The Fringe

There weren't always dragons in the Valley, so to speak, the creatures currently rampaging through L.A could be called dragons. Their skin was rough and scaled. Massive black wings beat the air around them. Small explosions igniting around their bodies. They trailed down the middle of the town toward the city. Expansive fires engulfing the wreckage in their path. I watched from the shed out back. The bottle of pills in my blackened, lanced hands. I plopped down hard on the ground and fished out a single white pill. The scratched-out label on the side said doxycycline. The pill between my fingers had a very different efficaciousness. I put the pill back in the container and walked back into the shed. One last project before the end comes. I plucked out the small leather notebook. This will be the contents of how the end came to be.

* * *

The heat fogged up my glasses as I followed my mother outside of the thick glass doors of the airport. Prudence Damen-Fulton was a quiet woman. The stereotypical library-mouse. Down to the tight high bun, big coke bottle glasses and the oversized turtleneck that made any illusion to a feminine frame disappear completely into a beige void of thrifted wool. The glasses made her bright blue eyes look too big for her face. She always looked like a child just slapped for eating the last cookie before supper. She stood by my father. His height and girth made the illusion of her being a child that much plainer. Leonard Fulton was, in all aspects, a simple-minded fool. An anvil shaped head sat on stocky barrel shoulders. He wore a red, plaid button down and ripped, oil-stained jeans. The full mustache and beard combo made him look like a lumberjack right off the page of a fairy tale. Though the permeant scowl and preference for the more vulgar language demystified the fantasy.

I inched up to them on the sidewalk taking measured and deliberate steps. Watching them stand on the edge of the sidewalk flagging down a taxi. It took a few minutes as the bright yellow cars stopped for other fares. I glanced at my watch and saw it was almost noon. We would need to stop by the hotel to check in before grabbing lunch and heading over to the house. I looked back up as a taxi pulled into the lane in front of my parents, the driver started getting out of the car. He was a short thin fellow with dark skin and jet-black hair. My father glared and shooed him away as he reached for the luggage next to my mother. The cabby held his hands up in front of him for a second and stepped back. He turned to the car and opened the trunk instead.

Just after one we had put our luggage in the hotel and grabbed a bite in a small trailer style diner. We finally pulled up to the house. A small one-bedroom shack. It lied just outside Pacoima. The town was small but held a respectable business center. A year before in 1994 a writer from the New York Times marked the town as “one of the worst-off neighborhoods in Los Angeles “nevertheless, hides its poverty well." The article mentioned “neat houses” and “well-tended yards”. That description was a far cry from what stood before me. The once white siding was now stained a dull dirt gray. The windows had been boarded up from the inside. Chunks of glass missing. The weeds stood knee high, scraggly dried vines had started to reach for the sun on the edges of the house. The went halfway up and curled in on themselves, almost black at the ends as if the sun itself had come down and touched the leafy hands that reached up from the ground.

My father grunted and headed for the door. My mother pattered after him. Light clicking heels on the broken sidewalk. Once the screen door slammed shut, I made my way to the back of the house. In the back off to the left was a shed. The same dirty shade of might have been white once covered the outside. Though some of the siding had completely fallen away in some areas, and others looked like they had been burned. A small ramp led up to a small double door that was painted a faded blue color. Chipping on the surface and curling around the edges. I pulled open the doors and a hot wave of air poured out. It was chokingly thick, rancid air. It smelled of rotting beef and a long-forgotten smoldering fire. I covered my face with a hand. A cough caught in my throat holding back vomit. I clenched my teeth and swallowed back the burger from the diner. A stray burp came up in its place and my face twisted at the impression of half-digested pickle that suddenly filled my mouth.

