Wednesday

Abby was vomiting beside an overturned dumpster. She had little left to expel, nothing more than a few dry heaves of acid and stale bread.

Fog rose from the street in lazy wisps as a soft, tender rain exhumed the pent up warmth in the asphalt.

I could do nothing for Abby but pull back her brown hair and pat her on the back. No words of comfort could make the situation any less bleak.

The night was nearly over, though the difference between a.m. and p.m. meant little more than a deepening shadow now. The clouds were a deep golden hue that bathed the world below them in shafts of molten caresses.

Night no longer meant blackness. Instead, the dull glow merely deepened a bit, murky glimmers of dusk and blocked light making the entire world seem like nothing more than a golden reverie.

We hadn’t seen the sun in over a week. The moon might as well have disappeared.

Abby straightened and wiped her mouth dry. I hated myself for letting her suffer so, but there was little happiness left inside either of us to call upon. Instead, I just looked into her wide eyes and saw the wondrous sparkles that shone even in the monotone glow around us. She reached up and grabbed my hand, squeezing it, and I knew that her sickness had passed. She was ready to move on.

Wordlessly, we plodded along the deserted street hand in hand. We were in what used to be a rural area bordering the city, though now locations meant little. Cars lined the streets in oblong positions as if they too were apprehensive about the rain.

There were no others walking the street besides us.

The intersection branched in opposite directions. I waited for Abby’s familiar tug, which this time pulled me left onto a cracked road with dumpsters standing like empty turtle shells along the edges.

As we passed a blue sedan, I saw that the driver was still in the seat. Clutching at Abby’s hand, I quickened my stride.

I still couldn’t keep my eyes from darting to the corpse.

The woman’s eye sockets were hollow. Her skin had decayed into a sick grey shell--bumpy and thin as burnt paper--that was littered with holes. They couldn’t be much larger than bullet holes, and they poked through the husk of her body like a pincushion. The only thing that remained untouched of the caricature was her bright blonde hair: the locks hung in loose ringlets down over her slumped shoulders.

Abby’s hand broke out in a sweat. She tried to pull it loose, but I held tight.

“I can handle it now, Lenny,” she said. Her sweet voice wavered.

“I know, sweetheart. I just...I just hate that you have to see it.” I looked down at her. “And could you at least call me ‘dad’?”

The ten year old’s predilection for calling me by my first name had started the night the world came crashing down. Now I was no longer ‘dad’; I was Lenny.

Little over a week ago, clouds blocked the stars, the moon. By the time I awoke, a tempest had stripped the earth of its living inhabitants.

The TV had flickered, then I caught the broken statement by a voice recording: these chemicals...never meant to...released...seek...

Static followed immediately. Phone calls went unanswered.

In less than five hours, the droves of golden clouds had left the earth gasping in a final, drawn-out breath. Corpses of those once animated lay as a reminder of what used to be. All of them looked like the blonde in the car.

Except for Abby and I.

For some reason my daughter and I had survived with little more than insomnia.

Those were some damn powerful chemicals to extinguish so much in so little time.

My despair had been overwhelming until Abby appeared by my side, took one look out the window, grabbed my hand, and led me out the door. Now we walked the streets to some unseen force. When I questioned Abby about her need to keep walking, she had simply smiled. I see the cracked orchid

, was her response. She saved us

.

Abby’s fingers suddenly turned into vices around my palm, tugging me back to the present. She stumbled and collapsed onto the ground, body rigid, eyes splayed open, mouth moving wordlessly. It was happening again.

I knelt beside my daughter and held her shoulders while she convulsed. Soon she went limp again, though her eyes remained fixed on the golden dome of clouds overhead.

“She sees me,” Abby said in a pitifully weak voice. Her words were halting, like a lost language being chanted aloud. “She wants me to join her. I have to find the cracked orchid!”

Then she moaned and rolled over, curling her ripped jeans up to her chest. I nearly cried out in heartache. My daughter was hurting and I was helpless. Utterly helpless.

If Sheila were here she’d know what to do. She’d take Abby in her arms and rock her slowly, humming a tune and whispering sweet prayers in her ears. My wife had been almost too caring while she was alive.

Then her car was hit by a motorcycle while she was stopped at a red light. The impact knocked her car sideways. The oncoming truck didn’t have time to stop.

Sheila had been enmeshed with the cold metal of the car.

When Abby rolled over there were tears glittering in her eyes. “Don’t you see, Lenny? She wants me to go with her. She’s calling to me.”

“Honey, what are you talking about? Who is ‘she’?”

