Vic wiped the mud off her cheek, hating herself as she left the gash behind. And then she stopped and lowered her heavy pack there in No Man’s Land. She turned, pulled her ker down around her neck, and ran back, felt near to her youth again, was crying like the little girl she never wanted to be, never wanted to be. And her mom’s arms were wide. No questions. Just tears streaking down her face. A line in the sand that was nothing, not even there, taken in stride.
“Thank you,” Vic muttered into her mother’s neck. “Thank you, Mom. Thank you.”
Which was more than love. And it sustained her as she went back to her burden—that crack in the sand a thing that could be crossed and re-crossed—and she headed dead into the wind and toward the horizon, her mother’s reply echoing in her ear, accompanying her on that long march, whispered there at the edge of No Man’s Land and over the insolent flap of that untamable tent:
“My sweet girl. My sweetest Victoria.”
58 • A Rap Upon Heaven’s Gate
Conner was the one who spotted it. On the seventh night, stoking the fire with a metal rod left over from incorrectly assembling the tent, he lifted his eyes to a sudden white glow on the horizon. It was a burst of daylight like the sun had forgotten the time and had leapt out of bed, rushing, late to work.
Conner shouted for the others, and his mother and Rob and Violet poured from the tent. Palmer rushed over from the other side of the campsite, buttoning his trousers, having gone downwind for a piss. Together, they watched the glow. It bloomed like a radiant flower. It was so bright it required turning away, required looking at it askance, required giving it the same quarter as the noonday sun.
“Jesus,” Palmer whispered.
There was no doubting that a city had just vanished. Conner had seen bombs go off before. Spotting the blast of a normal bomb was a chore from two dunes away. This came to life from over the horizon.
“Vic,” Rob said, sniffing.
Their mother put a hand on his shoulder. “She’ll be fine,” she said, but Conner didn’t think she sounded sure. She couldn’t know. None of them could know.
And then the noise hit after some long consideration. A rumble in their chests and bones. A deep growl of the earth and a howl in the heavens. The wind seemed to shift a moment later, and the sand startled into chaos and turbulence. They held on to one another. Violet took Conner’s hand and squeezed it, and he realized that their little sister was the only one who had ever been there, that she was the only one who had any sense of what had just been harmed. Conner could practically feel her longing to rush that way and see for herself.
“They’ll know we’re here now,” Palmer said.
“They’ve known,” their mother told them. “They’ve always known we’re here. They know we suffer. Now, they’ll give a shit.”
The uncharacteristic language brought silence. A heavy stillness. It took several heartbeats for Conner to realize what was wrong. It would’ve been easy to not notice at all, to go on not noticing for days and days, so steady had been that backdrop of infernal noise that its absence could almost not register. But he heard it, somehow. He heard that quiet far over the horizon.
“Listen,” he whispered. “The drums. They’ve stopped beating.”
There was food and water for five more days, but they made it last eight. Vic had told them not to wait, but they waited. Their mother told them not to hope, but they hoped. Eight more days of camping, of the tent hot at noon and chilly at night, of a quiet shared, a story to pierce the silence, the relief of occasional laughter, the most time ever spent together, time spent talking and thinking. There were stories of Vic to go along with stories of Father. A long wait for some return. If not a person strolling over the horizon, then at least an apparition. If not an apparition, then some word. If not a word, at least a sign.
Palmer spoke of Danvar. A finger in a rip by his belly, he confessed to a murder and their mother held him like he was a boy again. And Conner saw a man in his elder brother’s sobs. It was all life would ever be, as the days and nights drew out and half-caps of water were sipped. No one would ever go back to Springston, for there was no town. They would live in the tent until the food and water was gone, such was the drawing out of night and interminable day as dreams and stories mixed and a week felt like a summer, and the moon went from a sliver to a pregnant disc, and even the rhythms and howls of the wind could be sensed and foreseen, like an old man who has watched the sands with such burning intensity for a wrinkle of years that he could paint a picture of a landscape that is not yetbut will be.
This was how keenly the moments were felt. Especially by the crack in the earth, the Bull’s gash, where a haunting depth opened in the soul of any who stood there, where toes were daringly dangled just to feel the cool air rush up between them, just to pretend that the howl was for the delicately poised, just to imagine a lovely visage down in the darkness screaming Don’t do it. Step back. You are too bold and lovely and singular to look down in here and upon me.
Conner sat there anyway and swung his legs in the gash, so intimate had the two become the past weeks, so hollow the threat and weak the pull. He dribbled sand through his hand and down toward the center of the earth. Nearby, marbles of glass were flicked to the far side, those small beads formed by Palmer, who spent much of his time showing that he could, no doubt thinking that it would’ve been better had hegone, the eldest son.
And on the eighth day, when the hike back should have ended, when they could wait no more, as the last of the water splashed Rob’s tongue and even the moldy heel of the bread was divided among their family, they gathered by the gash in the earth, crossed and re-crossed like a thread leaps and forms stitches, and surveyed that boom-less and quiet horizon.
It was early. The sun a mere hint. A pink ghost lurking. An unusual heaviness to the sky, the lingering night sky, as the stars disappeared. But it was not the light of coming day that swallowed them; it was something in the air. Conner dropped his ker, the sand that normally stirred on the winds succumbing to some mystery, alerted to some presence, a sound like marching in the far sand, and the cool morning grew cooler, the ice in the desert night clung piteously to dawn, fearful of the pink ghost, and Conner heard footsteps. He heard a grumbling. A noise. Something approaching.
“Something’s coming,” Rob said, scrambling to his feet. “Something’s coming!” he shouted.
Palmer and Violet and their mother paused in the dismantling of the tent and ran to the gash to join the two boys, eyes and ears straining in the heavy darkness, tent canvas flapping in a gathering wind, the rhythmic sound of a steady advance, an approach, not of the dead or their long-gone sibling or their father—but of the even more impossible. It struck Rob first and then their mother, pattering across the desert floor, coming with a whoosh of cold wind and a blotting of the stars, a wetness from the heavens, an answer to the long silence, a sign that someone far away was listening.
Their mother fell to her knees and burst into tears.
And the sky wept for its people.