By Jake Nuttall

In a famine-stricken alternate Earth, a teenage mushroom farmer enters a local university and confronts substance abuse, despair, and the consuming totality of young love as he searches for a future worth surviving.

Table of Contents

Chapter I: Unwelcome Renaissance

The curtains lift from the center and pull upward and outward in each direction, an open smile. Beyond it, our stage is a dusty plain on a beige horizon, sun-bleached against a burning, spotlight sun. A town, threadbare and decrepit, stands at the edge of an endless expanse of waste, a desert trimmed in scrub brush and brittle, thirsty life. This is THE FALLOW, where THE BOY was born and raised, where he toils on a farm of sparse rows of little knobby stalks that poke from the dirt like fingers of the dead. These are the mushrooms—rotloaf, amanita infirmis, minimally nutritious but edible—the only crop that grows consistently anymore in the Western Territories, on the ruined edge of a land that had once been America.

Now here’s the boy, 17, Sam Delson, a slim and dark youth, filthy in dirty overalls, his messy hair sweat-pasted to his forehead. He leans on a hoe and is lost in tormented thought. Before him festers a field half-covered in fertilizer. The stench is profuse.

From THE FARMHOUSE porch, THE MOTHER calls. She is a small skeleton, a mousy woman whose bones poke through her homespun.

Mother: Sam! Come here for a minute, please. I need to talk to you about something.

Sam says nothing but drops the hoe, leaves the field of shit behind, and steps carefully around his budding crop. He approaches his mother. The farmhouse leans.

Mother: There’s my man. How’s the south field?

Sam: Got about an inch, same as last week.

Mother. Yikes.

Sam: Yeah.

Mother: But I know you’re doing everything you can. Putting those man skills to the test.

Sam: Ma—

Mother: But that’s what I’ve been meaning to talk to you about. Your father sent some money for you. For your education.

Sam: My education?

Mother: A means to get skills and opportunities away from The Fallow.

Sam: But—

Mother: Don’t worry about the farm. We can let it go for a season. Your father and I have seen to that, so don’t you even worry. We want you to have a life outside of this place.

Sam: (laughs) A life outside of this place… Look, ma, I’m not even sure there is such a thing. Won’t you need help here? What will you eat?

Mother: I can take care of myself, Sam.

Sam: Course. But what’s the point of an education if we can’t eat?

Mother: That is the point. With an education, you can do real good—maybe help out food in other mouths, too. The things your father’s team is doing off the coast—

Sam: And how much has it helped us, huh?

Mother: Sam, he just sent us money! He sent you money!

Sam: I don’t want his money, and I don’t want the university.

Mother: I’ve already paid your tuition.

There is a silent beat. Sam is crestfallen. He looks back at his field of shit.

Sam: What if it doesn’t help?

Mother: Then it’s worth a shot. You are worth a shot, Sam. This isn’t all there is to life.

Sam: Isn’t it?

Pain slaps across his mother’s face as though he has struck her. She recognizes the truth in what he’s said.

Mother: Your train leaves the twenty-fourth.

Sam: Great.

Sam takes his leave, walking back through the field. But he doesn’t return to his work. The boy moves through the dusty patchwork to a rise that flanks the property, a suggestion of a hill overlooking the south side of the house. Sam climbs, seeking the privacy of the single remaining tree on the grounds, a dead and nearly petrified thing of thin, gnarled brambles and reaching finger-like branches. It makes only the slightest movement in the hot fart of summer wind.

The boy’s boots leave soft impressions in the dust as he rises. There, at the top of the hill overlooking the farm, is a small plateau. It is here the dead live, marked by that petrified tree and a carefully maintained patch of bare earth.

Growing from that patch beneath a meticulously carved sandstone plaque his father spent weeks on, is a mushroom the color of fire and crimson. Perfect, vibrant, and alive.

Sam: Wanna trade places?

The only answer is the scream of a train whistle.

Shapes and colors hardly distinguish themselves from the spectrum of brown.

People. People, people, people.

They seemed to grow upon his awareness like a tumor, bulbous, choking his blood flow, his breathing. God. Fuck people. They all moved around him, inside their own heads. He wondered what a better world it would be if everyone existed only in their own heads. Or would it? Isn’t that how he lived now?

Speckled squares of scuffed white framed everything ahead of him. He tried to keep his feet within the boxes without making his movement awkward, but it was impossible. The worn heels of his boots cut the cracks, broke his mother’s back.

Fuck. What would she do, his mother? What the fuck would she do?

She might have been screaming for help alone in that house right as he walked. She was so terrifyingly skinny. A skeleton in dirty canvas and a flowery blouse.

I should be there, he thought; I should be there now.

His heart was beating too fast. It felt like saline in his veins. It made him nauseous and sick and hateful. Fuck people. They were too close to him. He just wanted to find his platform and get out of here. Sail out forever on a train-track sea and forget the whole world existed.

The station was massive. The walls ended in a glass-paneled ceiling of refracted rainbows and the dirty yellow air choking Thomasville Station. He felt like an ant. He was getting warm, unnaturally warm from those huge skylights that baked this ugly oven of brown brick. In a few hours the sun would be at its zenith and the clogged air of the station would be stifling, stinking of bodies and breath and frantic, useless movement.

The Earth never stops moving nor does the life on top of it, though Sam Delson longed for it sometimes. The quiet. The cessation of movement. He believed he could almost feel it when he focused hard enough or slept deeply enough.

He was a hazy black shape in the diorama of this station, a cardboard box of paper people. Their mouths twitched oddly and their eyes shifted and they would not look at each other or anything, only forward, searching for their platform their destination exactly as he did, and he was no different at all from any of them and yet the raw cut-out wrongness inside his stomach told him otherwise, told him truth, told him, “One of these things is not like the others.” One of these things is you. And he could only breathe in short little spurts through his nostrils, which burned his lungs for want of more. There wasn’t more; the others were using it all. Sucking it up through slack jaws. They could take it all. Somehow they were capable of taking it all. And they could have it. He didn’t even want it. He wanted to stop consuming. He wanted to stop consuming everything because there was so little left to consume and he didn’t think he was worth it.

Let them take it. Let them use it all, and he’d be gone before he had to watch the slow collapse of what had not collapsed already.

But really, what would his mother do without him? True, she could handle the labor, but what if something happened? The only reason Sam could leave at all was that he knew she was too selfless to let him stay. She’d played the trump card, paying his tuition. Refusing to go would mean turning his back on her.

Platform 6A. Not yet. Further on, following the trains of people to their trains, pistons, wheels, legs, turning, spewing smoke breath, and he spewed thoughts into the dim bubble of his consciousness from which he could not escape.

