A FORGETTING

The odor was caustic, yet sweet. It was malignant in a way that tapped directly into primordial wiring, drawing the visceral, species-part of him up out of sleep with tooth-like acuity.

Clickety-clang. Clickety-clang. Clickety-clang. Clickety-clang…

Michael could not attest to having heard anything before the limping fan summoned him back to the living, but the half seen walls beyond the bed had an immediacy to them that was hard to describe, like they had been thundering down to stop within inches of the mattress. The night was more brackish brown than black in color. Charged electrons hung in it—words spoken but not yet digested in the gut. He roused from his pillow to probe the ledge of the nightstand: The windowpanes could have been coated with resin for what little light they were letting in. Regardless, he could see well enough to tell the bedroom door had closed of its own accord.

Clickety-clang. Clickety-clang. Clickety-clang. Clickety-clang…

He turned on the lamp and followed its burlap glow down through crusty eyelashes and spindly table legs to connect to a floor. Gravity tugged on the two halves of his splitting head, though his knees provided a serviceable vice to arrest the breach while he poked about for house slippers under the bed skirt. There was a delayed shudder to find the mousetrap by the bedpost had sprung and flipped over onto one of the shoes. He pinched at the slipper timidly until he realized the trap was empty.

Clickety-clang. Clickety-clang. Clickety-clang. Clickety-clang…

He slumped forward to turn off the racket in the floor and watched the fan blades slow with irritation. Even though his senses were quick to adhere to their sticking places, voids remained in his thinking. The cage was intact, though one—and only one—of the fan blades inside it was bent. Michael dragged his nose over the hot motor, but already knew the faint smoke was not electrical in nature. Sitting in the floor, he listened intently to the old house around him, yet was incapable of differentiating between noises conjured by his fright and those that properly elicited it. All the pictures on the wall were listing to the right; the dresser mirror was similarly inclined. He finally stood up and noticed the blinking light on his answering machine, but just as his finger lit on the play button a more distinct crack sounded under his feet. The idea he might have an intruder downstairs made him switch the lamp back off.

The returned darkness, far from being a concealing cloak, turned up what had not been seen before. A thin wedge of dim light was gnashed in the gap beneath the bedroom door. With this unsettling realization, the resident crept over to encounter resistance when he pulled on the doorknob. The door was out-of-square and scraping against the floorboards. The hallway beyond it was dully illuminated with shadows thrown off by stairway slats. They leapt up high on the walls in hued bands only to ripple down through murkier gradations. Michael peeked down the steps to spy glare from the television slithering up the banister. A glass-covered painting across from him had fallen to shatter against the baseboard, and like the mousetrap and fan its state was symptomatic of something else. Before his fear and logic could work out a plan of action, a scratchy creak arose at his back. He jerked around to hear the attic door popping on its painted-over hinges at the top of a second, darker flight of stairs. An inexplicable breeze was wafting down from it and over his pajama bottoms. Caught between two undesirable choices, he opted to go downstairs and confront the more frightening prospect.

The ground floor greeted him with icy solidity, although he could scarcely draw in enough breath to cover the remaining distance to the living room. A mangled picture on the TV screen came into view first, but on scanning the dim surroundings he almost missed the child sitting on the couch.

His follicles hardened to chafe. “Hello?” he peeped.

The wide eyes of the pretty little girl did not acknowledge him. They remained fixed on the TV.

He spoke again to confirm his being awake. “Who are you? How did you get…”

The answer was already in sight. The backdoor was open in the kitchen, and the smell of acrid smoke was filtering in from outside.

He tried again. “Where are you from, child?”

The girl’s camphor-white skin was ready to ignite with the next flicker on the screen, but she would not speak.

Michael’s gaze drifted over to the garbled image that captivated her. Even though the picture was skewed, a discernable news crawler bearing phone numbers conveyed a sense of emergency. Concerned, he went over to raise a better station, but the other channels were even worse. He glanced up at the television’s eerie light on the craggy stucco ceiling. The whole house had been witness to some event and was ready to implode at the slightest provocation.

The child on the sofa remained as she was, and with a look hardly in the world. A portion of her white dress was torn away; an abrasion was above one ankle. He touched her shoulder to find her shivering. Not sure what to do, he took her into his arms and carried her upstairs to the bedroom, whereupon she was tucked into the warm sheets with misgiving.

