Worth Your Salt: And the World Fell Asleep

We are thrilled to publish the three winning short stories from the Worth Your Salt: A Fiction Contest, beginning with this runner-up piece, “And the World Fell Asleep” by Eric Martell. To enter the contest, each writer chose one of three prompts, each an excerpt from Jeff Smieding’s serial ebook, And In Their Passing, A Darkness: The Salt Machine (Red Sofa Books), and used it in their story. “And the World Fell Asleep” uses the following Salt Machine excerpt: “One night, near the end of an unusually cool and cloudy summer, it was George’s turn to cry.” Extensive thanks to Red Sofa Books and our fantastic judges, David Oppegaard and Esther Porter. 

 

And the World Fell Asleep

by Eric Martell

One night, near the end of an unusually cool and cloudy summer, it was George’s turn to cry. He wasn’t the last one left. That dubious honor would go to one of the Tasswell twins, maybe, or to Old Man Rogers – if there was a tougher son of a bitch in the panhandle, George hadn’t met him – but with Mabel gone, he was the last who mattered.

He didn’t want to follow his wife quite yet, and the night wouldn’t last forever, so George wiped his tears on the sleeve of his flannel shirt and resumed digging. The sun, cloud-covered as it may be, would warm the ground and make for easier work, but he’d stand out like a sore thumb on the plains, a lone man highlighted against the dull grey sky. George remembered nights from his youth when it would be ninety, ninety-five, even in the dead of night, but now even south Texas was lucky to see that as a high once or twice a year. The same people who didn’t care that what they were pumping into the air made the world hotter were the same people who didn’t have any idea what the stuff they pumped into the air to cool it off did, and the world had fallen asleep at the switch.

Once the best grazing ground in hundreds of miles, or so George’s father claimed (and who wanted to dispute a claim like that about the family homestead), the grass worth eating out here was sparser than the hairs on George’s head. As the world started cooling and the skies had gone grey, things just stopped growing. In the north, forests died by the acre. Kansas now grew no more wheat than a good-sized family farm could’ve grown on its own. There just wasn’t enough food, and before the scientists were silenced, there had been reports that calling this a decades-long famine was way undershooting the mark.

It wasn’t fair that Mabel wouldn’t get the funeral she deserved. Mother of three, grandmother of five, teacher, Girl Scout troop leader – hers should have been the kind of life that was celebrated by a standing room only crowd at First Methodist. Instead she got an old man digging a hole in the dark. His tears would have to be enough of a memorial for her. There wasn’t enough time to erect any kind of marker, and even though a stubborn part of him wanted to make a show of defying the Ordinances, to let Old Man Rogers know that it didn’t matter how much money he’d had once upon a time, or how many guns he had now, wrong was still wrong, George knew they’d just dig her up, and they’d both be on the menu next week. No, better to hide her completely, to let nature do its work until even the hungriest dog would turn up its nose. She’d never fertilize the crops in the greenhouse, never give up that last measure of her humanity. He suspected that there were some who didn’t wait that long to reclaim life from the dead, but one of the first questions George had learned in law school was never to ask a question you didn’t know the answer to, and he really didn’t want to know the answer to that one.

George wished he could see the moon, to have some idea what time it was, but he just had to go with his gut. It didn’t seem right to take her from the dark of night and place her in the eternal dark, not his Mabel. They’d loved the lights of the night sky, but it had been weeks since even a star had poked through the clouds. Her eyes were gone – glaucoma had claimed them a while ago, and she couldn’t see the lie in his eyes when he told her about the glory of the Milky Way shining down on them as her life slipped away – but he didn’t think he’d fooled her for a second. His tears, which had temporarily retreated under the exertion, now came back, hot and harsh. He wanted to dance with her one more time, under the stars, under the moon which had bathed them in its pale glow as they’d made their first child, under the heavens that promised an eternity that heavy grey clouds denied. But there was no more eternity for them, none save the great unknown.

