SAMUEL SACRISTAIN — Overcast

In the city of Coriolana, the theory of Heat Death had come back into fashion. It had been mostly stripped of its Victorian characteristics of typology and late-alchemy, and rather than pretending to calculate the Sun’s eventual exhaustion of energy, our cosmopolitan counterparts instead predicted the combustion and incineration of pool tables, acrylic nails, backgammon dice, hollow points, tile versus carpet versus linoleum, catalytic converters, lawnmowers, haircuts, and legal documents followed by their signatures. Eventually there would come a tipping point when their things would no longer melt or even heat up, but immediately zip out in a white point of energy. We never saw the math behind these theories, but when my wife and grandmother and I went up to sell the wool or vote we’d hear them moaning about it the way we, out in Crownlay, urged the droughts and moths to worsen so that we could call them biblical and end their cycle. It’s November again and the sky is severe-clear over the city. The anniversary has passed and it is proven again that a curse in the country is a plague for the city. We are assured that over those three days last year, their moaning would have become vengeful in the style of the doomed, in a voice less intelligible as it gets desperate to make retribution its own weapon, as it attempts to continue the cycle of violence before it has received its share. Vengeance being as if you had the power to damn a neighbor yourself, as my grandmother would tell the radon-mitigation men. Yes ma’am, they remembered the weather event she referred to as “single overcast,” but wanted to reassure her that the trace levels of radon in the cellar could not have been exacerbated or “saturated” by those freak conditions. * * * On the morning of November 1, we felt a cold wind on a bright day that Coriolana should’ve read like rippling water approaching a sailboat. The overcast followed slowly behind, as if the wind were towing it by the thin streaks of cirrus clouds or rogue contrails that reached out of the darkening mass. My wife caught one of those heavenly towlines and left unannounced. By the time I realized she was gone, the gray clouds were losing their heavy shapes, and I watched the sublime billows of marble veined with rain break up and blur as they approached the city. She was going for a swim, but she wasn’t dressed for it. At the city limits she opened the train’s emergency hatch and gestured to the sky with her long, glamorous hand, which was marked with hard work and disguised again in jewels. From Lake Park’s polluted banks, a species of unidentified microorganism were drawn up into the sky with the warmthless sun’s last evaporations, and would remain there in deep cover over Coriolana until they returned as the small, sluggish, gray creatures eventually named Hydrodromeda myopoedius. In the harsh climes of the troposphere the hardiest of these organisms began cannibalizing the limited biomass of their ascendance. Future generations, separated from their forebears and prey by less than a second, multiplying, consuming, swirled around on the grace of their own lightness. By the afternoon of the first day, the Coriolanians couldn’t project the figures of their world onto the clouds anymore. The city was blanketed by the palpable and palateless image of gray, ultimately dense and indiscernible through squints and widened eyes, always threatening to separate into some particular formation, later promising and teasing, both hungry and delicious, sucking up all the living light below and beyond. Even the eye floaters of those watching below, so complete and formless that it could have been a dome or an outright reduction in dimension that flattened the horizon and captured the citizenry. Above, they saw figments of surging, furling, and folding— “Oh, it’s disseminating,” said one. “I say coagulating,” said another. “I see a perforation folding to the northwest,” said my wife, Von Margolis, approaching a bar patio that was packed with spectators who wouldn’t look away from the sky. She interlocuted upon the barmaids who had forgotten their viscous liquois, dicemen who had taken their eyes off the table, ticklers choked mid-giggle, letterheads breaking the habit, junkfiends with nothing to spare, Beats-Me-Bobbies plugging their leaks, and wetly creased bigwigs bringing their trousers out to dry. She was unsure if anyone had heard or responded. She interjected her jangling bangles between the inclined heads of two strangers wearing lavender uniforms with sunflower boutonnieres. “Gollibet—” said the first under his breath, so that Gollibet strained his ears, which shifted his entire scalp up and back down his skull, “—we are granted reprieve.” She snapped her long fingers that gestured with silver and turquase rings towards the pearl-gray mirage made just for her. Small-style talk continued without her. She wore a navy dress she’d been knitting for the past two months. It was tight, but perfectly measured so that it didn’t stretch anywhere. It had a mock turtleneck and there were cap sleeves that brought out her broad shoulders, and a cable-knit braid design down the sides that narrowed at the waist and widened at the hips and finished above the knee with the heads of two entwined snakes. On the second day of so-called digital time, the Coriolanians found themselves