Burnt Sky (ePub)

408 pages.

I take another sip of the Riesling and feel the buzz. I slide back into the bed and nudge my head against Leaf. My beautiful beloved Leaf. Light of my life, holder of my secrets. I turn off the light and the darkness goes past black, into hallucinatory tiny-speckled white spots on black canvas that my eyes generate. I crawl under the covers and allow my legs to be near Jack's. I imagine we are in a double coffin buried in the earth. The freight train passes through the pipe, the vibration more present than the sound. It seems like an air filter is in the coffin as the smell of debris and wet ash attenuate. I lay here with eyes open wide and then suddenly the only sound is the refrigerator motoring with a small hum. The vibration of the cement walls cease and the blackness becomes starker. I lay here longer, not sure how long, cuz time has no quality in here, and then the refrigerator stops humming—it's like being alive without any senses: sans eyes, sans ears, sans taste, with a little smell, but surely sans San Diego. I grab Leaf and hold him against my face.

I realize my only tether to this human world is Jack's quiet breathing and the heat from his body. My life, our lives, have changed forever with the outside events. Unfamiliar territory. Probably no beach friends left—unless they're as fortunate as us. I am in bed with a handsome older boy, a man that I had never spoken a word to in my life before this day, and I know that—what do I know?

What do you call the apocalypse once it has begun? Where does a dream come from that exists before you ever dreamt it?

Once he slips away from me toward his edge of the bed. Some of the covers go with him, and for a minute I feel myself slipping away into the depths of the ocean, the depths of despair, and then suddenly his legs jump spasmodically, from an apparent dream, and they kick my thighs back into this world and the rest of me follows.

I wonder what the morning will bring. Will there be a morning? If so, how will we know there's a morning? Dare I go to sleep and off into a dream from which I might never wake? Or maybe this is a dream and I will later wake in my bed and make myself breakfast. But this is the first time Jack has ever appeared in my dreams.

fAnd then they come, first small drops at close intervals, then morphing into small streams of tears that cascade down my cheeks and I turn and bury my face into the clean cotton covers of our bed. Holding tightly onto my Leaf, I quietly blubber into the pillow, "The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want—" And I drift away to the nether world; come what, come may.