The word ‘suicide’ was written in the
preacher’s harried strokes, slashed across the blackboard in
lowercase script.
The preacher ranted about the evils of the
unforgivably selfish act of taking one’s own life. He forgot his
food, remembered the private family room’s smell, where the funeral
home director had led him and his mom before his father’s viewing.
It was an escape from well-meaning mourners, a place to rest your
ears more than anything. He supposed the wilted flowers were
recycled from earlier services, one more shot to brighten misery. A
cold cut tray and pre-sliced rolls sat preserved and untouched
beneath stretched plastic. He considered the significance of the
knife’s absence.
“
Brimstone!”
“
Drink,” he’d answered, lifting the
bottle and resolving to pick a bushel of flowers for his shitty
room if he woke in the morning.
The camera zoomed in on the preacher, tongue
moving across her bottom lip, specks of perspiration where tears
might gather. She inhaled deeply then spoke directly to Dash.
“Three words to know, to write down and copy a hundred times, and
to share with everyone you touch ….”
He looked around his room, but his notebook was
zipped away in a backpack.
The preacher stepped in front of the blackboard
and pulled down on its wood frame. It rotated to display the other
side, where three words were written in the same script:
suicide
hurts, amen
.
“
Words from our Lord and Savior,”
said the preacher, turning back to the camera, hair swishing back
over thickly padded shoulders. She righted her glasses then lifted
the Bible over her head with two hands, head down, shirt pulled
taut across full breasts. “Suicide hurts,” she said.
“
Amen,” Dash whispered, putting down
the imaginary knife he’d been holding to his wrist.
“
Amen,” Willy repeated from behind,
the rumbles and lightning waning as the sun began its rise from the
hidden sea.
“
Amen,” said Tiki, who was smiling,
watching the storm recede.
One less morning remained in Dash’s life. He
considered the active volcano might draw attention from the outside
world, but there must be dozens if not hundreds of similar events,
many within easier reach. And they were likely beyond the time when
scientists would have evacuated, instruments left to record and
transmit data, as well as providing the fate of recalcitrant
villagers refusing to leave.
A new mist descended over the compound, and
Dash held out a palm to discover it was a fine, gray powder.
More snow
, he thought, weighed down with despair.
Soon it
will shower rocks, and then it will rain lava. But I’ll be long
dead, and won’t get to see any of the real fireworks. Manu was
right about the volcano keeping the soldiers away once and for all.
They’ll have no reason to come to a barren atoll populated only by
charred skeletons half buried in cooling lava. No more pretty
little girls
.
He touched Tiki’s lopsided hair as they watched
the four guards convene in the morning light, adjusting their
underpants, the one back from Manu’s hut talking fast, pointing up
at the volcano. Their hair had turned white, as if they’d suddenly
grown old.
“
I wish I could have a kitten for
one day,” she whispered, right hand stroking his forearm. He could
feel her sharp fingernails, could see how ragged they’d become from
her new bad habit of chewing and spitting the tiny
pieces.
He wondered how far the little amber disk had
floated.
C
ooking fires were kept
burning to light the afternoon when the sun was nearly snuffed out.
Dash and Tiki sat over untouched food bowls left on the hut’s front
steps. Their last supper was the same as every other meal, except
that this one was coated with ash from the persistent flurry.
A line of young men formed in front of the
stage curtain after someone got the idea to use the ceremonial
paints. Bright red triangles were drawn on cheeks and foreheads to
represent the volcano. It was the same color that had been used on
the women’s nipples to entice Dash’s libido. The demeanors of the
decorated men changed once the paint was applied. Each one stalked
away from the woman doing the artwork energized, ready for a
fight.
“
They look dumb,” said Tiki. “I draw
better volcanoes.”
