conte [issue two - Intro to Narrative]

I say these words to the circle of pale blank familiar faces looking back at me from the shadows of my basement, the only light coming from the candles burning on top of the dead washing machine and it is barely enough to penetrate those shadows. My words seem too small, again, and their delivery too flat, too rehearsed.

I look again at my friends but one by one the shadows claim them, dragging them out of sight, and my voice stalls. I’ve practiced this for what feels like years but it’s only been seven months.

Seven months and I still don’t understand. Not really.

Before I blow the candles out, I look at Megan. She’s there, in the corner, her eyes looking back at me and the rage behind them is almost tangible. I feel my heart start to race and my hands are shaking again. I quickly kill the fires and try not to run to the stairs. As I’m climbing the stairs, I hear Megan’s chains rattle and I swear I can hear that awful sound of her teeth hammering against each other.

I move as easily as my nerves allow to the top of the stairs where I close and bolt the door behind me. My body has pressed itself against the door, my palms, my chest, my right cheek all one with the wood while my lungs play catch-up and my armpits bleed sweat.

On the way to the living room, I stop by the front door and peek out its small window.

There is nothing to see.

I lie down on the couch and it takes me a long time to fall asleep.

On the other side of the creek, Barry should be asleep in one of the two upstairs rooms of his house while Arnold should be outside on patrol, walking his beat (which probably means he’s around back burning a joint).

Arnold moved in with Barry seven months ago. They tried to get me and Nathan to move in too, but Nathan keeps thinking that the phones are going to start working again any minute now and he wants to be beside his when they do. Nathan has a son in Texas and a daughter and her family in Arkansas.

I acted stubborn, which, in a way wasn’t really an act. I went on about how nothing would make me give up my house and I just repeated variations on that theme until they pretty much eased up.

And there’s still Mort, of course, but Mort isn’t really one of us so, you know, whatever.

It’s five-thirty in the morning and I’m drinking cold coffee out of a dirty cup, staring out my kitchen window at the distant shadow that is Barry’s house. As soon as I woke up, I checked the basement door, took a leak, checked the other entryways, and then thought long and hard about shooting myself.

We were going to be a family.

She stood here, in front of the sink, and asked me to pick out my top two favorite baby names. Man, that seems like yesterday.

Twins. Dig that. First time out.

I sat at the table after I came in here this morning and I wanted to die. I closed my eyes, trying to summon up the courage to make it happen, but instead I summoned only the memories of Dina and of seeing Lon burning up.

I sip at the coffee as though it were scalding and let my eyes drift across the root of my field of vision and then into the sky. I don’t want to think I’ll never smell breakfast again. I am starting to believe, though, that our new world could only smell of cold coffee, shotguns, and stale cigarettes if we let it.

I am starting to believe a lot of things, but none of us are experts yet. I guess I understand as much as anyone does, except maybe for Mort. Hell, it still surprises me that daylight doesn’t change anything and it’s been seven whole months now.

Seven months. As far as I’m concerned, it happened June nineteenth, but I may be off by a day or two for anywhere else it might have happened. June nineteenth is when it happened here.

The way Mort explains it, during the eighties, America and the Soviets went into this kind of crazy overtime of the Cold War – a sudden death match which took the form of a military spending staredown. Both countries went nuts trying to out arm the other both in size of arsenal and in diversity. Ronald Reagan initiated a Star Wars program, sending satellites into orbit - floating machine gun turrets for the new space age, designed to cosmically protect America and her dream from both the Russian bear and, oddly enough, from space aliens. (I’m not sure I believe that last part; Mort’s an odd old goat.) We had heard about all that back then, or we hadn’t, and we liked it or we didn’t, and that was pretty much that. We heard about a network of satellites being a missile defense system and we pictured big cannons in space because we were children. We were children and it turned out that there was more up there than we ever bargained for.