Everyone Knows

I usually head out in the morning, just as the darkness outside begins to gray and before the day starts to creep into full-blown fever. Even then, one can feel the previous day’s heat weltering amid the homogeneous shanties, a neutral air that dies in the nostrils and sticks to sweat. There was a time when Graet would come with me, but then she found the lumps just under her left armpit, two of them - hard and conspicuous like beans nestled strangely beneath wet, sallow sheets. Everyone knows that can happen. So, today, I was going it alone.

I barred the door gingerly so as not to disturb her, in case such a thing even could, then slinked down into the dry overgrowth that comprised this rolling patchwork of lawns. The brushy vista rippled in a near-imperceptible breeze, and in the gloaming I felt for a moment as though we were living atop a vast Doggo: the grass, its tawny hair, ever bristling. All this thrumming heat, its life force. I stooped, hand against its imagined flesh. Good Boi. Let me find food today. When I was little, and before her moods began to eat her alive, Mom used to tell me that what I believed was My Truth. “Always be true to Your Truth,” she’d say. Today, that meant the world was Doggo and I was going to eat, so I stroked the grass, ingratiating myself to my new friend.

In my reverie, my hand brushed against something. I parted the grass curiously, revealing the daintiest chained cord. Looping it around my fingers, I brought it forward, squinting at the dark shape strung upon it. There, dangled an unfamiliar bauble - two eggs merging but pointed on the bottom. Everyone knows that this sort of thing is a sign. I stood, Doggo’s Favor shining upon me, and added the trinket to my foraging bag.

My parents taught me to Think Positive, just as their parents had back when the power was still on, and the dark magic of technology crackled through every space it could find. Those were terrible times, the legends intoned, troubled by chemicals, illuminaties and demon-rats. But people endured by Thinking Positive. My mother owned a picture of Jesus, handed down generations, with clean, blonde hair and eyes as blue as the deadly sky. It hung over the microwave where she would store her dwindling supply of supplements, and whenever I went by, I would see him there, tenderly clutching his rifle. “Thank you America,” I’d pray. “Bring us cool water and Non Jee-Em-Oh food. Thank you…”

I turned the corner where bent poles leaned into the highway, their snare of dead wires spilling across the road, then hopscotched between them in the gloom until I made it to the drop-off just before my destination. Below sprawled the great tan complex, its blue sign branded with seven white letters and one six-petaled yellow flower. Long ago, buildings like this one served as temples for products and food. Dad taught me to hunt here, and sometimes we’d find remnants of this former bounty: mushroom soup, gloppy and metallic. Sugary beans to slurp straight from the can. Spaghetti noodles, preserved behind dilapidated shelving. By the time I was hunting solo, though, it was all gulls and rats, boiling their bones for a second meal.

People just didn’t come here anymore. They liked to avoid conflict, and as such, each other. It wasn’t necessity, then, but nostalgia that kept me coming back; Dad and I would spend hours here when mom was too sick - or too well - to bear our presence, losing ourselves in the mysterious apocrypha of the place:

"Here’s a Snugglie." He said once, toeing a box of rotting cloth. "The blanket you could wear. And this was a Copper Thay-ree-putic Ankle Cuff. It'd align your chakras so good your pain would just, wapoof, vanish."

"Does it still work?" I remember asking hopefully, thinking of Mom.

"Nah, old-timey 5Gs prolly borked it. Dang, here’s an Ex-Box! Your grandpa fought wars on his Ex-Box.

Here’s the book by the lady who invented crystals." He lowered his voice to a whisper, his bald, bearded head turning the color of a skinned knee. "It’s why women stick crystals up their you-know-what to gain powers."

I opened my mouth briefly in protest, but he went on:

"Here’s Himalayan Pink Salt." he flipped the package over thoughtfully, its contents long absconded-with. "It’s the best salt. See the butterfly? Non Jee-Em-Oh."

"What’s Jee-Em-oh?" I scowled, trying to forget about crystals up the you-know-what.

"People playing God. Everyone knew they were bad. Good thing no one’s left what makes them."

"And these?" I sidled along some shattered glass to reach for a tall, slim candle in an ornately shrink-wrapped jar. It was one of three whole candles left amid an assortment of broken ones. I recognized the cerulean gaze of the figure on the front, two bleeding hands held palm out. There were no rifles in this version. Instead, He was limned gallantly against the billowing folds of the Red, White, and Blue.

"Votives. They louden folks' prayers. Know what? Snag a few!"

"Right." I tucked the Jesus candles under my arm and that night we lit them and prayed our usual prayers. For Mom's health and mood. For rain, but not too much. Protect us from Bad Hombres that want what’s ours.

I hunkered and began to scuttle down the gravelly decline toward the sea of tarmac, cinching my bag to my side with my elbow so that it wouldn't drag. Overhead, seagulls drifted in lazy circles upon the first updrafts of morning. Suddenly, the embankment gave way beneath me and I slid, skidding along on the small of my back as my arms and ankles scrambled for purchase. In my panic, I wrapped my hand around a tuft of razor-sharp sedge and whipped around just as the blades bit into my palm, sliding face down and feet first the rest of the way. When I finally came to a stop, I lay there, stunned into stillness.

