The Cracked Orchid - Patrick S. (distant reading .TXT) 📗

Wednesday

Abby was vomiting beside an overturned dumpster. She had little left to expel, nothing more than a few dry heaves of acid and stale bread.

Fog rose from the street in lazy wisps as a soft, tender rain exhumed the pent up warmth in the asphalt.

I could do nothing for Abby but pull back her brown hair and pat her on the back. No words of comfort could make the situation any less bleak.

The night was nearly over, though the difference between a.m. and p.m. meant little more than a deepening shadow now. The clouds were a deep golden hue that bathed the world below them in shafts of molten caresses.

Night no longer meant blackness. Instead, the dull glow merely deepened a bit, murky glimmers of dusk and blocked light making the entire world seem like nothing more than a golden reverie.

We hadn’t seen the sun in over a week. The moon might as well have disappeared.

Abby straightened and wiped her mouth dry. I hated myself for letting her suffer so, but there was little happiness left inside either of us to call upon. Instead, I just looked into her wide eyes and saw the wondrous sparkles that shone even in the monotone glow around us. She reached up and grabbed my hand, squeezing it, and I knew that her sickness had passed. She was ready to move on.

Wordlessly, we plodded along the deserted street hand in hand. We were in what used to be a rural area bordering the city, though now locations meant little. Cars lined the streets in oblong positions as if they too were apprehensive about the rain.

There were no others walking the street besides us.

The intersection branched in opposite directions. I waited for Abby’s familiar tug, which this time pulled me left onto a cracked road with dumpsters standing like empty turtle shells along the edges.

As we passed a blue sedan, I saw that the driver was still in the seat. Clutching at Abby’s hand, I quickened my stride.

I still couldn’t keep my eyes from darting to the corpse.

The woman’s eye sockets were hollow. Her skin had decayed into a sick grey shell--bumpy and thin as burnt paper--that was littered with holes. They couldn’t be much larger than bullet holes, and they poked through the husk of her body like a pincushion. The only thing that remained untouched of the caricature was her bright blonde hair: the locks hung in loose ringlets down over her slumped shoulders.

Abby’s hand broke out in a sweat. She tried to pull it loose, but I held tight.

“I can handle it now, Lenny,” she said. Her sweet voice wavered.

“I know, sweetheart. I just...I just hate that you have to see it.” I looked down at her. “And could you at least call me ‘dad’?”

The ten year old’s predilection for calling me by my first name had started the night the world came crashing down. Now I was no longer ‘dad’; I was Lenny.

Little over a week ago, clouds blocked the stars, the moon. By the time I awoke, a tempest had stripped the earth of its living inhabitants.

The TV had flickered, then I caught the broken statement by a voice recording: these chemicals...never meant to...released...seek...

Static followed immediately. Phone calls went unanswered.

In less than five hours, the droves of golden clouds had left the earth gasping in a final, drawn-out breath. Corpses of those once animated lay as a reminder of what used to be. All of them looked like the blonde in the car.

Except for Abby and I.

For some reason my daughter and I had survived with little more than insomnia.

Those were some damn powerful chemicals to extinguish so much in so little time.

My despair had been overwhelming until Abby appeared by my side, took one look out the window, grabbed my hand, and led me out the door. Now we walked the streets to some unseen force. When I questioned Abby about her need to keep walking, she had simply smiled. I see the cracked orchid

, was her response. She saved us

.

Abby’s fingers suddenly turned into vices around my palm, tugging me back to the present. She stumbled and collapsed onto the ground, body rigid, eyes splayed open, mouth moving wordlessly. It was happening again.

I knelt beside my daughter and held her shoulders while she convulsed. Soon she went limp again, though her eyes remained fixed on the golden dome of clouds overhead.

“She sees me,” Abby said in a pitifully weak voice. Her words were halting, like a lost language being chanted aloud. “She wants me to join her. I have to find the cracked orchid!”

Then she moaned and rolled over, curling her ripped jeans up to her chest. I nearly cried out in heartache. My daughter was hurting and I was helpless. Utterly helpless.

If Sheila were here she’d know what to do. She’d take Abby in her arms and rock her slowly, humming a tune and whispering sweet prayers in her ears. My wife had been almost too caring while she was alive.

Then her car was hit by a motorcycle while she was stopped at a red light. The impact knocked her car sideways. The oncoming truck didn’t have time to stop.

Sheila had been enmeshed with the cold metal of the car.

When Abby rolled over there were tears glittering in her eyes. “Don’t you see, Lenny? She wants me to go with her. She’s calling to me.”

“Honey, what are you talking about? Who is ‘she’?”

