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

it’s time to drive a
little faster over the dead and follow those road-lines like strangle-wire into
the ever night, like fragile painted spider-threads high into the mountains.
    “And let me tell you, Mrs. S.-G., the blind night?  She is a mercy
laid low compared to all you see in that black and cinder radiance of the day,
the Burning World under the Archangel.
    “May we be blind, may we never see the path we played behind us.
    “Jesus forsake us.  Jesus, walk away.
    “That blackest storm I went through?  She went and gone, on my way
up into the mountain.  Remember, I was gone up into the west, on to Black Hawk
and then to find you.  That storm crawling east on all its claws, He’s got another
storm coming soon, I know.
    “You want out of here, you got to hurry.  There be nothing to stop
the wind next time, all the trees done burned up, all the grasses gone, and
without the green the world’s old skin has been peeled back to set free the
fire-blood and the earthen bone.  It’s all become dust now, and the dust be the
dead people and all their Hondas and Infinitis and all their piles of stupid things.
    “Oh I know, I lay as guilty as them all.
    “That’s what I fear, the next storm with nothing to be held down. 
Only the wreckage might be keeping down what’s left of the elder world, that’s
all there be now.  There’s no forests, no skyscrapers nailing down the tapestry
no more.
    “But through all that Great Dying, from the Fire, I made it here,
oh I did.  All the way to Black Hawk, sweet way up known to my heart because
the missus, Jenny she like to gamble, see?  And pray that I don’t mind.
    “Deep dark over mountain, to Black Hawk I knew the way even at
twenty feet a span, even the glow and gaslight crawl of my old burned-out car. 
Plowing through those piles.  Headlights all aglow forever on.
    “But I did stop and out to look back once, to try to loose
my bowels upon the road.  What I did see?  First nothing.  There was only a
sound like the cries of dragons welling up from beyond the horizon make me
look, bellowing of those dragons given birth out to the east.  I had stopped
just before I made my black car crawl up that pass, there was horrible sounds
below all where Denver once was.
    “And those roars did push a little moonlight and burning cloud to
light the way for some time.
    “And let me tell you what I saw:  that wind, that cyclone with
everything in its belly but the rain, she was so strong she was pulling up
cars, flipping dead bodies into cartwheels, tumbling Mack trucks like they was
toys.  That cyclone and her dragon’s hoard, that pile of twisted everything,
they’s all rolled up in piling hills now out to Kansas and left out to decay.  Huge
piles of death and tumble, all waiting for the rain.
    “I not tell you?  The rain, she starting when I come in.  Yes,
still somehow it rains.  Dark and thick as greasy ice and warm upon your face,
leaving stains on you so deep you never will come clean.
    “And when she rain, I believe that whole range of wreckage hills,
that endless ash out to Kansas is going to turn itself to mud.  And that mud,
that’s going to bake out and harden into concrete, a concrete made of cars and
skulls and torsos without legs and all our ashes, that concrete going to set
itself hard as stone.
    “So next the storm, the Great Storm, it going to start all over
again.  Beat that concrete with the thunder, hammer those bones with blackest
rain.  Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.  I bet you anything, best part of this
God-lost world going to be buried ten feet deep in another hundred years.
    “Who knows?  Maybe, somewhere a hundred years from now, a flower
dare to grow.  Maybe somewhere too, some young hand be there to pick that
flower, and some mind to dream.  To wonder what lie beneath.
    “But that’s all, that’s all yesterday.  You won’t see as I have
seen, if you journey through the storm-eye.  Go soon.  Keep to the mountains
best