Devil’s Lake

Each night, our clothes unraveling from barbed-wire snags, we carry the shattered pieces of our old town and load them into wagons and wheelbarrows. Whatever we find, we call it a load, whatever can fit in our hands and be conveyed. We don't call them what they really are, the remains of our previous lives.

Tonight, we find the shrapnel of a gas station condom dispenser, an entire gross of singed gauze pads, and a tire so distorted by heat that it has inverted itself and split open. We awkwardly secure it in our busted wagon and haul it back to the cave. We cannot decide if we are populating our new home with memory or if we are clearing our old home so that it can be reinhabited. Are we moving on or coming back? When we find something still recognizable, holding onto some vague suggestion of its history, we try to believe that there is enough still hidden to go back in time to when there was no need for either option.

There are three thousand of us in the cave; the other half of our population was blown skyward and settled back to earth in a vaporized fog that lasted for hours. Once the fog cleared, those of us who had been spared ran bleeding and ear-drum-busted to the caves, leaving everything behind, our hands shocked into claws, unable to lift a thing. We left our lives in the husks of our burned houses and carried only the guilt that we had been too frightened to take the things we loved with us.

The loads are jagged and ash-dusted, but, in the dim light of the cave, we cradle them like sleeping children. We give our devotion to whatever we can scavenge.

A few nights later, it takes ten of us to uncover and upright a safe, the combination as mysterious as our circumstances. It is a load that holds another load, so we drag it with half-burned strips of nylon. We pull and pull and occasionally a strap will pop like a weak gunshot and one of us will fall forward, face bloodied and teeth dislodged. When it happens, we take a place behind the safe and push it forward. By the time the safe is strapped into the sturdiest wagon, we are panting, rubbing the places where the nylon burned into our hands and wrists and shoulders. If these wounds will ever heal, we will consider it a miracle. Our bodies are scarred beyond recognition. We often mistake each other for a stranger. We sometimes are confused if someone we once loved was killed in that awful moment, or if they have simply been made mysterious to us by their disfigurements.

How and Why are questions forever lost to us. There is no point in asking, our lives altered in ways that those questions that cannot answer. All that is left, the key that unlocks the mysteries of our new circumstances, is What. We dig into the charred earth and uncover the objects that bear our names. What, we ask. What, What, What, What, and the answer is the thing we hold in our bleeding and cracked hands.

For nights and nights afterward, we all take turns pounding the safe into a new shape with rocks and hammers. We wait for its contents to spill out of the wreckage that, for once, we ourselves have made.

It has been four years since we lost our town, and, in that time, not a single child has been born. When this fact occurs to us, we wonder if that moment has sterilized our internals, but then we try to remember the last time any of us has had sex. We cannot call forth the memory of skin against skin with any clarity. We are not sure if this is good or bad, the lack of gurgling infants. This cave, always damp, always dark, streaked with vermin, is no place for children. We are a group, decimated by God's awful disinterest in us, which would perhaps benefit from an eventual, uncertain extinction.

The perfect load is something that can by carried by one person, distorted by ash or misshapen by fire but clearly an object of our past lives. Toasters. Hammers. Oversized Stuffed Animals. We desire a load that reminds us of a time when the things that we placed our hands upon would respond in kind, an almost silent humming of acquiescence.

When the safe gives up any pretense of safekeeping and is finally pried open, we crowd around it and dip our hands into the darkness. We pull out a heavy stack of papers, their numbers and letters a language beyond our capabilities. We shred and burn it for warmth. We find six bars of gold. We will melt these down and rudely fashion them into poor imitations of teeth for those of us who need them. Finally, we exhume a shoebox filled to overflowing with color photos of a family: father; mother; two sons; a daughter. We look at their strange smiles and expansive gestures and we squint until we are quite certain of their identities. They are us. All three thousand of us who still remain. We know in our hearts that those images, those captured moments, are of the family we once were, before it was taken away from us and burned into an ash so fine that it cannot hold our fingerprints when we touch it. We hold the photos in our hands and think of the loads that are still undiscovered, the things that will, once we have turned the world upside-down, remind us that we were once alive. Each load that we carry in our arms will thrum with the reverberations of our heartbeats. Whatever was lost, we pray, will once again be found.