In the house of three that would soon be the house of two, Andrew Alabaster lay prostrate on the bed that had once belonged to his son. He did not feel very good at all; felt, in fact, as though one of those Dyson vacuums had been hooked up to his anus and sucked out all the fluids from his decrepit body.
Peter sat on a stool abreast his grandfather, his head bowed and tears rolling lazily down his cheeks. Beside him he could hear the plaintive hiccoughs of his sister, Scarlett. She had said that she wouldn’t cry—The Alabasters were Irish after all—but had done so only several seconds after seeing Andrew. She was not beautiful at all in her grief; her eyes were puffy from tears and mucous dripped from her nose, to her lips, and down her chin. Peter hated to think it, but she looked like a hybrid that had gone terribly wrong after some sick scientists had fused her DNA with that of the Blob’s. The allusion only made him cry harder.
It was funny how the world operated. One day you were alive and the next day you were. What was it that Macbeth had said after his wife had committed suicide?
Life is a tale…performed by an idiot…with sounds and fury signifying nothing.
“Sing me that song…one last time,” that was Andrew’s voice and in his melancholy, Peter at first thought that his grandfather was speaking to an angel. But, then he saw Scarlett wiping her eyes with the back of her hand, cleaning up her snot as best as she could and he thought: Oh!
From the basement of her throat, Scarlett began to sing Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You.” Peter had expected her voice to shake, but it came out as smooth as steel. No notes were missed.
If I should stay
I would only be in your way
So I'll go
but I know
I'll think of you every step of the way
After a while Peter told her to shut up. She didn’t seem to hear him, however and so he yelled it:
“SHUT UP, SCARLETT!”
Scarlett shut up.
Silence descended on the Alabasters once more as though a pall had been pulled over them; as though they had all decided, inwardly, to die together. Andrew Alabaster did not notice that his granddaughter had stopped singing, nor that Peter, who was normally a reticent fellow, had raised his voice to a decibel his father would normally use. Instead, the old man mouthed the words to the lyrics Scarlett had not been allowed to sing and Peter could not stop him. Didn’t have the heart to stop him.
I hope life treats you kind
And I hope you have all you've dreamed of
And I wish you joy and happiness
But above all this I wish you love
Peter left the room.
***
When Scarlett followed after him thirty minutes later, there was no need for her to say anything. She had wiped away all her tears, but her eyes were still red and her lower lip was thrust out, as though any moment she would start crying again. Irish blood be damned.
“At least he had a good life.” Peter said, his voice quiet.
He had hoped that that would lighten the mood, but Scarlett only gave a faintly perceptible nod to show that she was not ignoring him. “At least he had a good life,” was something everyone said during times like this. The words were empty and impersonal. Peter hated himself for saying them. He looked at his wrist and was oddly surprised to discover that his Rolex was there. He didn’t remember putting it on this morning. Then again, he could not remember anything before Andrew’s death.
Had time existed before them?
It seemed possible. Heck, it seemed damn right probable yet, Peter wasn’t certain. It was as if Grandpa’s death brought the epoch of a new era, and the era prior to his death was forgotten.
The Rolex read 3:49PM.
The town meeting would still be going on. Yesterday—yes, there was a yesterday; time had existed before Grandpa’s death—Peter had decided that he would attend. He was the man of the house now that his father was away and would need to assume all the responsibilities that occupation entailed.
Although things hadn’t gone as planned there was probably still time to get there without missing everything and he told Scarlett exactly that. She looked as though she wanted to come with him, but something stopped her and Peter thought he knew what.
“She doesn’t want to leave Grandpa,” he thought.
Dead or alive, Grandpa had been there for them when their father hadn’t been. Their mother had died not too long after Scarlett’s birth and so Peter and Scarlett didn’t quite remember her. As a matter of fact, Scarlett didn’t remember her at all and the only aspect of her physiognomy that Peter could recall was the throbbing sore on her ankle that Peter now understood as an ULCER. Whenever the Alabaster kids had asked their father what their mother had looked like he only gestured to his chest and smiled in that way rapists probably smiled right before they ‘gave her the D.’
“She had huge knockers,” he would say and then whatever gameshow—either Family Feud or Wheel of Fortune—he was watching would once again arrest his attention. And if he was drunk—which had been pretty frequent during the latter days before he had moved out—then he would just squeeze Peter’s tit and laugh “her breasts were a lot bigger than yours, shaawtie.” That had been his pet name for Peter. ‘Shaawtie.’ At twenty years old, Peter was a meager five foot seven and so the name fit just fine and that only made Peter loathe it all the more.
He looked back to Scarlett. She was biting her lower lip. “Stop that Scarlett you’ll bleed,” Peter said and sure enough, a trickle of blood rolled down her chin. She wiped it quickly. “I’ll go on to the meeting, see if I can get any information and then I’ll bring someone back to…” his voice trailed off, but Scarlett nodded nonetheless as though she had heard, from some ESP, the words he had left unsaid: bury the body. They were siblings after all. Maybe not twins—she was thre years younger than him—but Peter wouldn’t be surprised if they shared some sort of psychic power that enabled them to read each other’s mind if their emotions were heightened enough. Peter looked into her eyes, tried to read her mind to see if she was okay.
She wasn’t, but he didn’t need mind reading to figure that out. That was just Big Brother instinct. He gave her a strong squeeze on the shoulder, smiled, and headed south towards the Town Hall.
“Almost the whole town must be here,” Peter thought as he slipped through a small opening made by two muscular rednecks. Standing on the stage was Mrs. Matthews. Peter had always found her beautiful—in a Cougar sort of way—and had to admit that he had had a crush on her when he was younger. This crush had persisted several months after she had married Robert (Peter always called him “Robbie” inside his head). Peter had pretty much forgotten about her when he had left to study English lit at the University of Maine and wasn’t at all surprised to see that she had become mayor of Clay Valley during his absence.
Makes a lot of damn sense actually, he thought.
Sitting on a metal chair Peter saw Clay Valley’s former mayor—Kent Clark. He seemed pissed about something, but that was not surprising. He always found something to be pissed about. Scarlett and Peter would always call him “Kent Clark: Superman’s Alter Ego” when they were both teenagers and definitely when he wasn’t within earshot.
The crowd seemed restless, but they were not very loud, which was unusual for the denizens of Clay Valley. In a town where the borders between races was non-existent, and even the families on opposite sides of the Valley thought themselves as neighbors, silence was a rarely seen commodity. Other than the several questions that floated around, order reigned supreme.
Before Peter asked a question of his own—before he grabbed the attention of every neighbor he had had from preschool—he thought: My grandpa is dead and there’s not a goddamn thing I can do about it. He’s dead because of this stupid EMP or whatever the heck happened—Kent Clar: Superman’s Alter Ego would probably put this as another one of his “government conspiracies” and why not? Why the heck not?
Finally, he asked: “What are we going to do to combat the gangs who are causing chaos at night?"
He surprised himself by asking that. It wasn’t the question he had been thinking. ‘Where do we bury the dead once the graveyard becomes overfilled?’ That had been his question, but oh well.
No need to start a panic.
This Side of the Long Night (IC) (PG-13)
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