Obscura Burning (2 page)

Looking at that expanse somehow makes me feel less lonely.

Lying back against the stone still warm from the day, I stare up at the stars. They’re brilliant out here, like someone scattered bright silver quarters into tar. One looks out of place though, and it is. It blinks blue where the others are white.

They’re calling it Obscura; a planet about the size of Mercury that just spun into our solar system unannounced and took up residence between us and Mars. I don’t understand the physics of it all, but it seems the unwanted lump of rock has got herself stuck, forming this perfectly straight line with Earth, Mars, Mercury, and Venus. She’s fouling up the TV channels and interfering with radio broadcasts. There’s a bunch of doomsday nuts preparing for the end of the world as well. I don’t care about any of that. Bring on the apocalypse.

The desert turns chilly and dinner beckons. Thoughts of Danny’s memorial replace thoughts of strange planets. Shira’s determined to involve me even though there’s little point to it. In this reality, Daniel’s dead. Asphyxiated by smoke and killed by falling beams, so says the coroner.

They buried him a month ago while I was still on a morphine drip in the hospital. He’s rotting beneath the ground beside the bones of his uncle and his two-day-old sister. All the pretty words have been said. Can’t see the point of lighting more candles and saying more prayers.

Besides, when I wake up tomorrow, it’ll be Shira who’s dead again.

The night of the fire is a gaping wound in my memory. It might be because I downed a bottle of tequila before playing with matches, or might be PTSD amnesia. That night’s not a blur, but a brilliant canvas of flames. My only memory is fire. The heat: glorious, choking heat and tongues of orange licking at the rafters, a burst of cinders, and the screams. Then nurses and morphine.

If I could just remember what happened, could piece it all together for myself, then maybe the world would go back to normal.

Tomorrow will be better. Danny will be alive and I won’t be a half-melted monstrosity. Shira’ll be scattered ash, but at least she won’t demand so much of my attention. No memorial for her. Danny doesn’t expect me to dredge up more words, more lies and weave them into some poetic elegy that only offers a temporary balm for the living. The dead don’t give a damn.

* * *

“Dinner’s on the table, sweetheart,” Mom shouts from the living room as the screen door bangs shut behind me.

Pork chops, beans, and mashed potatoes. Gag. I shove it in the microwave anyway.

“How was your day, son?” Dad peers at me from behind thick spectacles.

I answer with a shrug.

“You all set for the memorial?” He grabs an alcohol-free beer from the fridge, pauses, offers me one and I almost accept, but shake my head. What’s the point when it’s nonalcoholic? It tastes like piss.

“Don’t think I’m going.”

“Daniel was a good friend. Might be good to get some closure.”

Danny was more than a friend. I wonder how Dad would react if I told him it was Danny—not some East Coast tourist in a miniskirt—that I was sneaking into my room at night. Maybe I’ll announce it at the memorial, walk up to the podium and look all the closed-minded townies right in the face and say,
Daniel sure was a good buddy and one hell of a fuck.

“I’m thinking about it. Still got a few days,” I say instead, and Dad smiles. He’s about to clap me on the shoulder when his hand stops midway above my left arm and his smile wobbles.

He makes a fist and waits for me to bump it. Maybe he’s afraid to hurt me even though the scars are all healed up now, or maybe he’s just too grossed out to touch me.

I leave his fist hanging and retrieve my meal from the microwave.

“Thanks, Mom.” I bound up the stairs to my room, and slam the door shut.

I eat at my desk, watching my pet vinegaroons, Rictor and Shatterstar, devour a cricket. They look ferocious, like giant cockroaches in battle armor, but they’re gentle really. Poor misunderstood bugs, judged on looks.

Disembodied voices from the TV float up to my room. My folks have turned it up thinking it’ll drown out their fighting. Sometimes I eavesdrop, hear the exasperation in my dad’s voice as he consoles my mom that his son will still find a wife one day, that there’s a chance he could still have kids. It’s my mom’s crying that prompts me to turn up the radio. Neil Young and static…thanks to Obscura hovering in the sky.

I grab my headphones and MP3 player instead, not that I can hear much on the left any more. Metallica. Not my favorite, but the angry noise drowns out my parents’ voices. It was Danny’s favorite album…still is in that other life. It’s hard to keep things straight, to know which one of them is dead when it changes on a daily basis.