The platforms were trenches in the brick, framed by columns and loitering, gaping people, waiting with bags, luggage, even racks of clothes or goods, escorted to trade in nearby towns and villages. He’d done the same before, taken crates of the freshly harvested fungus to see if he could get better prices in Winslow or Carrington than he could in The Fallow, where hopeless farmers were more prevalent and less successful. By the time he’d reached Carrington and went to retrieve his goods from the baggage retrieval, they’d vanished. He didn’t know what he’d expected. Thievery was more common an occurrence than eating, depending on where you were in the Western Territories.

A droning scream of metal-on-metal brought a great tube with jagged blotches of rust and long white gashes into the station, where it stopped on the opposite side of the tracks. There, it came eerily close to another similarly damaged monster. The people waiting in a line beneath the corresponding archway became suddenly lively and hurried, gathering their things and congregating even closer to each other. A rectangular door screeched open, and a man in a flat cap bounced out, absently scanning a paper and jostling away.

Sam found the giant clock fastened into the brick just below the riotous glare of the glass ceiling. The fat hand rested an inch past eleven. The thinner one moved ponderously towards four.

Why had he arrived so early? Why was he so horribly anxious about arriving late? Would it really have been so bad if he missed it?

Yes, he told himself. It would have ruined everything. But going would ruin everything, too. This was happening now. He hadn’t wanted it, but he had let it happen. Passivity warrants ruination. It was weakness. Now he could go nowhere but to this train over whose direction he had no control.

Platform 6B. The sign was big and the letters were black and peeling like every other drop of paint in this huge brick hotbox. He stepped towards the archway beside the empty tracks, where rows of thin plastic chairs waited, two or three occupied. He approached, threw the bulging bag from his shoulders beneath the final and closest chair at the end of the second row, and sat down. His back was to the rails. He wouldn’t see the train coming and thought it was better that way. More innocent. Turning away from its coming was a denial of free will.

Someone else is doing this, not me, he thought.

But no one else was there when he looked up at the great glass glare. No puppet pulling strings, no god, no man, no father, no president, king, or governor. Only an empty, invisible strand that connected his life to the universe. He closed his eyes to will it away, but it was futile. He gave it up after a single mental shove.

An old woman in a wide black hat flipped through a deck of cards with fingerless gloves. Sam Delson watched the wrinkled tips of her fingers bend the paper, changing them, shapes, numbers, colors flying in a long musical phfffft. He closed his eyes on a Three of Hearts and focused on it, letting the red grow into his eyelids and stretch into his brain till it faded into the orange burn of sunlight, streaming in through the windows.

If he fell asleep and missed his train, that would not be free will either.

The old woman three seats to his left continued to flit through the cards, the shifting noise an incremental sound like a beat, and he thought his heart matched pace with that shuffle, pumping his blood through his brain at the same speed till the rhythms were indistinguishable.

Barren hilltop.

Crimson droplet in a brown sea.

Hair, her hair, flowing.

Shapes and shadows, and he was tilling the earth, pulling, straining, his muscles screaming for end, for cessation, for something other than this constant shuffling, this phfffft, this noise that he’d become. He didn’t like it. Was so deeply exhausted by it.

The heavy orange-yellow spotlight was pulling over the stage, casting such strange images in its shadows. He was at the edge, and then the woman stopped.

Sam’s eyes opened instantly, and he felt the grind, the reverberation in his seat, the arrival, long before he saw it. He didn’t want to see it; he wanted to deny his fate, but his neck refused him, and the long rusty centipede of a train rode in on the wind.

The allusion to freedom was so ironic, Sam grinned. Becoming immediately aware of the lunatic look, he tore it from his face. But the old woman had seen it; she must’ve thought he was happy about the appearance of the train and smiled back in Sam’s direction.

It was uncomfortable, and Sam avoided eye contact. He gathered his bag and stood.

He stood in the already-formed line of people beneath a diversity of hats. He ran his fingers through his own bare head of hair in discomfort. He heard the old woman grunt into place behind him.

There was a symphony of grinding metal, opening doors and slowing pistons, and the burgundy boy stepped out, his face a wreck of red acme and purple pockmarks so deep his cheeks appeared gaunt and bruised. He smiled, meeting no one’s eyes. Stood with his hands behind his back and clapped his heels. The motion forced Sam’s eyes to the boy’s boots, two glittering tar bombs of shoe polish cutting holes in the earth to the void beyond it. But if his face looked like that, Sam thought he would make a spectacle of his shoes as well. Distract the eye.

Sam dug in his pocket for the wrinkled stub of ticket, hoping his nervous molestation of the paper would not have faded the words too harshly. Or perhaps he hoped that it would have faded too much, and he would have been sent home through no real fault of his own. Fate.

He looked at the ticket. The words: Departure 11:35 – Destination: University of Orion Station, Plato Square, Orion, West Oreida. Black as the boy’s boots.

“Going off to the university?”

He turned. The old woman grinned at him with through a skinny, wrinkled, eagle’s face. Her eyes were pale blue and clouded with scarlet veins.

“Yeah, yes, I am.”

“How exciting.”

The dangling lines of her furrowed smile formed an extra face beneath her, and the intent that permeated both faces was unsettlingly hopeful. Sam smiled back at her kindness and hoped she would leave off at that. The burgundy boy with the ruined face made a perfunctory gesture toward the clock followed by a small, self-important smirk. Sam moved his hands out front and crossed them there.

“I miss my school days,” said the old woman. He thought he heard the shuffle of the cards once more.

He was in the classroom, chalk screeching out lines, shapes, words on the blackboard, and none of it meant anything, it was all one big noisy jumble from where he sat in the middle-left row, with his chin resting on his hand and his eyes vacant if not drooping. There were others surrounding him, but they were all one color—brown like The Fallow—and he could not distinguish them.

“Now boarding.”

His palms were sweating where they held the straps of his encumbered bag to his chest.

We have free will. Phffft, but Sam Delson was being shuffled into the train, up the step, through the door, the green peeling heavy upholstery, the dank stench of decay and leather and rot and the sharp metallic of steel and rust.

He was going. He was leaving. This was it and he had not stopped it. Too late. The bird in the sink. He could not stop it.

The burgundy boy smiled as he took Sam’s ticket, and Sam did not meet his eye but looked only at his shoe.

“Have you ridden before?” the old lady said, surrounding him.

“Once.”

The floor felt thin through the runner, a sheet of tin. The seats had high backs and were ubiquitously green, set opposite each other in little booths. Ideally he could get one all to himself; hardly any passengers were boarding, and many had already taken seats for themselves, congregating in little noisy groups that spoke ceaselessly but hardly looked at each other. He didn’t recognize anyone from The Fallow; the other passengers more likely coming from Yellowleaf or Coldwater a few miles out, where the soil was better for brown beans and the hard peas that were nearly as common as dirt and tasted the same.

Everyone wore a hat.

