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.
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.
"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."
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.
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."
"How does a birdie know my business?"
"It doesn't lie. And you might be better off keeping your mouth shut after what I am going to tell you."
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.
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."
"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.