I toss the pork chops out my window. The coyotes and crows can have them. Scrabbling under my bed, I retrieve an A3 drawing book and bag of colored pens. The first few pages are half-finished comics, a story yet unfinished waiting for my imagination. Then there’s a multicolored map scrawled across several pages, denoting my life: pages filled with boxes, each dated and timed, connected by lines as I try to make sense of what’s happening to me.

With a ruler and green pen, I draw a new box, jotting down the details since waking up at Shira’s.

I glance at my watch just to be sure. Tuesday, 21:47, June 26.

The map is a spaghetti mess of interweaving lines and text boxes. I’m not sure when my life got so complicated. Maybe when I was bandaged in the hospital, delirious in an opiate-induced haze, or maybe in those first few days after Danny’s spinal fusion, days I spent pacing the halls waiting to find out if he’d ever walk again.

My starting point is marked in red. April 6. The night of the fire.

I stash the book under my bed and strip naked. The stink of sex clings to my skin. Girls smell different, ripe and cloying. It’s a smell that gets everywhere. Even my hair reeks of girl-musk.

The tiles are cool against my back as I stand beneath a jet of cold water. Although my burns have healed, the scars are still sensitive. If the water is warmer than tepid it feels like I’m on fire all over again.

Running a hand over my mangled flesh, it’s as if I’m feeling the strange surface of some weird planet. Caressing Obscura perhaps. Her cratered and shale-smeared crust probably looks a lot like my skin. At first it was terrifying, the bubbles and swaths of too smooth flesh, the pink knots and swollen ridges slithering down my belly. Now it’s fascinating, all the warped shapes and odd textures. Surreal really, like it’s not
my
body that got deep-fried.

Not sure what the big deal is about me not being able to have kids. My left ball only looks a little more wrinkled than before, less hairy and more like a prune. The plumbing works just fine. Sex doesn’t feel the same, but then with a girl, how could it?

My face is a different matter entirely. I used to be cute, with matching dimples. Danny loved them; he’d tell me the crappiest jokes just to make me smile, and in the other life, he still does. In this reality, my smile just makes children cry.

At least my eyes are intact. Can’t say the same about my ears, but my hair covers the bulbous lobes. I stare at my reflection in the mirror, pulling grotesque faces at myself. The scars wouldn’t be so bad if people would just stop looking at me the way they do. They’re still apologizing to me for something that had nothing to do with them.

My lighter, my fire. Or did I have matches? Can’t help feeling responsible even though everyone tells me it’s not my fault. Their words are hollow, echoing with accusation. Maybe I’d learn to live with the scars better if they didn’t keep disappearing. Tomorrow with Danny, my body’ll be pristine, all flat planes and angles.

Bed. Sleep can’t come quick enough. Staring out my window, I imagine a hundred other lives. A life where we’re all still breathing, where I never cheated on Danny, where we never even went drinking out in Ghost Town. I’m so tired of bouncing back and forth; it’s exhausting. Maybe God’s listening for once, so I pray that tomorrow I won’t wake up, pray that it’ll be Danny and Shira planning
my
memorial instead. The dead have it easy.

Chapter Two

Shira’s dead

Alarm clock blaring, I reach over and smack the damn thing across the room. The shrill ringing continues. My phone’s under my pillow. I grunt in answer with eyes still closed.

“Morning,
cielo
. You ready yet?” Danny’s voice is syrup as his tongue wraps around the term of endearment. Hearing his voice makes me smile, makes waking up that much easier.

“I’ll be ready in twenty minutes. I’ll come pick you up.” I inch my way toward the edge of the bed, tossing aside the duvet.

“You better. Don’t make me wheel it all the way to town.”

I roll out of bed and into clothes. I grab the sticky notes sitting on my desk beside the terrarium. Looking at my watch, I make a note just in case things change and I can’t remember the “when” of this morning.

Brush my teeth, twist my hair into a tiny ponytail, check and double-check my face. Not a single scar, not even the faintest trace of burns. I lift my shirt just to be sure, but my skin’s pristine. Life is so much better in this reality.

Dimples intact, I grab my keys and head for my pickup, Dad’s pickup really, but he just sits at home all day, unemployed and apathetic.