The inside of the shed was filled with boxes. They lined the back walls. Leaning on each other like a house of cards. Books and journals flowed out of them. “Jesus Christ.” I muttered. A desk on the right wall was covered with more papers. They were all covered in writing and doodles. Journals were strewn across the desk and floor. Pages wrinkled and torn. I reached for the piece of paper tucked away in my pocket and brought it out. I unfolded the torn page and looked over it again. ‘Dear Landyn’, the letter began in a small tight scrawl. The top of the page was covered in doodles. Similar to the ones he could see on a few of the loose paper that laid on the desk. It was a diamond shape with a crudely drawn cat eye in the center. On the outside rough crisscrossed lines tethered out from the diamond. It gave the impression of an unfurling carpet surrounding the eye.

There was a small wooden chair in front of the chair. I straddled the chair and sat down spreading out the letter on the desk. “I know it has been a while, but I have missed you so much. I know your father and I have had our differences, but I hope that has not dampened our relationship. There is so much I must tell you. I don’t have a lot of time. Most of the information I need to tell you will be in my shed. You might not believe me. Everyone else has written me off as a complete fool, but I will show you that I am of completely sound mind. It is urgent that you find the fringe. I have left the coordinates in my shed in the bottom right drawer. All my experiments and data are in the various notebooks and pages around the room. I know this will be difficult to understand at first, but I know that you will make quick work of coming to the same conclusion that I have made. The fringe must be closed before it is too late. I am getting weaker as I write this letter. I know I won't have much longer. I am headed back to the fringe tonight if my body will make it.” I closed my eyes and squeezed the bridge of my nose with my thumb and index finger.

I had gotten the letter from my uncle Dr. Timothy Fulton the day after the news came. He was found dead a few yards from the shed. He had been there three days before a passing truck with some hunters had noticed him in the tall grass. Their dogs had picked up the scent and went ravenous. One of the men had almost gone over the side of the bed of the truck when one of the dogs tried to jump out. The news had reached us in Des Moine, Iowa two days before I had received the letter. It was post marked the same day the corner had assumed time of death. He had probably just stuck the letter in the mailbox before the embolism burst in his temple. The day before we left for the plane, I had called the corner and gotten as much detail about his death as I could. Dr. Fillmore had told me my uncles' hands and arms had been badly burned and lesions covered his palms and forearms. He was also perplexed that the embolism caught him before the cancer. He said my uncles' organs were riddled with metastatic cancer that seemed to originate from his colon, and a fresh first stage osteosarcoma was found spreading rapidly in his bones.

I didn’t tell my parents about the cancer or the burns and cuts on his arms. My father, my uncle's brother, had a rocky relationship with him since they were kids. My father never understood his brother's aptitude for higher thought, and my uncle always accused my father of being intentionally dense. When I told my father I was going to go to college for chemistry and focus on microbiology, like my uncle, he lost his mind. Threatening to kick me out for not joining the family business. I never considered his construction business that he started in his twenties to be a family business. He cursed his brother for filling my head with thoughts of grandeur and a contempt for the working man. Though the former word was chewed by his southern accent and came out graner.

My mother on the other hand had always loved my uncle. I saw the way she had looked at him during the few family gatherings we had back when my grandmother was alive. My uncle had told me in confidence at one of these gatherings, after having a few too many beers, that he was planning on asking my mother out to prom when they had been in high school together, but before he had a chance to set up the elaborate plan, my father had found the plans in my uncle's room and set it up the next day. My parents have been together ever since. I saw the way her face fell when we got the news. She didn’t cry in front of my father, never in front of him, but I could see the dismay in her eyes, and it tore me up inside. Later that night after my father migrated to the bar, we held each other and cried.

I started leafing through the pages on the desk. I put the letter to the side making a mental note to finish it later. I couldn’t stand reading the rest here right now in this space that reminded me of him so much. I grabbed a pile of papers a deck of cards thick off the left side of the desk. Under them was a frame. It was an 8x10 frame, basic black with a chunk of glass missing from the top right corner. Inside the frame was a black and white photo. The older gentleman was in a checkered button down and black slacks. His horn-rimmed glasses had slid down his nose perched on the tip of it. His face was thin, with an angled nose. A hard jaw line and a bulbous Adams apple sticking out of his neck. He was on one knee and his bright light eyes where fixed on a small boy to his right. The boy had a neatly combed head of dark hair and a face just as thin and tight as the mans. He was in a plain t shirt and a big smile that stretched from ear to ear. On the man's left was a bike that he held up with the hand that wasn’t tucked behind the boy's shoulders.

