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

Then she laughed, such a sudden outburst that I jerked back.

I clutched at her precious body as she slowly swam back to lucidity. “What’s happening to you, Abby? You’re scaring me!”

“I know what we have to do now, Lenny. I know who she is, but...but I have to go with her.”

No words could answer the girl. Was she really suggesting that someone was talking to her? That she was leading me somewhere away from all this? I could only wring my hands in perplexed agony as Abby took my hand and led me back out into the dome of dimming gold.

Sometime later, as the scenery darkened with the advent of dusk, I saw movement. I thought it was the creature at first, but then I saw that it was a person--actually, two people walking in tandem, one tall and the other short.

Real, living people.

Someone else alive. I was going to call out but Abby spoke first.

“Don’t worry, Lenny. They’re going the same place we are. We’re being led.”

“And where are we going, Abby? For God’s sake, where the hell could we possibly be going in this...this place?”

The ten year old didn’t respond for a moment, but continued her slow tramp through the street. The people had disappeared around a corner, our chance to catch them gone.

Then Abby’s hand gave mine a squeeze. “We’re going to find Mommy’s heart.”

Friday

I woke from a dream that left me drenched in sweat. Abby was standing over me, eyebrows raised expectantly.

“We’re almost there. She’s so close!” Then she turned and walked away. Her painful visions left me flummoxed.

But what is reality anymore

? I thought sourly to myself as I walked after Abby. The world is dying and somehow Abby acts like she knows what’s happening

. A part of me wished her visions were actually leading us to a grand place, where the world was untouched by this devastating event.

Here in the pitiful cavity of the world, the streets narrowed and began to turn into dirt; we were leaving the city behind. The rain had dissipated sometime in the night, its wake leaving a humid stench of wet leaves and putrefying food.

We left the street and clomped through grass down a long, sloping hill that opened into a fenced off area of lush trees, vines, and shrubs. It looked strikingly familiar, but I couldn’t place it.

Abby quickened her pace and soon we painted our legs with mud and dew. The bottom arrived quickly; the fence looming above us.

“She’s here,” the girl said. Abby ran ahead and climbed half the fence before I reached her. Not bothering to question her, I scaled the fence and caught up to Abby. She was distracted; she didn’t seem to care that I was with her at all.

The trees bathed us in shadow, the overhanging mat of clouds unseen. The air in the midst of such tangled flora was stifling.

Then, from somewhere to the right, a pair of people emerged from the undergrowth as well. It was a woman in her mid thirties at least, flanked by a young boy with spiky red hair and copious freckles. Both of them were caked in mud and twigs, their faces drooped in exhaustion.

But they were real. The urge to sink at their feet and praise the heavens was strong as Abby only glanced over at them. The woman saw me.

“Who...who are you?” she asked. Sweet Jesus, I’d underestimated the magnificence of another human voice besides mine and Abby’s!

“I’m...I’m Lenny Harelson. That’s...that’s...”

“Abby,” my daughter finished for me.

“I’m Audra, and this is my son Zak. He’s...leading me somewhere.”

She fell silent. I didn’t bother to ask if her kid had been having visions.

I turned back around only to emerge into a large clearing with hundreds of pale, hard stones festooning the ground. We were in a cemetery.

At the head of the gravestones grew a massive Weeping Willow. In the pale shafts of light from the clouds, the tree’s long drooping leaves were burnished in silvery dew. But what caught my eye was the red flowers that poked out between the leaves from vines that spiraled up the trunk’s length.

A tree blooming in red flowers.

A tree that was weeping.

My skin turned to gooseflesh as I gaped down at Abby. The girl was eyeing the tree with the joy of a favorite Christmas present.

I realized we were definitely not alone. Four other duos had arrived silently, all adults with a child in tow. We stood now in a broken semicircle around the expansive cemetery and Weeping Willow like flies drawn to a light.

“What is happening?” I whispered to Abby. The girl’s head rolled towards me.

“She’s here!” Abby said. “We’ve found her. Do you see the cracked orchid, Dad? Can you see it?”

My heart flipped as she called me ‘Dad’ instead of ‘Lenny’.

Abby reached up and gripped my arm. “Can you see it now?

”

Then I looked. There, standing tall behind a wide gravestone was a large orchid, flowers blooming and haloing its petals. Down the center of the red flower was a thin line that nearly cut the flower in half; only a tiny section at the top remained intact. The rest was cut as cleanly as with a knife, down the stem and all.

A cracked orchid.

Jesus Christ, it was real.

Every child in the clearing seemed to be in some kind of trance, their movements slow.