He followed the open bridge between cars to an entirely empty cab. The deep perfume of musty decay was stronger here. He walked the car to its opposite end and threw his bag beneath the window seat of the second booth from the door to crawl in and notice the old woman had followed him here, as well as others who had taken seats further up. Her wide black hat sank into the booth opposite him, and he felt a moderate pull of relief. Words might still have to be exchanged, but fewer than there might have been if—God forbid—she had taken a seat in front of him. He noticed she was already retrieving her cards and placing them on the narrow table bolted in front of her. He wished he had thought to bring some cards. He was so tired of the scenery.

Sam looked out the window and all he saw was brown. But perhaps now he could get some sleep. Perhaps, away from his room with its hole in the ceiling, he’d be able to quiet his mind and get some modicum of rest. Sleep was a little bit like death, a little bit the denial of free will he’d been using to take the guilt off himself. He kept picturing his mother breaking her arms out in the field and screaming for help to the empty dirt. He kept wanting to tear his eyes out and die for picturing this. He wanted to go home. He wanted to go home and hug her again and stare at that hole in the ceiling till his eyes forced themselves shut for a decade or two, long enough to give him another chance at this.

He curled one foot behind his bag and the other in front, so he’d feel it if someone tried to yank it out from under him. It happened. And he shut his tired eyes uselessly, because he could still see the open seat in front of him and the dull yellow-white light and brown brick screaming in from the window. He could still hear the old woman playing with her cards.

Could he fall asleep to this? He had better; he would not reach Orion until this evening if the train was on schedule. He opened his eyes again and looked around the car. God knew how long if it wasn’t.

The burgundy boy peeked in the car and squinted his eyes, decided all was well, and disappeared again. Sam hoped he would be left alone.

“Attention passengers,” the PA was gritty and garbled but audible. “We are now departing Thomasville Station. It is 11:35. Next stop, Odin at approximately 3:15. Bathcars are at the front and back, dining is in Car Three. We ask you to stay seated as much as possible and enjoy your ride.”

Sam looked around, found the faded number ‘5’ in the top center of the car. At the mention of dining, his stomach gave a little lurch. He had forgotten to eat that morning. Perhaps he would get something with the small amount of spare coins his mother had shoved into his pocket as he left. He would attempt a nap first and see. He closed his eyes again, and the car rocked back and forth to the hideous grind that signaled departure.

This was it. Sam Delson was leaving.

He had no idea when he would return. His father hadn’t in years.

I am not him, he told himself, but it hung in his mind, uncertain, till the curtains closed and the spotlight rose hot and yellow beneath his eyelids.

Chapter II: Opening Curtains

The stage is back-lit. A yellow spotlight sun makes silhouettes of our cast, the boy, THE REDHEADED GIRL, and the endless fields of blooming yellow mushrooms. This is The Fallow, where the earth is dead and all that grows is death in the form of a fungus that feeds off carrion and produces only rubbery half-nutrients and—under the right conditions—mind-altering substances. It is a playground of melodrama and bitterness. A mockery. A cliché.  An empty gimmick. This is the end of the world. The apocalypse, a long final draw of breath to counter the Big Bang.

The redheaded girl plays upon a hill, where a thicket of dead trees spreads skeletal limbs. The boy sits beneath the hill. His knees are pulled to his chest. His face is drawn, ghost-pale, and frowning. The girl is laughing. She is laughing and smiling and jumping. The girl is life.

GIRL: Come and play! You can see the whole wide world from here. Just watch for the lava!

Her hair is as red as lava. She is skipping in little bounds, avoiding the rocks, the patches of nascent fungal growth. At the boy’s feet lies a bird. It twitches once and stops. The cessation of movement triggers a deep, compounding confusion for the boy. He watches the stillness.

Enter MAN. He is a silhouette. He has no face or features, only a shadow, an impression.

MAN: What is it? I heard you calling.

The boy points to the dead animal.

BOY: I thought we could save it. I thought we had time.

The man looks at the bird for a long time, falls to his haunches, and picks up the corpse in his huge black hands.

MAN: It’s still alive.

The stage shifts to the interior of a cluttered but well-kept wooden farmhouse as man and boy enter. Their backs are to the audience as they gather cloth and light, little hard seeds and a small bowl of water. The man handles the bird so gently. Dribbles water on its beak and wings. Nests it in a dishrag. The bird opens an alien black eye. The boy jumps back. He is so small and so young and the unknown life terrifies and delights him.

MAN: Give him some food.

The boy picks up one of those hard little seeds and tentatively, tentatively approaches that curious eye. He holds the seed out with a finger that is barely wider. The bird does not move. It meets the boy, eye to eye, and the stillness holds and holds.

In the blink of an eye the beak strikes out and takes the seed, leaving behind a scarlet bead of blood where it nicks the boy’s finger. His mouth quivers, twists into anachronistic lines and wrinkles. A single drop of liquid squeezes from the corner of his eye, but he makes no noise. The Father, the shape, the shadow, presses the palm of a huge hand onto the boy’s head.

MAN: Leave it be.

The spotlight sun cartwheels over the farmhouse, The Fallow, the stage where a life is set, and the bird grows fat, healthy, fit. It rises from its man-made nest, takes a step. A small white hand stretches forth. The bird stares, and the stillness holds.

BOY: Come, birdy, you need a bath.

And the bird is in the sink, dirty yellow-white, and the water roars out of the faucet, and the stillness is gone, has been sacrificed to a demon who is holding the steel crank. The water rises, and the bird cannot move. Its head flits about in terror. It tries to lift its wings, but the water is too heavy and its wings too weak. The water rises. The boy twists the crank with all the dexterity his tiny hands can manage, and it is not enough. The crank will not turn back. The water does not stop as he needs it to. Rising, the water submerges the beak. The bird twists, flutters, spasms. The boy is choking on hot, white panic. His eyelids have peeled back into his skull, shoving his eyeballs out wide and open, forcing him to watch as he kills the bird, his pet, his friend.

The bird is drowning, and the boy’s soul is going with it, choking, gasping.

The boy tears the bird from the water, placing it on the lip of the sink where it flaps and falls right back in. He lifts it out again. It slips from his small, wet hands and hits the brown tile, fluttering, staring.

Staring into him with its dying black eye.

BOY: I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I’m sorry!

He slips to his backside, cradling his knees to his chest. Watching the bird twist and die.

The black shape stands in the doorway. The boy cannot see it.

The jerking, trailing light against his eyelids departed in an eclipse.

Sam Delson opened his eyes to the girl standing beside the window in front of him, shading him with her long, narrow body. Searching through her bag, moving things, pulling something out, replacing it. Her hair was long and brown, and with the window in the background, glowing like a corona, alive with gold and copper.

He kept looking at her nose. It was small and pointed and gave her face a haughtiness that he found rather adorable. She didn’t realize that the sleepy boy she decided to share a booth with was awake and staring unashamedly. Sam quickly looked away.

