Max Gardinier

When my mother left us, I asked my father why she couldn’t come back. He leaned over me and whispered: “She don’t love us anymore.” He smiled, but I could see the sadness in his watery eyes. “She just don’t.” His breath smelled of whiskey and in the low lighting of the room, he looked old and sickly. I became cold and rigid, after hearing his words. I felt empty. He kissed my cheek and left, and soon after, the sound of his sobs seeped through the thin wall that separated us.

Three months later he announced that his great aunt, who had no children, had died, and he had inherited her old beach house. My sisters both began to cry; they didn’t want to leave their friends behind. And slowly I realized what moving meant. How it meant I had to leave the house in which my mother had raised us. All my memories of her would slowly leave me. I could never again look at the back deck and think of when I painted it with her, never again look at the door and remember her holding me after it closed on my fingers, never again look at the mirror in her bathroom and imagine her smiling back at me in the glass, hairbrush in hand. So I left the room, and I crawled into my bed, and I cried, but I tried my best not to make a sound. I wanted the Earth to swallow me up and the world to forget I existed.

Dad didn’t care. We moved, and for months I couldn’t forgive him. I stopped talking in an attempt to punish him for what he had done to us. For fifty-three days I didn’t say a word. I drew out plans to run away, and live freely, relieved of all my troubles. I wrote stories of a young girl who fell off a boat and realized she could breathe underwater. She found her mother, a beautiful mermaid, and she lived alone with her, deep in the depths.

But my mother was no mermaid.

Dad couldn’t afford a psychologist, so he begged. His begging eventually evolved into punishment. But he soon realized he had nothing to take from me.

The school would hand me detention after detention, for refusing to answer questions, until finally they suspended me for insubordination. Dad had to work, so for four days I was home alone.

On the third day, the phone rang. Not many people knew our new phone number. The caller began to speak immediately after I answered, “I know you told me I shouldn’t call, and I know I fucked everything up, and I’m so, so sorry, dear God, I’m so sorry, but you have to forgive me baby, please–”

“Mom?”

There was a long silence.

Then she hung up.

That was the first word I’d spoken since we moved. I was glad my mother was the only one to hear it.

I ended my mute phase after that. I’d grown out of it.

She died a few months after that call. Dad wouldn’t tell me how. He wouldn’t let us go to the funeral.

Guilt clung to my back for a long while, hanging on my shoulders with its claws deep in my flesh.

 

————

Every night, whenever I reached that state of mind in which I was neither fully awake nor fully asleep, I’d sneak outside and visit the fairies that lived in the leafless trees of our backyard. I would lay down in the sand, and face the sea, and they would come and dance on my shoulder and my side. I’d wake up in bed the next morning, with sand still in my hair.

Sometimes I would rub my eyes, and the fairies would transform into clueless lightning bugs, flying aimlessly in the cold night air. They were trying to hide themselves from my conscious state of mind.

Some days of the week, I’d remain in that state between sleep and wake, even while I drew, or studied, or chatted with my teachers, and the only thing that’d wake me up was a good night’s sleep. I feared that one day the sleep wouldn’t be enough, and I’d be stuck in some kind of perpetual limbo, never to be fully conscious again.

I became obsessed with my mother. I felt I had to learn how she died, why she died, where she died. If I was at fault for her death. I wished I could talk to her. Every night I prayed to God to let me speak with her again, a full conversation, one that started and ended with happiness and love. But God stopped listening to my prayers after a while.

I felt entirely hollow, as I had that night the year before. I spent my days sitting on my bed, facing the wall, thinking of different stories and narratives and characters to keep me company. My body grew smaller; food all tasted the same. It was all the same, and I was stagnant, like a festering body of water.

I spent my nights on the beach.

Her name was Frances. Dad wouldn’t tell me her maiden name.

Like my spoken word strike, my search for answers ended abruptly, when I no longer had the energy to search for her ghost. But she never stopped haunting me.