A familiar, stifled hiss rose from the ground in front of us. My skin broke out in a heavy lather as the black entity rose from the very earth itself, convulsing and gurgling like it was the intestine of some awful creature.

Impossibly, thin membranes of flesh began to appear out of the void, hazy images like ripped marionettes being wheeled towards us from some hellish destination beyond. Soon the black, twisting thing

was gone, replaced by floating, slightly translucent bodies--at least four of them, all in an ebbing circle.

It was as if we were in the presence of dead disinterred.

Abby was tugging at my arm. “We’ve found her heart, Dad. Can’t you see her? She’s here!”

When I glanced at the hovering figures, I saw that one of them was Sheila. Distorted into patchy wisps, her long nose and bright red hair were still recognizable. I was staring straight at her.

My dead wife was staring at me.

Now I remembered why the cemetery looked familiar: we had buried Sheila here. In the cascade of the new world, I had missed the recognizable shrubbery until it was too late.

“She’s calling to me,” Abby exclaimed with a smile. “She wants me to go with her. It’s so beautiful, Dad!”

I was having a hard time staying alert. My heart jackhammered. “Abby? Is Mommy talking to you?”

“Yes! I told you that she was calling to me. She’s been calling me since the world ended. It was Mommy who saved us, Dad. She saved us! Now she says...she says that it’s time for me to go with her.”

I realized I was crying as I clutched Abby’s hand. “Honey, where is she taking you?”

“Away from here. She says I found the cracked orchid, and now she can take me away from this world, somewhere...safe.”

Around the clearing I could hear gasps and other hushed conversations. I knew the entity still exposed its ghosts for us to see, but I could look at nothing except my daughter’s wide, glittering eyes.

Sheila was speaking to her.

So real. So unutterably real. It wasn’t possible. And yet it was happening right in front of me.

“Mommy wants me to tell you that...she still loves you.” Then Abby jerked her head up, breathing hard. “I have to go now, Dad. She’s calling to me.”

“Abby, help me to understand! How is this possible

?”

“I...I don’t know. All I know is that if I don’t go with her now, I won’t be able to anymore. She says that...that she can only take me.”

I thought of the past week--alone, hungry, wet and shivering most of the time. The world had vanished, the only remnants of the past residing in our memories. I wanted Abby here--God, I wanted her with me so bad!--but another part of me wanted to free her from this hell.

When my eyes fixed once more on the silent, floating ghost of my wife’s likeness, I saw that the face had changed: there was a trace of a smile on the beautiful specter. The very same smile I saw every day when Sheila was alive.

Abby hugged me tight, and I bent down. She put her forehead against mine. Our eyes met. In that moment, the world melted away. It was just her and me, father and daughter.

“I’ll come back for you,” she whispered, “but I have to go now. I...I love you.”

Then she trembled and collapsed into me, limp. Vaguely, I heard a scream from one of the others in the clearing, but I couldn’t be bothered with it. Abby was gone. She was lying there, lifeless.

When I managed to look up I saw the ghostly figures disappear. One instant they were there, and then they winked themselves out of existence. I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t focus on anything. How could the world be crashing down around me like this? Can it be real?

When I came out of my stupor, people were huddled around me. I rose to my feet on shaky legs. Everyone had tear-stained faces, but for some reason we were all smiling.

“They’re safe,” a woman said. “I don’t know how, but I know they’re safe.”

Everyone nodded their astonished agreement. I found myself nodding as well without really knowing why.

Beyond

I walk the unending surface of the world destroyed, but I am not alone. I am joined by those who survived, others who were protected by the gripping love of those passed on. We share a bond not sewn by words or deeds but by unspeakable tragedy and unfulfilled dreams.

A devastating, expansive chemical radiation rolled over our planet, killing as it went. Now we search for those left alive amidst the tangled debris and ashen, hole-scarred corpses.

Our children are gone now. They led us to the place where their loved ones called them, and they left on unfamiliar wings to a place beyond our world.

I don’t fully understand it all. I don’t think I ever will.

The only thing to do is move forward, try and make some semblance of life here in this barren place. Perhaps one day the clouds will leave. Perhaps one day the sun will warm our skin. Until then, we must survive.

I am often plagued by nightmares and heart-wrenching anguish, but when I see that terrible black cloud or the shriveled valleys and fields, I also see Abby’s smile, her breathtaking eyes. I remember my wife’s beckoning features as she somehow reached across time and death to grant our daughter a reprieve from this suffering.

I know one day they’ll come for me. One day I’ll see them. I know that somewhere under this veil of uncertainty, my own cracked orchid calls to me.