The wildflowers we grew out back this summer died overnight. I pulled up this morning after I took Milla to school and I could see it had happened when I wasn’t paying attention. Their deep pinks and theatric yellows have retreated, and in their place we get those palish hues that come with having your throat slit just as the party is beginning to get interesting. I stand there in the yard taking pictures of them with my phone.
No one is around. The morning air is sharp, bracing. I whisper at a Black-Eyed Susan.
See you in Hell, amigo.
There is no response.
Until there is.
Tell my mother I died with my face staring at the enemy, mutters a small, light voice.
I try to pick out which flower said that but how can you tell, you know? There’s a bunch of different ones. Was it the Susan I was talking to or was it some other flower? I guess it doesn’t even matter that much. I consider trying to take a video, start the discussion, make a TikTok or a story on Instagram, but then I bail on that. People would think I faked it. Maybe it’s AI, they would suggest. No one wants to believe in anything fantastical or magical anymore.
Even a lot of the God people are starting to have their doubts.
I punch a Susan on my way towards the house. I give her a black eye even as she lays there in death. It’s not because I’m mean or crazy or anything like that either. It’s just that I am a little sad because the flowers are going.
I am mad at them for leaving.
So I sock one, wild nature blowing through my bones.
Then I head inside, eat three Kit Kats from Piper’s Halloween sack, and come upstairs to write this.
In the Walmart the other day, I was pushing another cart with a nasty wheel/ the squeaking pissing me off/ all the frozen pizzas and the packed lunch chips and the soda for Halloween and the stuff for meatballs, all of that making me unsure/ uncertain/ making me nervous and embarrassed and feeling self-conscious even though everyone else in there was buying whack shit too.
Old lady with canned cat food and saltines and nothing else. I picture her spreading the Fancy Feast on a few crackers on a nice china plate and then hobbling real slow into her musty front room and sitting in her burnt sienna chair and eating them alone as she watches Fox News.
Mexican dude, young, no English maybe, buying two pairs of cheap kids sneakers. I have bought these same ones a lot in my life. You do that when your kids are young and you are poor and there is no sense in buying nice kicks when they will be outgrown and destroyed before two months is up. I feel a solidarity with him and I try to catch his eye but he doesn’t care. He probably thinks I’m hitting on him. I consider buying them for him/ telling the cashier to include his two pairs of sneakers on my tab, but I don’t have the courage in the end.
What would he think?
And what if it’s an insult to him, you know?
He might have been saving a while to buy these things for his kids and suddenly here comes what? Fucking Daddy Warbucks at the checkout? I hardly have a pot to piss in myself, so what business do I have throwing some unsolicited charity at this stranger next to me? He could take out a phone and start recording me trying to take care of his purchase and shazam! The next thing you know, I’m all over X: public enemy number one: husky white 50-something cookie-cutter cookie-eater guy in Walmart trying to belittle a hard-working young immigrant with the strange mad condescension so common in tragically unaware American bleeding hearts.
It’s not easy pulling off overt kindness. I’m telling you, man. You have to look in all the mirrors before you pull the trigger on these kinds of things. Otherwise you can end up shooting yourself, or even worse, someone else, just because you got confused by all those damn reflections all at once.
I guess what I’m saying is this.
I should have just bought the sneakers for the guy. Why??! Because it’s better to get burnt at the goddamn stake for good intentions instead of being skinned alive because you’re so fucking afraid.
Ugh.
I keep wondering what his kids are like.
Even there at the checkout I found myself thinking about what they were going to be for Halloween. I don’t know why. I keep thinking that I’m in a novel. It helps me through the long day, I guess. So who were they going to be then?
Mario and Luigi?
A couple Marvel dudes?
From the looks of the sneakers they were boys, probably around 8 and 6. So maybe a homemade scarecrow and a homemade Dracula. Maybe two Goodwill mix-n-matches. A werewolf mask and a Jack Skellington coat. A baseball uniform with some cheap zombie makeup. I guess it’s all dumb, me thinking about that kind of thing.
Thing is though, it’s exactly what I was wondering right when everything went sideways.
