Note: The following is a work of fiction. Our hearts and minds go out to all the families of the passing individuals, and to the many that lost their homes and parts of their communities. Rest in peace to all the victims that were taken by the Californian wildfires.
A man laid on his back in an alley. The passageway that held him was the first dark corridor one would see upon entering the city. It was also the last shadowed bunker before the brittle bushes and winding trails led to Mother Nature. His clothes rotted off his body like a fresh corpse. Grime under his nails built into mountains, and bits of sand glinted at the odd angle of dirt smeared fingers. His hair squiggled and rose like a children’s drawing, and his clothes shagged away from him, attempting to scurry from a constant putrid smell. 52 years young, and the man held deep and thoughtful wrinkles on his forehead to prove it. A half-crooked nose exhaled white puffs into the cold morning air. Balanced upon that uneven seesaw in the middle of his face existed bloodshot eyes, hidden behind lids that stayed strong and shut, no matter the weather. His white skin was pale and translucent in some areas but tanned and hardened in others. Beneath the man’s bony skeleton, a backwards American flag lay ragged and hanging from the sleeve of a garbage-green dress shirt. The Iraq war didn’t do as much to him as he did to himself.
His eyelids snapped open, and he outstretched a black thumb; it met the gray clouds like a dark crow. 6:30am, East of Los Angeles, January 7th, 2025, just another day to survive. The man’s crusted eyelids diminished and smoothed, and the soldier went back to sleep.
—————
His mom once screamed at him how the world worked. The military was quickly becoming the only option for him and the concept haunted him every night. Cold sweats in their small concrete dwelling; the cold was something he had been accustomed to since a young child. He had grown up in California, yet they had lived (and his mother had died) in that concrete hole on the cliffside of the coast. Horrified and crashing waves were like background traffic of the cities, seagulls replaced pigeons, and cold flowing air visited from across the sea, sharpening one’s thoughts into lightning shaped daggers. The rocky coastal land was discounted, but even then, his mother had rented it for years, before work finally picked up. Her white skin had become pale and yellow as the days dragged. The beach winds didn’t seem to invigorate her, but instead deteriorated her flesh like a pile of sand. Empty bottles had begun to build in the corner of their shared gray room. He remembered looking at her one day, the first memory that strengthened in his mind as a young man:
“Mom, why do we have all these bottles?” His tone reached tall heights.
“Well, why the hell not?” She exhaled in a grumble.
“They’ve been breaking in the night. Shards have been stabbin me and wakin me up.”
“Stop ya movin then.” She glugged from a full bottle, and wiped a dirty gray sleeve across her wrinkled and puckered lips.
“But,” his eyes floundered from the glass structure of bottles to his mom’s red, scarred, and ghostly face.
“…why do we got them in the first place?” The boy’s lips tilted. Concern dawned on the crinkles of his glossed eyes.
“Medicine.” She said. Her face flat-lined, and she wouldn’t hold her boy’s stare.
“It’s just medicine.”
The bottles grew themselves into a see-through mountain and new rings formed around her purple eyes. She became a tree in that way, storing her age with circular physical manifestations. Our body leaves trails that resemble how we have lived, and when the man was young, very young, he learned this from his mother. She sunk into debt like how the neighbor’s shack had sunk, then somersaulted into the sea. Their neighbors harbored a poor wooden thing that kept warmth and family senses. His family home was more solid in some ways, with a lot less foundation in others. He had learned a lot from those pillars of concrete that they called home; both in living in it- peering out at gray skies and the blue ripples below, and in selling the land at such a young age. He wondered if mom would be proud. Mom and her continents of glass.
—–
He had been so afraid of joining the Army. His limbs, his body, skinny and without use at his 18th birthday, shook like a sad wet dog as he entered the recruitment office. So horrified, with a bodily terror that superseded any other thought. The intensity sparked new things in his brain- the possibility of death, the relinquish of freedom, the adherence to strict regiment, rigid and brutal structure. He was drawn to these ideas outside himself, he had to journey into this beast. He signed the dotted line, and the pen reached the very edges of both corners.
——
The first body, the strung out and ruptured thing, was laid bare on the path to God. That’s what they tried to convince him with, the lieutenants and the officers with their pressed and presentable camouflage uniforms. Everyone kept whispering at him, in between the yells and the orders, that this was for his “nation”, that this was their destiny, his destiny. He remembered the first day of bootcamp when they recited the Pledge of Allegiance, a skinny white boy next to him, Alex Thompson, started tearing up on the word “America”. A few soon-to-be soldiers stood straight ahead while it happened- Mr. Thompson started gushing at the word “God”, his eyebrows like mountains, his chin prickled, and tears attempted to cover everything. Alex became the first body the man saw without a soul.
The man stood straight as an arrow during Alex’s event and believed that there existed something childish about the Pledge of Allegiance. Mind you, he wouldn’t dare say the same about the National Anthem. Perhaps because the Pledge was drilled into him during elementary school. He remembered almost warmly the retreat into the school system, away from the haunting cliff and his brutally strong mother. The grades advanced, and a small bit of peach fuzz grew a hint of masculinity on his face, a faint thing that never grew further. The hallways of each institution grew, but they grew darker and more sinister too.
