Shadows in the Wind

The night my father buried me, he told me, “I have to.”

He didn’t cry. He didn’t smile. He didn’t bother to look my way as he wrapped spools of rope around my waist and shoulders. I closed my eyes and nodded. I understood. We’ve been here before with mom, and my brother along with his seven-year-old son. The two were buried with their arms wrapped in a hug and their hearts thumping against each other. It was the last sound they’d share as my brother whispered into his son’s ear and said, “This is our Forever Song; it’ll play on and on, and on, long after we are gone.”

Sometimes, I can hear it too. It is a swollen cloud beating in the wind. It is the soft crunch of my father’s shoes stepping right beside me. It is the rolling rain falling off the moon’s cheek, as soft as my father’s tear.

The night my father buried me, he said, “Not yet.”

He didn’t cry. He didn’t smile. He didn’t bother to touch my hand as he rolled me into a blanket and carried me on his shoulder. My eyes were shut and my head bobbed, bouncing against his back. I understood. He told me already, “You’ll remember the day you die. You’ll remember the day everyone forgets you. The day when nothing breathes but ghosts of unloved memories with bodies as pale as expired milk. You’ll remember the smell of the room—if you are in a room. You’ll remember the blood that leaves your mutilated fingers. Your muscles will sink into your aching bones, leaving you abandoned and as lonely as the dust thickening around your tongue as you remember the smell of sweat. And for once, even for just that second, you will know peace. You will know what it feels like to lie in total nothingness, watching the foggy silhouettes crying over your body, begging and pleading, and saying a name you’re not even sure exists. Is that me? You’ll say but no one will hear as they beg for your response, yet all you can say is, ‘I’m not here anymore.’ And maybe that’s not such a terrible thing. Because it’s here where everyone forgets you. Where you are just a collage of body parts stuffed inside of a bag, one bloody thump after the other. The dandelions won’t smell as fresh. The trees will rot. The dog won’t stop scratching at your head in the ground. And all that anyone will have left of you, is a closed casket, cushioned white walls sheltering nothing but air, and your soul dying to be seen.

A long stretch of darkness hangs over Cumbá Island where the air is stuffy and salty, and thick. My father abandoned the road and receded into the forest as shadows drop off the trees and blacken around his body. He carries me on his shoulder, making the two-hundred-pound bag of carnage look weightless; in a way that I would expect a dead body to be. But it isn’t. A dead body turns into cement and stiffens, then it sinks further and further into the ground, and the more my father drags me to the ditch, the more I sink as though I want to take him with me. Then he places my body into the black, carved hole and begins to jab at the dirt with a shovel, digging faster and faster, dumping it over my body. Yet every time it splats onto the bag it only crumbles off, leaving him staring at the things that can’t be covered. He digs again. And he dumps. And the dirt disappears.

And he digs.

And he dumps.

And he digs.

And he dumps.

Then a branch snaps from behind him. The forest is darkening, and the moon, like a flashlight, glows across his skin. Leaves crunch from beyond and another branch snaps. Something is watching him. He can feel it in the dark: one set of sunken empty eyes, cold and soulless, under a long sheet of black. He can feel it digging into his skulls, it stares for so long he can feel it seep into his skin. It is waiting for him to turn around—but instead, he grabs his shovel and he digs, and he dumps, and he digs, and he dumps until the ditch is covered and he stops and reaches into his pocket to pluck a pre-rolled cig.

From burnt, gritty lips, hangs a cigarette with white smoke. The fumes sizzle into his mouth. It is as brutal as a filthy word. It is as dirty as the curb of my father’s bunker below ground—in the last place he wanted to be. He ponders on the moon, and the shadow behind the moon, and his eyes turn into glue. They permeate. They stalk. They chisel into bone. He usually calculates the approximate time of their arrival, although—like today—they sometimes came a little early. After three years, it had become habitual to judge the daylight by the notches on a broken clock, even if it was not always the best method. It’s why he built the bunker underground to avoid the unnecessary task of counting.

Two-hundred-and-forty-eight…two-hundred-and-forty-nine…fifty. He stops in the middle of the forest where the tall trees grow out of the earth and touches the night sky as the faint moonlight peppers through the leaves. The flickering shadow waves over the door that’s in the ground, covered by a blanket of leaves. He lifts the latch and climbs inside. It has a rough-edged opening, about a twenty-two-inch square. He thumps down the steps, leaving the heat of the forest as a brush of cold air welcomes him on his descend. Support beams had been placed to hold up the ceiling and the only light that comes is from the flashlight snapping on in his hand. The bulb sputters into life, too dim to reach the corners as he closes the trapdoor above his head. Fluttery cobwebs stick to his fingers before he wipes them away on his jeans.

