Last Night...

The blast went off some hundreds of miles in the distance, but I saw the rushing wave coming for me with amazing speed, I fell into the ditch outside of my high school and buried my nose into my hands and my hands into the soft earth as the purple rush of radioactive debris flooded over me, I couldn’t breath and I might have screamed but the sound of a million gallons of water dumping into my ears was all I could hear. It was over just as fast and when I got up the landscape around me was deadly silent. Everything was light grayish-white and huge flakes of soft purple carcinogen snow floated lazily around me.
For the most part, the structures around me were still standing so I must have been farther from the blast then I thought. I contemplated how I could have witnessed the angry mushroom blast into the stratosphere and yet the flash didn’t instantly burn the eyes out of my head, or how the wave of irritated debris didn’t rip the flesh from my bones as it rushed over me at 250 miles an hour…

No matter for that now… I need to get home and load some guns, what if this is a movie and hordes of post apocalyptic zombie mutants will be coming for me… hungry for my brain or something.

I ran to the farthest northeast entrance of my high school and kicked the door in (something I always wanted to do), and looked around. It was pretty empty; it must be a weekend, or maybe summer break. I ran up and down the halls slipping on the freshly fallen purple snow. Aside from a few burned out corpses and charred books I didn’t find anything useful for any sort of zombie army defense. A boy I don’t know came around the corner and looked at me in horror. He didn’t look mutated or melted or anything but maybe I did… I simply grabbed his shirt and told him we better cover our noses because nothing purple should ever really be ingested. We both made makeshift surgical masks and I told him that he could tag along with me if he wanted but that I was headed for my parents house to make sure they were okay and to load some weapons.

We ran down the road to U.S. 31 and saw a small shack with 4 or 5 U-Haul vans outside in the dirt parking lot. There was a decaying dog still tied to it’s leash outside the door… I kicked the door in and found a few people inside huddled around the desk looking at papers. I told them I needed a van as I grabbed for the keys hanging on the wall. The eldest lady, who must have run the business didn’t seem willing to let me have the keys and began to raise a fuss about how she didn’t have the gas in them to just lend them out to whomever. I gave her a hard push and she toppled head-over-feet backwards. The purple snow had begun to subside over here, and as I looked out the tiny window next to the keylock box I saw some fires burning in the distance, toward Holland… toward my parent’s house… toward where I was headed. I looked back at the now decaying people sitting in there chairs, still studying the withered papers but now with empty eye sockets and leathery faces and I said: “I’ll return the van when I can… and you should have covered your mouths when the purple wind came”… I walked out without closing the door and found myself alone again. The kid must have run off, I didn’t need him anyway.

The van didn’t start right away and when it did it didn’t run very well, the air intake was choked by the nuclear fall out and it kept stalling on me. There were no other working cars on the road, just a few flipped over in the deep ditches along the sides of the highway. The sky was getting darker now, a deeper purple then the snow, but the ground was glowing softly like a low watt incandescent light… I thought about Chicago at 3am on a Wednesday night in January, when the ground was brighter then the sky like someone painted the landscape thinly on top of the surface of a huge light blub and you could look in every direction and see no living things. Just steal and concrete humming with a faint glow in soft fresh snow.

I crashed the van into the neighbor’s car next to our house, and then jumped out without turning it off. I ran up to the northern side of my parent’s house, my heart was pounding out of my chest, but something caught my eye in the backyard. Down near the creek where my birthday-tree was planted there was something shimmering golden-white. I had to run over to it to see what it was. On the edge of the creek embankment a fresh well had sprung and was pouring an opaque green liquid into the creek. It looked like Absinthe, frosty white-green and swirling with movement under its smooth surface. Under the shallow wake I saw coins of all different shapes and sizes, gold and silver and bronze coins, from ages ago and from millions of years in the future. I was afraid to reach into the water for fear my hand would melt off or freeze. I tore a branch from my birthday-tree and poked around in the shallow riverbed until I had pushed one of the coins onto the soft muddy bank. I picked it up and rubbed off the years of dirt that had crusted over the deeply cut design. The coin wasn’t in English but I could read the numbers: 08052057.

I know those numbers, August 5, 2057. It’s from my favorite short story from Ray Bradbury. It’s part of the reason I came up with the name of my band…

Without worrying about my hand melting off from the Absinthe colored spring, I shoved my hand deep into the opening and it was freezing cold inside. I shovel-cupped my hand and dredged out a huge bounty of coins and soft mud. I looked up into the sky and smiled at god for a moment. I kept digging for the next few minutes each time digging deeper and deeper into the increasingly larger hole and each time removing all manors of coins from throughout humanities existence. A great record keeper had made his stash right next to my birthday-tree and it took a nuclear accident for me to find it. I was sure that my life’s worries were over now. I wouldn’t have to pay any bills ever again… But was it because I found this strange treasure or because the Earth was destroyed and no one would come looking for me now? The deeper I dug the more I pulled out: Clumps of my curly hair as a child, my favorite childhood teddy bear that my niece accidentally burned when she stood him up against the electric space heater in my sister’s room when she was 6 years old. The dark blue plastic army guys I buried in the front yard when I was a kid… The car keys to my first car, my brown and green button down shirt that the paramedics cut off of my collage roommate Brent in the ambulance on the way to the hospital when he fell off the balcony at Michigan State and landed on his face. The tiny star necklace I bought for Mandy that she lost at work, my neon green drum sticks, my favorite drawing book with the dragon on the cover, the picture of Becky when she was a sophomore in art class, the shoebox with my marching band gloves and the broken snare drum parts I had under my bed… my stainless steal silver box my dad made that I had my 13 lucky buffalo nickels in. The coins were running out by my past wasn’t. It was pouring out faster then I could dig now, like if someone on the other side was pushing it out. Expelling it from the cold Earth onto the scorched and sickly post-nuclear landscape that I may have asked for just before I saw that blast tear open the sky back by my high school. But that’s where the dream began, there was nothing before, and I wouldn’t ask for that, I would never ask for a place for everything I had once been to be reborn, and even if I had, it wouldn’t have been a burnt and dead version of what my world was before that moment... That’s not worth reliving.