Florian squinted through blurred lashes: grey glare of fields, stalktops, sky, a flock of birds turning in one black mass. He grew dizzy immediately.
After crawling with his eyes closed for a long time, Florian cleared the field and found himself on hard flat mud. When it turned rough to the touch, the boy opened his eyes and immediately recognized the ground beneath him. To his right, the path led to the old man and the girl, but also to his father who was waiting patiently for Florian’s return so he could drag him by the hair down the front steps, bones clacking on the stone, and out into the courtyard where he would wrap a burlap sack around the boy’s head and beat him with a piece of plywood.
No, he turned left instead and continued along the road, limping upright now. To his right soon appeared the rusted husk of a car propped on four cinder blocks, bare axles exposed. Detritus strewn in piles, exploded garbage bags flapping lightly in the breeze. Beyond this disarray lay a house with broken windows, through which Florian could see the spectral contours of dust-covered furniture. The door was wedged slightly off its hinges and he limped towards it.
Lea’s left foot squelched into the carpet and her right foot stayed hovering above the black stain. Not two wet feet, please no. Already the left one was slippery and cold, and she pulled it to her nose with both hands. Piss. She used the sheet to wipe it dry, careful to dry between each toe, and lay flat on her belly so she could hang off the bed and take a look, but she already knew what had happened. The blue milk jug had overturned, capsized by the old man in his rush to belt Florian. And now the boy was gone. He had left her alone in the farmhouse with nobody to care for. If Florian returned she would not even look at him. This she swore to herself. Lea stepped from the bed and put both feet down in the piss and walked right through it to find Christophe.
The remaining bits of window-glass were made from the fragmented flesh of some grey animal and they shifted as the boy approached the door. Florian stopped in his tracks to apprehend this new form of life. The stillness of his own pale skin reflected back to him in the dusty glass, frozen there along with his heartbeat. When he moved again so did the images. He repeated this several times until he finally understood that no harm would befall him. The fragments were only the manifold phantoms of light that followed every being, shining back from glass, metal, and water, dimmed only by whatever murky vessel harbored them.
The door swung easy on its hinges but Florian struggled nonetheless to push it open, so weak he had become. The air inside the house was warm and Florian shivered as his body began to adjust, eyes darting around the room to discern the menacing shape of his father, not on the moldy sofa, soft and warm, nor in the doorway to the kitchen, leaning against the jamb, holding a knife, nor crouching somehow beneath the table with its rotten wood and torn plastic tablecloth in red and white checkers. His eyes returned to each place a second time. Nothing. A single red can stood atop the blackened fireplace mantel. Florian had seen this can before. He knew it contained a rough sweetness, if he could only pry it open.
Heavy, it slipped from Florian’s grasp and fell to the floor where it rolled several times, collecting ants and flattening dust motes before coming to rest against a table leg. The boy kneeled and reached again for the can, this time careful to hold it tightly as he struggled with the metal tab. He succeeded in wedging a fingernail beneath it and felt the sudden spray of spume as the can exploded open. He drew this new chaos to his lips and with great difficulty sucked from it, spilling a good part down his naked body, so impatient was he to quench his thirst and hunger. When no liquid remained in the can, Florian turned it over in his hands and licked the outside, which tasted of metal and dust. He then discarded the useless vessel and used his hands to wipe the sticky sugar from his body and licked his fingers until they no longer tasted sweet. Finally he pressed his tongue to the floor to lap whatever had spattered there in the dust.
For a long time Florian remained on the floor of the abandoned house, staring at the ceiling as his body awakened. His bones rushed with cool liquid and the boy could feel the bottom of his stomach sliding sweetly towards his chest. Then a swallow darted across the cracked yellow ceiling and disappeared into the ceiling lamp. Florian heard the chirping of baby birds emanating from the concealed nest.
The boy used a chair to climb onto the rickety table, struggling to keep his balance, giddy, and he stood there jumping and flailing his arms, but failing to swat the lamp, until he abandoned this approach and climbed back down to the floor. He picked up the red can and threw it at the nest, but it bounced harmlessly off the sanded glass. Too light. He returned to the garden where he collected stones from the wasted lawn and returned to the house, leaving three stones on the sofa, squinting his eyes and taking aim at the lamp with a fourth. It chipped the side of the glass bowl and the mother bird shot out from the lamp and disappeared through the broken window. Florian could hear the babies chirping wildly now. He missed with the second stone as well and it thumped against the ceiling, leaving a mark and clattering off a commode on its way down.
It was with the third stone that the boy finally succeeded in shattering the lamp. Thick glass rained about him and one of the smaller pieces nicked his shoulder, leaving a shallow wound Florian did not even notice.
It was in death that his wife showed herself completely. Loathsome creature burst open and covered in bruises, at my hands, no, at their hands. Loathe the way your mouth makes noises as you eat, the space you employ for breathing, the things assembled into your lifeless shape. Of course you resisted, of course they were the weak ones, even in death you vanquished us, even as we choked the last bit of life from your eyes. I am a man of the men who did the things that we did to this earth. I am the hand that washes the fist. What god made this man. What god made this coward. Who is the god of vermin, the god of bacteria. Who makes the bloodthirsty and who makes the blood they thirst for. Who makes the endless night in which we forget. Who makes the fruit that rots on the branch. From the tumor to the atom bomb, we will be connecting.
Christophe sat in the car, seatback up, reading something russian translated long ago into french. His eyes were young and they still shone a pale blue as they swept the page from left to right. It reeked of burnt tobacco. She had been smoking again. He would not bring it up. There was no point. She would only lie to him. It was cold inside the car, windows steamed white, winter cityscape a dim blear of faded turquoise, no heating, no motor running, no waste whatsoever if he could avoid it. His wife was inside the unremarkable building, speaking to some civil servant, or waiting without dignity in one of the plastic chairs cemented to a grid, because that is how things are now, Christophe thought, we are beyond redress as a people. So he waited in the car, reading his book and not listening to the radio. Even the classical station had become infected with advertising designed to interest a store owner of his age, a lover of classical music, a man with a wife but no children, somebody the machines had determined to be a devotee of leisure and culture in his free time. They could not have been more wrong. Christophe was no man of leisure, no idle hand, and he did not even think much about music. He owned four compact discs, that was all, and he listened to them once a week at most. Sometimes when he was alone in the car, running errands such as this, he might find himself listening to the classical music station, but this was absent of mind.