Penumbra- A short story
Penumbra
Shards of terracotta clay fanned out across the yellow dirt, skipping into Choya bushes and under what was left of the exploded boat. A disquieted critter, maybe a lizard, skittered from underneath the wreckage and into the treacherous thicket of cactus in the failing light. I dropped my Red Ryder down on the boat shell and shook my head. “Not making that mistake again” I muttered to myself. It didn’t matter if the mysterious critter had a diamond ring around its little tail. Nothing was worth going anywhere near a Choya bush.
With gnarled, green limbs covered stem-to-stern in inch-long white needles stretching over 6 feet tall, Choya was called “Jumping Cactus” for a reason. If you so much as brushed into it, the inconspicuously barbed white needles would latch into your skin or clothing. Your well-intentioned response would be to pull away, which takes an entire segment of the vicious cactus along for the ride, turning one puncture into dozens.
I wince, memories of my last encounter fresh in my mind. A low howl drifted over the dusty scrubland, the shifting skies turning from ochre-yellow, to purple like a sprig of lavender. The bright sun had disappeared behind the Yucca Valley ridge half an hour ago, and the air was beginning to lose its vitality, taking on that chill that heralds the deserts army of dangers.
As if to confirm, a pair of neatly synced howls, higher in pitch, replied to the first. A chorus of *yip* and chortling barks followed, most distressingly, from the other side of the blasted boat from where I was sitting. The pack of coyotes that usually hung around the house in the evening was separated. The low howl was west of where I was standing, the enthusiastic young chorus of replying pups was southeast. The pack would be merging soon, and I was in between.
It’s way past time to go home, I resigned. Biting my lip and picking up the BB rifle, I flung the last of the small clay pots out into the green cloister of spiky Joshua Trees. They eagerly grew out of the shade on the other side of the boat shell. The trees came to life in a flutter of wings and grey tempest accompanied by an urgent “pwheepwheepwhee…” that grew quieter as the pair of Mourning Doves evades my carelessness.
I allow myself a moment of regret at being a colossal jerk. But the ongoing performance of howls makes me grimace dramatically at the trees and amble off southwest towards home. The coyotes of the southern Californian desert are no bigger than your average medium-sized dog. And they are typically half starved, mangy, and cowardly to a fashion. But you never took a chance when there was a large group of them. That same weakness broods a desperation that flies in the face of logic and reason, and I didn’t think my BB gun was going to dissuade the pack from the prospect of a meal.
I passed the “slag pile”, my name for a loose mound of blackened charcoal next to an old metal kiln, rusted through and riddled with conspicuous holes. Squinting, I peered into the gloom between a pair of Yucca plants, eyes tracking an odd silver glimmer sliding around the backside of the shooting, jagged flora. Everything in the desert seems to be jagged, pointy, or poisonous. Sometimes all 3. But the silver, smoky glow was foreign. It captured my attention as quickly as a wildfire.
I rubbed my eyes on the collar of my shirt, my vision clouded by the sweat brought by evening heat. Edging around the perimeter, the sight didn’t make any immediate sense. The ground on the other side of the Yucca was covered in a thick smoke; not a roiling, choking murk that signaled a fire nearby, but a thin, indecipherable haze that clung to the ground, sweeping silently toward my feet. It hid the rocks and choppy scrub on the desert floor, giving the appearance that the world had dropped off, miles beneath me, and I was aloft on a sea of pale mist. Lighthouses of green Joshua and Yucca, twisting spires of sparse sagebrush, and angry Choya seemed to rise through the roiling vapor from distant shores below.
The sea at my feet did not reflect the ocean overhead. The sun had long set, and its dying luminance was a poorly-recalled story, its legend stronger in memory. Instead, the mist was a mute curtain of curls, having danced its way around my ankles now. My breath caught in my throat with a sharp sound. I didn’t know what to expect from what my eyes were seeing. But the mist brought no discomfort. No sensation at all, really.
Instead I felt a keening in my gut. What the vapor lacked in sensation it brought on instead in razor-sharp grief and mounting turmoil. My breath was gone, replaced by short gasps as the weight of mortality was seated on my shoulders like a ruler seated on its throne. Flashes of eternal longing and unspoken words consigned to silence robbed me of reason. I was an old man who let opportunity pass him by, the stench of cowardice my final fragrance. I was a twisting zephyr on a field without trees, my motivation spent and the product of my existence too meager a sum for words. I was shattered faith and tight fists clasped around an infant, wretched in agony and begging to hear its cry, and noxious umbra closed in as I knew I never would.