————

The fairies danced on my shoulder, I laid in the sand. I watched the ocean. A figure rose silently from the water. The moonlight bathed her silky skin. Slowly she walked to my body. She wore a long white dress, unsullied by the sea’s predative waters. I watched from outside myself as she bent over and dragged a ghostly hand along my cheek. She walked around me with great caution, then lay down behind me, her body against mine. I closed my eyes.

These nights, I could not tell where the sky began and the sea ended.

When I woke the next morning, tears stained my white sheets. I realized that I no longer felt isolated. I felt whole again.

————-

Years later, when the fireflies were no longer fairies, and the sand was no longer cushion, I looked through an old family album. By this time, Dad had died, my sisters had married good-looking men, and I had started college.

I recognized my mother, not from my early childhood, but instead from the night she had taken everything undesirable from my mind.

I drove back to the house I grew up in, the summer before my senior year in college. Someone had repainted the back deck, but the house did not belong to anyone. I let my fingers graze the door, let my mind wander in the old bathroom mirror.

I took this trip alone, as I felt that going with someone else would ruin the sanctity of the experience. I felt that no one could understand how much these hallowed buildings had meant to me.

Night arrived once I reached the beach house, and the moon colored the sand blue. After I moved out, my oldest sister sold it as a vacation home to a wealthy family in New England, and split the money between the three of us.

The home was empty.

I went out back and lay down. I closed my eyes and let the tears drift quietly down my cheeks. It felt as if my youth was ending. I didn’t want to move on, I didn’t want to leave the fragmented memories of my mother behind. I wanted her ghost back.

So the fairies danced on my shoulder.

Slowly, they healed the scars my guilt had left behind.

And I was at peace.

 

 

Max is a senior at Pope High School in Marietta, Georgia. He likes to spend his time reading, listening to music, watching an ungodly amount of Netflix, drawing, and writing novels he’ll probably never finish. This is his first time being published.

My bunker is safe, I know that. I built it myself, buried it deep in my backyard, stocked it with food and water and guns and ammo, everything a grown man needs to ride out the end of the world in comfort. I had hoped for my wife to join me, naturally, but she walked out just weeks before it all hit the fan. She called me crazy, didn’t believe me when I warned her that the end was near.

I bet she believed the sirens.

Even alone down here, I knew I was safe. I had fresh air, clean water, the radio said the detonations were in Maryland and Georgia (before it cut out, anyways), so I’d only have to wait a year or so for the fallout to clear away enough that the surface would be safe again. Everything up there is gone. I heard the trees being ripped up, I heard the houses blowing by in pieces, I heard cars and trucks being thrown hundreds of yards, but I was safe down here in my bunker. I never told anyone about my hideaway, except my wife, but she’d left the state to move back in with her parents. I hid it well, deep in the woods, dug it out myself and rented the tools in cash. I made every precaution to be sure absolutely nobody would go finding out that I was prepping, lest they try and take my bunker from me.

And yet, someone’s started banging on the door. At first it was just for a minute or two, every few days, but now, it’s gotten more and more constant. It’s been weeks since the nukes dropped, there’s no way anyone’s living out there, and if they are, there’s no way I’d let their irradiated asses into my vault! That’s their own fault for not being ready; politicians had been organizing furniture in a burning building for years. I could see it, but nobody believed me. Looks like I got the last laugh after all. Take that, Rodger.

For a week now, it’s been nothing but constant banging on the metal door, a nonstop whack, whack, whack, I shout at them to go away and they don’t listen. I threaten to grab my shotgun and make ‘em leave, they don’t listen. One day, I’d had enough, I threw open the door and swung my twelve-gauge towards the ladder, but there was nothing there but the tunnel. I closed the door, sealed it up all tight, sat down and the thumping started right back up like nothing happened.

Now, I ain’t the superstitious type, never believed in ghosts or god or nothing, but whatever’s out there ain’t natural. I’ve tried all sorts of things to get it to leave, even sat in the tunnel for a few hours one day, but it just started banging from the inside of the door. I tried one of those rituals from TV, drawing the star on the ground and whatnot, but it just kept on smacking on my door.

