Bad Glass

“Your friends in the military have been driving, pell-mell, up and down the street.” She pointed along the cross street, first toward the hospital, then toward the courthouse. “Their fucking Hummers—they almost ran me over. They don’t know what’s going on. They have no fucking clue. They think we’re under attack. They think that that—” She waited for a handful of heartbeats until a fresh crack rang out in the sky. “—is artillery fire. They think somebody’s lobbing shells at us.”

“It’s got to be atmospheric,” Hershel said. For someone so old, his voice was surprisingly strong. “Vapor in the air. Colliding fronts. The red—it’s got to be refracted light bouncing off of something in the atmosphere.”

“Red sky at night,” Mama Cass recited, nodding, but the smile on her lips suggested that she thought Hershel’s explanation was complete bullshit. “Sailor’s delight.” She raised her beer bottle to the sky, toasting the chaos, and took a long swallow.

Taylor looked back down the street.

“They’re not going to help you,” Mama Cass said, not even looking in Taylor’s direction. “They don’t know what’s going on. They don’t have any fucking idea. You might as well just sit back and enjoy the fireworks.”

She gestured toward my backpack. “And you … you might want to take some pictures,” she said. “I’m sure your Internet fans would love to see what’s going on.”

I spent a moment staring up at the bloodred sky, that violent, roiling sea above our heads. Then I shrugged off my backpack and followed her suggestion.

A piece of paper torn from a lined notebook. Undated. Hand-printed words:

(The piece of paper has been crumpled repeatedly. The left-hand side is a ragged tear, torn from a notebook binding. Large, shaky words cover the top part of the page—smeared pencil, inscribed by a palsied hand.

The paper is aged and well handled. It is no longer crisp; instead, it has been transformed into a fragile cloth, by folding and refolding, by damp and greasy fingertips.

Dingy and gray; smeared graphite. Sprinkled, dipped in water, then dried once again.

The words are barely legible. But they are legible.)

—there’s nothing left in me, Taylor. Not anymore.

I’m sorry.

I failed you. I couldn’t stop failing you.

The sky stayed red for about twenty minutes.

I had a hard time taking pictures of that sky. Without anything in the foreground, it looked like nothing but a red, fluid pattern, an abstract collage of crimson and pink and electric blood. Finally, I went wide-angle and focused on the eastern skyline, down the length of the street. It was a view of the city from the floor of a concrete valley, with the walls on either side reaching up (and bending out) before opening onto the wide red sky. I set the camera to burst mode and shot five frames a second until I caught a couple of frames with the lightning—or the artillery fire or whatever it was—above the left-hand line of buildings.

After I captured that shot, I sat down on the asphalt and pretended to stare up at the sky, taking my place alongside Taylor, Mama Cass, and Hershel. But really, I had the camera down in my lap, angled up at Mama Cass as she watched the heavens. There was a childlike wonder spread across her face, and I tried to capture that expression, that joyful, rapturous euphoria, with the bright sky shining behind her. I was shooting blind, though, so I couldn’t be sure if the autofocus was locked on her or on the buildings in the background. I didn’t bother to check on the LCD screen, and after a minute, I just shut down the camera and tucked it back into my backpack.

The street was still eerily quiet. I knew that there were people on the sidewalk behind us—I’d seen them as Taylor and I had approached—but they didn’t make a single sound.

I reached out and took Taylor’s hand, gently, trying not to startle her. She looked down from the sky, first glancing at our joined hands and then looking up at my face. She was perplexed and overwhelmed; I could see that in her glazed eyes. I gave her a reassuring smile, and she turned back toward the heavens.

She didn’t drop my hand, at least. For that I was grateful.