His words strove for reassurance on her cheek. “Stay here while I go for help.”

He hurriedly returned downstairs to his half-opened backdoor; it too was out-of-plumb and rubbing against the linoleum floor; a second empty mousetrap was tripped behind the garbage pail. Unable and unwilling to grapple with any of it, Michael looked out his cracked door at the hazy streetlight across the courtyard. Its light, like that coming in through his upstairs window, appeared to be trapped in layers of mica, or brittle-thin obsidian.

A man wearing dark overalls appeared out of nowhere. He directed a flashlight into the homeowner’s face and growled, “You have a flashlight?”

No sooner did the words leave his lips than several other men wearing the same gear rounded the corner of the house.

The resident weakly replied, “Yes. I have one.”

The man pointed back over his shoulder. “There’s been an airliner crash about a quarter of a mile from here. Out in a meadow.” He gestured in the darkness. “The radius of the debris field includes this neighborhood. We’re checking yards, swimming pools, and so forth for bodies, engine parts…”

“My God!” Michael gasped. “What can I do?”

“We need volunteers to help us until we get more feet on the ground. What we want is for someone to help us secure the perimeter and keep people out of the field. Also to make a mental note of anything they find.”

“Of course.” The distressed man fetched his flashlight from his cabinet drawer and followed the emergency workers off the stoop. He then remembered. “I found a little girl in my…”

The party was already dispersed back into the night.

Michael peeked up at his lit bedroom window and imagined the child would be safe for the time being, until help came.

He gravitated to the edge of his property, and only piecemeal took in the surreality of the landscape. The smell of jet fuel was heavy in the air; branches and leaves were coated with it like death. Articles of clothing were tattered and drooping in tree branches; a twisted length of metal gouged a hedgerow. More frightening were bodies (or pieces of them) scattered on rooftops. They resembled carcasses tumbled from Francis Bacon paintings, with wounds like mouths and mouths like wounds still waiting for screams to catch up. A sense of dread was quickly dragging down through his gut as he passed into the darker thicket. The dirge of crickets greeted him; busted luggage was strewn in his path. He was mindful of his steps in the razor-like grass, and his attentiveness turned up the unmistakable form of a human finger. The sight of the bloodless body part made him acclimate at once to the true ghoulish character of what lay underfoot. Reeds, splattered in a halo of dripping mud, were blown outward around a passenger seat submerged in a puddle; perhaps someone was still strapped in it. Michael was growing more terrified by the second, and rapidly approaching a point where he would be entirely useless in his appointed duties. He lifted his sights above the weeds in hopes of redirecting his attention, yet the prospect yielded more unwelcome details. The tail section of the airliner, betrayed by a wreath of encircling smoke, rose against the grim curtain. He wanted to keep his flashlight still in a desire not to uncover more, but a nervous sweep turned up a black box poking out of the ground. His first inclination was to yell aloud to whoever was in earshot, knowing the significance of his find.

Someone was just then moving in front of him in the field. He leapt over the hazardous terrain in an attempt to get their attention, but immediately realized his foolhardiness. When he hit a clearing, he stopped in his tracks to find no one about. The bizarre configuration of ground and sky before him, however, was arresting.

The wind had changed direction in a heartbeat to chase away the haze. Myriad stars emerged on the unimpeded horizon, and with such radiance they pierced him down to watery marrow. His eyes slowly lowered and narrowed around a pale form in the blowing grass.

It was a woman lying on her back.

She was nude, evidently having all of her clothes sheared away in the fall. He approached her initially with morbid curiosity, and then, as he drew nearer, with a growing sense of reverence. Her skin showed no signs of burns or trauma, though more astonishing was her beauty. The supine attitude of her body made her appear posed, and the serenity of her expression, touched more by sleep than death. He knelt beside her—though more like drawn to his knees—, and looked away only after a numbing while. The silent, mourning stars moved over them in a processional circle, but seemed prepared to release him. Rising to his feet, he stared in the direction of his house. It was now etched in silhouette against the same starry sky. He could see it, as if viewing it through a telescope. A hole was in his roof. White fabric—a piece of a torn dress—blew from an exposed beam. He turned back to the woman at his feet.

Her eyes, retracing her fall, looked back onto the sky of burning windows.