“
The island is turning into a snow
globe.” Dash watched the smoky dome and wafting ash. “My father’s
store had glass balls with winter scenes inside, and loose plastic
shavings for snow. The balls were filled with water and some kind
of clear oil that made it thicker, so the snow fell slower. You
turned it upside down and shook, and the scene became a winter
wonderland. People collect them.”
She held out a hand to catch a flake of ash. “I
think the Volcano turned us upside down.”
“
And she’s still shaking,” he said.
“I guess we’ll be going in a few hours. Did Manu say how
long?”
She ignored the question. “Is Sarah
pretty?”
“
Pretty on the outside. The kind of
pretty that made me wonder why she fell in love with
me.”
“
But she wasn’t pretty
inside?”
“
She hurt me.”
He pictured the disheveled bed. The sheet was
an escaping ghost half on the floor, blanket pushed across his
nightstand. They’d broken the shade of a hundred-year-old lamp, a
gift from his mother. Maybe it was a Hong Kong knockoff. Tommy
Chamber’s hairy ass fully visible as they humped away directly on
the dimpled mattress skin. Sarah’s fingers were claws, nails
pressing deep enough to puncture flesh, touch bone.
“
You were going to marry
her.”
“
Love does messed-up things. I hated
what she did to me, but I lost control of my life. Her power over
me was humiliating.”
“
Like when someone opens the
outhouse door when you’re not done?”
“
Sure,” he said. “It was just like
that. But I convinced myself she’d change. I wanted to
believe.”
“
Manu says I can’t be loved because
of what the soldier did, and no man will ever want me. The Volcano
God is the only thing left for me because the soldier made me dirty
and spoiled.”
“
Manu is wrong.” His voice made her
flinch. “What happened didn’t change you. It was nothing but
violence, something a weak man does to feel powerful. But even if
you’re small and have tiny muscles, you can still be stronger than
the man who hurt you.”
“
I’m more valuable to the Volcano
than the village.”
“
Manu is shit for saying that. He’s
giving the soldier power, and that’s the opposite of what anyone
should do.”
“
He’s my father.”
“
Fathers are wrong all the time. My
father was a coward for leaving us. He did the weakest thing
possible,” Dash said, then added, “except for what Manu is doing to
you.”
“
You think Manu is a
coward?”
“
It’s a cowardly thing for sure,” he
said. “A wise friend taught me where gods are born. You know how to
see gods, how to get close to them. But do you know where they are
made?”
She thought for a minute, and then
shrugged.
He spoke slowly. “People create them from
nothing. They are invented to fix broken lives, when a god is
needed the most. A god becomes real when people believe he is real.
You told me I needed faith, to welcome the gods into my heart.
Maybe I was too broken, or maybe I was just too broken before I met
you. You taught me belief is everything, the most powerful thing in
the world.”
“
Like how magic works.”
He nodded. “And you have to understand that the
soldier is a coward, driven by his own fears of what he really is.
He has no power to change who you are, unless you believe in him.
It’s entirely up to you.”
“
He was strong,” she whispered. “I
fought, but he was too strong.”
“
Shitter bugs move balls of poop
that would be mountains to us.”
“
He’s a shitter bug,
right?”
Dash reached out, put fingers under her chin to
lift her face. “Maybe someone with a heart like Sarah’s never gets
better, but cuts and bruises heal. Chopped off hair grows back. I
believe you are the same beautiful girl as always.”
She smiled.
“
And bee stings heal,” he said, and
also smiled. “Do you know what a princess is?”
“
I think so. There was a story in
one of the burned books. A princess is a girl who marries a prince
to get her glass shoe back.”
“
Okay, yes, and a princess is also a
girl who will one day become queen of a village filled with people
who love her.”
“
I want to be a
princess.”
“
You already are a princess. You
have a beautiful heart everyone loves. Manu learned things in
another time, when people didn’t know any better.”
She fidgeted with one of the bowls, flattening
the rice and then making indentations to form a face. She looked up
at him. “Nobody will have a chance to love me, because I’ll be
dead.”