in the positions they’d been in for hours, with necks craned and heads thrown back, and the choked conversation degrading into a wordless drone. The density of the overcast singularity entranced the formerly urbane as they searched for, not a sign, but the shape of the sky. They continued to see fleeting textures and designs as the gray expanse appeared to come right up to the point of the viewer’s nose, or would suddenly propel off into the infinite as the lens and brain attempted to adjust. Their posture restricted the glottis and their united voices created a low vibrating hum that could be heard at every corner like a tired storm siren. The sun was now fully obscured, and this fleeting moment, though unnoticed, was marked by a sudden shared memory of a last light in the minds of those below. But no night had fallen as far as the cityfolk knew. A weak gloom of stale sunrays remained to reveal the gray horizonless sky above, the bloodless faces below, and the fragile city all around, transformed to coral, chalk, and dusty charcoal. The Coriolanians began to understand that this ugly light had been trapped when the clouds coalesced so quickly that the rays couldn’t escape and return to the sun. The decaying sunbeams thought each time, with waning hope, that they would be picked up on the next revolution. In a last desperate attempt they worked their way upwards, clinging to the wicked wall, devising among themselves new light-languages to call for their father in inverted shadow. These signs looked like angry faces to the citizens below. The droning voices pitched up only slightly, but this marginal expression was enough to communicate horror and terror. They saw angry, reproachful, or regretful faces in the dying light. My wife dared to look up for a moment to look for the shapes but instead saw, in these words: A dreadful apparition. Two armies facing each other with a steep valley between them. The armies were made up of huge, ovoid, man-like creatures. They appeared to have burlap for skin filled with sand for innards. They were so swollen that none of their features could be discerned. In their digitless hands they held blunt weapons such as baseball bats, golf clubs, and hockey sticks, which were sized for human athletes and looked delicate in their horrible hands. There was some grumbling, then a sudden accord after which both armies tore down the valley with their instruments held high. They smashed into each other, a soldier from each side against its counterpart in the middle of the valley as they crossed a shallow river, falling where they met. Their collisions were terrifying and they did not swing. A cloud of yellow dust filled the air so thick that it appeared gaseous and smelled like sulfur. The gas settled and returned to the corpses if they had ever been living. When the air was clear, the stream carried the bodies out of the valley and over the northwestern horizon. My wife found she was no longer looking at the sky. All around her the faces were rigidly shaking with fear as they strained to see inside. They were remembering the first time they’d flown above bad weather in an airplane, shocked to see a blue sky above dark clouds, and they should have been happy to see that God’s opinions were only a thin layer between themselves and the universe. Instead they had felt banished to a small world, and knew that there was an inside to the above, and that it had features they couldn’t imagine. But my wife had some perspective now. She stretched her neck and started in the direction that had been revealed, and maybe even had an idea of the fluid topography of that other world. Maybe it looked the same as the boulevards and alleys she now faced. Her path was threatened by an architecture of demise, as if she were walking through a city that, after years of decay, had been finished off by an afternoon of airstrikes. She couldn’t tell if any windows remained. One structure leaned and one structure slumped, and it went like this street after street as if they’d been made out of chalk and cheese. There was even less to cling to above, but it was all the myopoedians ever knew. There were fewer for survival, though they numbered in the tens of thousands, but the efficiency of energy conversion was miraculous. They continued on with larger bites and developed nascent body parts and these became vestigial and were amputated and served as delicacies. They sheltered in their own waste and shadows though they excreted a weightless film and had no eyes. They began to reproduce sexually, but not out of necessity. The second day of the myopoedians' history (for they had a sense) was a time of celebration, and they expected to soon see their millionth generation. They received a gift from below, as if to signify demiurgic approval, when the General Chemical Company suffered a catastrophic collapse in their waste disposal line. Ten tons of gaseous nitrates were released into the troposphere. This germane waste catalyzed a blossoming fauna, and they grew to the size of a greasy human hand, and power created discord. The old encouraged reliance on photosynthesis to address the depletion of food and selves, but these elders were ignored and consumed. The young protested with a hunger strike and were consumed before they got hungry. The artists and academics ruminated on the seeming paradox of their existence, and