Fire in the Sky

Fiction

I’m suppose to tell you things, to tell you everything. I’m supposed to tell you how we ended up here and what here ‘is’ exactly. It’s hard for me to find the words. It’s hard for me to decide what to tell you. It’s hard to explain what’s left to tell you about. I think the worst part of the whole affair was the sky. It just never really came back. I don’t really know what to tell you about that... except it’s not exactly there. When you look at it you see something closer to some kind of dark, blood color. It’s as if the very color of fear hangs in the sky over us each day. This fear, it never leaves us. It never lets us rest or leave it behind for a moment.

It’s always there.

The sky now hangs somewhere between us and everything else as only a very thin barrier between us and everything. There’s something different about it now. It’s almost translucent. I imagined last night in the truck that if I could just stand tall enough I could grab a star and put in my pocket. If I could reach past the red sky. The sky isn’t quite the sky anymore. They replaced it with something else. That’s a whole other story. They. Nobody has seen them yet or even heard them. Nobody around here anyway. The closest I came to hearing them was one night when the gangs went door to door making sure everybody had obeyed radio silence for the night. We left our worst radio out on the porch for them to check just in case the radio check included a collection of some kind. It did. I went inside once they had left and turned the nobs on the closet radio, looking for a little sound. Something. I wanted something to know them by. Something other than these dark nights. That’s when I heard them the first time. It was beautiful though, the sounds they made. They almost sung to each other with a few english words thrown in between their rhymes of music. The chatter grew ecstatic and they changed from song to sound and it seemed as if a whole city was sounding to each other in the same moment. That’s when dad walked in and turned it off. I knew he wouldn’t yell. The gangs were still going door to door.

            That’s always how we’ve known them to be here. They have become as much apart of the dark nights and silent radios as anything else. It’s how I know them to be there at all. We always turn our radios off in case of them. That and the fires. The fires are always raging. I asked the neighbors the other day if they had set the sky on fire too. Why was it so dark now? Why did we never see the sun anymore? The smoke sits over us in the valley almost constantly now and for whole days we’ll sit inside, winding our fan by a crank dad engineered. I guess... I met them through the fires. That is before the nights never ended.
            The night they came nobody really knew how to respond. I certainly didn’t. I was sure the house was on fire across the street so I ran to my window and peeked through the blinds. But none of the houses burned. The sky, I thought, might be burning. The sky was active at least. That’s all I could really tell, was that the sky was so busy this morning. And that the busy things in the sky had set the fire. I just knew. I’ve always blamed them for the fire in the sky. I was watching the busy sky zoom in and out of downtown and around the sky scrapers when the neighborhood burst with life. They were nearly as busy as the sky that morning. They threw things, just random things I thought, into their biggest cars and drove off. Right through their yards and the neighbors yards and through the mailboxes. They drove off. Dad broke down the door as he came through, it just fell right off. I felt bad. Would I have to fix the door? He threw me my backpack, the same one sitting here in the dining room somewhere west of the Mojave, and told me to stuff it with food and get in the truck. They never told me exactly where this was. I only knew the signs pointing toward the Mojave nearby. 48 miles. I knew that.
            We drove about 4 hours that first and last night. Four hours through the mountains and valleys of California. Much of it had already burned or would burn after we drove away. The sky was still busy and the busy things mostly headed in one direction: the one we came from. Sometimes something nasty and slow would pass us in the sky. We drove inside car washes or left open garages until they passed.Then we drove on. We drove through the valleys under the new sky. The sky that bled for us, the sky that wept for us. Into the valley we found a California that hung somewhere between California and the rest of the world; between city and suburb. The cities seemed to have not decided if they were a city yet or what language they’d speak in these half-cities. We drove under the busy skies, through the smoky valleys and in the confused cities towards Nevada. That’s when dad and I first learned of how they find us: the radio.

            The city sign read ‘CITY’ population 1200 and the digital radio read 92.7 KFM with a flamingo guitar strumming nonchalantly over the hum of our truck’s engine. Dad twisted the dials a little to the right and asked me to sleep as he drove. I watched him fumble over the dials inside his sweaty fingers. He’d twist until he couldn’t grip the cheap plastic and then wipe his fingers on his t shirt inside his jacket. “Sleep!” he asked. He reached over while I watched him fumble through the dials and released the seat adjustment, slamming me back against the chair leaving me facing the roof of the truck imagining the violence taking place on the other side of the roof. I looked at dad and saw the sweat run away from his face and onto the seat. I worried. “Sleep!” he asked. I turned my head away from him and looked back at the roof, watching the desert and the few houses on either side of the road slip past the truck and blur somewhere into the sky. The sky. It had changed.