My eyes were clamped shut, but I still witnessed countless visions of terrifying loss. My ears were a torrent of crashing woe and regret. I smelled only blackened stone and felt nothing through the convulsions brought on by what felt like the entire sum of the world’s lamentation.
This seemed to go on for an eon, not that I could comprehend that span of time. So deep was my incarceration in abhorrent and alien regret not my own, I hardly noticed the mist retreat from my ankles. It swept southwest toward the house on the back of an unseen mare, a formless rider on an invisible steed. Collecting in the center of the clearing, it began to rise, leaving the expanse of dark dirt uncovered again as it gained form.
Two legs manifested first, toes without cover, lithe and muscular from the shin to the quads. As the hips and torso came into being, so too did a pair of clenched fists, disjointed from the body and hovering, wrist and arm following behind.
My head had cleared by now, and the surreality of the situation was beginning to come home to roost in my mind. Something was very wrong with this. I shouldn’t be here.
Surprisingly, a second pair of hands formed, hovering just above the first, an arm forming in imitation of the pair of now fully formed arms below it. The chest of the vapor-being was forming. Its torso from navel to collarbone was poor in detail, as it was still only roiling vapor that constituted this form, but a pair of holes sat where its sides should be, passing through the being like a pair of air intakes. It reminded me of the engines on a fighter plane.
All four arms connected to the main body, finalizing in a head without facial detail. The last touch was for the remaining smoke, still drifting in a gentle cyclone around the figure, to form into a crown of eight long braids that extended down the back of the figure and drifted to the floor like a bridal veil. A pair of piercing, glowing yellow orbs sat where eyes would be. As I stared, paralyzed, it became clear the eyes were not glowing in the traditional sense. It was more like they were windows. Ovular and set in a facade of clear smoke, the dusk and dawn shone through them both as though the sky behind the figure was one of nautical twilight.
It seemed the form was female, and it stood and regarded me. Its shape was unclear, yet lithe and curved. Its eight braids trailing behind it, and Its bare feet hung pointing at the earth as it hovered just above it. The silence of approaching night was heavy and sobering. No gales crooned. No doves hoo’ed. The meeting of Coyotes had not called out since I spotted the mist, and their cries did not puncture the gloom now.
I could not find speech. My mouth simply opened and closed and my head shook slightly in disagreement. My mental faculties were returning, despite the incredulity of that I just witnessed, but words eluded me. As I attempted to speak, the figure angled its head to one side, pointing one of its eyes of dying sunlight at me in a cautionary glare. It shook its head ominously, mimicking my dissent. It raised a finger to the space where its lips would be, and its yellow eye narrowed.
Silenced by this imposing specter of smoke and sunlight, I could only stand, mouth agape as my hands dropped to my sides. I took one step back when a voice filled my head like a too-early alarm when you haven’t slept enough. The voice was deep but feminine, a tone like wind though an unexplored cavern, or like a spring rupturing fresh ground and cascading over my ears like a newborn river.
The work is complete. The gloaming time has come. Wellspring of clarity, denial of purpose. I have riven the mountains with my shout. The earth will render up its remorse. I will swath myself in a robe of its winds, her glimmering depths are to be a jewel upon my finger. No tears fall from my face to succor the parched seas. For you, child, are the vessel to the wages of my will, the goblet in my church, and I am its ecclesiarch.
I struggled to comprehend what I was hearing. A church…? What was gloaming?
Struggle not your fate and the burden shall be light. But should you instead cling to senseless purpose, you will suffer. You are the wick upon the wax of your kin. The brighter you burn, the more their agony consumes you. Bear this well, I will complete my work, and you shall feel no more.
The voice faded, and the figure turned from me, its braids beginning to dissimilate into fog again. My throat tightens as questions begin to bubble up. My fingertips tremble, pins and needles rising with every attempted syllable.
“What did you do to me?”
With the emergence of those words, the figure vanished on a gust of wind. Almost immediately, her threat is made very clear as the weight comes crashing down on me again. Only this time, the world yields to utter night as my body hits the dirt.
Time seemed to prowl around me like a hungry animal. When I started breathing again, I coughed up a cloud of dust. Light had gone completely in my absence, and in the night sky, a stream of silver stars wove light enough to examine my trembling hands. Ten fingers, ten toes. I thought. At least I didn’t get turned into some alien or anything. I stood and stretched. The stiffness told me I had been on the ground for some time. I looked up to assess the time.
Joshua Tree proper only held a few thousand people, and we were living miles away from town. Star Lane was an apt name for the dirt road that let to our little house, because you could see thousands of them. Tourists flocked to the monument every year for that exact reason. So when I looked up, I was not surprised to see a luminous blanket of white milky-way, studded with more twinkling stars than I could ever hope to count.
