If All Else Fails by Craig Strete Read Free Book Online Page B

though they still lived in it.
They had buried their city.
    He was an owl and
he knew this. He had heard them. He saw them through the eyes of sick animals. The sun was going
to come at them and they had gathered together like a swarm of locusts. They were like
storm-frightened cattle and the wings of frightened birds brought their words to him. They said,
"Let's swim to the moon."
    He was an owl and
that is what they said.
    The old man looked
up at the flaming sky of high-sun time. It was hot like a pot oven and the sun was
spinning like a wounded spider, dangling
closer to its prey on a single strand of fire. It filled the sky and moved quickly to the west.
Moving fast like a thrown spear, the sun pulled night after it like a blanket. It was dark coming
at noon. It was the end of the world coming and darkness and flames. Flames and then
darkness.
    "I am an owl. I
live in the dark. I will not be angry when it grows dark."
    That was what he
said but things within him snapped like twigs in the summer and he sat down on the ground like an
old man. He sat down like an old man.
    "I am not an owl!"
he cried and he beat the ground with fists, not wings.
    "I shall fascinate
you. I shall tear out your eyes with spirit teeth," he said, and he laughed and laughed and the
sound of his laughter was a noise in a hollow barrel and the warm tears ran out of his eyes into
the ground. He was an old man. And old men cry when the world ends.
    Back on the hill
they were gathered. His song had grown cold. His song had no relatives. All his relatives were
gone. They could not be there. The other people had buried their cities on them and the sun could
not see them down there under the city.
    And in the city, in
buildings called museums, there were rustling sounds and weeping sounds. In cold gray filing
cab­inets, the bones of the old ones stirred uneasily. In vaults, in labeled boxes, the bones of
the old ones cried restlessly and they could not get free. In one box the leg, an arm in
an­other, the skull filling with tears in a long display case in an­other room. And the sun could
not reach them and mother earth could not bring them awake and they wept, quietly, quietly, in
the museums. And they wept.
    The old ones, and
the young ones, and the no longer rest­less ones were sitting quietly on the hill. They talked
and laughed with their relatives. Far
away on something like a hill, the owl knew what they said. They said, "It is a good day today."
They said, "We have today and each other. It is a good day to die." And behind all these words,
they said one other thing and that was a shy thing that could not be spoken. So it was said with
a time of quiet, or a soft look, or a touch. It was said between father and child, between man
and woman, with quiet movements that brought them to­gether. All together. They were there with
the ground peo­ple and the animal people. All together. They were there and the world was ending
and they were there. And with faces, not words, they said, "No one here gets out
alive."
    There was a cold
tiling coming out of the old man's heart. His cold song had come for him. The wind had blown his
song away and it had come for him.
    The people on the
hill did not see his song blow away, be­cause in the last of the time left they only had eyes for
each other, only had eyes for those of their own kind, and he had told them he was an owl. That
is what he told them. They could not see his face, all silver and golden, in their minds. They
thought he was an owl and owls, when the world ends, say, "Don't look at me with your
eyes."
    Buried animal and
ground people were trying to reach out through the cracks in sidewalks. The ground people moved
restlessly under the concrete.
    "I will fascinate.
I will roll my dead fist in your dead eyes." He raised his fist at the city and did not laugh. He
could hear her under the concrete, scratching, scratching.
    The world was
ending but the