Scratches and smears on the walls, bolstered and splintered things that became thicker, and bolder. Heavy walls became shields of staples and offered a dungeon to the eyes- only middle school, while high school was a blur of beasts. Werewolves that never returned to humanity. The corners of the educational institution lingered with aromas of piss and dingy marijuana. The physical dirt grew onto the elbows of abused children and infected the backs of their necks. More dirt summoned from the walls like an ambush, growing into some of the kids’ souls – racial slurs shouted with braced up chests, other words that singled students out, words that killed, while security slightly looked the other way. Yes, the dirty corners were a hint.
—-
When the body flashed beneath him, the poor brains of Thompson leaked in squiggled masses, and the red – so vibrant you’d have thought it was paint – made him reflect on those early years. How things could have ended had he not grown away from his “Thompson”-like timidity. The first fight that broke out in school, black hair pulled, ripped shreds tanked to the ground, the back of a pale head meeting a sharpened cinder block. Red blue smeared the scene, teachers yelled to move back. The other fighter, horrified yet readied for more. He walked away, large steps, before things really got out of hand; large fists rocketed at security guards, concealed weapons glinted from pockets, and multiple ambulances finished the day.
Bootcamp, and then deployment, created a novel on the themes of his life. He was used to the flashing, the sudden wind shears of panic, violence but not murder, abuse but not death.
He went back to being a civilian, but big bad mom wasn’t there anymore. The government wasn’t there anymore; even the VA kept pushing back his needed medical appointments. He craved the kind of motivation that abuse gave him, and part of him knew it. A daggered scar right below the eyebrow, and the longest line you’ve ever seen slithered on the man’s neck. His left leg rotated the wrong direction, teeth splintered when he moved it; the thing needed surgery years ago.
He went through the motions, the painful brittle movements – today was a bad day for Lefty. He grunted, gave a last good heave, and his body laid back against the building. It was 10:42am, January 7th, and as the man dozed off to sleep once again, a small bright light took hold of his unconsciousness. It allowed him to feel like he was floating, his poor leg able to fly again in the weightlessness. At first, it didn’t do as much as the medicine he took every night- the medicine that he kicked in his sleep. His own alleyway was littered with bottles that reeked of moldy and sugary alcohol.
When the dreams took him, a bright warmth – one of flour, eggs and milk, replaced the cold pungency of the dingy alley. The rays of the sun sent scents that bubbled the crisp edges of apple pies. Spinning leaves and puckered flowers spread out the aroma. Building and falling sensations coasted throughout the body. Cold battling heat, loose battling firm, circular and living, like a breath. It rotated a beauty that infected his body.
The sand on his fingers lightened and decayed their brownish hues. Floating. His leg rested, and healed in the warmth, and the bright light only grew brighter. Brighter. The warmth healed his frozen toes. The warmth took hold of his back and his front.
The leaves that wound the air slowly landed on his hair, his forehead, his cheek. He heard a sizzle in the distance and scratched his face, craving to stay in the dream; the manifestation where everything was okay; where there wasn’t any more glass bottles in his childhood home; where mother was still alive to guide him.
A single leaf landed on his only dry jacket and heated his chest with power. The man shook his eyes and vaulted up. The dream died in a fiery heat. He ripped off his jacket and stamped it into the Earth. Heat and embers encircled him. A brutal black and orange world. Flames danced and rippled into his body. He ran. The building next to him crackled and laughed in the colors of a stove’s flame. Burning roof tiles dropped at his feet. The house creaked and crackled. The cracks popped, and the sizzles only finicked for higher notes. Violence was on display.
Palm trees were sparklers, held from a loose fist of a child. Enflamed pom-poms crushed a car’s roof, and the man was halted by the elongated flaming stem. Hell imprinted onto childhood homes, a red alarm, ghostly images where half the house used to live, and the rest embodied in orange and white. Smoke bubbled and circled, rose and created walls, walls like those stapled things in middle school. He could only stare as the scene descended upon him. Spawning as a gray fog, the world convulsed into bellows and vast amounts of black smoke. Then, the roaring light – directionless, the flames were God Himself – everywhere – inflicting an orange-brown hue. The man escaped a swelling smoke screen street, clothes still drooping off his body, drool dripping from his bottom lip. Hands rested on his knees – out of breath, breathing in all the gray. Expensive gates dripped their black paint and blasted open from an explosion. The boom triggered a trail of fire that continued the onslaught, each flame was alive, they were taking back what was theirs. The man hobbled on his bad leg, further and further from the alley he called home, closer to the ocean. Silhouettes of running victims outlined in front of each burning background. Brush and shrubs were lit-up in lines, sinister spools of thread stripped bare. God unrolled his linen at the people. He torched the trees so that their fires and smoke worshipped him, higher and higher.
Men dressed in yellow bumped into the man, and he almost tripped on pale elongated hoses that appeared like stripped snakeskins.
Few houses were saved in their final moments. Under rubble existed family heirlooms, licked with patches of charcoal. Stairs that once ascended, grand beautiful and marble things, now planted themselves at the base of beginnings – simple white and black ash.
———-
Skeleton houses – new skylights, some
Preaching millionaire people’s possessions
Matter into embers. What matters, past December
Coal now exists in the streets; coal is the street.
The fires lick and jump and stride –
Wheat fields ablaze and sprinkle at houses
Whispering like whiskey in a room of former soldiers
Warmth erupts, the feeling of home in the bottle.
Cold Californian – homeless hands display their brittle fingers.
It’s 12:06pm – another day to survive.
———-
Thank you for reading,
Erickson
Writing Erickson - Adventure + Writing Blog 
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