She was pretty, sure. He probably wouldn’t speak to her.

He would probably speak to her, but he didn’t want to. His heart was beating near his throat now, bubbling up a thin film of acid anxiety.

God, why? Why the fuck sit here?

She moved, turned her whole body towards him, but she didn’t look at him. Her eyelids hung heavy, nearly shut, as she lifted her arms and pulled her long hair behind her head, tying it with an effortless, practiced motion.

Sam practiced a smile while she tied, preparing for her to notice him.

When she did, her eyes moved away at first, and then back, gradually. Like she was preparing, too.

He lifted his eyebrows as he smiled, closed-mouth, and it was so fucking awkward.

The girl smiled back in a similar fashion, a small, thin-lipped smile that pulled the corners of her mouth into a series of ripples that were almost dimples. Sam looked at it with the same confusion that he looked at her nose: unsure as to how it could invoke such a pleasant sensation within him.

“Is it okay if I sit here?” she asked, still smiling.

“Of course,” Sam replied.

She sat. And Sam was both excited and perturbed that he now had to spend this ride in anxious, self-conscious agony with a beautiful girl.

Out the window, the endless brown fields jerked by in a series of sunburst angles. There was nothing out there but falling wire fence and the occasional wooden shack, blown in at one side like a massive toddler kicked it in a fit. This wood-block world. A playground.

Can she see it? Can she see me?

Her eyes were on him, he could tell by the way his face faintly burned, like her hair in the sun. He hazarded another glance at her, and she shifted her eyes away again. He did the same.

“Are you headed for the university?” she asked, and he sat up in his chair, clearing his throat, practically coughing.

“Uh, yes, yes I am.”

Pause.

“Are you?”

“Yeah. This is my first year.”

“Yeah? Me too. I have no idea what to expect,” Sam said. “I’ve always pictured a prison, but with the food they slide through the bars of your cell every morning and night there’s a book and an exam with it.”

The girl’s laugh was a bit forced but her smile was grand. It made Sam grin like a lunatic, and he self-consciously reigned it in as a little half-smile that stretched his lips to their breaking point.

“It’s nothing like a prison. I mean, they do call the rooms ‘cells,’ but that’s just traditional. Meant to evoke monastic dedication to one’s studies, but it’s not bad. I’ve been on campus. It’s amazing, actually. Open and green. Have you been?”

“Not once.”

“God, I’ve been there loads of times? My dad used to work as a professor of mathematics—”

“Gross.”

“Gross?”

“Sorry, I didn’t mean offence to your dad or anything. Mathematics and I just don’t, uh, get along.”

“Oh?”

He had offended her. Talked for two minutes and insulted her father. Idiocy knew no one as intimately as it knew Sam Delson. He would sit the rest of this trip in glaring silence. Everything be damned.

 But she continued, unaffected. “No, I know what you mean. Fuck math. But also, I think mathematics and science are the only ways we can get out of this mess. Without math you can’t have science, and there are scientists out there doing some really cool shit to try and sort all this out. Have you heard about the marine nitrate farming?”

“Yeah. Yeah, no, science is great, and nitrate farming sounds great—if they can get it to work properly. My father is actually in Eugene working with marine farms on the coast, and they are trying a lot of stuff like that. They just haven’t had much luck.”

That was months ago. Six or seven. The last time Sam had received a letter from his father. He had rambled on and on about all the things he and his crew were attempting with marine agriculture. Dark waters and alien plants. A man drowned in the netted cages of kelp when the gate closed unexpectedly and no one was around to notice that he had not resurfaced. Sam’s father had written about it in detail, as if trying to prove that he was still alive by impressing his son of the danger. For whatever reason, Sam didn’t love it.

“Well, tell your father his work is appreciated,” she said. And he thought, What the hell? Who do you think you are, you beautiful stranger? He’s not doing it for you. He’s not doing it for anyone but himself.

“Yeah…if I ever see him.”

Silence rode with them then like a third passenger, Sam’s mind cast aboard lilting wooden boardwalks on a black sea, where dead bodies popped up and floated the surface like lilies.

Dead, dead, dead, why is it all dead? Why is he dead? Did this pretty, silly girl know she was sharing a carriage with a corpse?

He was tired, feeling the numbing haze of the nap that had taken him an hour or so into the blazing orange future where all is vague contradiction and strange lies.

Education. Education of the undead.

A pretty girl in an ugly world.

The sharp, incessant rise of his heart rate as the silence tread into unfamiliar territory. He thought of the endless plains of the dead lands, where the famine and disease first spread and left behind a corrupt and unlivable waste, an America that fell apart quickly once the food dried up. Then the fighting started, and the bombs fell. What was left of the Midwest was mostly a toxic expanse to which people said the laws of nature no longer applied. The East was just gone.

Sam broke the silence with a question.

“Are you studying math?”

Her aqua eyes turned back to him. He watched the tip of her tongue press against the line of her teeth. He thought at that moment that he loved her, and immediately quashed the idea as absurd, moronic, and an insane thing to think about a stranger.

But the girl talked and became less of a stranger.

“Politics and law, actually. Trying to get away from my dad’s field.”

“Lawyer or senator? Or both?”

“Maybe both,” she said. She laughed, and he wanted to hear more of that laugh. “I want to go after all the military and defense commissions and redivert government funds into science and agriculture. That’s the end goal. If I can make any goddam difference in this corrupt world.”

“Commendable,” Sam said. “Completely futile for the reason you just stated, but commendable.”

She laughed more at that, and Sam fell into a comfortable blade of his anxiety, feeling it but riding with it.

They talked. Her eyelashes heavy, her pink lips pulled back over her words, her hair catching fire against the setting sunlight. Glowing. Vibrant.

The girl was studying politics and law. Plato, Socrates, Aristotle. She had read all the dialogues, debated, ridden across the northwest to visit libraries and schools and people and shout at them about the nature of human beings and the incorruptibility of the human spirit. She wrote letters to senators and met them in person, shook their hands as her father took photos. She wanted to bring reason and youth and life to the world. She wanted to hold humanity together long enough for them to hold themselves together. There was something about her. Sam suspected it even then. She could do something. Show people things.

As she spoke, co-illustrated this shining image in his head, he wondered how she could exist. How a person like this could even be alive. What her name was.

“I’m Sam, by the way,” he said.

“Oh. I’m Marie. Sorry, I probably should have said that in all my rambling.”

But she knew she wasn’t rambling, nor was Sam in any way bored or annoyed. She knew people were not bored or annoyed with her very often.

“You wanna get something to eat?” Sam asked.

“Absolutely. I’m fucking famished,” Marie answered.

They wound their way through the cars. They did not notice others. They noticed only each other, only the excited rise in their chests and the smiles they couldn’t help but sneak.

