From the Fire IV by Kent David Kelly Read Free Book Online

burned-up
doll-bundles hanging out.
    “But they ain’t dolls.
    “Driving, oh it’s slow and endless and ever on.  You can’t, you
ain’t even see but your own frail and ghosted headlights, beams of a
drowning glow like vapor spider-webs, swirling maybe twenty feet out in front
of you.  And you behold , the things them headlights catch in their
failing candlelight, you close your eyes so many times and when you hit
something soft, soft piles you need to go through, you hit the gas and you just
slurry your way through all those bodies and all the low hills that they have
made, Lord receive them, choked body-floods with them cars ring all around.
    “The people, it seems so many in their dying wanted only, only to
… they crawled out of their car windows and they held each other until the
end.  Piles in the middle of every street where those people all went fetal,
buried by the other splayed ones up on top of them, all burned and hollowed out
like scarecrows, where all them other burning and dying piled on.
    “And oh, the world it is feasting on its ashes.  Hungering,
howling, the ashes of everything.  It’s like the Beast, twisting, dead and
feasting, and he’s disintegrating while he drags himself everywhere on all his
thousand hands.  Phantom hands made of smoke and dust, crawling over all.
    “Them ashes, they slither across the road in sticky cables,
tentacles of dust that keep together somehow.  It’s like some glue made of
melted plastic bags that keeps all them ashes together and turns them into
churning snakes.  It is horror to see, those snakes smogging across beneath and
up your headlights, some flying and some crawling, all made of concrete shards
and beads of glass and lumps of dead women’s hair.
    “The roads?  They are the hollowed veins of this old earth now,
the termite tracks eaten through the flesh of the endless black.  They’s all
the world is now.  But the lines , the lines that those veins are all
cored away and railed on — the breakdown lanes, them yellow dashes for the
passing zones — those are the lifelines now.  In the dark, the lines
will guide you.  Those lifelines, they tells you when you’re driving true,
they’s tell you as you’re crawling along, following their last threads up into
the maze of wreckage.
    “You think you guided well and on, you go.  But then the wind howl
up, and the ash-snakes come a-winding and the world is all a-swirl, tentacles
of dust.  That sound, them snakes gliding, it’s like dead people sighing all
around you.  I know that don’t make sense, but that’s what it feels . 
Endless, endless sighs of the lost, the fingers of that ashen Beast feeling
their way through the dark, clawing away the road in front of you.  They’s
migrating, ever and ever on, ever east.  Them’s fingers crawling all over your
car on their pilgrimage into darkness.
    “Hell come to all souls now still alive, those few souls that the
fingers might be crawling to.  No forgiveness, no power going to save them.
    “And then you drive on and the dust clear with a great moan and
the gashes in the sky, the sky is glow-lined .  The sky is black cloud in
circles, it’s like you’re looking up from the eye of some hurricane straight
into a thousand upside-down drains spiraling ashes into the air, that crimson
sun enthroned over his wasteland of burning dust, oh I don’t even know how to
tell you.
    “And the one greatest storm, on high.  Archangel .”
    * * * * *
    “If there was a God, he’s done with us now, his failed
experiment.  The world is all dried out now, all we are is ashes.  The
hourglass is turned over, and the bloody husks of sand, of us , are all
flowing out upward into that feasting sky.  That is all.  That is all there
will ever be and you know this, you see as you drive on in the
endless.  And then the great wind come and then — O thank the spirits — all
your beholding is gone again.
    “And a new black crystal storm is coming, oh