Daylight Planetes

The land here is mysterious, and slightly cursed. The weeds are full of gravestones. There are houses, too, a few in in the span of each mile, the kind that may as well be ground-level treehouses for how entangled with limbs and foliage they are. It is verdant here; the brush is bright with a hue as vibrating as the cicada chant that carries on under emerald cover. 

The driveways are pebbly strips of grey dirt, and camouflaged, like the animals. The drives come straight up to the road out of the brush, so you don’t have any warning of them ahead of time. The route signs are like this too, popping out at motorists only once they’ve been passed by.

The road though, is paved. It curves through the woods smooth and easy as a snake.

It had rained that afternoon, a deluge so sudden that the sun did not have time to vanish, and it shone right through the downpour. The raindrops clung where they would, or trickled where they would, scattered around like thousands of yellow glass beads.  Now the air is vapor, and sunrays rake through it in parallel strokes.

One of those hidden gravel driveways leads half-a-mile away from the road, through the tree line, into a field, and up to a barn. The barn is study and standing firm. Inside, a few straws drift here and there, at the beck and call of any passing draft. There are precise wooden steps that lead up to the loft. 

Up in the loft, it is dark. The windows keep out most of the light, even though the sun is in its afternoon vigor.  Pigeons mourn in the rafters, and a black snake glides up crossbeams to the roof.

A hunched figure makes its way up these steps and hobbles across the creaking floor. Moths and feathers scatter before her. Behind her is a young man, his eyes casting about with curiosity and also fear. Despite his apprehension, he follows the woman, and she leads him to a corner where two dusty windows, one on each wall, let in grey light, and the beams cut through each other in the air to make a dusty X. There are bales of hay in this corner, shedding their straws into a sweet-smelling nest on the floor. 

There is a wicker basket in the hay. The woman picks it up. The man draws back tentatively. “It won’t bite!” the woman cackles. “Or… it might.” Her hand is like the twisted trees that grow along the drive. She pats the blanket that covers the basket. “There’s a cat in here.” Then she asks, “Is it dead or alive?”

The young man frowns, confused. He wishes he could leave the barn, yet also isn’t sure he wants to let go of this novelty. But he knows, with some relief, he has no choice: he’s bound somehow, perhaps by courtesy, or perhaps by this little woman’s will. 

“I… I don’t know. Do I guess?”

“You don’t guess, you choose,” she commands.

Choose?  That was the worst thing this woman could ask of him. He never did well with decisions, and struggled to avoid those he could. Even stopping to help old lady limping along the road had been preceded by a storm of indecision. 

He had been coasting along, thankful for the coolness in his car as he drove through the rain vapor rising off the road. He was making good progress. It was even reasonable that he would reach his goal before nightfall. 

Then he’d gone around a curve, and spotted a figure hobbling in the weeds and roots. Its back was to him, but he could discern the smallness, the weakness, the limp. He slowed, not wanting to frighten this local. 

He was almost at a crawl as he passed, and chanced a glance at the person’s face. The face was bent to the ground, and wrinkled, the lines made more pronounced by the grimace of effort that twisted the features. 

The man drove on, then his conscience tugged him back. Then ensued an embarrassingly long debate, and several times he turned the car around. Back and forth, back and forth. 

By the time he made up his mind to go back and offer the woman a ride, he was sure she would be gone. But no, there she was, hobbling steadily away, batting at overgrowth and gnats.  He had slowed and rolled down his window to offer a friendly greeting and a lift. The woman accepted, and her thanks was expressed with a strong tinge of relief. 

She directed him where to go, but had not spoken other than those few instructions. The man said nothing, being no great conversationalist himself. And anyway, the woman scared him, though he didn’t allow this thought to cross his mind. Her watery eyes, lined face, and the haphazard way she seemed to fit together under her large shawl and wide skirt, all made her presence uncanny. The young man wasn’t sure if he was glad he stopped for her or not – true to his nature, he couldn’t decide. So he let his satisfaction and unease both hang somewhere inside him, and knew that the dominant sentiment would be discerned by whomever first heard his story.

