Hilary Gan
I have just passed Picacho Peak along Interstate 10 on the way home to meet Shane for dinner, Tucson spread out before me in the dusk, when the sun grows so bright that the clouds turn black like an old film negative.
When I come to, I am picking glass out of my neck. My car has stopped halfway into the trunk of another car and all around me I hear the keening of half-naked humans like the screams of snared rabbits, bleeding from their burns, kneeling in the desert, pebbles sticking in their naked knees as black rain falls, hot and steaming onto our ironed bodies. I am keening, too, and I don’t even notice until I take a breath that tastes like metal on fire and the sound stops.
I smell my own skin burnt in the pattern of the small white flowers on my button-down shirt, flowers like scarlet tattoos over my breasts and down the line of my torso. I am saved where the shirt was blue, though the shirt itself is falling away in sticky threads like spiderwebs. I prefer the smell of my own charred being to the acknowledgement of the dead and dying spread before me.
This is my city and I know where the center is, where the lance was loosed, but I do not let myself think of it. I walk, for what else is there to do but keep moving forward? I hold the morningstars of my arms away from the forget-me-nots along my sides so that they will not chafe and lose their petals. I climb over the hot metal side of the train and walk, towards the center of the city, towards the source of the embers and blackness, opposite the way the living travel.
What does that make me?
A mile down the road under the darkened sky I see a woman trying to stuff her own intestines back into the hole in her guts with the hand that isn’t holding her shiny, red, dead child. I say, “There are helicopters coming to the city — they will take you to the hospital — you can make it to the helicopters.” I do not know if this is true but I think it should be true and so I say it.
She says, “No, I need to reorganize my closet,” and as she says it, congealed black blood oozes from her teeth and her body twitches and then she passes out. I leave a mother on the pavement holding her own intestines in with her child’s corpse because I cannot lift her without sobbing in agony at the pressure on my skin.
At the edge of the city, I see a man, upright on a bicycle that has fallen against a lamppost in the absence of forward motion, a man blackened except for the eyes, which have melted in their sockets. I steal his crispy shoes to keep my feet from bleeding as they drag along the asphalt and I rather suspect that he won’t mind, as he doesn’t need them. When I try to take them off his ankles crumble, though his feet are whole and I have to ease them out like the cardboard shapers at shoe stores. But all that happens when I wear them is that the blood from my legs and feet pools and makes it hard to walk and leaves spongy shoe-shaped blood footprints on the cement.
A living man approaches me when I get close enough to downtown to see that it does not exist, see the gradual slope of what was a tree-lined street running a bare trail down into the blast site. I don’t scream when he grabs my morningstar arm until I see his eyes are grey and then I feel the pain and make that keening sound, that same word.
“Lila!” he says like it is 1849 in California and my name is a precious metal.
I stop keening.
“No, I’m Lee,” he says.
“Lee,” I say, and he twists his hand around my arm and some of my skin sloughs off like she-loves-me-loves-me-not daisies. I don’t yell, but he lets go and stares at the piece of my skin in his hand, like a wallpaper sample, and then I know him. We were in love once, until — dear God, the world is ending, and I still run into my ex-boyfriend on the street at exactly the wrong time.
“Lee,” I say, and then I see he is covered in glass, shards of it sticking out of his right side. “Lee, I have to go home.”
“Lila,” he says. “That’s on Fourth Street.” He looks at me, more concerned than when my skin peeled off like an orange rind.
“Will you walk me home?” I ask.
“Lila, that’s on Fourth Street.” Then the pain of my body slips beneath the surface and I know what he means; he has turned his head to face the empty shells of buildings, towards downtown, hard to see in the ash and the dark. He is looking the way I was going. The wrong way.
“You can’t go home.”
There is no water in my body but I can feel my throat begin to close. “I know,” I say, and sit down, and I feel the skin of my buttocks stretch and tear as I hit the pavement. Truly, we are animals, and we will not know it until our bodies make us remember.
“Lila,” Lee says gently, and I hear myself say, “Shane — ”
And I wrap my morningstar arms around my ruined body, for I hadn’t just been keening like a dumb beast: I’d been calling his name.
HILARY GAN lives in St. Louis, MO, with her D&D-playing husband and terrifyingly curious toddler. Her major inspirations include Bob Dylan, Epictetus, Neko Case, trees, Jack Daniel’s Tennessee Whiskey, an insistent orange cat named Harry, and an odd-but-loveably-goofy second set of claws named Bruce. Find more of her fiction and essays at www.hilarygan.com.