Sam opened the slider between cars to the screaming air outside, where the sun burned the plains with golden fire, painting long shadows across the fields of fungal stalks and catching once more in Marie’s hair and eyes as she looked out at him. There was silence despite the noise. A sort of quiet that took up space in Sam’s head, where silence was a stranger.

He decided he could not lose this. He could not ruin it. He decided he did not care what happened later—if she never spoke to him again after this—but doing this now, getting lunch with this crazy, amazing girl in this moment, meant everything, and he could not articulate why. There was that odd magic in the air again, that sense of half-reality, a dry ache lingering at the back of his eyeballs—probably just the last traces of his nap. He felt more awake now than he had been in a very long time and was determined to make it last.

He stretched out his hand, hoping she’d take it. Hoping she’d let him help her across.

She smiled, sliding hers into his. Soft and cool.

Forming around them, the dining car siphoned all thought and noise into a postcard painting of blazing sunset and synthetic steel, milling faces and dancing sound. Sam took a deep breath, and the familiar meaty, dusty smell of wasteland cuisine flooded in. He found he was still holding her hand and released it, a wave of trembling awareness burning in his cheeks and crawling down his arms. He did not meet her eyes.

“What sounds good?”

“Meat,” she said.

“I agree,” he agreed.

They approached the counter. In front of them, a young man with a mustache like a clump of hay stapled to his upper lip ordered a loaf and proceeded to spin atop one of the metallic stools lining the bar. There were scatterings of others at the booths, chattering and laughing. It was faint, but he could hear the violins gently churning out “Summertime” from some muffled speaker box. The mustached boy hummed along as the man behind the counter brought him his loaf, the steam from it glowing in the window light.

“What do they have?” said Sam.

Marie pointed to a chalkboard sign behind the man, a menu on which every word was misspelled awkwardly enough to argue against it being intentional.

“They have ‘dawgs,’” she said.

“How good does that sound?”

“Pretty fucking good, if I’m being honest.”

Sam grinned at her, feeling the color leave his face, conscious only of the light in her eyes and the ever-present musty meat smell of the car. Behind them, a group of passengers—headed for the university, judging by their ages—started a loud and animated conversation about pranks they pulled on certain authority figures.

“…and when he had his pants all the way down so that they were bunched up around his ankles…”

Sam and Marie approached the counter. The aproned man there glared at them silently. Sam gestured the girl to go ahead.

“I’ll have one ‘dawg,’ please, and…a sparkling water.”

Disgusting, was Sam’s immediate thought. He was questioning this girl with him now, her taste in everything, now that she’d chosen a carbonated water.

Breaking him from his amusement, Sam found his mother staring at him silently from a shadowed corner of his mind. Her eyes were vacant, her body too thin.

Where are you, Sam? she said. It came out as a gasp, a whisper. Choking.

God, he thought. I didn’t want to do this. I didn’t want to come here.

The girl, Marie. The line of her nose. Her eyes, little black wings for lashes. What was he doing here? What was she doing here? Was this reality or some sort of sick dream as he lay in bed, roiling as chemicals burned out of his system? The future had no sense of ceremony, only thrust you into its depths like its goal was to drown you.

He was studying this girl, and the door was sliding shut, and the man at the counter was saying, “Whaddya want, mister? Come on.”

“Yeah, I’ll have a dawg as well. And a sarsaparilla.”

The man sighed or groaned; the sound was kind of a combination. Marie raised her eyebrows, giving Sam a questioning look that could be ‘what the fuck is his deal,’ or maybe ‘why would you order that?’ What kind of person drinks that?’ Sam smiled at that idea and Marie smiled back. He did not believe he had ever smiled this much, and the muscles in his cheeks gave out little pangs.

What the hell is wrong with you? he asked himself.

I’m not doing this on purpose.

That’s exactly why it’s concerning.

They found a place to sit, beside the sun-washed window and far enough away from the gaggling group that all they could hear was the occasional snippet of “and I swore I smelled shit” and “then I stuck my finger….”

“Delightful company we have,” he said, to say something.

“You mean me?” She lost the sarcasm in his tone.

“No, no. The pranksters of Table Five over there.”

“Right. I rather liked her story of the time she made her teacher shit himself when she surprised him at the blackboard. Very Shakespearean.”

“Really? See, I was thinking Cervantes.”

“Right, right. Very quixotic,” said Marie.

He laughed. Marie laughed. Thank God, she laughed. A little snorting sound that made Sam’s heart beat a hundred times faster.

“Do you read much?” she asked.

“As often as I can, really,” he answered. “I enjoy it. Kind of an escape from…everything.”

“And where do you escape to when you have your choice? What are your favorites?”

“God, that’s an unfair question…those Russian fantasies, probably. Tolstoy, Dostoevsky. I don’t know. A bit of everything.”

“Fantasies?”

“Yeah, well Russia obviously never existed.”

“Some people think it did.”

“Well, some people think a lot of things,” Sam said. “I prefer to think they were writing about some other world, someplace they could see that no one else could. Makes me feel less rough about this one, I guess, like it hasn’t lost everything.”

“What else do you like?”

“What can I say? I, like your average infantile male, enjoy my stories about knights and cowboys, and zombie-ninja-detectives.”

Marie was silent, just sat back, crossed her arms and looked at Sam with a sort of pleased and searching expression on her mouth, dimpled folds at the corners like curtains being drawn over a stage where a play was about to begin. Where the spotlight burns with the dying fury of the setting sun, orange and yellows and fiery reds, making all the props and characters glow and casting the rest into infinite shadow.

“Dawgs!” the man shouted.

But the play was already beginning, the prologue finished, the opening monologue told. And now the characters were moving, rising from the shifting, black mass into the burning spotlight world….

Chapter III: New Arrivals

We open in a small bar, stinking of beer and piss and sawdust and the unmistakable, sour pungency of unwashed, sweating bodies. A ceiling fan slowly spins. The shadows rotate in golden slats on the ground.  The chirrup of locusts creates a dull drone that comes in from outside despite the wood and the low roar of the patronage and the tinny beat of whatever old song is playing from the radio. The locusts are the real ambience. They are the life of this place. On the faces of the drinkers—in their eyes—is only numbness, or a kind of living zombification.

A shadow at the counter sloughs shadows into the void of his mouth, churning up and down as he speaks.

DRINKER: At the beginning, I told her I wanted our relationship set up like this:

He moves black bars of his hands into a teepee, a triangle missing the bottom. Two lines leaning upon each other.

DRINKER: But then it started slipping one way—

His right hand descends along the left, propping up the other, changing the angles.

DRINKER: And now it feels more and more…

The hand lowers and lowers till the fingertips of the right are pressing into the base of the palm, just above the wrist. It is a perpendicular angle now.

