The Dead Yard (41 page)

Transformed all of us.

And I have lost a lot of it.

Red under my back and legs.

Red, all of today and yesterday.

I’m exhausted.

Lying prone on the ground, like a child making a snow angel. My hand cradling her white neck,
massaging the capillaries to keep the rigor at bay for a few minutes yet. A vermilion hand. A
flower of grief.

I’m too weak to get up. I can’t move. So here I’ll stay. Half-naked between the trees. The
story of the precipitation running through the vultured rag of human paint that is smeared in
great swirls across my body. In my hair and in my eyes that are almond now and black.

Stay here.

Under the ordered sky.

The growing day extinguishing the lamps of heaven and the yellow of unprayed-for souls. A big
tiredness in every constriction of my rib cage. A lightness in my head that can only be oxygen
deprivation. Death wants me, too.

About us, insects scenting putrefying flesh and descending onto the snow-draped soil where two
bodies lie.

Five this morning. Five in the space of an hour.

One the day before yesterday.

I blink away the snowflakes.

I try to get up.

But it’s too hard. And anyway it’s better here on the ground, the earth licking my wounds in
the protection of the trees. Better than up there in the afterlife of the accursed, caught
between a massacre and the stretched attitudes of the hills.

If I get up, I know how it will be.

I know what will happen. A hushed absence and around me the sentient creatures will move aside
in recognition. They know there will be more slaughters down the road. For I am the one, the
master of the art.
I
am the favored son of Death. Touched was a mere pretender. They’ll
run and the skeleton will smile beneath his hood.

No.

I’ll resist it. I’ll stay here. With her.

An ocean wind. A faltering front. The snow is ending. Back in its box until December. The
weather will return to something more autumnal, but the world will not be as it was before. I’ve
changed it. Everything remade with a bitter quality. I see it manifest in the ghost of pine
trees, in the clouds, the black bark, the dead girl next to me in the snow.

I shake my head.

I’ll resist it…

A jet.

The moon.

Aye.

Do that, Michael.

Don’t get up. Don’t let them see you. They can leave you for a while yet. They can let you be.
Those tongues of midnight. Whispering incantations. Casting glyphs. Biding their time. They’ll
weather well their wait, blessed as they are with the virtues of patience and fortitude and the
knowledge of their propagation with the blood from the never-ending works of man.

You’ll live to see another day. They’ll let you have some years of peace.

You’ll live because
she
is out there and
she
wants you. And her power is
growing and will grow until she cleanses the deck of all the captains.

And you’ll live because
he
is out there too. And no one knows. And
he
is
coming. And the rage in you is as nothing to the bursting dam that is
him
. And you’re
the one that set
him
free.

It’s a dangerous world, Michael. Stay in the woods. Hide. From the paramedics, the feds, the
killers, hide from them all. Don’t get up.

Don’t get up if you know what’s good for you.

Snow blinks into my eyelids.

I watch the sky.

Not a jet.

A helicopter.

Rotor blades.

Engines.

Sirens.

Cars.

A squeal of brakes.

A slamming door.

Voices.

Footsteps.

I get up.