Lately, I think it’s been coming closer to me, like it’s playing some game. Saw something in the corner one night—looked like a person, just standing there—but soon as I turned the lights on, it was gone. Sometimes I see it out of the corner of my eye while I’m eating or checking the radio, I thought to start keeping the shotgun with me just in case it gets any ideas.

Sometimes I talk to it. Folks might think I’m crazy, talking to a ghost, but it’s hard being alone in the bunker, and this ain’t no ghost. It’s real, even if it don’t talk back too much. It still bangs on the door all the time, never does want to shut up. I’ve put a few more shells into the door than I’m proud to admit, trying to get it to stop. The knocking’s driving me mad, it never stops unless I open the door, but I can’t open the door too much or the radiation gets in. Between the knocking and the rads, though, there are some days I choose rads. Is radiation even real? The government makes up all sorts of things, radiation’s probably a lie to keep us away from the stuff they’re trying to cover up. Leaving the door open hasn’t hurt me yet, and it makes the knocking stop. It makes the knocking stop.

—-

A wanderer pushes back vines covering a manhole in the middle of the woods. Plants had flourished in the years following the nuclear Armageddon; radiation did wonders to help plants grow bigger than ever. The masked figure pulled out a machete and wedged it beneath the heavy manhole, prying it open with great effort, before carefully slipping down the ladder presented. This was how they survived; looting the remains of old bunkers for food and water, since just about everything left was either poison or rad-filled.

Ever so cautiously, they descended. Despite several years having passed, sometimes there’d be a living person still hiding out in some homemade bunker, and they typically weren’t too keen on visitors. This one seemed quiet enough; the overgrowth covering the entrance was a good sign that whoever once occupied this hideout hadn’t left in quite some time.

Reaching the bottom of the ladder, the survivor pulled a flashlight from between their teeth and shone it ahead, revealing a heavy metal door resting slightly ajar. Had some other scavenger beat this one to the stash? Undeterred, the looter slowly pulled the door open, wincing at the screech the rusted metal produced. Taking a small breath, they shone light into the room, and were greeted by a scene unlike any they’d faced before.

A corpse rested facedown in the middle of the room. That much was common. There was a worn and rusted shotgun sitting atop the decayed body, and as the wandered inched closer, they began to make out a faded pentagram beneath the cadaver. The walls were covered in drawings; some of them were identifiable as various satanic images and glyphs, while the vast majority were a complete mystery. The shelves in the back hadn’t been picked clean, so a careful trek to the other side of the concrete space revealed a trove of cans of non-perishables and cases of bottled water. This place would almost make for a good temporary shelter, if not for the fact that it looked like someone had been sacrificed in the middle of it.

As the masked traveler began carefully collecting cans and depositing them into a bag, a small sound echoed from the opposite end of the room—a faint pat, like a tiny foot against some floor. The survivor paused, shining light across the room, yet there was nothing in the empty doorway, only the sun shining through the manhole entrance above. After a moment, they passed it off as the wind, and resumed looting, albeit with a little more haste. This place was putting them on edge.

Not a moment later, the door slammed shut with a terrible echo. Darkness enveloped the room, leaving the vagabond with nothing but a flashlight. They quickly rose, aiming the light towards the door with one hand while the other reached for a handgun. The beam searched for the culprit, scanning across the painted walls of the bunker in frantic streaks, arms quivering as they backed towards the back wall of the small one-room holdout. The tin cans in their duffle bag rattled against each other as their back pressed into the concrete.

In the tense and fearful silence, a faint knocking could be heard from the other side of the bunker door.

 

 

Ricky Martin is a senior with a side passion for creative writing, especially flash stories and poetry. Fascinated by fantasy and science fiction alike, he does his best to find inspiration in every aspect of life, and aims to one day go on to be a professional author.