I was, however, surprised to see the streak of blue, unfamiliar nebula cutting a long, winding path through the southern sky. My face scrunched up in confused disapproval as I looked for the four tell-tale stars of Ursa Major- the big dipper. I shook my head. This can’t be real. No Ursa Major. Nor its little cousin. I shook my head harder and spun east- Mars had been humming along right next to the moon the past week or so, I just had to figure out where the darkened sphere was right now. I don’t believe this. My eyes jumped from one unfamiliar constellation to the next. The moon was full, when it had been a waning crescent before. And no sign of the thrumming reddish speck of Mars either. Instead, something else sat by the moon, a darkened spot. Okay, alright, Thomas, okay. I exhaled deeply, trying to fend off my panic. You clearly weren’t dreaming. Something was obviously not right. I struggled to make sense of the eerie white mist and the punishing mental breakdown it brought. It talked about some weird job it had to do… something about purpose…It threatened me, and then it made good on that threat for trying to talk to it… I had begun walking, absentmindedly, through the brush as I pondered. Starlight and moonlight granted me just enough brightness to avoid walking into a cactus, and my ears were on constant alert for a hiss, growl or rattle.
Being out at night was far less than ideal. The dangerous cold-blooded creatures were in their hidey-holes, but the desert night belongs to a different host of dangers. Coyotes, cougars, bobcats, mountain lions and even the odd wild dog, to name a few. But Tarantulas scared me more than any of those. I had been surprised by a massive specimen when I stepped out to pee one night and I kid you not, it reared up and stared me down and I had to change my pants before bed.
Working the problem of what I had experienced passed the time, and eventually the dark silhouette of my house stood against the quiet sand and pokey trees of our sprawling lot. It was a flat roofed single-story house, barely 700 square feet inside. A single white box stood up over the roof – the swamp cooler. It normally hummed loud enough to find home by sound from a mile away, and the smell of damp, uncleaned mesh on the outside would lead your nose home if the sound didn’t. Tonight, I could only smell the old thing, it was silent as the grave. I wiped sweat from my head and frowned. That’s not right. It was plenty hot out. And besides, the house was far too dark. There never wasn’t a light on in the living room. My mother lived in front of the television, and Lifetime, Oxygen, and Nick-at-Night ran a constant cycle at the foot of her futon, even late into the night.
I bit my lip and held my chest, trying to control my breathing. Panic was trying to step in again. The quiet stillness of the night was pressing down on me like I was a tin can in the deep sea. No bug noises. No Owls. No Coyotes. I hadn’t noticed the deafening silence until now, as I was too busy thinking about the vapor-lady and her horrific eye boring a hole though me and exposing my nerve, or lack of nerve, as it seemed. But it was indeed too quiet out here, and the house looked cold and lonely. Disused and abandoned. I didn’t have any choice in the matter, though, so I stepped toward the back door. Doing this, I instinctively went to take my BB rifle off my shoulder, but I had left it out in the clearing by the big Yucca plant. That’s great. I have to go back tomorrow. I thought to myself, angry that I would need to return to the place where everything had stopped making sense.
I opened the back door and stepped carefully into the kitchen. I unclenched my jaw, which had begun to hurt from how hard I was gritting my teeth. The dead air hanging in the pitch-black hall in front of me seemed to push on for miles. At the end of the rectangular galley-style kitchen was a set of white shelves that also served as the dividing wall between the kitchen and living room. A small round dining table sat in the corner to the left, just past the refrigerator, which notably sat silent, its familiar droning hum conspicuously absent in the ominous gloom. Just beyond the wall of built-in shelves, one could normally see what made-for-tv movie Mom was watching. But the house was completely dark, the air utterly still. The swamp cooler wasn’t running, nor the refrigerator. The TV wasn’t on, and the clock on the microwave and oven were dark.
I carefully edged forward, closing the back door behind me. As I squinted into the gloom, the silence was punctured by a sudden rush of air, like a deep exhale directly by my right ear. My hair stood on end as the sudden breath grazed my neck and I spun backwards, sending a glass on the edge of the sink smashing into the basin. Standing in the kitchen in front of me was a spirit comprised of familiar white smoke.
She was my height, and though her insubstantial form lent little detail, the outline of her hair was clear enough, the general shape of her body familiar enough, and the slouching posture reminiscent enough to leave little doubt I was looking at my mom. Her drifting white form walked though the kitchen towards the living room as though I wasn’t there. As she walked by, a familiar tune wafted through the still air -the waltz-y opening notes to “I Love Lucy”. The smell of Virginia Slims hung over the kitchen like an aura, but these senses yielded to silence and stagnation as the vapor-spirit passed further into the house, disappearing into the black hallway toward her bedroom. I let out a small gasp as the breath I had been holding finally broke the silence. I stayed and took several deep breaths, calming myself. I started off after the figure, feeling my way along the hall into the darkness. My eyes had begun to adjust as I continued into her room.
