THE FLICKER

“The world is a den of thieves, and night is falling. Evil breaks its chains and runs through the world like a mad dog. The poison affects us all. No one escapes. Therefore let us be happy while we are happy. Let us be kind, generous, affectionate and good. It is necessary and not at all shameful to take pleasure in the little world.”

~Ingmar Bergman

     Deadness of mind settled in. Though sleepy and still hungry after eating rock hard bread, I kept watch. Those two idiots were with me, but they were loyal idiots, at least for now.

     I don’t recall how many days, months, had passed, since the Flicker. But I know it was cold and now the days are longer, and warmer. The sun angle moved up a whole hand in the sky. Still at night we kept a fire, not to keep anything out... but to remind us we were still alive, and needed a reminder of something warm and inviting and comforting in this world. 

     I met these dolts well over a month ago. I think they’re brothers. They don’t talk much anyways. One is taller than the other, more oafish. The smaller one has lizard-prick eyes. I can’t decide which one I hate more. They won’t leave though. They’re constantly fighting over the scarce bits of food we manage to track or find. .A few hours before dawn, I laid in my bedding, stirring a stick in the mud. The rain had stopped, but I was still soaked. Not shivering, but damp and uncomfortable as all hell. Both the idiot brothers were snoring. I had spent the last thirty minutes thinking of ways I would murder them, each one more bloody and depraved. A log smashing their faces into bloodblack mulch. Tying them up and stabbing them over and over with shoddy rusty long knife I kept in my rucksack. But nah, they were safe for now. Just pesky little fantasies to fight off the boredom of the night. Couple of fucking idiots; will probably kill each other before I ever get up the guts to do it.

     The Flicker happened and nothing was ever the same. Layers of time were eaten off like burnt skin, down to a bloody bone no one, including myself, recognized. If I had a dream of from before, it was in hot bright glimmers of barely connected imagery. A fully intact gable of a house with black windows, a hawk flying deep into the sun with a carcass of an animal in its mouth, a fragment, like stone painting, of a face once presumably familiar. A mother, a sister, a daughter?  Did we live in the house? Nothing would ever come together as a cogent memory of the past. 

     I threw another rock at the big idiot-- we’ll call him Oaf from now on, and the other one Gecko-- and this time I squarely hit him on the nose. He popped awake and looked around him in a frantic manner, expected full on assault. I laughed. He stared red-nosed at me and shouted: “hey, what the fuck. Why you did that?” Then he slumped and looked hurt. What a melodramatic douche. 

     “Time to take over watch. I want some sleep.” 

     “Okay. Any bread?”

     “Nah, I ate it all. Go chase a mouse or something.”

     I wasn’t joking.. he really enjoyed doing that. The other guy, Gecko, was tossing and turning now, apparently having a nightmare. I wondered what kind of stupid ass dreams he had. He was only a tiny bit smarter than his brother, but infinitely more slimey. I imagined his dreams went something like this: a snowball rolling downhill, becoming a massive white planet plummeting into infinite space, a cat he tried to fuck, then breaking its neck and eating it raw, then black snake vision through a steaming swamp, eyes rolling like lottery balls, slithering in and out of black wet branches, his prey not a rat or rabbit, but a small child wandering alone in the dark and the dank...

     The fire was down to just embers now, and lightning went off in the distance, each time lighting up a row of naked trees. Still mostly Winter yet. Does Spring even come anymore? I huddled in my bedding and pretended to be asleep. Every few moments I would slowly draw my eyes open and either look at Oaf sitting calmly staring off into idiot space, or watch the lightning engage with a sky I couldn’t quite connect to, as if it truly was another dimension and no long apart of my own. The wind kicked up a rustle, and distance branches cracked and swayed in the darkest of dark...

     The black windows were reflecting orange globes now, maybe streetlights, maybe just reflections of the low angle sun, then pulse and fade, filling up the entire glass and puffing out, then in, over and over and faster and faster, like the fucking entire house was breathing! then a sullen sidewalk fading into fog, the visible patchwork of soft yellow street light, the flickering of leaves unseen.. now a man coming into and out of focus, wearing a full white robe showing only the hint of slint black eyes, and gnarled toes split by sandles. He was coming closer, almost up to me now, raising his white robed arms at me, not aggressive, but not friendly either. I ran between houses, hurdled iron and steel fences, enraged a barking dog, or mewing cat. Looking back every now and then to see if the white robed man was following me. Finally, out of breath and bent over, I slinked quietly into a shed at the back of a dark yard. My breath was visible and I could hear the thundering of my heart inside my ears, and brain... Then turned and saw the white robed man was inside already, staring deep into me. I was screaming, what do you want, what do you want, over and over, while his penetrating stare caused my entire body to vibrate... what did you do, what did you do, whay did you do!

     

     Startled awake, I shivered in the soft rain, dull light from the sunrise had filtered into everything. Both Oaf and Gecko were awake and huddled under a makeshift tarp, both gnawing on a couple of dead rats they had found this morning. Cook them? Nah, why bother. These numbskulls preferred raw meat. The last of the flour to make bread was gone. I guess I’d be eating tiny creatures soon as well, if I didn’t want to starve. 

     “Found us some rats, Guy. There’s another one for you. We likes you. Really.” Oaf, the afterworld’s humanitarian. They both called me Guy, and I never disabused them of that habit. I was almost just--Guy-- to myself at this point. The clouds were dripping gray and low, and now in the drab morning I could just make out the broken and staggered fence of a farm house. As were most in this bleak countryside, it was empty. Some had a few food items left, but mostly the scavenger clans had raided them. We were far out of the city now, and heading up into the mountains. I saw we, because I had intended it only be myself alone, but I had these two clowns now. 

     Gecko said, ‘Why are we going up into the fucking mountains, Guy? You say there’s food and cunt up there?” His mouth was black from rotten teeth and apparently he had found a pouch of chewy tobacco, because diarrhea colored juice was dripping down his chin.

     I just stared at him, and didn’t answer. He’d asked this question a hundred times now. He was obsessed with finding a woman, anything female, and fucking her (of course he never used the proper term for what he wanted to do). Called them all, ‘cunts’. In his reprobate mind there was no delineation between fucking and raping, I guess. I had a sudden thought of shoving a hot red poker up his ass while he was muffled by a dirty dish rag, going deeper and deeper in until his guts were a mangled, half-cooked mess.  

     My initial plan was to just head up into the mountains and find a nice contemplative place to die, but then I had the idea of hording as much as possible and finding a cabin somewhere and wait out the Winter, then in Spring plant a small garden. See if I could survive a Summer, away from the sweltering valley humidity and heat. Then I somehow managed to collect these two leeches, and I figured might as well keep them as long as they were useful. They could help collect food, perhaps ward off a raider or two, keep watch for the larger murderous clans than were wandering about the hinterland as well. But those larger groups of mauraders usually kept around the cities, and the old highways. I never asked, but I was fairly sure these two clunkheads formerly belonged to one of those clans, but were kicked out by them, because they were just too stupid and simple to be a functional part of their group.