Scorch Atlas (4 page)

The day the sky rained gravel I watched it drum my father’s car. A Corvette he’d spent years rebuilding. He liked to watch his face gleam in the hood. He kissed the key before ignition. He read the owner’s manual aloud. When he lost the strength to stand he left the car uncovered in the street. Each morning I took a Polaroid and we tacked it to his headboard—a panorama of slow ruin. After four years, the car’s wear matched the sallow skin of his sick head. He had me bring the smell of the old leather to him in plastic bags. He’d always said something was coming. He’d always said the world had no idea. Imagine him in bed on that gray day. Imagine him wishing he could drive at 80 through the downpour down to where the tide had begun to expel foam. Where the whales washed up half-rotten, their huge, soft heads brained by the hailing stone. The gravel piled up on the front lawn, covering the pets we’d already buried, one each year. I’d never been good at keeping things alive. On my own headboard I cut notches. The Corvette’s paint came off in yellow divots, my father’s hair loose on the pillow. His teeth were weak. He sucked a bottle. Soon the car’s roof caved. Imagine my father’s baby chipped to bits. Shit falling out of orbit. The scream of others down the street. Imagine the soapy loam covering the beach sand where for years he and I had fried. Where with our skin still raw and itching we’d fit our church clothes over our swimsuits. If I’d listened, in those soft days, I would have taken other pictures to show my children (
the children I’ll never have
). I’d flip through the photo album backwards and watch my father’s head grow full again—and me smaller, brighter eyed, head shook clean of later days. Imagine the endless pummel of our sore home. The sound of the bigger buildings bowing. How my father insisted I help him to the kitchen so he could see out to the street—where the car sat six feet under, smothered. The stink of the ocean through the glass. Imagine us there together. Imagine the billow of his eye. Imagine the way the hail slowed to let the sun through before it really started coming down.

The glass came first in early morning. I watched through the only safe storm window. The sound of sky come ripping—some sour music box, cranked to crack. The panes shattered on impact, each giving off a second spray. We watched the dead yards, already buried, now held under new refracted light. Glass over grave sites in display. Glass slit through awnings, billboard faces. The facemasks became more dire in the scatter, each inhale suspect, lined with slice. Glass specks embedded in our eyelids—count the new ranks of the blind. The glass came in many colors: some pure translucent, however tarnished; green and brown burst bottles; backed with silver as in mirrors; blue from Depression-era heirlooms; stained from the awe-stuck eaves of churches. The shriek of glass on glass peeled my skin. The screech of all things scorched around me. The brassy, tinkled detonation. Shards of wronged birds. Real birds impaled and writhing. Even the sun had hid its eye. We were several layers under now. We could not think of other times. We called truce and splayed our fingers. The sky would not forgive.