The boy watches from a few stools down, captivated. His hands are trembling. This is too much. He has taken on too much. And now he wants to run, but he also wants to stand. He cannot abandon his decision. If all the rest about him is petty and pathetic and rotten, he can at least say that he is not a quitter.

He can at least be proud of that.

As it is, the trembling in his hands and feet do not stop. The uncomfortable damp patches beneath his armpits give off an unsatisfactory smell, and he is hyperaware of the sweet and sour stench of the box of goods he has hauled to the stool next to him. The bartender has given that box prurient glances since Sam arrived, exacerbating his discomfort. He shifts his own posture so that if someone means to grab the box, he might have a chance to seize it first and break out at a run. As it is, no one moves. There is only the silence. The low drone.

Sweat beads out on Sam’s forehead, his palms. His mouth is rough cotton around a twisting tongue. Even his tongue is seeking security, some sort of handhold on a wildly spinning world.

BORACE: Whatcha got for me, Sammy?

The old farmer is round with paunch. The bulge of his neck where it breaks the line of his shirt is coated in thick, viscous sores, all callous with what looks like dried, crusty pus. This grotesquery takes the place and attention of a secondary face, an area with which Sam continuously and accidentally makes eye contact. The small, fine hairs poking like tiny quills from an otherwise bald head catch the dull bare-bulbed light of the overhead electrics. This is a bald place: bald man, bald bulbs, bald wood, bald terror.

Sam hardly meets Borace’s eyes.

SAM: This is what grew best. I thought you might, maybe, still be interested. We really need the money.

Borace picks through the box, finds a particularly plump stalk of that dab, gray, dead color and pinches off a bite of it with his fingertips. The flaky meat powders easily. Too easily. Like ash.

A queer expression passes across Borace’s ruffled, bald face then. A brightening of the eyes accompanied with a twist of the mouth that might be mirth…or it might be loathing. Perhaps both. He removes something from a pocket. A small flask, maybe.

BORACE: Do you know what you got here, kid?

Sam is humiliated. He feels the color crawl and burn across his face, lining his eyes, pouring into them, stinging. He feels the heat glow from the tips of his ears. He wants to cry, he wants to run, and—for the first time in a long time and the last time for a much longer one—he wants to be held by his mother.

Borace ignores this obvious discomfort, instead crumbling that fine, ashy powder along a metallic mesh at the neck of the flask. He turns a catch that closes the powder in and then flips the bottle upside down, shakes it twice, and rights it. A sharp vinegar smell shrieks off it. Sam believes he might be imagining it, but he can hear a buzzing coming from that little container, a kind of mad crackling sizzle that sounds almost like a tiny scream. The sound is gleeful. The sound is insane.

BORACE: Well kid, if yer gointer sell this shit I s’pose you better know what it really is.

Borace releases the catch and the powder springs up, now fuzzy and white, as if it was gone on a shopping trip and returned with a fancy new coat. He pinches it once more in his fingers and pounds it down on the bar directly beneath Sam’s nose.

BORACE: Go on, Sammy. You gotta know if I’m gonna buy these sweet treats from you.

Sam looks at the clump of fuzzy powder before him. He can still hear it faintly screaming, but it sounds like glee now instead of…what, pain? What had that small sound been in essence when Borace first moisturized the flaky fungus? The high-pitched noise buzzes through Sam’s mind, his sinuses, his eyeballs, everything.

He knows what this is. Rotloaf. The mushrooms that, treated properly, have drug-like, maddening effects.

And Sam has to do it. He has to.

What’s more…he wants to.

A grim and fatalistic line replaces the boy’s lips. His eyes narrow around the hoary, dusty pile beneath his nose.

He places a hand over his right nostril, as he has seen them do all over town.

And he breathes in, sharply.

What follows is perfect blinding ecstasy, madness, and clear, cold rationalism.

Sam had no idea anything could make you feel all three.

The bar around him wavers and percolates into popcorn yellow spots, blossoming out like urine in a pair of khaki pants to darken the world. On the edges of everything, Sam can see the seams. Crisp and black. Pull them out. He is aware of Borace grinning, grinning, grinning to eternity, and of his own swimming head and climbing insides. There is a noise in him like a symphony testing its instruments before the performance. Dissonance and insanity. He is melting with it as he realizes that he has been taken out of the bar, out of The Fallow, out of this world. Here where he sits is some kind of other place. Here where he sits is outside the world, a café at the edge of the universe, perhaps, and he cannot breathe.

He clears his nose, coughs, inhales largely through gaping lips. Borace grins and grins. And the exhalation slams on him like it has fallen from heaven. It is a great weight that makes him lighter. He can see now why Borace is grinning; there is so much to grin about when you can see the outline of the whole world below you, shifting and pulsing in iridescent everything.

Yes, this will help him, he thinks.

The sun is coming in as rainbows through the slatted wooden walls of the bar, their heights waning and waxing into vaulted celestial glory and the lowly hovel, and Sam is sitting straight up in his seat, his box forgotten, Borace grinning, this little cut-out of another world swirling around him like God. He can see every mote of dust drifting through those many-colored sunbeams. Every mote in that stream of millions pouring in and down and up.

This is what it feels like to be alive, Sam thinks.

BORACE: That’ll put some hair on yer chest!

The bartender is gone or has at least turned his back on the proceedings at the bar so thoroughly that he has ceased to be visible.

Sam stands up, gazing into every angle and line of the shifting madness around him. All of it is good. All of it is right. And he has never felt this way before, not once seemed to notice that the composition of the world around him is inherently good, not till this moment when the sunbeams shine in a million colors and the chemicals buzz through his head like long electric trains running saws out the open windows while radio static roars through the sky.

I’m back, I’m alive.

I’m dying, I’ve killed myself.

If this is what it is to die, Sam believes he is ready, or so he tells himself behind a mouthful of terror that has risen up from that pit in his stomach where it never ceases to boil like hot soup, always ready for serving—come and get it! This act, this inhalation, has wrung the triangle and a whole symphony has taken up its place in his head, testing instruments in that dissonant chaos. And is it not beautiful? Even the test, the pre-performing, the warm-up, is that not beautiful, too? It feels so much like being alive that Sam actually suspects he might be. Fully. Not some wandering specter. Not some undead mistake of God’s perfect hand. But an actual human boy, alive and well.

Mistake.

Has to be.

He cannot be anything else.

But then how can he feel this power burning in his blood, glowing like hot coals, emitting electric sparks to every cell in his body?

He wants to go home.

He wants to look his mother in the face.

He wants to see the world written there and understand.

He wants to tell her he never wanted this, scream at her till she understands what she has done to him by damning him to this world, this body, this blood.

He wants to see that dazzling, iridescent sunlight.