* * *
The drinking circle grew louder as the painted
men took their places. They laughed and elbowed each other, full of
bluster as the cup made the rounds. The sounds were raw—backs being
slapped, slurred curses, loud spitting. Dash guessed the young men
were boasting in their language about girls they claimed to have
kissed, fish they supposedly caught. Dash was an insider when it
came to those lies, had joined right in at the beer pong table a
hundred times.
When the ash fell thicker, Dash and Tiki moved
back under cover and shared a mat. The air grew more humid, and
thunder rolled back heavier than ever as their final afternoon
passed into night. Everything was cast in the color of unhealthy
skin. The sky’s energy competed with the volcano to shake the
buildings, knocking dead bugs and dry leaf slivers from the walls
and ceilings to litter floors. A new wind mixed up the trash,
carried some out to where the fog swirled like a wizard’s hands.
Great gusts occasionally pushed aside the haze to provide a
fleeting glimpse of a moon nearly in balance, half black and half
bright. Then darkness would fold back over, dirt shoveled onto a
coffin.
“
Maybe it’ll rain,” Tiki said in a
hopeful voice. “I miss rain.”
There’d only been a few brief showers since
he’d woken after the plane crash. The drought was longer than most,
judging by recent grumbling over how low the cistern level had
dropped. The water tasted like poison, even worse when Manu ordered
it boiled. There was no escaping the ash.
Lightning crashed close enough to share its
heat, and Tiki cried out, covering both ears, cringing from the
explosion that didn’t come. Dash rose from his knees with old man
grunts, ducked through the entryway. The four guards had turned
gray in the gloom; only their eye sockets and where they’d dribbled
clap-clap proof they weren’t ghosts. The men parted from a huddle,
Dash catching sight of the jug one had hidden behind his back. Not
even the churning sulfur mist hid the smell of gasoline mixed with
rotten fruit.
“
Bottoms up, shitheads.”
Dash stepped down into the night and then
pushed his way through. Tiki’s footsteps slapped against the wood
floor to catch up. Off to his right, the elders continued drinking
in their uneven circle, oblivious to Dash or the growing tempest.
The women still tended the fires, darting in and out of huts to
feed the coals. All the candles had blown out or
suffocated.
Dash walked to the center of the playing field,
left tracks past the crude soccer ball that might have been a
decapitated head. The ball sat abandoned, with a stretched and
deeply tanned layer of skin. He guessed it was made of pig and
stuffed with grass or ferns.
Something struck Dash’s forehead, and then his
right shoulder. His chest was hit twice, his stomach and cheeks.
When he was nearly convinced he was being pummeled with small
rocks, the rain made itself known to the entire village and jungle
beyond. The night creatures went silent, pausing from their quest
for food, territorial claims, and romantic lures to find
shelter.
He glanced back. The drinking circle was now
brown men with shiny vertical streaks stumbling to their feet, and
Tiki was a few steps in front of two guards who followed. All were
cast in silhouette by fires still hot enough to boil away the heavy
drops.
The rain was glorious. Dash turned from the
villagers, slipped his underpants down and stepped free. He shut
his eyes and lifted his face to let the cold drops beat down and
run over his skin in rivers of cascading fresh water. Like the moon
and stars, it was the same rain as back home. But this was better
than celestial objects thousands and millions of miles away because
the rain enveloped him, touched every part of his lonely body. It
ran across his lips, across blue veins carrying blood from his
broken heart. The rain splashed down over his ruined privates now
dangling free.
“
I can feel the rain,” Dash said,
opening his eyes and looking back to where Tiki and the guards
stood. They too were naked, discarded underpants in lumps. Beyond
them was an approaching crowd, perhaps the entire population. In
the now faltering flames, it took Dash a moment to comprehend their
strange dance, each person stopping to hop from foot to foot, then
continuing forward. He realized they were all removing their
underpants, kicking them away, allowing the rain the touch them
everywhere.