts toward her.

She looks for something – anything close by. A slipper. A VHS tape. A kerosene lamp on the nightstand. Grabbing ahold of the bedside, she reaches for it. The cougar pounces and tears into her left cheek. It gushes blood; a gaping hole. Then, her neck. The last thought she has is one of Gabriel on his bed, jugular torn in a mess of bloody sheets.

Gabriel, still very much alive, would never be the same after discovering his grandmother’s body.