“I...I don’t know yet. I hear her, and I see...I see a tree blooming in red flowers. It’s so beautiful...” Her voice trailed off and she sat up, yellow blouse wrinkled.

She rose to her feet and pushed her lips into a thin line. For a moment, just a moment, I saw a bit of the boisterous girl she had been, the laugh that could make me cry and the smile that always hugged my heart.

Then it was gone, and the downtrodden mask slid back into place. She grabbed my hand again and we continued walking across the silent world.

Ghostly whispers flew in on the rain. Around us, the air was warm, even musty.

So why was I shivering?

Thursday

We found some cans of soup in a car dealer’s lot, where an open barbeque and dried hot dogs signaled there had been a party. We walked and I watched Abby tip up her can and drain it. I felt a terrible withering of my heart. We seemed to be the last people left alive. Something had taken everyone else’s dreams, their very existence, and snuffed them out, but we were spared.

Abby didn’t deserve this. It would be so much easier if we just stopped, stopped moving, talking, breathing...

I grunted and rubbed my temples. Stop talking like that

, I told myself. As long as Abby’s alive there’s a slice of happiness somewhere in your heart

.

“You alright Lenny?” Abby asked, tossing her can into the gutter.

“Yeah, I’m fine sweetheart. Just...thinking.”

“We’re getting closer,” she said, and began walking.

The day seemed as gloomy as the others, all time lost. The rain had lessened its downpour, but a flimsy veil still lingered.

All around us the golden hues of the new world warred with the shadows lingering in cramped spaces. The trees and grasses hung in brown splatterings, all green stripped away. Nothing was changing.

We passed a few more corpses, sitting on lawn chairs in their bikinis and swim suits like moldy statues. I turned away, put my hands over Abby’s eyes.

She claimed it didn’t bother her anymore.

I didn’t want to believe her. I couldn’t.

Abby led me to a wide four lane road littered with cars. Each of them housed a holey, ashen corpse.

When we walked by a small house on the corner, I heard a noise. It was a scratchy, almost hissing outburst like a hoarse scream. It came behind a blue house, the first sound we’d heard that wasn’t from the weather or us.

I tugged Abby along, feeling her resist but unwilling to let the disturbance go unnoticed. Perhaps it was someone else alive!

Then it rose above the house. At first I thought it was a gust of wind carrying horrendous amounts of dirt, but then I saw that it moved too slowly, too deliberately. It had no shape to it other than black tendrils of opaque fog all flailing like dying snakes, no discernable center or heart other than its concatenating arms and puffs of some kind of insidiously black tar.

It was like watching a miniature cloud come to life above the roof of the house. Its waving black vines had taken on a multitude of subdued colors all whirling inside somehow, like a broken lava lamp bubbling in a frenzy.

My mouth ran dry. The thing was hissing in a horrid way, like a cat choking with a crushed windpipe, and the formless blob was scaling the roof easily.

Straight for us.

Run. We had to run, to escape.

I tugged Abby’s arm. She resisted, and I nearly had to drag her limp body down the lawn and onto the street.

“Lenny, it’s okay!” Abby called. I ignored her. The speed with which the entity soared over the jumbled mess of vehicles was astonishing; it would catch us in minutes. Unless...

I veered left, nearly tripping Abby. My target was a thick grove of pines and bushes bordering a small park. If we tangled ourselves inside the thick foliage, perhaps the apparition couldn’t get us.

That was just a guess.

We ran headlong into the plants, spiny branches whipping at our faces. I felt a pinecone scrape at my forehead, but I didn’t stop until we were inside the thick copse and entangled heartily.

Now we could only wait. In the darkness, Abby’s arms wrapped around my neck; the girl pushed herself against me and I hugged her close as we crouched next to a broken bush.

To feel her warmth, her heaving chest and strong little arms around me gave me the hope I needed to keep breathing.

“It’s okay, Lenny. It only wants me to go with it. I can’t stay here.”

I pondered my daughter’s words and waited for the misty, devilish thing to take us. But it never happened. We waited for a minute, perhaps longer, but nothing took us. Nothing enveloped us.

Just as I felt relief wash over me, Abby’s body went rigid in my arms.

I let her down gently onto a small patch of soil. Abby’s eyes were open, but this time she wasn’t looking at the sky or rolling them about. She was looking at me.

“I see her,” she said. “I can see where she’s pointing. The tree...it’s weeping! But I have to go with her. The cracked orchid...!”

“Abby? Abby, can you hear me?”

Her gaze never left mine, but she was not speaking to me--at least, not directly. “How do we find you? I want to see you. How...?” Then she laughed, such a sudden outburst that I jerked back.