Finally they turned into a driveway and passed a small, once-white house. It was like its scattered neighbors, with trapezoid windows baring glass teeth through which was a dark interior that you could see right through to the light on the other side.

They passed the house with no comment and stopped at the barn. The young man was ready to wheel around and get back to the road. But the woman had put a hand on his sleeve. This made his blood run cold. She offered a gift, she said. 

He wanted to decline, but could not decide if he should follow his instinct, or if he had better humor the woman. But when the woman was suddenly out of the car and pulling open his door, the decision was made for him. He pocketed the keys and did as he was told.

He had hoped the exchange would be quick, but now, as she stands

in the shadows holding the covered basket and speaking that dismal word, that hope is gone. “Choose,” she says again.

He breaks out in a cold sweat. Alive? What if it bites, like she said? Dead? I don’t want to kill an animal… He tries to reason his way out of it. “I can’t choose. It’s not a decision, it’s a fact. Why, asking me to make a choice on something that must surely be decided already is… is… ludicrous.” 

He ends on a long word, and that gives him comfort. Long words are good for muddling the facts until no one knows what they’re talking about, so no one has to have a point of view. It had worked in the conversation with his parents, that, after running along in rambling sentences bloated with vocabulary, had deposited on his father the task of figuring out a future for him. He had managed to make “I can’t decide,” into “Really, though, how unfair of you expect me to know what I should do next.” It happened that the father had a friend whose business had no openings currently, but could be made to in order to accommodate a friend, and this had carried the young man as comfortably as a raft on a river to prospects of a job and rented room the next state over.

The long words aren’t working now, it would seem. The woman shakes her head. The scarf that is knotted under her chin has slipped slightly back, revealing that she has only a few locks of sparse hair on her head. “It’s both,” she says. “Until you decide, the cat is waiting for its fate. Both paths lie open. Choose.”

“I can’t do that. It’s immoral to make such a vital decision on behalf of another sentient being…” has he lost her yet?

She sighs grimly and lowers the basket to the floor. “You need your tongue tied,” she decides.

The young man looks toward the stairwell. It is gone. They are enclosed in a solid-walled room, broken only by the windows and their shafts of smoke-colored light, and, now, two doors. The woman’s fingers twine into the man’s. He shudders, though he is ashamed of it. Her hands are soft and cold. But he finds his feet move willingly, and she leads him with no trouble to the doors.

“I promised you a reward,” she said, “and I’ll make sure you’ll have one.” Her knotty finger jabs at the doors. “Take your pick.”

“What’s in there?”

“Choose,” she mumbles, almost as an afterthought. She settles onto the hay bales. 

The man faces the doors, wet with a new bout of sweat.

The doors are identical, unpainted and splintering. He listens for clues, and it seems even the gently vocalizing doves have vanished. But now there is a droning in the silence. It’s a carpenter bee, he realizes as he catches sight of the large black insect bobbing around one of the doors. For a moment, his terror of the parts of nature that bite and sting makes him freeze. But then he remembers that carpenter bees are not aggressive, and his pounding heart slows. 

It skips a beat, though, when he looks at the other door. A large snake, black and shiny as spilled ink, is gliding in front the doorframe. The man takes his time watching, and the snake takes its time gliding. It reaches the door post, and keeps on going, up and up until it reaches the top of the door frame, which it traverses easily, showing its pale underbelly. Then it creeps down to cross again in front of the door. 

The bee or the snake? The snake or the bee? Which is better? Which is worse?  

The bee’s drone seems to fade away. It is drowned out by a sharper, louder buzz, and this buzz is punctuated by a hollow rattle. The man whirls to look behind him. The woman sits like a statue, blue-black and backlit on the haystack. “They’re coming, dear,” she notes. 

He sees the snakes first. These are not like the black snake, idling along in silence. These are rushing on, moving with a vengeance, noisy with the rattles on their tails. Then he spots the cloud. It is amber and gold luminescence, like a handful of screaming confetti. It a flash he distinguishes the beating wings, the long, segmented body, the dangling legs. Wasps!