The cigarette dangles out his mouth, trailing a threadlike tail of smoke around his shoulders as he walks through the tunnel. One of the carved-out rooms holds supplies of water bottles, storage niches holding blankets and clothing, radios, medical supplies, a generator-powered battery bank, shelving units with canned items and packaged food, and beer. Lots of beer.

My father slumps onto the cot, the give of the weak springs causes him to sink into the metal foundation. He sighs, weighing his head down to the floor where his eyes catch the movement of something walking away just beyond the door. He stares into the ill-lit hall as blood flushes into his ears and throbs and tries telling himself he is imagining things—but then he heard it: a soft, whisper drifting through the air like something was sucking wind through its teeth and letting it out in a hiss.

Did it follow me here? He wonders. No, it couldn’t have. Impossible. It was not dark enough for it to come out. Not yet. I made sure to come home early.

He stares into the blackened hall, waiting for a sound, but after sitting for an unsure amount of minutes, he slowly rises from sitting to a standing position and steps forward.

Crack.

Something crushes under his boot, causing him to look down, and wedged between the grooves of his rubber sole is a metal chain. He digs it free then holds it before his eyes as a pearl-pink locket dangles in his pinched fingers. He plucks his cigarette from his mouth, sighing with a breath of smoke slipping from his lips. The smoke swirls around the locket and makes it jingle. The gentle ring is an incantation, summoning all the memories of me, and it sounds like the first time I laughed when he cradled me in his arms and tickled my feet. It sounds like: “Dad, you cannot be serious. I am not going to prom with Ricky.”

“Why not Ricky?” he had asked from the driver’s seat.

“Ew, Ricky?” I cringed, sticking out my tongue, “His breath smells like two words: garbage sewer.”

“The same could be said about your upper lip,” my father had joked, “But you don’t hear me complaining.” I shot him a cold glare before shoving him in his arm. He laughed as the stoplight turned green and he pushed on the gas.

The ring of the locket sounds like a lot of things, both sweet and bitter. But it is the bitter ones he’d rather do without. The bitter memories have too much screaming, and fists banging on wooden doors, clawing to get inside. It has the sound of thick, hissing voices descending on the earth, bringing with it a heavy fog. It rouses the memory of seeing a ground covered in a sheet of mist, so thick, he could see it turn gray. Thunderheads rose quickly in the distance, opening to translucent shells of rain. It materialized on his skin and made the plants sag into a dip of water. Shadows stretched from the trees surrounding him with blackness on all sides before he heard the constant whisper of something telling him to run.

That day was the first stage of the end. Three years ago. It sent us racing through the streets, slapping our hands against storefront windows, yelling for anyone to let us inside, but as we investigated the dimly lit windows, people started dropping. Some turned into a gust of air and faded through the ceiling as soft as ash.

“What is happening!?” I looked at him, but he didn’t look back. He only stared at the dark silhouette walking amongst the road. It didn’t have a true shape, it was more so, a shadow. A ghost. Crows cawed and swooped down from the sky, digging their feet into people’s scalps, and yanking their hair. It looked like my father was moving his lips, but I couldn’t hear above the loud cawing and shouting. “What!?” I yelled before being muffled by the wind.

“We have to go!” he said with eyes round with terror. A torpedo-like wind twisted garbage cans and vehicles into buildings as pedestrians ran for safety—before they too sanded into ash. “We have to go now!”

There hadn’t been a day noisier than that one, my father remembers. Now all that there is, is silence. It is true silence. It is the loneliest sound. It is why he keeps my locket for when the nights get too quiet and the bunker below echoes not a sound. Sometimes he’d reach into his pocket and give it a little jingle just to make sure he could still hear, to make sure he was not losing his mind. It is what keeps him sane besides the cigarette habit he picked up after the day my mother dropped dead. Sometimes he still recalls the moment he fell. He said it was like cement. One second standing, next second, boom. Down. Like a rock. Every few days a static would hiss from the radio. It only does it when the spirits are whispering from above the bunker.

My father walks to the door and hooks the locket onto a nail.

If the spirits are down here to get me too, I am ready, he thinks. Then he walks back to his cot, lays his head onto the cold pillow, flattened by sweat, and closes his eyes.

The bunker is silent. Unnaturally silent.

Then, as faint as the air slithering down his arm, he hears the softest jingle just above his door. It is here for him: the end. He flips on a flashlight and the glow brightens on a face as the locket above the door, rings and rings, and rings.