I clutched at her precious body as she slowly swam back to lucidity. “What’s happening to you, Abby? You’re scaring me!”

“I know what we have to do now, Lenny. I know who she is, but...but I have to go with her.”

No words could answer the girl. Was she really suggesting that someone was talking to her? That she was leading me somewhere away from all this? I could only wring my hands in perplexed agony as Abby took my hand and led me back out into the dome of dimming gold.

Sometime later, as the scenery darkened with the advent of dusk, I saw movement. I thought it was the creature at first, but then I saw that it was a person--actually, two people walking in tandem, one tall and the other short.

Real, living people.

Someone else alive. I was going to call out but Abby spoke first.

“Don’t worry, Lenny. They’re going the same place we are. We’re being led.”

“And where are we going, Abby? For God’s sake, where the hell could we possibly be going in this...this place?”

The ten year old didn’t respond for a moment, but continued her slow tramp through the street. The people had disappeared around a corner, our chance to catch them gone.

Then Abby’s hand gave mine a squeeze. “We’re going to find Mommy’s heart.”

Friday

I woke from a dream that left me drenched in sweat. Abby was standing over me, eyebrows raised expectantly.

“We’re almost there. She’s so close!” Then she turned and walked away. Her painful visions left me flummoxed.

But what is reality anymore

? I thought sourly to myself as I walked after Abby. The world is dying and somehow Abby acts like she knows what’s happening

. A part of me wished her visions were actually leading us to a grand place, where the world was untouched by this devastating event.

Here in the pitiful cavity of the world, the streets narrowed and began to turn into dirt; we were leaving the city behind. The rain had dissipated sometime in the night, its wake leaving a humid stench of wet leaves and putrefying food.

We left the street and clomped through grass down a long, sloping hill that opened into a fenced off area of lush trees, vines, and shrubs. It looked strikingly familiar, but I couldn’t place it.

Abby quickened her pace and soon we painted our legs with mud and dew. The bottom arrived quickly; the fence looming above us.

“She’s here,” the girl said. Abby ran ahead and climbed half the fence before I reached her. Not bothering to question her, I scaled the fence and caught up to Abby. She was distracted; she didn’t seem to care that I was with her at all.

The trees bathed us in shadow, the overhanging mat of clouds unseen. The air in the midst of such tangled flora was stifling.

Then, from somewhere to the right, a pair of people emerged from the undergrowth as well. It was a woman in her mid thirties at least, flanked by a young boy with spiky red hair and copious freckles. Both of them were caked in mud and twigs, their faces drooped in exhaustion.

But they were real. The urge to sink at their feet and praise the heavens was strong as Abby only glanced over at them. The woman saw me.

“Who...who are you?” she asked. Sweet Jesus, I’d underestimated the magnificence of another human voice besides mine and Abby’s!

“I’m...I’m Lenny Harelson. That’s...that’s...”

“Abby,” my daughter finished for me.

“I’m Audra, and this is my son Zak. He’s...leading me somewhere.”

She fell silent. I didn’t bother to ask if her kid had been having visions.

I turned back around only to emerge into a large clearing with hundreds of pale, hard stones festooning the ground. We were in a cemetery.

At the head of the gravestones grew a massive Weeping Willow. In the pale shafts of light from the clouds, the tree’s long drooping leaves were burnished in silvery dew. But what caught my eye was the red flowers that poked out between the leaves from vines that spiraled up the trunk’s length.

A tree blooming in red flowers.

A tree that was weeping.

My skin turned to gooseflesh as I gaped down at Abby. The girl was eyeing the tree with the joy of a favorite Christmas present.

I realized we were definitely not alone. Four other duos had arrived silently, all adults with a child in tow. We stood now in a broken semicircle around the expansive cemetery and Weeping Willow like flies drawn to a light.

“What is happening?” I whispered to Abby. The girl’s head rolled towards me.

“She’s here!” Abby said. “We’ve found her. Do you see the cracked orchid, Dad? Can you see it?”

My heart flipped as she called me ‘Dad’ instead of ‘Lenny’.

Abby reached up and gripped my arm. “Can you see it now?

”

Then I looked. There, standing tall behind a wide gravestone was a large orchid, flowers blooming and haloing its petals. Down the center of the red flower was a thin line that nearly cut the flower in half; only a tiny section at the top remained intact. The rest was cut as cleanly as with a knife, down the stem and all.

A cracked orchid.

Jesus Christ, it was real.

Every child in the clearing seemed to be in some kind of trance, their movements slow.

