A Long way back

It started through the woven metal screen. The front door was open halfway, which wasn’t normal. You don’t leave your doors open around here. Or your windows, for that matter. Every crack, every crevice is a chance for something to creep in. The hot sand is teeming with life, and your house is a shady refuge better left vacant of the tenants that crawl.

---

The screen door was securely shut. An old, faded white-painted wooden design of lantana vines, blossoming with colored starbursts whose radiance had long faded to dull pastel adorned the weathered door. Its hinges were likewise painted white, but the finish had flaked free where the moving parts were. Likewise, the brassy metal shone through on the handle, and along the inner edge where the door was held open by impatient hands, often clutching groceries or making way for those who did. And through the screen, the dusty kitchen stared lazily back at me.

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My companion rocked uncomfortably on his heels. “What are you waiting for? It’s your house, isn’t it? The sooner we’ve seen this done, the sooner we can move on.” He picked a bit of breeze-fluff off his pressed, blue suit. I uncupped my hands from the screen and narrowed my eyes at him. “It was your idea to walk around the desert in a three-piece suit, not mine. And something isn’t right; I can’t explain it. The door sh- actually, hold on.” I crossed my arms. “Why ARE you wearing a suit? When did you put that on?” He ran a comb through his wavy black hair, cut neatly above his ears. “You’re wasting time. We came here so you could see what there is to see, you wanted the truth. I agreed, and here we are.” He finished combing and tucked it in his breast pocket. “Open the door” he drew out the last word, almost like a challenge.

Turning back to the door, I frowned. Something’s seriously off, here. Shaking off the unease, I pressed the handle and pulled the screen door open. The creak echoed through the shrouded house. The mid-day sun beat down oppressively on the tin roof, but the light was as unwelcome inside as I felt myself. The curtains on the kitchen window were drawn shut, and an old comforter hung over the living room window. The swamp cooler was clearly not running, evidenced by the suffocating silence doing a dizzying waltz with the oppressive heat and damning lack of humidity. My lips were cracked and my tongue did little more than irritate them.

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I turned to the sink, looking around for a cup. I reached to the cabinet I knew held cups, bowls and plates. Opening it, my hand recoiled. Inside, a nearly empty cupboard housed an old dish drying rack and nothing else. I gaped at the empty space. I just had a bowl of cereal this morning, why were things not where they should be? I shut the door and looked through the other cupboards hastily.

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From the living room, the couch creaked, my companion rising and strolling to the half-wall between the two spaces. I glared at him and looked behind me at the back door, to him, and back again. “You were just behind me”. He gave me a plaintive glance and shrugged. “I don’t know what you mean. Neither of us is where they should be, am I right?” I scowled and shook my head at him, eyes narrowed. “What on earth are you talking about?” Grasping around another empty cupboard, I slammed the cabinet door in frustration. The heat was really getting intense, and I felt like my body was drying up. My companion laughed, disappearing into the hallway. “Not exactly, but you’re close”.

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I don’t have time for this. He’s always acting like that. Isn’t he? I found myself struggling to summon up any memories of my time working together with him. The heat must be getting to me. I have to finish up, find my family. “Hey, don’t go down there” I jolted towards the hallway, suddenly remembering my mother’s room was at the end. “Let me go first, she has to be asleep again.” And probably drunk. Forgot to turn on the swamp cooler, middle of the day… What else is new? The hallway yawned back at me, as dark as the grave, her bedroom door inscrutable in the gloom. Behind me, his voice made me jump out of my skin. “Go first, where?” Standing at the sink, he had a hand on the faucet, a glass tumbler in the other hand, which he held out into the kitchen like a carnival-worker hustling prizes on the midway.

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I stammered uselessly, looking right into the living room, and left into the kitchen at him. “Y…You need t..to stop doing that” I managed. “Doing what, Thomas?” He replied innocently. “You’re burning up, friend. Why don’t you take a drink?” The faucet creaked open as he held the tumbler underneath. I stared longingly, moving closer to the sink. My chapped lips bled, the sticky fluid running back into my mouth, the coppery taste making me grimace. My face felt like sandpaper, and the skin on my arms was blistered and red as though I had been outside for hours.

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I held the tumbler up to the faucet, my other hand outstretched behind me. I stared back at my open palm in confusion, returning my arm to my side and concentrating on the faucet. It produced no water, instead a hiss filled the kitchen and before I could step back, smoke began to pour from the tap. It came in belching, dark grey clouds. I gasped and dropped the glass, which shattered in the sink, now full of dark smoke. I coughed and covered my mouth with my hand. “Where’d you go, hey!” I called out to my companion. He had been filling the glass; he was right there! I thought, angrily. But the smoke-filled kitchen drove me, coughing, into the living room. I rubbed my stinging eyes. “Where are you?! We have to get out!” I shouted. I struggled to remember my companion’s name. The harder I clung to each theory, the more desperately it slipped away.

I swung my arms blindly through the rising smoke. The heat of the uncooled house was stifling. Through the murk, a hand reached out and latched onto mine, pulling me forward. I stumbled into the sitting room, and jerked backwards before running directly into my mother. She stood in the middle of the small sitting-room alongside the living area. Her guitar was poised in the corner, a tall organizer stacked with cassettes of Air Supply, Pink Floyd, Stevie Nicks, Journey and other 70’s and 80’s rock and roll dominated the room. A bay window looked out onto the clawing Joshua and Yucca trees that bordered our house, as well as a juniper tree, filled with tiny, fat birds. The sun was setting over the western hills of the monument, and the stained-orange light cast the room in a fiery glow.

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Her face was serene, a peaceful smile on her lips, and she looked at me like there wasn’t a care in the world, like time was an unwelcome salesman at the door that she and I had agreed to ignore. My eyes darted from her to the window, my mouth jittering pointlessly, words refusing to form. Our hands were joined where she had pulled me, and I clapped my other hand on hers, my senses finally flying in though the sunlit window. “Mom, we have to get out! Something’s not right. It’s not safe! There’s smoke, I can’t find you, come on!” I pulled insistently on her and turned to the living room behind. My breath caught in my throat.

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The room was simply gone. What remained was a charred, windswept hellscape of blackened furniture and collapsed walls. The roof above had caved in and lie in ruins over what had been our living room floor. The kitchen I stood in minutes before was a heap of twisted wood and cheap asbestos-woven insulation that refused to burn. I stared at the ruins, my breathing short and rapid. I looked for my companion, for our car. Or truck. A bus? I couldn’t remember how we had gotten here. I winced away a splitting headache and looked back, “Mom, we have-“ I stopped. At the end of my grasp, from a blue sleeve held fast by a silver cufflink, a hand erupted, clenching mine. It was scarred and had too-long fingers, which terminated in nails over an inch long and filed to points. I followed it to the striped blue suit and the face of my companion, a sneering grin on his massacred visage, which matched his hands in scarred, cratered deterioration.

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I cried out and tried to pull away, but from behind me came a horrid heat as the room was batched in orange light again, only not from a gentle sunset. I looked into his yellow eyes and trembling, managed to ask “Where am I? Where is my family?” Reaching up with his free hand, my companion gripped my chin and slowly turned my head to the right, where a mirror hung on the wall next to the stereo. Looking back was a burned man in a blue suit, his face unrecognizable, white skull showing though a mostly-intact black hat.

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“You never came back, Thomas.” Was his chuckling reply.