“I...I don’t know yet. I hear her, and I see...I see a tree blooming in red flowers. It’s so beautiful...” Her voice trailed off and she sat up, yellow blouse wrinkled.

She rose to her feet and pushed her lips into a thin line. For a moment, just a moment, I saw a bit of the boisterous girl she had been, the laugh that could make me cry and the smile that always hugged my heart.

Then it was gone, and the downtrodden mask slid back into place. She grabbed my hand again and we continued walking across the silent world.

Ghostly whispers flew in on the rain. Around us, the air was warm, even musty.

So why was I shivering?

Thursday

We found some cans of soup in a car dealer’s lot, where an open barbeque and dried hot dogs signaled there had been a party. We walked and I watched Abby tip up her can and drain it. I felt a terrible withering of my heart. We seemed to be the last people left alive. Something had taken everyone else’s dreams, their very existence, and snuffed them out, but we were spared.

Abby didn’t deserve this. It would be so much easier if we just stopped, stopped moving, talking, breathing...

I grunted and rubbed my temples. Stop talking like that

, I told myself. As long as Abby’s alive there’s a slice of happiness somewhere in your heart

.

“You alright Lenny?” Abby asked, tossing her can into the gutter.

“Yeah, I’m fine sweetheart. Just...thinking.”

“We’re getting closer,” she said, and began walking.

The day seemed as gloomy as the others, all time lost. The rain had lessened its downpour, but a flimsy veil still lingered.

All around us the golden hues of the new world warred with the shadows lingering in cramped spaces. The trees and grasses hung in brown splatterings, all green stripped away. Nothing was changing.

We passed a few more corpses, sitting on lawn chairs in their bikinis and swim suits like moldy statues. I turned away, put my hands over Abby’s eyes.

She claimed it didn’t bother her anymore.

I didn’t want to believe her. I couldn’t.

Abby led me to a wide four lane road littered with cars. Each of them housed a holey, ashen corpse.

When we walked by a small house on the corner, I heard a noise. It was a scratchy, almost hissing outburst like a hoarse scream. It came behind a blue house, the first sound we’d heard that wasn’t from the weather or us.

I tugged Abby along, feeling her resist but unwilling to let the disturbance go unnoticed. Perhaps it was someone else alive!

Then it rose above the house. At first I thought it was a gust of wind carrying horrendous amounts of dirt, but then I saw that it moved too slowly, too deliberately. It had no shape to it other than black tendrils of opaque fog all flailing like dying snakes, no discernable center or heart other than its concatenating arms and puffs of some kind of insidiously black tar.

It was like watching a miniature cloud come to life above the roof of the house. Its waving black vines had taken on a multitude of subdued colors all whirling inside somehow, like a broken lava lamp bubbling in a frenzy.

My mouth ran dry. The thing was hissing in a horrid way, like a cat choking with a crushed windpipe, and the formless blob was scaling the roof easily.

Straight for us.

Run. We had to run, to escape.

I tugged Abby’s arm. She resisted, and I nearly had to drag her limp body down the lawn and onto the street.

“Lenny, it’s okay!” Abby called. I ignored her. The speed with which the entity soared over the jumbled mess of vehicles was astonishing; it would catch us in minutes. Unless...

I veered left, nearly tripping Abby. My target was a thick grove of pines and bushes bordering a small park. If we tangled ourselves inside the thick foliage, perhaps the apparition couldn’t get us.

That was just a guess.

We ran headlong into the plants, spiny branches whipping at our faces. I felt a pinecone scrape at my forehead, but I didn’t stop until we were inside the thick copse and entangled heartily.

Now we could only wait. In the darkness, Abby’s arms wrapped around my neck; the girl pushed herself against me and I hugged her close as we crouched next to a broken bush.

To feel her warmth, her heaving chest and strong little arms around me gave me the hope I needed to keep breathing.

“It’s okay, Lenny. It only wants me to go with it. I can’t stay here.”

I pondered my daughter’s words and waited for the misty, devilish thing to take us. But it never happened. We waited for a minute, perhaps longer, but nothing took us. Nothing enveloped us.

Just as I felt relief wash over me, Abby’s body went rigid in my arms.

I let her down gently onto a small patch of soil. Abby’s eyes were open, but this time she wasn’t looking at the sky or rolling them about. She was looking at me.

“I see her,” she said. “I can see where she’s pointing. The tree...it’s weeping! But I have to go with her. The cracked orchid...!”

“Abby? Abby, can you hear me?”

Her gaze never left mine, but she was not speaking to me--at least, not directly. “How do we find you? I want to see you. How...?”