“The sky, she not die easy. She still dying. Archangel, writhing in her dance upon the high.
“She was still roaring and afire, and these waterfalls of liquid heat were washing their way over me.
“Live cables were sparking somewhere at the edge of sight, like some monstrous and ogrish welder was working his way through the neighborhood and getting caught up in telephone poles and shattered foundations everywhere. Everywhere.
“Flashes at the edges of once-my-basement, the heart of all that burning hollow, like what? Like when you’re watching one of those old science movies in school, and the projector breaks, and the faces freeze mid-smile and then all melt apart to shock-white right in front of you.
“That’s what it was like. That was everything.
“I saw a burning dog fall into once-my-basement. I smelt it, too. It was making a horrible sound, a squealing, ’til I realized what it was. Already dead. That was just the sound of its insides, baking and popping. Bubbling up out of its stomach which was just a burnt-out hole.”
“Right. Let’s go again.
“See, I didn’t understand what I was looking at once I came to again. There was no grief, no weeping, only a little pain. Just this confusion, this terrified wonderment of a newborn orphan trying to make sense of the Hell, the wilderness and the wasteland.
“Like being born in a furnace, all it was. Like trying to understand.
“I was gazing up through rafters and debris angled all atop of me. Powder was trickling down, cement and dirt and crystallized blood and what I later realized was hoverin’ chips of bone. Ashes. Make you want to stick out your tongue like a kid ’til you realize what it was, so stupid and so beautiful.
“People, it was raining burning scraps of people on my face.
“I sat up somehow, somehow I pushed all this mess of paneling and cinderblock and tire-shit off of me and I looked around. Like some idiot waking up in some Cocteau movie, you know him? What? Oh, French, his stuff was good. Too cultured for me to know. But Jenny, oh she loved him. Funny how movie dates turn out when you in love.
“Yeah, like a Cocteau actor, see. Knowing he’s in some surreal place that’s filled up with evil clowns or something. I expected stupid music at any moment, but all I could hear was the raging of the firestorm.
“And oh, the legion, the dying. The screaming. Everyone was still burning, everyone in hiding. It takes awhile when you all protected, for the fire-tongue to find you.
“All around me, my own house — Jenny’s house, mercy — thirty years paid, our beloved home had fallen in all around the basement line. Like a collapsed cake, a perfect rectangle.
“I don’t know how else to say it. Funny thing about that basement, you know those are rare in Denver-land because of the shifting sediment, but I chose good land way back when and that basement, we had a good one.
“But it required more foundation to be used as a living space, you understand? Well, my daughter and I, we’d built all that. Bonded over that for years and hauling lumber and burning our hands on pulley ropes and bitching up a storm at each other, daddy your fault, nope was your fault girl. You want a whoopin’? Ha! Paul Harvey and Dick Clark and Casey Kasem on the radio, good times. Yeah.
“Never again.
“We built that all up in the center so that my woodshop was like its own concrete control room in the heart of it all, with sound-dampening and such. Surrounded by a bigger room that was all the rest of the basement, see? Shell within a shell. Used to be where the water heater and the furnace were, that was a project let me tell you.
“Yeah, old house, damn good house. Water and heat got moved out safer a second time by contractors, out to the dry southwest corner when we renovated in ’02. And why is all this important?
“I do believe my daughter’s work, our life’s love and our labor, that’s all to only save me. There’s almost no one, Sophie. Every one survival is a miracle.
“Or curse.
“Believe me, I saw no one dead or living intact as I myself was. Anywhere, anywhere, until I got up to west of Black Hawk. Everyone else in Littleton, Denver and all the rest, millions all. All had been shattered and broken and mutilated and only finished off then by the mercy of the burning, but not me.
“No. Do believe I was made to suffer. You write that down later, I don’t care. S’all right. I live on so with pride, I do in the name of love. I live so that all those who are gone who I remember, they live on inside of me.
“I am the ship of all the loved ones I have lost. I’m a sinner but I done right. I sail on, I suffer well.
“I give them to you, Sophie. Never let them go. I give you every soul, and to you in my heart I hold. You listen and you receive them, to you I give these souls who were my people. Every one.”
“Well, that ol’ basement room did save me. But the saw blade had crashed down about six inches over my head and was buried in what was left of my northwest corner. How I stood up around that blade, I have no idea.
“But that, that’s how I knew Denver had gotten its closest bomb hit from the southeast. I knew I needed to go west, but only that glimpse of Black Hawk up above before the almost-blinding had given me any hope.
“If anything up the mountains had survived, Black Hawk’s all it was.
“Getting there without being burned, oh, now that was the tricky thing. That’s a story for tomorrow in the even, Mrs. S.-G., if I don’t die tonight.
“Hey, now. You so like my daughter, Lucille. No. You listen to me, I’m going to tell you as you are.
“People see you cold, don’t they? They see you cruel, spoiled. But me, I see the secret, the sweetest heart of you. You cold because you care too much and you hide it all away. Like you bitter, like it hurt too much to love the world.
“I understand. You distant in yourself, because you hurt, because you can’t fix everything so every time you love, you love in secret. Your Tom. Your Lacie-love.
“Don’t you cry, Mrs. S.-G. Oh, Sophie. See, I call you Sophie even though it pains me as a gentleman to do so.
“Yeah, there’s my smile. Almost, even a good one. There we go.
“It’s all right… Sophie. For now, I can. I can promise you. I promise I won’t leave you, good Lord willing.
“Pray, I know you don’t pray but pray with me. May we have a little time.”
(Having followed over multiple days, the above session continues after approximately three hours. Sophie recorded a time-index here, perhaps indicating an accidental erasure in the record. A slight portion of the transcript is blank, implying some seconds of material were over-recorded or otherwise lost.)
“—(M)atter now? No?
“No more, no more cutting now. I need to talk. See, yeah that’s just it. You taking this? No matter after Mabelie, I just thought you wanted my words for when I’m gone.
“All right, no more about the kids. No more of that. I’m sorry.
“No. I can’t sleep ’til I’m done telling you.
“I was in that shattered room with the outer basement all around me. And my little shop door, just paneling painted white, that was all blackened shrapnel, splinters all. The door had burned off, hinges and almost melted.
“Looking out, I saw Jenny’s house had collapsed in that ring down all around me. There was much screaming still, the others all trapped and dying up and out there, I just could not hear myself.