I picked up the frame wiping off a thick layer of dust from the glass. I felt my eyes stinge. My heart leapt in my chest. My breath hitched in my throat. The picture was taken probably fourteen years ago when I was eight years old. My first bike. Uncle Timothy had gotten it for my birthday while my father was out on a big construction job. That day was the first time I noticed how happy my mom was around my uncle and the first time I realized just how much I wished he was my father.

I glanced around the papers I had been trying to organize. My head started to ache. I collapsed in the old wooden chair. It grunted against the wooden floorboards but didn’t protest my weight. I looked down. The letter coming to mind, and I found the drawer that he had mentioned. Inside was an old land map of the area and a big black journal. It was old cracking black leather with a frayed belt keeping it sealed. My fingers closed over the leather, and it felt warm to the touch. Not burning or scorched, but like it was held to a heater for a few minutes just before being placed in the drawer.

That same image doodled on all those pages and my letter was burned on the cover. The eye in the middle seemed bigger unlike the other doodles. It was still capsulated in the diamond casing, but it almost seemed to bulge at the edges. My skin started to crawl looking at the eye. The top of my head seemed to squeeze together as if I suddenly had less skin than skull. A deep sinking dread filled every pour of my skin. The journal slipped from my fingers and thudded dully on the floor.

“LANDYN.” My name rang through the air outside and I jumped up knocking over the chair and scattering more papers. I pulled open the door and saw my dad standing outside the house. “Yes, I’m back here.” I yelled back and started up to the house.

“Me and your mom are going to head back to the motel. Do you want to come?” He spoke evenly and straight. I knew what he meant, mom was going to go lie down and cry while he hunted down the nearest bar to start forgetting he was supposed to give a fuck about the reason for our trip. I glanced back at the shed, without turning back to him I answered,

“No, I think I will do a bit more work before the funeral tomorrow. The shed is stacked with boxes. This will probably take me days to sort through.” I hear a grunt in response and hard clomping steps as he walked back into the house. It took about twenty minutes before I heard the cab pull up and take off. I glanced out of a partially blocked window to the left of the sheds door and saw taillights fading down the deserted road. In those twenty minutes I pulled out the map. It had scribbles all around the border and a cipher near the faded compass rose. Two distinct set of numbers that seemed to be the latitude and longitude of a secluded section roughly a mile away from the house.

I had briefly flipped through the first couple pages of the old leather journal. It was filled with my uncles writing. His neat small script described basic molecule structures and bonds. Simple concepts usually found in Gen Ed chemistry classes. My uncle had two doctorates in Chemistry one focusing on microchemistry and one with a focus on biological chemistry. His work never spent so much time on basic and simplified concepts. By the second page tangents in his writing shifted topics every paragraph. One paragraph talked about the binding possibilities of nitrogen atoms and the next was talking about Prue, it read like he was talking about a lifelong pet. Uncle Timothy never had animals. He was allergic and detested that an animal be so pitiful that it required constant care to survive.

After the taillights faded, I grabbed the map, the journal, and an old, chipped compass I found at the back of the drawer. It was around four in the afternoon by then. A good four to five hours before it was too dark to make my way back. I started out northeast of the house. Rough rock and small shriveled plants made the trail tough to navigate. I spent a good twenty minutes fumbling through the dirt and rocks before I came to where the map said these coordinates should be. There was a clearing. Almost perfectly circular roughly ten yards across. In the center was a pile of rocks coming up waste high and give or take four feet in diameter. Everything was silent. No bugs. No wildlife. Not even a breeze broke the unnatural stillness in the air. My arms felt electrified and my mind screamed danger. RUN. RUN. RUN… My muscles froze in place as my mind protested.