            “Dad, the sky changed” I notified him. He grunted, smacked me on the knee and told me not to watch it. “Dad, it’s darker now. But not all of it”. We both paused for a moment and sat looking out the front window. It certainly was darker now, but not all of it. It seemed to grow harsh and violent somewhere right above us and then fade back to its nasty former self as we drove forward. The sky then, it followed us. The violence of the sky followed us. “Dad, the sky sees us” I said. “I’m aware” he grunted. We both sat silently watching the sky watch us as we drove through the desert and passed the empty Spanish houses on either side of us. Dad pulled over, he thought it best, into the sandy lot of an abandoned house and rolled down the window. When he’d rolled down his window and stuck his head out to watch the sky watching us I quietly adjusted my seat upwards, the window downwards and my head outwards. We watched the sky watch us for a moment. Then we saw somebody in our desert.

            “Don’t breathe m**********r”, was all I heard. Dad gasped and reached to put the truck into first gear when the truck started shaking from side to side, raised upwards and then fell. Two men and a woman stood by our tires with three axes while another man pointed a rifle at my father through the window. “Turn the engine off. Now! Turn it off! Take out the keys!”, said the excitable man at our window. Dad stared into the rear view mirrors a long time watching the men with axes who stood by our truck. Then turned and looked at me. He cried just once. Not dramatically or even with any noise. But he cried as he looked over to me. Just a tear. It was enough, I thought.

            The sky revolted just about then. Lights grew inside the violent sky as it angered itself. A small fire grew inside the lights and then the sky shook inside itself. The man with the rifle at our window reached back to swing the rifle into Dad’s head and just then, he pulled the keys out of the ignition and the truck settled under us. The man with the rifle halted mid swing, grabbed the keys from dad and ran inside the abandoned house. They all did. The two men with the axes and the woman, they all ran inside the house. The sky was revolting over us. But just then in its rebellion, just as dad pulled the keys out of the ignition the sky found its former nasty self again and settled. We sat there in the truck watching the sky, wondering if it’d strike us from above or make demands of us. But it just sat there. Then the fires in the sky dimmed and the lights inside the fires passed over us and towards home. Home. I thought about the three flat tires and the men with the axes and wondered what home meant anymore. I watched the smoke pour into the valley from the cities and wondered if home was there at all.

Then the axe people inside the house opened the front door for just a second and tossed a paper airplane into the space between us. We watched it float and fall ten feet or so outside the front porch and stared at it. The sky, the axe people, the violent sky, our flat tires. We hadn’t really decided what to make of any of it. We were still inside the chaos. I watched the airplane lie on the grass and fidget in the desert breeze and wondered if I cared to walk towards the axe people’s house to get their message. I had no care of it, they had axes after all and even the woman at that, but dad had already walked to the airplane and onto their sandy yard. He cared. The door sat open barking its musical demands to be closed and not forgotten as dad leaned down to read the plane. His hands shook slightly as he picked up the airplane and separated its folded wings. He stood looking down at the paper trying to understand it. He looked up at the house again with his mouth slightly parted as his words collided with themselves inside his thoughts and on his dry lips. He moved his mouth but said nothing. Then his hands fell to his side and he stood facing the axe people’s house with the paper laid out for me to see at his side.

The paper read in bold, excited black marker: “RADIO: BAD. US: GOOD. COME INSIDE. BRING FOOD.”

 

II.

“Since when did you start callin’ people a Momma F’er?” said the woman.

 

The man with the rifle stood in the hallway with a smirk on his face as he parted with layer after layer of jackets and scarves. A mismatch of wintery garb lay in a pile in the center of this mismatch of a group as dad and I closed the door behind us and watched our soon-before enemies of the road make small talk with one another. I watched them complain and heave their clothes into the stack and was sure they knew each other longer than the day or so that the sky had been on fire. I looked at dad and he knew. He was thinking the same. “They’re family” he said without looking at me. Dad knows people. It’s his job. He sells cars to them. To people that is. I suppose he’d even sell a car to these car jackers. That’s just who dad is. Then the man with the rifle… the old man with the rifle… tossed dad the keys to the truck. Which made them car jackers no longer. Just car slashers or choppers or something.