He’d always read stories about weight leaving the body when a person died, but she’d fought so hard to live, it only made sense that she’d resist her final journey. The thump her body made when it hit the bottom of her grave echoed alarmingly through the night, and George froze, listening for other noises in the dark. The quiet was uninterrupted, however, and he was about to turn back to his work when a light flashed on the western horizon. It was soon followed by another, the pair of lights growing closer, followed seconds later by the revving of motorcycle engines.

They wouldn’t find him right away, not if he worked quietly, but he wouldn’t have until morning as he’d hoped, and George’s heart started to race. Did he have time to cover her up and disguise her grave before they found her? To get far enough away that they wouldn’t be able to trace his activities back to this spot? He did some calculations in his head and they kept coming out the same way. He was caught.

He could try to run. The pickup was full of gas, and he had her gold jewelry, what there was of it. But he couldn’t leave her to them, not to the Old Man and his ghouls. The vows he’d taken in front of his family and his friends and his God hadn’t expired just because she’d passed away, “ ‘til death do us part” be damned. He’d do what he planned in the event something went wrong, although he didn’t really believe it had come to this.

George lifted the gas can slowly from the bed of the pickup, some plastic and three gallons of liquid, a burden that made his hands shake. It wasn’t the literal weight, though he felt a jolt in his elbow as he lifted the can, but the finality of all this. He had barely begun to understand how he could say goodbye to the woman who’d been by his side day in and day out for forty-six years, and wrapping his brain around how he was going to say goodbye to everything else was beyond his limitations.

The bottom of the grave was too dark to see Mabel’s body, but George envisioned the cold liquid covering her stiffening body, making her clothes stick to her as a penultimate obscenity. There were a lot of stories about dying with dignity, but there is nothing dignified about our exit from this world. George had seen enough death to believe that the best we could hope for was to lose our dignity in front of people who loved us too much to care, or who cared too little to notice. He emptied the entire can, whispering a prayer that he would be forgiven for what he was about to do, although he supposed it didn’t much matter if he was given divine absolution or not; there wasn’t time to do much of anything else.

The lights from the motorcycles were getting closer. He was making too much noise in the quiet of the night to hide from the searchers, and he was down to no more than a few minutes before they’d arrive. George considered waiting, delaying until the riders in the night could see him go out in a literal blaze of glory, or at least defiance, but that really wasn’t the point. He knew that Mabel would understand, and that was enough.

George pulled the lighter from his pocket and flipped back the lid. A remnant of his days as a cigar smoker, back before pressure from his daughter and his doctor got him to stop, it still fell easily into his hand. He’d always loved the solidity of the metal, the heft that reassuringly filled his pocket in the years before it was replaced with an omnipresent cell phone, and he rubbed his thumb over the monogram on the side, thinking about the Christmas when Mabel and the kids had bought it for him. He put his thumb on the wheel, ready to set spark to fuel to make flame, when he caught a gleam reflecting off the metal. His first guess was that it was the headlights from the motorcycles, but as he turned to see if they’d closed in that far already, George saw the break in the clouds and a portion of the arc of the Milky Way.

The sky wasn’t very bright, and the clouds would hide the light before long, but there was just enough of a glow for George to see the faint outline of his wife, down in their grave. He snapped the wheel and smiled at the flame. It wasn’t a good night, and what was coming up wasn’t going to be gentle, but it was his, and it was time to go. The gasoline which had soaked into Mabel’s clothes flashed blue and orange, and George stepped easily into the flames. It was time to enter eternity together.

 

Eric Martell is a relative newcomer to the world of writing, more often serving as a physicist, goofball, purveyor of puns fine and excruciating, and at this very moment, a chair for a five year old boy. You can find his stories on his blog, and maybe someday read a novel that he wrote during JuNoWriMo 2013, The Time Traveling Umbrella. He lives in Champaign, IL, with his wife and three sons, and can often be found on Twitter @drmagoo.

 

Artwork: Todd Hido, Untitled #5105, from A Road Divided series, 2008. Photograph. www.toddhido.com