A familiar, stifled hiss rose from the ground in front of us. My skin broke out in a heavy lather as the black entity rose from the very earth itself, convulsing and gurgling like it was the intestine of some awful creature.

Impossibly, thin membranes of flesh began to appear out of the void, hazy images like ripped marionettes being wheeled towards us from some hellish destination beyond. Soon the black, twisting thing

was gone, replaced by floating, slightly translucent bodies--at least four of them, all in an ebbing circle.

It was as if we were in the presence of dead disinterred.

Abby was tugging at my arm. “We’ve found her heart, Dad. Can’t you see her? She’s here!”

When I glanced at the hovering figures, I saw that one of them was Sheila. Distorted into patchy wisps, her long nose and bright red hair were still recognizable. I was staring straight at her.

My dead wife was staring at me.

Now I remembered why the cemetery looked familiar: we had buried Sheila here. In the cascade of the new world, I had missed the recognizable shrubbery until it was too late.

“She’s calling to me,” Abby exclaimed with a smile. “She wants me to go with her. It’s so beautiful, Dad!”

I was having a hard time staying alert. My heart jackhammered. “Abby? Is Mommy talking to you?”

“Yes! I told you that she was calling to me. She’s been calling me since the world ended. It was Mommy who saved us, Dad. She saved us! Now she says...she says that it’s time for me to go with her.”

I realized I was crying as I clutched Abby’s hand. “Honey, where is she taking you?”

“Away from here. She says I found the cracked orchid, and now she can take me away from this world, somewhere...safe.”

Around the clearing I could hear gasps and other hushed conversations. I knew the entity still exposed its ghosts for us to see, but I could look at nothing except my daughter’s wide, glittering eyes.

Sheila was speaking to her.

So real. So unutterably real. It wasn’t possible. And yet it was happening right in front of me.

“Mommy wants me to tell you that...she still loves you.” Then Abby jerked her head up, breathing hard. “I have to go now, Dad. She’s calling to me.”

“Abby, help me to understand! How is this possible

?”

“I...I don’t know. All I know is that if I don’t go with her now, I won’t be able to anymore. She says that...that she can only take me.”

I thought of the past week--alone, hungry, wet and shivering most of the time. The world had vanished, the only remnants of the past residing in our memories. I wanted Abby here--God, I wanted her with me so bad!--but another part of me wanted to free her from this hell.

When my eyes fixed once more on the silent, floating ghost of my wife’s likeness, I saw that the face had changed: there was a trace of a smile on the beautiful specter. The very same smile I saw every day when Sheila was alive.

Abby hugged me tight, and I bent down. She put her forehead against mine. Our eyes met. In that moment, the world melted away. It was just her and me, father and daughter.

“I’ll come back for you,” she whispered, “but I have to go now. I...I love you.”

Then she trembled and collapsed into me, limp. Vaguely, I heard a scream from one of the others in the clearing, but I couldn’t be bothered with it. Abby was gone. She was lying there, lifeless.

When I managed to look up I saw the ghostly figures disappear. One instant they were there, and then they winked themselves out of existence. I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t focus on anything. How could the world be crashing down around me like this? Can it be real?

When I came out of my stupor, people were huddled around me. I rose to my feet on shaky legs. Everyone had tear-stained faces, but for some reason we were all smiling.

“They’re safe,” a woman said. “I don’t know how, but I know they’re safe.”

Everyone nodded their astonished agreement. I found myself nodding as well without really knowing why.

Beyond

I walk the unending surface of the world destroyed, but I am not alone. I am joined by those who survived, others who were protected by the gripping love of those passed on. We share a bond not sewn by words or deeds but by unspeakable tragedy and unfulfilled dreams.

A devastating, expansive chemical radiation rolled over our planet, killing as it went. Now we search for those left alive amidst the tangled debris and ashen, hole-scarred corpses.

Our children are gone now. They led us to the place where their loved ones called them, and they left on unfamiliar wings to a place beyond our world.

I don’t fully understand it all. I don’t think I ever will.

The only thing to do is move forward, try and make some semblance of life here in this barren place. Perhaps one day the clouds will leave. Perhaps one day the sun will warm our skin. Until then, we must survive.

I am often plagued by nightmares and heart-wrenching anguish, but when I see that terrible black cloud or the shriveled valleys and fields, I also see Abby’s smile, her breathtaking eyes. I remember my wife’s beckoning features as she somehow reached across time and death to grant our daughter a reprieve from this suffering.

I know one day they’ll come for me. One day I’ll see them. I know that somewhere under this veil of uncertainty, my own cracked orchid calls to me.

One day I’ll find it.

Impressum

Tag der Veröffentlichung: 20.05.2011

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