They’re closing in, and have blocked his escape. He turns back to the doors. The bee is bobbing and weaving in the doorway. The snake is making its turn across the top of the door frame. He chooses the snake. He grabs the handle of the door. Rust chafes his hand. He throws his weight against the wood, and stumbles inward. The snake tumbles down, writhing in surprise as it brushes past the man’s shoulder, and thumps to the floor. The man slams the door behind him.

It is quiet again. There are no windows in this room. A lone lightbulb dangling far above lights the room with brown light. There is no hay in here either. It is empty, except… something against the opposite wall. A basket. He creeps toward it, watching for movement, listening for sounds. 

His steps crunch. Gravel? He looks down in surprise, and sees the stones glittering up at him. He takes another step, frowns, and stoops to pick up one of the stones. It’s a gemstone. He drops it in surprise.  Polished facets flash from all around him in the brown light, even from the shadow-black edges of the room, where the flashes are like embers in the dark. 

He thinks for a moment about taking some of the gems. But he’s pretty sure that’s stealing. Should he risk it? He hesitates until, from somewhere distant, he hears a hollow rattle.  He hurries over to the basket. He toes it. It clatters. He picks it up. It’s heavy. Should he open the cover and see what’s inside? But what if it’s an animal, and it attacks him (though, what kind of animal would make such a sound, he’s not sure). 

He sets the basket down and looks at it some more. The cover bounces. The man waits, and toes it again. No clatter, just a kind of muffled thump. When he toes it a third time, it’s back to clattering. 

He goes back to the door. There is no door knob. Even as he throws his weight against the door, he knows it will be in vain. He sighs and looks back at the basket. The lid rises and falls slightly, and he sees the sparkle of animal eyes in fur. He walks back and toes the basket. It jingles. He picks it up, still wary. He lugs it to the door, and knows he will find a doorknob this time. He is right.  

The doves are back to cooing, and an occasional feather floats from the rafters. There are no rattlesnakes or wasps to disturb the quiet. The hunched figure is still sitting in the crux of the sunbeams. She looks at him, though he cannot see her face. 

“Well, what is it?” she asks.

“I don’t know,” he pleads.

“Choose,” she says. 

He is weary now. “What are my options?”

“Choose,” she says again, and grips his square hands in her withered fingers. “This is my gift, and what a gift it could be! It is everything, all at once, until you decide. Make your choice before the sun finishes setting, or your chance will turn to a basket of ashes. And don’t open the basket until you’ve made your choice, or the result will be out of your control. And now go. The day is getting on.”

She turns him by the shoulder, and he sees the stairwell. He leaves, walking as casually as if the basket in his hands were a bag of groceries. He gets in the car and, in no hurry, makes it back to the main road. 

He coasts along, glancing sometimes at the basket, sometimes as the sun which is now settling in the west. Sometimes the basket bounces, sometimes it rattles, sometimes it rocks like something large and heavy is inside, lolling with the car’s motion.

Then the road splits. The man stops the car. East? West? His mother had written out such good directions for him, and he had followed with no problems until now. He checks the paper again.  No, she had written nothing about this fork in the road. He steps from the car and leans on the door, batting away mosquitoes as he gazes down each road, neither of them offering any answers.

He starts down the westernmost road, brakes, turns, and heads to the east. A moment later he brakes again, and eases into another U-turn. The basket shifts with the motion of the car. The man sees the basket sliding off the seat, but his hand is too slow to catch it. It tumbles to the side and hits the passenger door, swinging it open. 

The car jolts stop. The man leaps out to salvage what he can. When he gets around to the right side of the car, the gold light of sunset shows him a crumpled basket crawling with worms. Masses of them twist in pulsating knots. Some are wrapped so tightly together, they’ve pulled in two. The broken halves are soon swallowed back down in the perpetual writhing. 

He looks away, sick in his stomach, and slowly climbs back into the car. He puts the image from his mind as he ponders. East? West? East? West? Back? 

Then an idea comes to him, and he smiles. He takes a quarter from the cup holder, pauses for a moment, then sends it into the air with a neat ping. He snatches it and slaps it to his hand, looking eagerly for his oracle’s answer. A weight seems lifted from the man’s shoulders as he happily starts the car and goes off in the coin’s direction. 

The road glides on through the night, through this land, carrying the man gently to oblivion.