 

“Sorry about the tires, man, we just had to get that friggin’ radio off. Especially if you’re stopping in this town for a while. Can’t have no radios on in this town. Not around us anyways.” Said the old man. The woman nodded with a sort of self satisfaction at the old man and whispered, “that’s more like the guy I know. I don’t know the hoodlum on the road who calls random people in a truck a momma f’er. You’re a philosophy professor for christ’s sake. Yesterday you were teaching of Aristotle versus Plato and today you’re callin this nice man a momma f’er”. The woman shuddered. Then grinned. The old man dropped his last jacket and began watching dad and I like he had outside. He was watching us as we watched him. “Welcome to base Alpha in the deserts west of the Mojave” said the Professor cinematically and sarcastically. “We hope your stay is just so pleasurable and we are not here to meet all of your needs” he paused for a dramatic effect. Dad and I stared and watched. Curious and afraid. “Eh, well, this ‘we’ would be me, the Professor, of the once lovely and spacious campus of Berkley” he continued and pointed around the room, “my lovely partner Anna of southern Romania, she’s a PhD student in the ontology department” she curtsied, oddly, towards dad in her oversized snow jacket, “and my son Jonathan a…” he glanced over to the young man who interrupted, “an automotive student at Berkley Community College and a professional driver to-be”. The professor stared a bit too long at the son and paused a bit longer while we took all of this into account.

That left one, however. A man who we couldn’t entirely make out. Dad pointed to the last man who sat in a chair against the window in the living room, “And him?”. Professor nodded and acknowledged dad, though a bit reluctantly. “Yes, that’s ‘Minivan’. He hasn’t spoken since we pulled him over. He came from somewhere north we think. His license plate on his minivan reads ‘San Francisco’. His wallet.. well..”. The professor paused and lingered on these words, watching Minivan stare at the fire in the sky from the living room window. We watched Minivan watch the sky as the professor found his words, “We think the north may not have had it as easy as we have had. When we stopped Minivan in a spot just ahead of where we stopped you, he’d been drinking pretty heavily and was unable to speak. Not on account of his intake of alcohol, but his distress. When we pulled him out of his minivan and tried to get him inside before the skies became too angry, he passed out mid-hijack in tears and awful screaming. We dragged him inside and checked his pockets for identification… and there it was. His family pictures inside his wallet. We think he lost his family somewhere north. We think… he saw his family lost to them. You see, his wife and two daughters all have red X’s over their faces on his family pictures in his wallet. His son remains unmarked. I figure at some point Minivan will come-to and explain this to us. We’ve seemed to have adopted him temporarily.”

Anna had curled up against the stairs, her thin legs curled up near her chest as she took heavy drags from a cigarette that just seemed too long for a cigarette. She was a beautiful woman. That I knew. Anna was thin and strong with a sort of femininity that overwhelmed any short glance towards her. Even with her mismatched snow jackets unzipped and hanging around her she was beautiful. Anna was a woman.

 Anna hadn’t come to terms with Minivan yet. The Professor’s retelling of meeting Minivan had upset her greatly. She left little lipstick stains around the cigarette as she inhaled purposefully from her nicotine stick. Dad noticed. “Professor, Anna’s got a gown on and lipstick” dad whispered as he leaned towards the Professor, “and there’s a tuxedo hung in the sedan in the driveway. What am I missing?”. The Professor nodded and leaned against the wall, watching Anna enjoy her cigarette or the cigarette enjoy her. Either way. The Professor grinned as he lingered on her and explained, “We came from Vegas actually. We’ve been going to Vegas for the weekends about once a month for a year now. But Vegas is mostly gone to them now.” Anna let go of her drag as she looked towards the ground. “You’d be surprised how flammable the desert is. It just burns and burns. The worst part of driving towards home was not being able to tell where the sky and the desert fires stop. They… seemed to blend most of the time. It’s hard to explain”. Anna let go of another drag and let her neck stoop a bit further and knees slide a bit closer to her chest, “It is.” she whispered to us and nobody.

“Then there’s the sky” said the Professor. Dad groaned a bit, “Yes, we’ve seen it just now. The radio seems to agitate it. That’s why you wanted the engine off.” The Professed shuffled in his feet and watched Anna for some sort of approval. Anna and the Professor stared at each other for a moment, sharing a secret, silent conversation between the two of them. Then Anna looked at dad and watched him. They watched each other and then she nodded to the Professor. “You see, the sky is not like this everywhere”. We froze. Minivan had taken notice of us now and eavesdropped. “It’s clear skies in the Mojave.”

 

III.