A/N: Pretty short, this one. Mainly because the next POV section is about 2,000 words and I didn't want to post a combined chapter of over three thousand words. Kids have such short attention spans these days.
[lill]
Lill pushed aside her curtains and looked out across the street at the Fulsons loading up their truck with crotchety furniture and hasty boxes. There was heat dancing in the yard, on the yellow, brittle grass that crunched under foot like mouse bones. One of their hens was dead on the walk up to the house. It had been there for two days now. Untouched feathers and a gulping throat. The Fulsons moved quietly, absurdly sped up and quick. The sun bled through the flowerprint curtains. Dishes were in the sink. Lill hadn't eaten since yesterday. And the house seemed to be shrinking around her. A spidery, gutless predation.
She could feel the hunger in her legs. It made them weak. But she would vomit if she ate anything. She just knew it. She couldn't get her mouth to open.
Clamped shut and iron, like steamshovel jaws.
A consummation of shade and rotting food. A harem of flies, the drone of lecture and dung.
Lill watched the Fulsons a little longer and then let the curtains fall. The room was spinning in a stately carousel and her mouth felt thick and bedded. The heat and the dull pump and suck of her veins. The eyes of Pastor Franklin. Wide, terrified. Rolling like sowbugs curled up in your palm. The dumb whore muling and squalling. She could hear their footsteps when she walked. She could see their outlines in the window curtains. Legs crossed and sitting at the table. And death in the air. A colorless, odorless djinn.
She breathed deeply.
Lill moved carefully towards the door, each step grinding the bones in her jaw and flashing spots in her eyes. The doorknob was warm. She opened the door and stepped out onto her porch. The sun on her skin, delicate and surrendered, like the feel of someone else's body under yours for the first time. Lill walked down the path, stepped over the corpulent, sticky body of the hen, and across the street. The Fulsons youngest son saw her first. He tried to smile, but the tired heat censured his lips. The two other children saw her, too, but kept loading the van, heads down, slippery and limp. Maggie Fulson stepped out of the house, hair nested and the base of her jaw shaded with dirt and grease. She squinted.
“'lo, Lill.”
“What's going on, Maggie?”
“Oh. We're moving for a little bit. You know. The weather's getting too much for us.”
“Where?”
“Ed's got a brother Tulsa. We'll stay there until fall, maybe.”
Lill put her hands in the pockets of her dress and looked off. Ed Fulson struggled out of the house with a pinewood headboard. His eyes were pushed into his head so that his eyebrows hung into them and his forehead was weary and polished, like an old pair of sunday shoes. He nodded at Lill.
“Looks a lot longer than a month, Maggie.”
Maggie bit her lip and shrugged. “I've gotta get going. Sorry.”
She started walking toward the truck, but Lill caught her arm. “Take me with you.”
Maggie shook her head and tried to pull away.
Lill whispered, “I can't stay here any more. Godssakes, I'm going crazy here! I keep thinking they're in my house. Take me with you. Please.”
“Don't you and Jeff have a place you could go?” Maggie asked.
“Jeff's gone. I don't know where. Last night. Heard the screen door bang and saw him running out to the car. He's gone. Haven't heard a word from him. The bastard left me with no way out of here. Help me out, Maggie. Won't you do that? Please. I gotta get out of here.”
“Ed wouldn't stand for it.”
“Why not?”
Maggie just shook her head and shrugged Lill's hand off her shoulder. Ed had started up the truck. The kids were piled in the back on top of a mattress. Their faces were brass and rusty. Mouths curved and plowed. Popping gaskets. Ed with his hands knuckled around the steering wheel. Maggie's hair fluttering around her face like moths begging around lantern light as she stumbled towards the truck. The grope and tumble of gear and valve. The slam of a door.
They drove away. No one looked at her. She stood watching after them. She felt real weak. Her knees squeaky and hinged. Her mouth hanging open. Dust in the air. The Fulson's front door was open. The copulating shadows hung around the doorway.
Lill walked back to her house with heavy steps.
She closed her front door and slid down until she was squatting on the linoleum and put her head in her hands.
The heat groaned.
**
The sun was scrubbed out until it was only a meager face through an unkissed veil of dust.
The wind was blowing hard. It wheezed and blistered through the streets and churned up little funnels of red dust, which caught trash and old pages of leaves and spun them up. Ghosts of dust stalked the doorways. Gritty sand in between your teeth if you stepped outside. Hazy living rooms because of cracks in the windows. The clap of shutters. Gray, humped houses slouching in the splintered air. The dust drove fingers through the rutted plow land, uncovering the pale, fruitless seeds and tossing them up, around.
And the restless wind. Calling, calling. Indistinct names. The coyote cry of hole and whistle. The trees bent and pumping like old fingers playing trumpet keys. A drumbeat in the heart of the land, feverish with a motherless temperature. Dry, thirsty well-lips. What water was left unevaporated was muddy and sullen. Little red aortas of bloody streams. Black snot. People covered up with handkerchiefs and bandannas and blinked, but the dust was everywhere. It burrowed into the pores like hungry ticks. Those caught outside during the duststorm squeaked and rusted in the joints with dust. A slow laceration. Pulpy, cloudy backwash in the air.
It lasted for five hours.
Tasteless dust.
People thought it was a plague from God. Clicking locusts and the tap-tap-tapping of a rotten angel at unholy doorways. Worn fingers massaged rosary beads. Prayers from split lips. They tried to sleep, but the wind played such strange music. Throaty and sore. A lovesick serenade at their windows.
Only the children slept.
Heavy, token eyes. A layer of dust on their lips like a layer of pesticides on an apple. Scuff them, shine them. Polish them up.
As the sun fell and the dust settled the sky was yellow.
The heat tangoed.
Very nice part, here, Ky. I like the perspective of Lill, however I want to see even more paranoia and insanity building up from characters directly involved with it and I am so curious about the resolution of all this.