Oakley, KS
20 August
Bending, cracked, cracking at the side of the motorway. The lean-to petrol station stood, a pathetic testament to whatever. As the decades passed, its flimsy skeleton had bandied about, breaking the force of the incessant sou’westerly that inevitably passed this way, but only just. Buttressed by a single, disused lamp post and a busted up milk truck, the dump had, for some time, endured as a sort of decrepit symbol, a desperate last ditch totem to true American grit. Or, something. From inside the leaning structure, David Gilmour’s voice warbled out the lyrics to Wish You Were Here only to be drowned away on the outside by a ramshackle-suited man who’d been there, posed in an action stance, for a thousand years. His rippled physiognomy hardly moved as he prattled on about Texas or some other God-forsaken place. The subtle flit of the doused cigarillo that dangled from his pencil thin lip was the only indication he was the one speaking. Around here, dirt was worn like skin. At his poorly shodden feet, a girthy child sat on the ground eating meat pies. With no one around to claim it, the only intelligent conclusion was that this beefy cherub was some sort of a bastard. Together, the three of us looked on as a neckless man, dressed in a unitard, screamed and threw slabs of cast iron about inside of a cage.
Trying to forget the roadway, I turned my eyes and blinked hard into the sun, now moving steadily along its ecliptic. Tomorrow it would be gone. But for now, sat here beside this fossilized rifleman and a bulbous toddler, it was all there was. No shade. No dark corners in which to hide from its cancerous light. Only its bright wash of radiation permeating the land. Looking out past millions of miles of golden fields, I tried to find something, anything else out there. But, there was nothing. Just that same primordial conflagration in the sky.
— We’ve outsmarted ourselves.
Looking at the chompy little foundling, who was now chewing on a soda bottle, the man with the petrified skin shook his head. Muttering to no one in particular, shame filled his good eye.
Like greedy little monkeys, and, now we are full of dread. I opened the bottle of Royal Crown in my hand and tried to remember where I had read that line. For years and years, we had lived in fear of these lands. Their unending sameness in every direction. Their vacant towns and silent churches. Their abandoned gentlemen’s clubs and disused spaceports. Yet, we feared them not because they were unfamiliar. We feared them because we knew them so well. And, the jowls of the plumped up orphan flapped in the wind.
•••
We had driven until the highway came to a halt. Along an endless, unmovable line of roadway cutting across the middle of America, I had watched for hours as the bow waves of semi trucks pushed violently through the overgrowth. And, AG slept. Sometimes, the monotony had been interrupted by the burned out hulk of a muscle car left to die on its own out here, so far away from any of its former glory. Other times, it was a 1980’s speedboat moored to a solitary oak tree, miles from any sort of a coastline. But, for the most part, it was a constant procession of tarnished billboards with adverts for discount legal services and eternal damnation.
As the sun began its descent toward the horizon, we had sped eastward, attempting to preserve every last minute of daylight. Sporadically, I could hear Pulp’s Sorted for E’s and Wizz coming in from the AM band, repeating itself on and on until, finally, we came to that dead end where a line of makeshift gibbets formed a strange and morbid skyline. Turkey vultures, arranged all in rows, sat along each, eyeing us up as we motored down a dirt road in a cloud of exhaust. Crossing a cattle guard, the flat, arid, cactus and buffalo grass prairie shook violently in the windshield. The great stillness that once grazed these landscapes was no more. AG looked back at the vultures only to see them turn their gaze at once to follow us. And, in that moment, my thoughts returned to the petrol station.
— Headed out of town?
I nodded in assent to the clerk’s question.
— Nothing beautiful around here, is there?
She grumbled to herself, turning things unpleasant with bloodthirsty alacrity. I turned to look at the scene behind me. With its mismatched florals, twitching fluorescent bulbs and aisle after aisle of vintage plastics, I couldn’t have disagreed more.
— The other direction is the way you want to go.
A twisted, gnarled finger pointed down the street, back the way we had come.
•••
In an instant, everything was silence. I had slammed hard on the brake pedal, grinding it deeply into the floorboard. The mid-sized family sedan screeched to a halt. But, not before crossing some sort of static threshold. Particles all around the vehicle lifted from the surface of the ground in a frenzy, accelerating along ballistic trajectories. AG quickly reached for the volume knob, turning it anti-clockwise. Gathering momentum then crashing back down to the earth, aerosols impacted with such velocity, ejecting more of the like back into the atmosphere causing turbulence all around us. Floating freely, a nebula of dust formed in a frenzy outside the windows. For several moments, the sheath of pelletized material that enveloped the car hid some strange, indefinable forms barely visible on the other side. We strained hard to sort them out but the cloud was too dense. So, we waited.
Soon enough, the fluid stream began to carry the cloud eastward, redistributing its energy, scattering solar and terrestrial radiation, heating the atmosphere along its way. Back into earshot, the low rumble of the Buick came quietly. And, the sky commenced to regain its darkening blue tones. The receding tempest revealed a dirt track extending far away in front and behind. That was when we noticed them. Jutting skyward from the plains, monoliths loomed all around us. An anomaly of arches and buttes spreading out across the acres. Broken rock, fused with sediment, creating towering formations.
This was a burial ground of ancient skeletons. And, all that remained of the dead Niobaran Sea floor. Beneath these bluffs and outcroppings thousands of feet of marine sediments lay, for years encasing the remains of long-extinct beings. Now, Carbon was all that was left behind, tracing out the silhouettes of the things that once inhabited this place. It was believed by some that life, all life, was related, descending from a singular cell. If this was to be trusted, then a reasonable conclusion might be that all living things shared a common thread. Man and animal, bacteria and plant. A line of kinship linking all living organisms carrying down the years. And, as it stood in that moment, a disturbance in that chain was becoming more and more apparent.
We roamed for an hour or so until the shadows of the great structures grew too long and the temperature began to cool. Above our heads, the contrails of jet liners created a reticulum, connecting one altostratus cloud system to another. As AG took the last of her photographs, I leaned against the car, staring wistfully into a binary sunset. And, Blur’s,”This is a Low” crackled. We were in the middle of the sixth extinction. And, little did we know, that when it would come, it would come much faster than any of us expected.