Sam pushes through the empty bar like he is trudging through muddy swamp land. When he reaches the door, he no longer remembers the steps taken to get there, only that he thought it and it happened. This is what it is to be God—or maybe this is just what it is to be alive.

He is several steps into the dusty street before the full brilliance of the sun makes itself known to him. He looks up in awe at the massive, burning beast of scintillating crystal divinity. It is a billion facets of purest light, every color, that iridescent brilliance is everywhere. Sam shields his eyes and watches the grace of the sky god paint his fingers, lengthening them, re-forging them. He laughs delightedly and looks around, seeing only Borace’s grinning face at the threshold. The box of goods is forgotten. It will not be remembered until Sam awakes in his own bed the next morning, burning and giddy and burnt out. Sam waves and trots out down the road towards his home.

The fungus is everywhere. On the road. In the fields. In his head. Buzzing. Singing. Growing. Huge mushroom trees spreading their umbrellas to block out that scintillating, perfect sun.

There was a girl once.

She had hair like fire and violence.

Now there were only the endless fields of growing death, of which Sam is more than a part. Some kind of undertaker.

Hazy wisps of cloud canter back and forth across a pale blue sky so deep he is afraid he will drown in it if he continues to look. So he looks down at the dust and can see every single speck with perfect clarity on the road before him, and he thinks how all these specks must be worlds, too, with a billion tiny Sams walking on their surface. Do his steps kill them? Are they destroyed? He feels well if they do; the act of destruction is Godlike and glorious. He feels well if they don’t; what right does he have to end a life?

Crimson. A shining carrot head of blood and memory.

Is this what we all become?

He suspects so, and he suspects that is alright, for all the moments live on, humming through him. Like this one, with the rainbow sun painting the whole world a million exploding colors. Did she know a moment like this, young as she was? Was death, or the process of dying, nearly so jovial? He thinks so. He thinks that, however dying feels, this is something similar.

Sam Delson walks the long road home and thinks of everything in the universe but that box of wares he has left behind. Those he does not remember even after he sneaks his way through his creaking house, avoiding his mother, climbs into bed, and wraps his blanket tight around his buzzing body. He sleeps like a stone through the night. The morning brings memory. The morning brings that raw, fiery ball in the hollow of his chest, a flailing orb of pain and terror that will never leave him.

She was gone when he returned from the bathroom. He blinked around the car, wondering if he dreamed her, if that tight ball of anxiety inside him had finally loosened the screws enough to make him imagine things and create people that he could not distinguish from reality. He thought about this and almost liked her better that way. A specter really meant something. A specter could not ruin its image through real actions. A pretty girl, on the other hand, could up and leave with only the sour taste of uncertainty tickling the back of your throat like bile as your head repeats over and over again, “Was it something I said/did/didn’t do/didn’t say?” Or the more frightening reality that your personality in general was of an intolerable nature and no reasonable person would have the capacity to stomach you for more than a few hours, anyway.

God, he might die.

Fucking girls, man.

He lay his head back against the seat and closed his eyes again, ignorant of time and place, knowing only the inevitable would arrive and he would be thrust into this thing that he still didn’t think he wanted, this artifice of other lives and minds that sought to mold his. Make him adult, make him intelligent. Well, by all means, let them, but he already felt as old as somebody’s grandpa. If only he were wise. If he were wise, maybe that girl—Marie, her name was Marie—would still be sitting here with him.

Maybe she’s taking a shit, he thought. That would be the greatest thing ever.

While he was thinking this, the old woman in the booth across from his let out a loud round of expletives as the cards she was shuffling exploded with a pfft to the dirty train floor, where the perpetual little bumps and shakes gave them another shuffle.

Grinning, Sam rose, bent and began picking up the dropped cards that littered the aisle.

“Oh, oh, oh, curse me sideways! Such a klutz: always have been, and always will be, I suppose, till my grave swallows me up and shits me out in a patch of mushrooms!”

The expression sent a wave of red anxiety through Sam’s chest and head, gone as quickly as it had come. His grin became a lackluster half-smile, half-sneer kind of thing that he knew would look to others as an expression of pure contempt. Sam Delson was painfully aware of what he must look like to others at any given moment. Or at least, he held to the conviction that he was aware, though the true comprehension of yourself from third person is never attainable. This is probably an evolutionary tool for the survival of humanity, lest we kill ourselves in distaste at what we see from another’s eyes.

“Thank you, young sir! Thank you much.”

Sam dragged the smile back into place; it was heavier now.

“No problem, ma’am. What are you playing there?”

“Just a bit of Blackjack, 21, my guilty pleasure. Always has been and always will be till my grave swallows me, heh heh.”

She nudged him then with the surprisingly bony tip of an otherwise meaty arm wrapped in black felt that seemed ridiculously oppressive in the stuffy heat of this train car. But Sam supposed elderly people didn’t feel things like heat or cold the way others did. Perhaps the years built up a resistance to it as they seemed to for most other things, like tears and pain and a whole cavalcade of emotions. And this resistance now and the recognizing of it made him want to cry in an exclusively mental sense. His eyes felt no tinge of moisture, nor his throat any trace of a lump. As a child, those things seemed to come so easily, unwarranted and unwanted.

Being a child is like being massively doped up, he thought, and the smile was lighter again.

“Would you like to join me, young man?”

Sam looked incredulously at the deck of cards in his hand and back to the grinning old woman in the wide black hat, whose teeth were worn down to slack nubs that barely shone through that smile. He thought of the girl, now gone. He thought of how he wanted to be alone.

“Absolutely,” he said.

“Excellent! I will deal.”

The woman shuffled the deck and passed them both out a pair of cards, face down. Their backs were intricate brown ideograms depicting scrawny, demonic humanoids in various poses. They looked to Sam like a Hieronymus Bosch painting.

“House flips first,” the woman whispered conspiratorially, and then turned her cards with a flawless and practiced gesture of her pudgy right hand.

She had an Ace of Spades and a Three of Hearts. The hand was versatile and lucky, and Sam nodded with polite admiration.

“Go on then, boy. Let’s see what you got.”

Sam unceremoniously turned his cards, aware for an instant of a passing annoyance on the old woman’s face. He looked down.

Instead of the standard face cards and four-suite patterns to which he was accustomed, Sam Delson found himself staring at two naked Grecian characters beneath an anthropomorphic sun. Below them, the card read ‘The Lovers.’ Beside it, his second card showed a skeleton, trapped beneath the steel bars of a prison. The key was at his feet, within reach on the other side. This one said ‘Death.’

They were tarot cards. By some sleight of hand, the old woman had slipped these in here. Why?

She guffawed with laughter.

“The Lovers and the Death card. Interesting, interesting. I would say your life is going to get interesting, young man. But let’s just call that 19 to my 14. Now if I win, I say you have to play me again.”

