1
I STIRRED GROGGY AND SORE in the watery well of a blackened crater that cradled me like a babe. Arms and hands crusted with blood, a ringing in my ears like a humming wire, I didn’t know where I was or how I’d gotten there.
Rain pattered over me and trickled down the scars in the crater’s steep walls. The air reeking of chemical fire, the sky opaque with violet fog, bombs thumped somewhere out of sight, the ground quaking as if beasts long trapped in the earth’s core kicked the underside of the land, demanding their parole into the world.
I heard a gentle splash, and was startled to find a woman crouched at my side. I was sure I was hallucinating, something in the air tripping my mind, but there she was, skin gray as tin, turbid eyes peering lovingly over me.
Then I recognized Mama’s wide mouth and tapered chin. A wound marred her forehead, a bullet hole, the gray skin seared and puckered. I began to tremble and Mama’s hand, as cold as stone, gently turned me onto my side.
I couldn’t see her face. I could only feel the chill of her behind me. A sharp pinch in one shoulder blade, like a needle piercing the skin, a pressure like twine tugged through.
I couldn’t move or even speak, but I wasn’t scared. Mama was there. Mama was with me. I tried not to flinch as the pain grew acute and then the hurt was too much and I howled as the world drained of form and color.
* * *
I SQUINTED against the dawn. No violet light, Mama gone, I was alone and the world seemed the world again. A heaviness like a blanket draped my frame. I sat up in the puddle of soot-black water to discover that what felt like a blanket was a shawl of feathers.
My back muscles flexed and the feathers lifted as naturally as an arm. I felt the cold where my damp shirt was shredded up the back, and reached over my shoulder and touched the muscle that fused with the curved ligature and the pneumatized bones of a wing.
Horrified and confused, I paced circles, sloshing about the watery hole. Then I began to remember. Scraps. Disconnected bits. Scorpions slapped together in a tub. Alone and marching through the freezing desert. Screaming at a light in the night sky. Lightning flash; a soundless explosion of light.
I didn’t consider the movement in the way a baby taking her first steps doesn’t consider walking, but the wings swooped upward then thrust sharply down and my entire body lifted. With a second flap, the crater’s floor released me.
My lungs bucked from fear and my wings clamped against my body and I splashed back down into the basin. The chalk sky open above me, I pressed a palm to my sternum and felt the muscle of my heart throbbing through the bone.
I tugged a wing as if to yank it from my back. My muscles seized against the pinch. The wings were somehow connected to the pain-center of my mind. I descended into panic, curled my fingers into claws, stiffened my heels into spikes, leaping and kicking, but the crater’s walls were too slick to scale.
Trapped and despondent, I finally allowed the wings to unfurl. I raised my arms and the wings flapped in spastic bursts. Higher I flew until I shot my hands above my head and grasped the crater’s rim and pulled myself up to stand in the acrid wind blowing over the raw empty desert.
WHITE PAWS sullied with midway dust, their withers higher than the highest head, a pair of white lions as stout as bulls parted the milling crowd. Sweating in my tac vest, I watched the giant cats lumber between the booths with carnies hawking games, past the funnel-cake vendor and the grill pits of corn.
A little man in a white suit followed the enormous lions, clutching a chain in each hand, the chains hooked into the cats’ massive collars. As they passed before me, I noted the man was in fact a boy, with pale skin and hair so blond it was almost white. A teen, if barely, he called with a grown man’s authority after the crowd, who turned to his voice and followed in his wake.
Twenty years old and fresh from boot camp, this was my very first mission. Though Sergeant Nazari had emphasized the mounting terror threats throughout the south, patrolling the West Texas Fair felt unworthy of the uniform of the United States Army. For the After Action Review, I’d justify my interest in the boy and lions as a security concern, though at the time I sensed nothing at all dangerous. I was simply bored. Curious and bored.
I trailed them into a little outdoor amphitheater and stood near a concrete stage that faced a semicircle of ragged wooden grandstands. The bleachers filled quickly, and the people cheered as the boy put the lions through a series of exercises one might a dog: pushing a ball with their noses, lifting one enormous paw and then the other, rolling over and roaring on command.
Then the white-suited boy positioned the lions on their haunches at center stage. With one and then the other he pried his fingers between their fanged teeth to spread wide their jaws. When the boy faced the audience and spoke, his voice boomed from speakers embedded in the lions’ gaping maws.
