Dusk Country Blues: Part I

Chapters I & II

I

She stood naked on the abandoned highway into town. Twilight casting shadows from the greyed husks of the industrial plants looming over the road. Her hair tumbled brown past her knees. Thousands of fireflies swarmed her antlers like a beacon.

I held my breath, crouched behind a rusted pickup truck, the blood pounding in my temples. Swallowing hard and breathing slow, I stood. Ready to approach.

But there was Abe, my twin, emerging from shadows, naked and walking towards her. He stretched a hand to her and she took it, pulled him close. They embraced, the fireflies swirling round their lithe bodies. He led her to another abandoned pickup truck and helped her climb onto its bed.

Frozen there, I watched as she took my brother in her mouth, watched as she pushed him down and climbed on top. My mouth dry and my body shaking, I watched the way he stroked her antlers, how he stood while she knelt and came on her antlers, how he licked his ejaculate off those same antlers, how she kissed him afterwards.

The crotch of my jeans was wet as I crept away from them. A battle raging within my chest.

Tears and shame and rage and frustration.

II

The tenth hour of true night but it was hot as ever. Abe took his shirt off, his torso lean and hairless. Every muscle cut as if his body were marble and his life the artist’s hand. Even his hips formed a V leading into his jeans. His feet hung over the miles of night while he leaned back on his elbows. Sitting crosslegged, I stared out from the roof of the town’s manufacturing mausoleum. There were no stars or specks of light to freckle the night.

“I met a girl,” he said, his lilting voice gentle in my ears.

My face flushed, and my body tensed so I didn’t turn to look at him, hoping my voice wouldn’t give anything away. “Yeah?”

He laughed. His words lisped, “She’s not like the others. This one’s special.”

I nodded, still not turning to face him. “Tell me about her.”

His feet lifted, and he used momentum to swing forward, his fingers gripping the edge of the concrete building and his head came forward, twisting round to look me in the face. His careless confidence constricted my heart. I thought of how easy it would be for me to push him, how hard it would be to forgive myself. How I hated him. How I loved him. How I needed to escape but could never go on without him.

He smiled. “Want to meet her?”

“Now?”

He snorted. “Not now, dummy. Maybe tomorrow. At dusk.”

Relief was a warm knot in my stomach coming loose. Sweat made my shirt stick to my back. I stood and stretched and unstuck my shirt from my skin, turning away from the open night, the too-close edge of nothing beckoning me. The always starless sky a blank curtain of black. In all directions, the grey outlines of crumbling industrial concrete reached up from the earth. Their purpose unknowable. Their machines all gone or rusted inoperable. Everyone who knew their names, knew how to make them sing and dance and buzz, just a memory echoing in the vast empty rooms and hallways.

“Do you ever miss them?”

Abe was standing next to me, staring out at the same emptiness but seeing something else. “Who?”

“I don’t know. Whoever was here. Whoever did all this.”

His hand on my shoulder was clammy and strong. Taller than me by several inches, he pulled me close and I leaned my head on his shoulder.

His voice was delicate, and he sang a warbling melody, “I sleep with no voice and wake with no name. The echoes can’t give me no pain.” His voice was terrible, tuneless.

He dropped his hand from my shoulder and took mine in his. We walked hand in hand from the roof through the broken stairways, through the vast empty rooms numerous as the combs to a hive. The dust danced over the concrete and swirled in the wind, in the faint light from the fireflies. Fissures ran through the floor of the bottom of the factory. Grass and vines and weeds snaked their way from the world outside, colonizing the industrial waste of abandoned humanity.

The door was rotted to the point it was only scraps of wood on hinges. We walked the miles home hand in hand. We followed the cracks in the roads, one of us on either side, tethered by fingers weaved together. His heartbeat faint but a part of mine. One heart in two bodies. His beautiful and perfect. Mine made from the leftovers of what it took to make a person. His limbs long and easily muscled. His body slender and lithe, a vulnerable strength to him. Like he could be blown away by the dusk country winds or could swing his momentum with enough strength to lift the rusted husk of a car. His face was almost feminine. High cheekbones, wide nose, deep black eyes, full lips, perfect teeth.