Standing in the small bedroom were two figures. My mother slouched to the left of the second figure. Taller and standing straighter, with a smooth head and wide shoulders, this decidedly male figure could only be my stepfather. I felt a sting of irritation at his presence. Whatever’s going on here, I guess it was too much to hope he wasn’t a part of it. Both of them stood facing the doorway I was in. They lacked the yellow, sun-filled portals the original invader had shown for eyes. Instead, theirs were simply holes in the shifting forms of their heads, showing the inky blackness of the darkened room. They regarded me with sterile placidity. The temperature in the room seemed to have dropped. The air remained still as death. The silence was slowly eroded by a low hum, originating from nowhere, or from everywhere, like a lost tune on the fleeing coattails of a dream. But the hum was growing, and soon my skin began to crawl. The figure of my mother brought her hands to her face and covered it, slouching deeper still. My stepfathers apparition simply stared stoically ahead.
Drawn in by misplaced concern, or curiosity, or maybe just stirred to action by the ever-increasing hum that was distorting the air now, I advanced and reached out for my mother’s form, grasping for her wrist.
A snap rang out through the house, and light flooded my eyes as the sound of a distant scream came closer and closer before burying itself in my head like a dying star.
I was gone again, roiling in malice. Blood-red sparks leapt out from the end of a lighter and flames rose up in my chest, fire erupting from my eyes, nose and mouth. No sooner was I conflagrated; I was thrashing in a darkened sea. Waves tossed my body like a piece of jetsam, and I tumbled out of sight, behind some darkened doorway which swiftly flew open. I stared down at a boy, huddled at the head of his bed. My eyes were coals, smoldering and terrible, and smoke issued from my mouth like a monsoon, filling the room as I stepped closer to the cowering child. My mouth opened with a fresh billowing gale of choking reek, which enveloped the boy on his bed until he cowered no more. He looked up at me with an expression of curiosity and interest, and reached up toward my face, indifferent to my horrors and treachery. And as the boy clawed towards me in the height of my malignant terror, I swept out of the room without a word, my kindling rage replaced by cold detachment, the door slamming behind me, plunging the room and its boy into ever-night once again.
I was dejected hate and cold cruelty. Ice gripped my heart and battled with my lungs. As I sank deeper into numb stillness, the waters of my prison came crashing down again and I tumbled though the turbulent whirlpool. With an explosion of stinging hail, I burst back into the house like a mountain gale, I had surely come from the top of the mountain, but equally sure I was from the deepest reaches of hades. Collapsing to my knees, I held a hand to my nose and felt hot, fresh blood running across my knuckles, so I pressed in and leaned my head back, feeling the heat trickle down my throat.
The bedroom was covered in a rime frost, oddly bright, the light from behind me bathing the room in reflective luminance. The crystals of ice sparkled on the wooden bedposts, the TV mounted on the wall, and the oak dresser in the corner. The white of winter dulled slowly in the mounting reality of the desert heat, and a pale vapor twisted over the center of the bedroom. Two sperate knots of rapidly swirling mist bent and warped, becoming smoother and slower until they settled over the floor in two new forms.
The first was a canine of some kind, but not one I had ever seen before. It stood a foot and a half off the ground, and had matted, short and shaggy fur. It had a tail tucked close to its body and an odd, stunted torso with shorter back legs than front. It bolted from the room, making a strange yipping sound, its smoky form leaving a trail of white fog that dissipated slowly.
The second was perched on the bedpost, easily distinguishable as a common dove. It tilted its featureless head toward me before flying from the room towards the back door, likewise leaving a faint trail of white. The stillness of the air had gone, and besides the unnaturally frosty room, it was clear things had returned to normal in the house. The TV in the living room behind me flashed through a rerun of The Mary Tyler Moore Show. The Swamp cooler hummed pleasantly. Walking into the living room, I found no sign of anyone in the house. Still alone, I slunk into the kitchen, shaking my head, and lost my footing. The world spun and my head grew heavy, falling to my knees. Fresh blood pooled between my knees from my nose as I breathed heavily and tried to stabilize myself. My body felt wracked, every muscle was sore, and my head pounded incessantly. Shaking with weakness, I slid onto my side, the cool linoleum pleasant against my cheek. With effort, I lifted my head so I could see the clock on the oven. Shaking rattled my body as my shoulders cried out in agony, and my eyes winced shut as the tears began to come.
