Jan Urban | Author
The Heart Of Summer
The day folded into dusk, the last light bleeding from the sky like a wound that would not heal. Darkness crept across our land in tides of shadows and breaths of silence.
I took you in my arms under the black window giving you a bottle of warm milk. You hugged it and drank it down.
"Sleep now, my little one."
The rain came down and drummed against the glass. A lullaby no one remembered. You babbled oy, oy, yai, yai, uy, uy, hmmm, and you drifted off to sleep. We were a creature with two heads in the night of old and pure. But I lay awake. The sharp quarter moon hung upon us burdened with worry.
But why?
The wind rattled through the Wheatland, speaking half-truths.
But why?
And the rain kept coming, trying to get in. They all rasped like steel dragged over stone. They said, the stories are supposed to continue until they heal.
Fork-tongued charlatans. Lies, all of it.
Some stories never heal.
Some believe this land has been reborn, but I've seen its harshness. Dreams of rebirth and innocence are justified by the good nature of those who've never stood beneath the furnace of our summer sun. And such dreamers are always puzzled by a thought that always seizes me so strongly that I finally utter it:
"A human being that burns alive shrinks so terribly, doesn't it?"
I say this, and every eye clouds over. They get into their cars, and I kick up the dust for a while.
"Who are you?" they ask and shield their gaze from the intense sun.
"Ed. I live in that house over there."
"Stop reading that shit," spoke the guttural voice. "You want to know what happened in the haystack, right?"
I stiffened. "What happened in the haystack?"
"Are you sure you want to know?"
"SPEAK!"
The stench in the room was unbearable. Something fishy and dead and deep.
"We lay together in the dark."
"W-what?"
"Flesh found flesh and we made love."
The creature's meanness was unending, but I got the sick feeling that he was telling the truth—and that was horrifying.
"Our bodies tangled, and the earth shifted. She came to me quiet as dreaming. And we moved like the shadows of snakes beneath the moon."
"Uhm, yeah sure!"
"And now I will stay in her until her tongue sticks out."
Her eyes stayed open too long.
Too long for any good thing.
Her pupils black, like the kind of coal too old and too hard, pressed deep into the dead ends of the earth. They stood still, staring like the world had ended. They revealed it, the goddamn thing. In that stillness, I glimpsed it.
A time before man. Before thought. It huddled there. Untouched.
I looked outside at the mountains of hail thrown upon the ground, and each flash showed how heavy the rain was falling. Wheat fields would be destroyed; grains had to rush out of fear from the stalks. There was another lightning flash—that silhouette again! Someone ran along the edge of the field and vanished.
The thunder rolled. An infantry of tanks crawled across the field. The chandelier trembled overhead, its crystals jingling softly, and the water in the glasses rippled. Then we all yelled. The earth trembled beneath us, because stones the size of potatoes rained down. If anyone had been driving on the southern road, they were dead in a ditch.
I pressed against the window. Behind the porch lay a carpet of little hails, and among them a piece of ice, white and big as a child's skull.
"I understand that you made yourself a new friend."
"Did I?"
She nodded with pursed lips. "Yes, you did."
"And how would you know that?"
"A little birdie told me so."
"A little birdie told you so?"
"Yep, this came straight from a little birdie's mouth."
"How does a birdie know my business?"
"It knows," said Veronica. "No need to be concerned with that."
"Since when do you trust the word of a bird?"
"It doesn't lie. And you might be better off keeping your mouth shut after what I am going to tell you."
"What would that be?"
"You are up to something, aren't you? Your dead friend is giving you orders now. But listen to me. He is full of hate. And he's an idiot. Do not trust his advice, for he plans to get you into trouble."
A body that burns alive shrinks so terribly.
It collapses inwards, like an abandoned shell with no one inside. It sits still and quietly, yet it is oddly stirring.
Without its body, the being shrinks to a child and then to a bird, its body so tiny that it fits in your pocket, and you can carry it with you.
I might even have such a talisman with me now.
What I remember most are the limbs: they were charred and twisted into claws of agony.
She was burned alive.
Like a witch.
After the door shut behind Edward, Nash quickly injected himself with morphine. He started sweating. Ants began crawling on his face. The little black dots were everywhere, swarming in his vision until the world itself had turned into nothing but crawling darkness. He slapped at his face, but they kept descending from a place above him, where they’d always been. Nash would wail and squint, chewing the bedsheets and crushing his hand into the walls.
The voice would squeal in the house, "Nash, it's a rollercoaster from here."
The house was a ship hit by the waves of the sea.
"More! Oh, more!" Nash would scream.
A cracked voice would rasp in the house—magnificent in its madness, shouting More, shouting Always more, and Nash would laugh and dance, the Great Soul, in the middle of the storm.
They drove this vessel into the black night, the night that howled and raged and gnashed beneath the ground-down, shame-bitten teeth of Nash. They plunged through curtains stitched from the carcasses of dead suns, butchered stars and rotting moons, each mile not closer but deeper, into something. A shattering wrongness, a place of death after death. And somewhere in it, a voice screeched like laughter turned half-backwards.
Who wants to come with me on this ship?
Who wants to come with me on this ship?
Who wants to come with me on this ship?
"Shut up, Nash, and look, Nash, look—the bottom of it all!"
"The bottom of it all, goddamn it is, goddamn!"
"It was never meant for eyes like yours. Not for any man's eyes!"
"Oh, Christ, more, more of this! Deeper! Downer! All of it!"
"The stars come here to die, you fool, you—goddamn genius—the abyss, Nash, the abyss, the abyss, the fucking abyss!"
And there was a hush, a breath, a calm.
And in the calm, the silent birth of a horizon, a land hushed in unclean light.
The shore slowly rose. And on it, the rubble of bodies.
"Are they sleeping, Christ’s sake?"
"No. Not sleeping. Not dreaming. Just dead."
"This was the end of them? Tell me the truth."
"Yes, the end of them, Nash. Piled like driftwood, aren’t they."
And Nash sighed, very tired.
"The goddamn gods. Dead. Good. Goddamn them. Goddamn them all."
"We need to heal now. We need to begin as if we are new. As if we are just born," he said.
And the snow outside fell silent on the sleepy land, soft as a memory of my Mom.