Just as I start walking away from the checkout lady and the Mexican fellow there is an explosion or something and I am caught in it. Blown into the air/ the silence is hissing when I uncover myself from the things that I bought that I am now laying beneath. There is dust. Or smoke. I can’t tell which it is. Maybe both. Maybe it’s something else altogether, but I am shaking and I am so scared.
I see him then. Mexican Dad. His eyes are wide-open and he is lying a few feet away in the partial darkness, the fire sprinklers raining down on both of us. There is something on his teeth. I think it is blood but it’s so hard to tell. I am afraid to move. Into my mind comes the simplest of thoughts then/ a single clear sentence born out of the slabs of crushed pyramids and fallen castles piled up on me like Fruit Roll-Ups and still cold fish sticks in a bag. Apple seltzer water is leaking into my pissed pants and I catch a blip of salty blood/ feel it leak off of my cut nostril down onto my top lip and then rolling to my mouth.
He is dead, I tell myself. The dad buying the sneakers is dead and now I close my eyes to sleep.
But even shock cannot get me here in these throes down deep, where only the true true masters play the game. In the seconds following my eyes closing slowly there comes the ripping thunder roll of the sky tearing apart. A bomb from the sky coming through the roof. Something shrieking in the end, furious at us, at me, for being here. The blast that follows happens as I lose control of my bowels and shit myself and gasp with the fragments of this dad’s skull slamming into my face with such pressure that for a brief moment our faces combine in the dark rain/ his brains trying so hard to mix with my brains but my brains shooting down his moves/ as his body is incinerated right next to mine which isn’t.
I see a single shoe like one of the ones he was buying smoldering over by a baby doll. Or maybe I don’t see that, I can’t tell. Another shattering blast comes through the back wall of Philly Pretzel Company and in the firey light I can plainly see that the doll is a baby and that the baby is dead and that it’s hands are blown off and it’s skin is on fire or at least it looks like that’s what is going on.
I throw up and my fear is overwhelming as I try to move out from under all of this rubble, all of these sugar cookies I was going to make with my kid, Blake. My ears come back a little and so I start to hear voices as I emerge from the mountain I was living under. They are sharp harsh voices and then they are followed by the chain of pops/ the firecracker pops. There are people screaming from far away. Their cries are difficult to comprehend. They seem lost in the back of the store.
I go that way but the floors are so slick with the water gushing from above and the dark is worse in many places than it was before. My thumb is torn open but I don’t feel any pain. I can see the bones of my hand a little. I notice them in the glow of a flashlight that is shining in a shelf. I should take it but I don’t. The dream is in charge. The nightmare is director. The script is written upon each second of real time and it is scripted by someone else, something else. I am not consulted at all. My thoughts go unused.
The next strike rips through the raftered ceiling and in the dark it cuts through the cake top and down into the parts where I am moving and I see it/ as a knife/ illuminated in slow motion/ it’s side shining in the certain angles of outside sky being written into the scene/ and it is then that it comes to me that it is a missile I am gazing upon/ a missile falling on the world.
I am thrown into a standing row of copier paper or something like that and I feel the metal shelving wrap halfway around my neck with the patient bending of a confident snake. I feel something under my boots and it is another person’s skin. It is so hot, so damp, with the feel of stew, me dipping my hands into some beef stew like a dumbass toddler who doesn’t know any better. It is a person. They are dead. Or else they were almost dead until I stepped in them after the missile and they died from the crush of my weight.
I am half standing and half slumped towards the floor and I am covered with the debris of another world entirely. Cloaked in the bone mist of Penn State fans who were just looking at caramel apples a few minutes ago, I am half dead and half alive. The gash in my hand is filled with images of blown apart children. I don’t understand how or why/ there is some kind of screen revealed in the hole of my skin. I watch it as I cough out the ghost of a pregnant mother; she tastes of charred scallions/ of vanilla wafers dunked in scalded cream; I long for the ballfields of my youth. I cry for the lush sprawl of once green summers slipping up into the burning slits of this wounded sky.
Don’t tell me what I do or who I am.
I am alone in my burning Walmart.
We all are, more or less, you see.
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Serge Bielanko lives in small-town Pennsylvania with an amazing wife who’s out of his league and a passel of exceptional kids who still love him even when he’s a lot. Every week, he shares his thoughts on life, relationships, parenting, baseball, music, mental health, the Civil War and whatever else is rattling around his noggin.