all were in the end redeemed by consumption. The millionth generation celebrated with a feast to mark their milestone On the morning of the third day, my wife stopped walking. She had followed the river through the night and stopped at Lake Park. She knew the time and up and down, and she knew that the river would never lead out of the city because she’d walked for four hours and could still hear the drone of the transfixed a few blocks away where she’d left them. But the lake at her feet was crystal clear, and she saw that the lake was man-made. Maybe no one had known this for years. The banks, which were smooth concrete, had been covered with bright green algae nourished by human, animal, and chemical waste that flowed freely through the city, collecting here in the end only because there was no outlet. Strangely blackened and warped garbage had floated on the surface, and any fabrication of any material shrunk and wasted away into the same twisted form. On previous visits she had observed both the hyperfecundity of marine flora and the transformation of plastics and metals as they grew and decayed before her eyes, somehow at the same rate and in opposite directions. She stood at the edge and looked into the water. It was so clear she could see her reflection ten feet down in the lakebed rather than the surface. But this might have been a trick of the light. She undressed and lowered herself in. She pushed off the edge and with a single backstroke found herself in the middle of the lake. She tried a synchronized swimming move my grandmother had taught her. The idea was to flip upside down, then descend slowly with one leg pointed up, like the romantic last moment of a sinking ship’s mast and flag as they disappear. At the bottom she rubbed her breasts against the fine mirroring surface, and it felt like skin against skin. She filled her mouth with the water and returned to the surface. She drank her mouthful then took another and held it, floating on her back, her shining black hair curling away like the light of a black star, and looked up at the gray sky, to see it reflecting the ripples from her angeling arms. She imagined, like I said we could try when we lay down and looked at the stars, that instead of looking upwards she was looking outwards. It looked different, and it felt completely different, and she lay in the feeling all morning, whistling or kissing out a thin jet of water from her pale red lips. It was noon on the third day in Coriolana, or it was about to be revealed to them. It might be possible they didn’t know a day or a meal had passed, because they weren’t hungry or thirsty anymore. By then, none of them could have closed their mouths to chew or speak. The singular shade of overcast burst into a brilliant pointillist monotone of itself, stretched or torn or perforated by the sharp blue proboscis featured on some of the fallen adolescents, a phenomenon weightier than heaven that fell, somehow, like it was falling through the earth and into a well rather than through the sky and to it. There they came, here they come, backlit by the forgotten sun, an argus-eyed sickness projected on the firmament. The spectators gasped or screamed from their bellies, parched choking on tongues. Shriek at the explosion of the sky and the masticable wetness of the drops coming towards them, the sky falling, getting bigger and bigger. I woke late that day feeling a thick lump go down, tasting like something that had been sweet hours ago. The cold bed felt like my wife had been warming it all on her own. I got scared, I was uneasy with the light, and thought the lump could have been something unhealthy or poisonous, like gum or a spider laying watermelon seeds. Grandmother was very concerned. I came up from the cellar and knelt beside her at the kitchen table and opened my mouth so she could see. She raised her hands, still holding the clean fork and knife from her breakfast. I raised my hand between our faces and she paused before the utensils reached my face, smiled and slowly returned them to the party napkins on either side of her empty plate. She turned to me and pressed her thumbs on my chin and rested her fingers on my cheeks. She leaned closer and braced herself against my face to keep from falling out of her chair, and the pressure of her thumbs parted my lips. The opening of my mouth couldn’t have fit more than a cherry, and I saw the light from the window behind me on her face. Her pupils dilated and constricted as she squinted and tilted her chin up to look down her glasses. She cocked her head left and right. She leaned back and took her hands away. “No, no,” she said, “I don’t see anything.” We heard a heavy sigh from the earth and went to the window where the light was fleeing and chasing. My grandmother and I watched the sky falling over Coriolana in a fat fleshy rain and saw the sun destroy the dying light that tried to crawl up to meet it. Not too far away I could hear a few scattered drops of the stuff as the wind blew them our way, and Grandmother commented on how still the air had been the past few days. I said she was right, and went outside to see if I could find any pieces as it continued to fall, flattening in the fields, pelting the fleeces of lambs that hadn’t yet been shorn. Samuel Sacristain is a rural letter carrier in the Rocky Mountains. He is the editor of Decadentata Books.