1.2: On Crashes

I didn't attend school this morning, because mother heard a crashing noise through the duct and thought we should wait for dad to return with news. She spoke of the crash with a quiet, distracted voice, and I suspected that it wasn't very important; she mostly wanted us to be inside today for her own reasons, whatever they were. I doubt she knew them well herself.

Crashes can be bad. They mean something, all of them, and we have no way of knowing what causes them but direct observation, which is like standing in front of a bus to determine in which direction it travels. Usually a crash is just a random decaying piece of the former world too fatigued to maintain its place, which falls to earth with a bang and clatter. Sometimes though a crash can have more ominous notions.

In school one day there was a crash and they locked the rooms. The principal and his security staff walked the halls to make room-checks and when they arrived at the crash-side of the school they found jagged edges of cement and iron bars sheared off as if by a scissor--the fourth grade was gone. I didn't have any friends in that grade but mom knew some of the mothers and we attended funerals for a week, perfunctory affairs where the absence of a body or molecular trace left the parents and siblings stunned into permanent breathlessness.

1.1: The Sky In Our World

We still have brightness now, but the sun which brings it is blocked behind the clouds. A burning grey-white sky like molten ash that boils your eyes like the sun once did, and it hangs over every day like a tinfoil blanket, baking us into the ground. Dad doesn't talk about the sun unless you ask him, but unlike Mom he'll talk if asked, whereas she'll retreat into that silent place where she lives, behind her eyes, quiet and alone.

"It was very pleasant," he would say and he would smile in that way he had of making you feel like the pleasantness of the thing was in you, the listener, and not in his memory. "We could go on the water then, we weren't afraid of it and the heat from the sun would sort of push down on you, into your bones." If you looked dubious he'd clarify, "It was very pleasant," and smile, just to be sure you knew.