The Silence of Ashes

Icicles shivered from the oak branches, wind whistling as through the marrow of a satyr's horn. Midnight. All Hallows’ Eve. The moon hid its mystery behind veiled clouds. A path weaved within the forest hiding shadows that skittered like frightened prey from predator owls, their flight a hush of white in the darkness. Above, through a moment of cloud break, Georgie thought she saw a star, first a dim white, next flickering pink, then pulsing red, but it disappeared behind a passing cloud. Maybe a stray airplane, she thought.

“I don't like this, Georgie,” Sam said, her little brother by seven minutes.

Georgie, always the older twin, with the wisdom of age on her side, replied, “Stop whining, Sam. We're almost there. Look,” she pointed. “See the smoke rising in the distance, just above that willow.”

Sam saw it, the willow draping the pond like cloth covering a coffin.

“That's grandma's house, her fireplace welcoming us.”

Sam agreed. Grandma and Grandpa would comfort them, their fireplace warm from the night chill, the promise of roasted marshmallows or roasted chestnuts or hot chocolate. So on they trudged, this Halloween night, following the path that snaked through the forest. They rounded the pond, its water black as a witch's cold cauldron. Ripples of water squirmed like worms on the surface. They turned left at a huge oak, its trunk scarred from a past lightning strike, now a gaping wound looking like a screaming maw. Its limbs creaked like bones. They topped a hillock, more burial mound than knoll, and saw it.

Where their grandma's house should have been was a spaceship, smoke gasping from its thrusters. Swarming at its base were hundreds of squid-like creatures, glowing luminescent, pale as cadaver eyes. The creatures were busy gathering things and bundling them into the rocket. But what? Animals, people, farm implements, plants, all in items two-by-two, like some ghoul’s version of a Noah’s ark. Georgie and Sam were too far to be certain, and the glow of the rocket’s blaster, like a hellish bonfire to sacrifice the innocent, obscured their vision.

Transfixed, Georgie and Sam stared. Transfixed, the creatures stared back. Then, in time faster than possible on earth, before Georgie and Sam could think to run, tentacles engulfed them, emitting a gelatinous gel. The two children were cocooned in a spider's embrace.

Faster than possible on earth, Georgie and Sam were transported to the ship, surrounded by other beings, equally entombed. Maybe they saw other children. Maybe they saw animals. Maybe the blobs to their left were familiar faces, their grandparents. But layers of gel and fear bound them in ignorance. At that moment, the two sensed rather than knew that they were rising in a billow of thruster smoke, less comforting than their grandma's fireplace. The spaceship rocketed skyward becoming one with the stars, leaving behind in the distance their forest they had romped in, their home, their safety, their youth, their innocence. First in pulsing red, then flickering pink, next white, the spaceship extinguished in the distant sky like a stilled heartbeat.

Back on earth, what had been their grandparents’ house was left in the silence of ashes.

Coma

From somewhere, I heard the whoosh. My heartbeat? Rotor wash from my Huey? Was I in a war?

From somewhere, I heard voices. “Is the respirator working, Gail?”

I wanted to say, “Yes,” but I was disconnected from the scene moving around me like shadows in Plato’s cave. I tried to reach out, but the shadows morphed beyond my touch, my hands remaining static as if pinioned. Or was a Cyclops holding down my arms, his one eye glaring at me? 

Somehow, I could feel my chest contracting, expanding, gently. Up. Down. Up. Down. But by whose power? A puppeteer was manipulating me, and I was wooden, connected by strings, as if by Giuseppe? Geppetto? What was that name? Why couldn’t I remember?

Blackness welled around me like a bracken pool, random thoughts swelling in a midnight tide.

What did I remember? A car. A red light. A windshield cracking into spider webs. Voices drifting in and out like sound from a TV, the volume knob rotating slowly one way then the next. And by whose hand? The puppeteer again? 

I was lifted and strapped onto something, I thought, or maybe the wind had risen, and I was floating. Or maybe the earth had shifted beneath me, and I was orbiting gravity free? Was I Odysseus tied to a mast, protected from sirens?

How did I know Odysseus . . . or Plato, when I wasn’t sure who I was, what I had been once, where I was now? 

“Insert an IV saline drip, Gail, ok?” the doc said.

I felt a piercing, like a needle trying to repair torn cloth, the needle failing at frayed edges. 

“How’s his BP, pulse, respiration?” the doctor asked.

“BP, 140 over 85; pulse a bit quick, 92 bpm, respiration good, oxygen at 96,” the nurse reported after checking vitals.

“We have REM doc,” Gail the nurse said.

I felt my eyelids pried open, and the sun! Blinding! 

“Turn it off,” I wanted to scream. 

Then the sun started to shift rapidly, left to right, left to right, like the sky was being shaken and the sun was a bubble inside a glass tube agitating.

“Let’s try to connect with him again,” said a voice as if shouting through the walls of a catacomb, like Poe’s “Amontillado,” another name I couldn’t imagine knowing. Who was I? Where was I? What was I? That whoosh I thought I heard, the words of a poem blown from the page by a mighty breath, similes and metaphors tumbling through the air, my thoughts jumbled and uncertain.

A finger snapped, or maybe a key locking and unlocking a door, or bones cracking, or a window shutting, a flag whipping in the wind over burial sites, nails being pounded into wood.

“Can you hear me Mr. Anderson,” the doctor said.

Then more cracking, windows shutting, doors locking and unlocking, wind whipping, a continual snapping, nails pounding.

“Yes,” I tried to shout. “I’m in here,” I wanted to scream. I felt my mouth open, and I waited for sound.

Steve Gerson, English professor emeritus, writes poetry and flash about life's dissonance. He has published in CafeLit, Panoplyzine, Crack the Spine, Decadent Review, Vermilion, In Parentheses, Wingless Dreamer, Big Bend Literary Magazine, Coffin Bell, and more, plus his six chapbooks Once Planed Straight; Viral; And the Land Dreams Darkly; The 13th Floor: Step into Anxiety, What Is Isn’t, and There Is a Season.