Danny lives in an orange adobe behind a chain-link fence at the end of a red dust road. The window frames and front door are a shade of blue labeled aquamarine in pencil sets. Mesquite gathers around the carport and the rickety windmill creaks in the breeze—a breeze that taunts us with the promise of rain—but there’s nothing but clear skies stretching toward the mesa.

His room used to be on an upper floor, a tucked-away loft that gave us all the privacy we ever needed. We used to play guitar, make out, and smoke Danny’s organic cigarettes—his mom’s tea leaves rolled in rizzlers. Now he sleeps downstairs on the couch while his folks offer Hail Marys that he’ll walk again. After getting his spine crushed by falling timbers, Danny’s lucky he can still use his hands.

I knock and take a deep breath. Danny’s older sister opens the door and wheels him out. His dark hair curls around his face; his fringe falls into even darker eyes.

“Thanks, Gabs, I’ll take it from here.” Danny wheels himself across the sand, tilts his head, waiting for a kiss. I lean down and hug him instead. His lips brush my cheek.

Gabriela raises an eyebrow before disappearing back inside and shutting the door. She hates me, blames me for the rent in Danny’s spine.

“I swear your sister’s gonna spill,” I say.

“And that’d be a problem?”

“Daniel…” He doesn’t seem to understand how hard it is for me.

“Nah, leave it, Kyle. All in good time, right?”

I nod, not sure if there’ll ever be a good time to tell my parents I like boys, that my boyfriend asked me to run away to New York and marry him. Maybe if Danny hadn’t been such a pigheaded ass, I wouldn’t have downed Shira’s bottle of tequila and wouldn’t have played with fire.

Grunting, I wrap my arms around his chest, and he holds onto my neck. Danny’s not light, five-nine and ripped. He used to run, long-distance marathon-type running that kept him lean and graceful as a gazelle. Now he spends his day pumping iron at the gym or treading water in physical therapy sessions.

He always left me eating dust. Despite my longer legs, I could never keep up with him. Still, I’m pretty strong, so I manage to haul him out of his chair and into my pickup. I’m sweating by the time we set off down the road.

Danny tries tuning into a Farmington station, but there’s only static and snatches of garbled conversation. My antediluvian tape deck is busted so we sit in silence for a while, eyes on the horizon, sweat staining our shirts as dust and warm air blows in through the windows.

“You burning yourself again?” He flicks my arm a hairbreadth from the newest scar. My gaze drops briefly to the cigarette burns on my forearm. One’s fresh, still raised and raw.

“Don’t remember doing it.” Maybe it happened when I was between worlds.

“Wish you wouldn’t.” Danny leaves it at that. He knows it doesn’t help getting on my case. There are far worse things in life than stubbing out cigarettes on skin.

“I think we should hold a memorial for Shira,” he says.

“Ah crap, not you too.”

“Not
me too
what? Someone else holding a memorial? Don’t look like it. Seems everyone’s just conveniently forgotten strange little Shira, strange little Goth Indian.” Danny’s getting riled up.

“Relax, man. I just meant…” How the hell could I explain? “I hate memorials.”

“People die, Kyle. We’ve gotta honor them. And tossing a tub of dirt into more dirt don’t count.”

“Do we have to do this?”

He drums his fist against the door. “No. You don’t have to. But all things considered, don’t you think you oughtta?”

“All things considered?” I wish the radio was working so I could drown out his next words.

“Couple of beers in you, and you’re the one sobbing on about how it’s your fault Shira’s dead. You feeling so guilty? Do something about it.” He’s staring at me, but I don’t dare look at him. I grip the steering wheel, my knuckles white.

“We owe her this. She didn’t even wanna go to your stupid party.”

I swerve off the road onto the rocky shoulder and slam on the brakes. My heart’s thudding a hundred miles an hour.

Danny slips sideways in his seat, fingers scrabbling at the dashboard to keep himself upright.

“
My
party?” I turn off the engine and face him. The memory’s there, hovering, just waiting for me to snatch it from the ether. “I thought it was your idea to have that party out in Ghost Town?” I’m pretty sure it wasn’t my idea to traipse off into the boonies for a couple of beers.

“I didn’t bring the gasoline and matches.” He’s scowling.

We haven’t really talked about that night. We’re both good at avoiding the topic, and I reckon that’s because we’re both feeling guilty. The gasoline had been for starting a bonfire; a dipshit dumb idea in the middle of a drought, considering the old buildings are little more than tinder.