Several things had come tumbling out of my bag in my frantic descent, and were now strewn around me. I groaned and reluctantly clambered to my knees, reminding myself to Think Positive. Mom's gun had rolled yet farther down the hill, resting against a section of chain-link fence with its last three shots intact. I bagged things, blood dribbling from the gash in my hand. Box of ammo (for a different gun), check. Mom’s Organic Healing Rocks wrapped in a shirt, check. Dad’s knife, check. Metal figure of the crucified Jesus that was also a working fire lighter, double check. The dainty chain with its weird bauble, tangled pitifully in some weeds...

I picked toward it with peculiar dread. The bauble looked different, broken maybe? Taking care to extricate it from its peril, I rolled it around in my hands. I could have given this to Graet, I thought with mounting remorse, trying to make sense of this now blood-smeared thing. Could it have cured her? Because you never know. Everyone knows that you never know. My eyes watered. Please don’t be broken. I remembered the day Dad broke his leg falling out of a dumpster. After his pain had given way to fever, Mom did everything she knew. She prayed, feeding him supplements and Bleach. She swabbed him with pee, clacking her healing rocks together in her sweaty hands. I did my part by positively envisioning his full recovery. The day he stopped breathing, she simply closed the door and went to bed on the couch. She asked me later which of us had done it, which of us had not wanted badly enough for Dad to survive. I blinked through tears, concentrating on the trinket. No, it wasn't broken, but open. It had popped open along a hinge, so that now the odd shape was mirrored by its double. And inside, behind a flimsy, translucent pane, there was a picture. I twisted it in the light to get a better view.

It was a portrait of a tidily dressed woman, fair and smiling. Though I’d never figured out letters, numbers were a different story. On her shoulder, in fat red print, sat one big nine and two little nines. Nine-ninety-nine had to mean something. I snorted back the salty concoction of snot that a good cry brings, and gazed out across the abysmal lot. Light had begun to dawn, and I found myself momentarily rooted by a queasy foreboding. What I needed now was faith. I squeezed my fist against the buzzing pain and shimmied beneath a well-worn gap in the chain link. Once on the other side, I spied a dark patch on the concrete some hundred feet ahead where the silhouettes of birds could be seen congregating.

The smell hit me as I moved into view. Despite not having been here long, this Doggo was already little more than a mat of hair upon a defeated jumble of bones. It lay there with its lipless grimace, hollow eye sockets fixated upon some unknowable dream. Bad vibes cursed the space around it, bearing down on me with mysterious intent. Still, bones could be boiled for broth, so I took the shirt from my bag and slit it - one segment to wrap the healing stones around my hand, and the rest for the dismantled carcass. Good Doggo. Shhh. Sleep now.

The rest of my expedition went uneventfully. I resisted potshots at seagulls and thought about how I’d met Graet on a hunt, some time around the end of Mom’s lucidity, when there wasn’t much left of her but haunted, slack-skinned bones leering from the living room shadows. I left her there and moved in with Graet. Her place became our place, and for a long time we did everything together. All this I thought, hoisting myself in and out of dumpsters and then, before the inescapable heat could find me out, I stole my way back home.

Graet was conscious when I returned, there in bed dredging up one breath at a time as was her way now, and watching the ceiling. She angled her head toward me as I ducked in beside her.

“I can make bone broth tonight. It’ll be organic.” I offered ineffectually, returning her weak smile. “And I brought you a thing.”

I fished the bauble out of my bag and held it out so that she could see. “It’s two eggs stuck together, lol. It means you and me, but also new life and, like, healing? And look -” I unclasped the side and flicked it open to reveal the golden, manicured figure depicted within:

“It’s Girl Jesus. Also, nine-ninety-nine - the opposite of six-sixty-six!”

Graet’s whole body shuddered, a wheezing snort-bark issuing from deep within her chest, and it took me a moment to interpret the sounds for what they were: a wry, pained chuckle. “That’s a heart, you dipshit.

Nine-ninety-nine’s the price tag.

Didn’t you ever see no hearts?”

My face flushed red. I could feel it, the cloying prickle of hairs bunching up around my scalp and ears, the stiff heat blossoming in my cheeks. It was the stupidest thing I’d ever heard. Of course I had seen hearts, and plenty of them, in seagulls and rats and Doggos. Not a one had looked like that. A weird, dour rage curdled in my guts, and I snatched the so-called “heart” away, cramming it right back into my bag.

“I’m not stupid.” I hissed at her, bolting straight up as her spasmodic laughter gave way to fits of breathless coughing, then more apologetic laughter. I slammed the door behind me and went to get started on the broth.

“Jesus Christ, Graet.” I called behind me. “Everyone knows what a heart looks like!”