I was his opposite in every way. Short and stocky and ungraceful. My square head and wide eyes. But my voice was a deep baritone, sonorous and forged in the decay of the dusk country stretching round us while his was light and breathy and lisped.

The streets were empty. Our barefeet clapped against the depths of true night. Home was a dilapidated pre-fab house stacked among hundreds, most of them empty. The door swung open at Abe’s touch and he said, “We’re home.”

Mother was a lump on the lopsided couch. Her face just a shadow in the darkness of night but her massive body spilled out like rolling hills cascading. She terrified and disgusted me and yet I loved her for what she had once been in those days of childhood, when life and love seemed possible. I heard the slide of a door and then the faint light of bottled fireflies. Abe handed me a jar and I brought it to mother.

Her mouth hung open and her milky eyes stared through me. Her pupils no longer the deep black of life but a pale shade over white. I put the jar on the table in front of her and touched her cheek. Flesh like moldy dough, I feared it would collapse or slough off against my fingers. She blinked several times, slowly, and focused on me. Her pupils darkened and I told myself she saw me. The sweet stink of decay emanated from her, like her body was a garden of rotting vegetables.

“Duncan?” Her husky voice swelled within me as it always did, throwing me back to those days before memory, before loss and rot. A voice that was the sound of my whole world.

“No, it’s me. Locke.”

She raised a shaking hand and gripped mine. Soft and without power, like her skeleton had softened or dissolved inside that yielding flesh. “Duncan, I’ve missed you. I saw the moon and thought of you.”

I blinked back tears. “The moon’s—”

Abe said, “The moon reminds him of you too, momma. I heard him calling your name.”

Mother’s throat clicked and her huge body rippled, and she leaned back into the couch collapsing and creaking beneath her. A tear made it through the crevices of her face.

Abe touched my shoulder. “Come on.”

I left the jar of fireflies there beside her and followed the faint light in Abe’s hands.

Abe threw himself into our mattress, kicking up dust. I climbed in beside him, let the night swallow us. My thoughts raced. Thoughts of the man who I’d call daddy. The mother slowly decaying along with everything else. The girl with antlers and the hundreds of girls and boys who trailed in Abe’s wake, who spread their legs for him, who moaned love songs into the night.

“You awake?” I felt his voice vibrate through the mattress, through my skin pressed against him.

“Yeah.”

“Tell me a story?”

“What you wanna hear?”

He shifted beside me, his body coiling in on itself. “Something beautiful.”

The cracks in the ceiling were just large enough to see through but the sky was only blackness. The faint glow of the fireflies revealed only outlines of our room, casting a faint sickly glow. I rolled over to face them, my back pressed against Abe’s. I imagined this is how we were in the womb. Reluctantly pressed together. All that’s desirable in a man pouring into him, while I leeched what I could to make myself whole. Somehow I stole enough to have the voice that belonged to him. The rich and unforgettable one that would fit inside his lungs and mouth so well, completing the image of a human perfected. But the voice was mine and Abe couldn’t sleep without it, because it was his too.

I stared at the fireflies rattling against the glass chaotically. “Years ago, the dusk country was alive. The hum of machinery was everywhere. The sun came up and stayed up for hours. It went so high that you could look straight up and it would be there for a whole hour before it fell back down. Mothers and fathers went to the buildings and made the machines sing. Children gathered together in the sunlight and played games. They didn’t just collect fireflies. They collected spiders and butterflies. They traded them, not as a commodity, but like treasures. They didn’t need to dig in the mud and the dirt for beetles but traded their precious gifts for a beetle destined to be champion and everyone would gather around to watch the beetles fight. The streets weren’t full of dust and grass didn’t break them up. No, people got in cars and made them move. They moved as fast as you can run, and no one got tired. There was food everywhere too. People ate more than insects and plants. Even the river flowed clean. The dusk country was a town made of light. Even the streets had light. And night would come but there were stars. Like a thousand fireflies but way up in the air. So high you couldn’t even reach them standing on a building. And there was a moon. It was like the sun but smaller. Night lasted only a little while before the sun came back. The best part was seeing people smile. Seeing people everywhere, smiling. Just smiling for no good reason. Just smiling because the sun was shining.

“You know what the best part was?”

“What?” his voice only a whisper.

“People didn’t just disappear.”