The oven clock spelled out the word “WARN”.
After the world stopped shaking and the grout in the floor tiles coalesced into straight lines again, I struggled to my feet. A darting speck of movement caught my eye; a scorpion skittered under the toe-kick by the kitchen sink. The back door had blown open when the swamp cooler kicked on and pressurized the house. Groaning, I stepped out into the night, not bothering to close the door behind me.
Above, the sky was shedding. That’s the most accurate way I could describe it. I rubbed my eyes, attempting to smother the disbelief. But there it was when I opened them again: the sky was a pristine umber sheet studded with unfamiliar white jewels; but it had scales of luminescent contrast rippling through the sea of stars. It looked like the night air was glittering with fallout from an impact in the heavens, and the site of the calamity was fracturing, its edges white-hot and sizzling outward like a smoldering sheet of inky-black paper atop a slowly advancing flame. The moon glared down in relieving familiarity, but it was flanked by a smaller, dark neighbor. Like a stellar child in its “new moon” phase, completely dark but for its haunting silhouette.
Alongside our moon and its unfamiliar sibling, a new cloud of turquoise and copper haze stretched across a quarter of the sky. It was taken right out of a NASA art gallery, a sprawling nexus of hauntingly saturated clouds, a nebula from a distant place in the cosmos, parked right by our humble Earth. The alarming calamity of flaking, broken sky was seated within the cloud, its apparent damage spreading outward at an imperceptibly slow pace.
A second moon, some kind of nebula cloud, wrong constellations, and now it looked like the something had shattered the sky? I mused. My head ached with the strain of digesting these new impossibilities. The incoherence of the astral had certainly dampened the incredible events I had witnessed in the house. But even those had come back around to add to the rushing ache in my head.
As I contemplated the roof of the world, the dry and dark dirt of the desert, blown across my sandalled feet, woke me and took me back to the world within my reach. Behind me, the intro to Judge Judy boomed in the living room, the cool, damp air of the swamp cooler gushed from the open door, quenching itself meaninglessly on the quailing desert heat. It cooled my back and reminded me of home, so close at hand. Of half a Whisky River burger from Red Robin, still in the fridge. Jim wasn’t around anymore to beat me senseless for eating his food. He was a little white dog of some sort, hopefully scampering off far from here. I grimaced bitterly at my acceptance of the supernatural. The world out here was falling to pieces. The air behind me was cool, I could eat. I could watch Judy and her bailiff dispense no-nonsense justice and pretend the sky hadn’t suddenly changed its mind about being consistent and logical. That phosphorescent specters weren’t haunting my steps and giving me episodic seizures and trying to tear my brain out through my nose.
At the thought of turning back, the pressure in my head lessened, too immediately to be my imagination. The cool invite of home was a balm to my discomfort, well-aligned with the cryptic warning the smoky figure had given me: Struggle not your fate and the burden shall be light. But should you instead cling to senseless purpose, you will suffer… It would be best, I thought, if I just tried to sleep this off. Surely, I would wake up and the world would be right. Mom would be asleep on the couch. Jim would be hacking up his morning cigarette.
A flash of cobalt blue in the shrouded brush on the other side of Jim’s truck wrestled my attention from the tempting thought. Beyond, lying low in the sagebrush, a white, smoke-bodied feline was regarding me. Alongside, a swirling mist converged into a second and a third, smaller than the first two. A small family of what could be cougars or bobcats, comprised of the same spirit-smoke I had seen so much of. The first one opened its formless mouth and called without sound, summoning tears from my eyes as the ache returned.
The spirits dissolved into the quiet night and I was reminded of a salient fact: If my home was lost in time, or space, or whatever it was before I came, and If I absorbed whatever pain and distemper was causing this catastrophe, albeit excruciatingly, could it happen elsewhere? Who else was lost to the savage sea hanging overhead? Where else did the insects not sound and the coyotes not howl? Was the icy stasis that had fallen over my home plaguing other families in theirs?
The throbbing in my head made sure I was reminded of the cool air behind me. Home. Comfort. Safety. Blissful ignorance and a soft pillow. The ground underneath my feet crunched and my shadow bounced off into the trees as the light from the open door grew smaller behind me, and I stepped into the thick sagebrush. A wisp of white smoke left a trail for me to follow east, towards town. Home grew smaller at my back as fresh pain clawed at my head. I kicked a piece of mesquite into the dark and trudged on; the white breath of spirit and the silent moon were my only light as the bright promise of home finally winked out.
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