“What have we become?” he asked, letting the question hang over us. “In my life, I’ve seen America in five different wars. I’ve seen viruses take countless lives. I’ve seen quakes swallow coasts and ruin cities, and new cities rising in their place. I’ve seen the wildfires and storms get worse and worse and—” He reached inside his jacket, withdrew a small white Bible, and held it above his head. “I’ve read my Bible every day to grant my life a context. I’ve seen that context shift over the years. This is to say that even the Bible changes with the times. I understand that’s a dangerous thing to say, but I mean no blasphemy. Soon we’ll be living on some space station, and who knows what it’ll mean then. The stories of the Old Testament. The wisdom of Christ. What will Eden mean once we’re gone from Earth? What will Bethlehem be to a child born on Mars?”
I surveyed the grandstand, people shaking their heads or checking their phones in realizing the boy had tricked them with the show of lions and was now going to preach.
The boy minister pushed up his sleeves, panned his eyes over the restless crowd. “There’s a sermon I’ve given in my mind many times, but never spoken aloud. It seems to have come from the darkest of truths, and it greatly scares me.” He stepped to the front of the stage and boldly pronounced, “I don’t believe in the Devil. I believe it’s only us. Jesus was paraded to the cross, a crown of thorns on his head. Judas gave him up. Peter denied him. What did we do to save him? What did you do? I wasn’t there, you cry. It wasn’t me. But you were there. You’ve always been there. Let’s be honest. Can we be honest?” he said, his voice rising. “We’ve gotten exactly what we want. Storms and disease. War and terror. It’s exactly what you want. And the relief you feel is tremendous. I knew it’d come to this, you say. I knew I was right. The power of knowing the despair you ordered has finally come to pass makes you feel like a god. Let’s be honest. It’s what you want. You want this world to collapse. Want people to be every awful thing.”
The boy pulled a handkerchief from his jacket pocket, dabbed sweat from his brow. “I’m one of you,” he said, softer now. “I’m not shaming anyone. I’m done with shame. All my life I’ve been ashamed of my thoughts, doubting I’d be understood. This is what I’m saying. I’m saying God gives us what we want. Not just what you say you want, though that’s a part of it. I mean your every thought becomes the world. Your every prayer. But not just your prayers. Their prayers, too. And from these prayers we get all the bigotry, all the poverty and violence, and all the harm we need done to those not like us because we hate ourselves and hate each other.”
“Stop it,” a man shouted from the stands.
The young preacher winced. He gazed out in the direction of the heckler. I leaned to see a bald muscular man glaring at the boy from the third row of the center bleachers.
“Stop it?” the boy preacher said to the man. “Isn’t that about all we ever say? Stop making me hope. Stop asking for love. Love costs too much. Hope hurts too much. Stop it—that’s exactly what we said to Christ. We say that we love him, but the truth is he asks too much. Be merciful? Be meek? Be the peacemaker? What weakness. What cowardice. Isn’t that what you feel? None of it gives you what you want. That power over your fears, over others. That utter destruction. Stop it. Fine, fine,” he said, patting the air. “God is listening to everything you say and don’t say. God gives you what you want. He put his son on that cross and Christ cried out, ‘Why hast thou forsaken me?’ God’s reply was clear—‘I have not forsaken you, my son, but simply given them what they want.’”
Chatter rippled through the stands. The muscular man stood and sidestepped to the aisle. He stormed out of the amphitheater, a young woman in a tank top following close behind.
The preacher shuffled his feet, seemed to shrink up there on the stage. “Listen,” he said, brushing blond-white hairs back from his sweat-beaded forehead. “You want me to talk about the End Days? About the final stand? About the Beast from the Sea? Seven heads and ten horns and ten crowns? I know that’s what you want so you can feel it’s all something beyond you, that we’re all just a victim of some great invasion. No,” he said, shaking a scolding finger. “It’s your heads and horns and crowns. If God only gives us what we want, then want must be most sacred, above everything. Above love, above peace. For our God is want, and want is God, and what we want is this world we’ve made. This world. We’ve made.”
A scuffling broke through the amphitheater, people rising and filing out of the stands.
“What about the children?” the preacher cried after those leaving. “What will you tell the children?”
The boy preacher’s chin dropped to his chest. He remained in that posture before slowly lifting his head and turning to the lions. He clapped his hands and the cats’ jaws snapped shut. The lions peered drowsily about, as if waking from a slumber. They lumbered up to the boy, nuzzling in close as to comfort him. The preacher slumped against a lion’s flank, burying his face in its snowy mane.
Copyright © 2022 by Alan Heathcock