“And if I win?” said Sam, too baffled by the cards that had appeared, been read, and now disappeared back into the pudgy folds of the old woman’s arms as she removed them from the deck.

“Yes, then what, my boy? You go find your lover?” She giggled hysterically.

“That girl wasn’t my lover.”

“The cards don’t lie, boy. Cards don’t lie. Are you standing or drawing?”

“Standing,” said Sam.

The old woman drew, turning the card effortlessly face up in her small, thick fingers, and of course it was the Seven of Hearts that she drew, bringing her neatly to 21.

“Again,” she said, shuffling the cards back into one deck.

This time Sam hesitated to flip his cards, but when he did, the normality of the suites was a breath of relief to the red ball squirming in his chest.

The old woman gestured to the seat in front of her, on the opposite side of the pull-down table. Sam slid in, casting one last, lost glance to the seat Marie had abandoned.

If she was on the toilet, the girl took her time.

This round, he drew a thirteen to her seven, drew a king to her ace, and resigned himself to another game.

“I deal this time,” he said. The old woman giggled wildly again.

“Afraid I’m cheating are you, Mr…?”

“Delson. Sam Delson, a pleasure.”

She leaned close to him, whispering conspiratorially. “I wouldn’t worry about that girl. She will come around…and if not, well, plenty of chicks in the sea.”

“Fish,” Sam grinned, aware of the redness that had risen to the tips of his ears. “Plenty of fish in the sea.”

“Aren’t there just!” she said. “And you can call me Jessica.”

Her laugh was bubbling and genuine and gleeful in an honest and non-judgmental way. It made him smile like Marie’s jokes and little glances had made him smile, and the comparison was uncomfortable. Perhaps he should just stop the lie he perpetuated internally that he detested human company and would be better off isolating himself somewhere distant…somewhere unrealistically green and cool and good. Whatever good playing cards with a cheating old woman on a train could be, that would have to do.

Sam shuffled the cards, taking great care to look through the deck for any more of those strange tarots, but all he found were the battered old spades, clubs, diamonds, and hearts with the brown ideograms and pictures on the backs. He gave up, dealing out a pair of cards to the old woman and then two to himself.

“You first, ma’am.”

A giddy grin stretched her wrinkled, hardly-existent lips. Jessica pulled the corner of her card up and over, revealing a King of Hearts and an Ace of Clubs, revealing 21.

Sam slapped his forehead with a palm. His own cards were Two of Clubs and a Six of Diamonds. He drew a queen.

Cards turned, flipped, shuffled, and Sam wiled away the time left on this train ride, this journey that felt more like a descent than a jaunt across country. Out the window, the scenery remained eternally brown. The scrublands whispered with a low wind that bent the weeds growing where they could. Even weeds seemed to have a difficult time in this broken west. But then, the East was worse. So people said. People said the East was a glowing, green eye-sore in which monsters thrived and sanity fled.

Hope she’s taking a shit.

But she wasn’t, he knew that. She had smelled his and gotten the hell away, as he would have done. He could not blame her for this, yet he despised her momentarily. That easy, restrained smile. A peek behind the curtain but not the full scene.

“Excuse me please, ma’am. I must use the facilities,” said Sam as Jessica shuffled the cards for another brutal round of 21 that never actually touched 21. Not for him. She gave that bubbling laugh and waved him off, tipping her wide black hat.

“Such grace with you, young sir. Go use that shitter!”

“I will use it with grace!” Sam replied, beaming. He strode off.

Two cars later, he saw her.

It was a blob, a sunlit curtain of chestnut brown hair by a window and he knew it at once. He heard her laugh. He did not stop walking but allowed himself one slow, absorbent glance back, back to the booth where a gaggle of girls reposed over the faux-leather seating. Marie was their guest. Marie was their god; in her glory, their tightly bunned heads bent inward in adoration and thirst. In photosynthesis. Her partial dimple was drawn, that curtain peeking back, those aqua eyes spotlights with the gravity of planets, coming towards him.

Sam looked away and walked, faster, harder, louder. His cheeks were burning. He was too hot and too cold all at once. He stormed into the bath car, slammed the lock into the ‘occupied’ position, and leaned over the sink. In the mirror, a dark form wagged back and forth. A grim omen on a pale face.

Why are you so fucking pale, Sam?

I’m a corpse.

Bullshit.

I want to be a corpse.

Then do it. Make it happen. Here. Now.

Past his glittering eyes was the polished glass, a thin sheet, mostly tin backing with a bit of help. If he broke it, the glass would shatter into unusable pieces; there would be nothing to wield.

Don’t be a pussy.

He could make himself bleed, undoubtedly. He didn’t want to bleed.

What do you want?

I want to die.

Why do you want to die?

Because I don’t want to do this. I don’t want to live. I don’t want to go here. I don’t want to leave. I don’t want to play cards with that woman in the booth, I don’t want to be in here looking at my goddamn pale ghost-self feeling like I want to fucking die after I saw this girl with some other girls! I don’t give a shit about that. Why would I give a shit about that?

You liked her.

So? What does that matter? Nothing would ever come of that, why even bother? She knows I’m a freak; she can feel it. God, if I can feel it, how could she not?

What am I going to do?

Oh god, what am I going to do? I’m going to die at this place.

A feeling, less a voice than a feeling, rose up from somewhere else, dismissing all this as nonsense, forcing him to look deep into the glossy dark of his own pupils, and it was like looking past that red, wriggling thing inside him towards something else. His mother. Alone in a rocking chair. Knitting linens that fell apart as the needles clacked. Blood fell freely from her hands. All the decorations in their home—the figurines, the pictures, the pottery—were faces twisted into rage and hatred and pointed accusations: This is your fault. Look at what you have done.

He just wanted some rotloaf dust, some fucking euphoric solace where these faces could not follow. He threw aside the thought that came unwanted and abysmally horrifying, the thought that said he was wrong about that, that those faces could follow him to that euphoric place. They could follow…and they had been following. Maybe they always had.

Maybe he had brought them there.

Sam resisted the urge to punch out the glass image of himself, as violent and passionate and knee-shaking as that urge had become. He was done with this shit. Why had he thrown out that last whiff of dust he had left? How stupid could he be? He could have saved it for this train, taken the edge off this stupid fucking descent into a hell he had not created.

That’s right, Sam. You didn’t do this. Your mom and dad made this happen. You didn’t do this.

I could have stopped it.

You can’t stop a thing, Sam.

I could have—

Then stop it now. End it.

Bile whispered up his throat, wavering in his stomach.

He felt dizzy. He was no longer steady on his booted feet but resigned to a kind of swaying lurch. He gripped the basin of the sink for support and wiped the perspiration from his forehead. A great final spasm shook him nearly to his knees, and then the screech and the grinding reverberated through the siding and flickered the overhead electric bulb.

It wasn’t him.

It was the train.

He had arrived.