I’m alone watching cartoons when the animals come down from the mountain. There must be hundreds of them. A stampede. They churn up our flower beds and shit over the traffic islands. They void the warranty on our tyres. They break the tiny penises off the pissing cherub statuettes in our gardens. Goats stick their long tongues through the letter slots in our front doors and frighten the children inside. Chimps do unspeakable things to one another outside the corner store, all of which is captured on security camera. They seem to want to take everything we have.
It is Saturday. Always disappointing when trouble arrives on a Saturday, a day reserved for selfish virtues, and it being early everyone is standing at their windows, dumbfounded and afraid. Waterbirds break against our roofs like hail.
My parents have taken my little brother, Kenneth, to his specialist and will be gone for hours. I’m forbidden to leave the house unless in their presence. I never feel more sleepy, I have learned, than in the first few minutes of an emergency.
As a little boy, I stood before the burning orchestra building, the heat like a hand closing around my face.
*
Some horses kick my side gate off its hinge and get into the backyard to drink from my brother’s wading pool. The water in the pool hasn’t been changed in about two months, so I can’t say if drinking it will be good for them.
I take some photos through the flyscreen in case I need proof to show my parents. They don’t often believe the things I say, even my most realistic stories, nor do they defend me when the folks from the neighbourhood take a swipe or treat me like a thing washed up in a storm. They are popular themselves. All summer they make love loudly with the windows open. They call each other disgusting names. The whole street listens to the ritual.
Kenneth, too, is considered a gift despite his conditions. His body resembles a jigsaw puzzle. He is sweet-eyed and warming to speak to. Visitors beam as they watch him quietly read Bible stories to himself. Due to his illnesses—his laughable immune system, his bones which grew as if in conflict with one another—my parents allow him the pleasure of scattering his toys around the yard and leaving them there to decompose over many thousands of years.
I’m not alone in here, I call to the horses. Do you hear me? I have powerful friends and tools at my disposal. I have nothing to interest the likes of you. You can just do your business and leave, thank you.
The morning is bright. I am confident the horses can’t see me through the flyscreen. All the same, one of them raises its head and charges right through the nice new patio door.
*
Outside, folks are counting the dead. They gather at the fountain, which is rank and murky with the bodies of rodents.
Everyone looks wounded and sorry for themselves. A heavy man with a head gash spits on the ground as I ride past on my bike, a bloody tooth dribbling slowly down his chin.
Most of what’s left has been trampled—the corpse of a wolf, some woodland things. A few household pets evidently inspired by the wild violence of the stampede. A dog wearing one of those anxiety vests. Something that seems to be a mule or skinny horse and about half a dozen long-legged, mud-coloured wading birds that couldn’t keep up. You’d think they’d all been run over by a tank. The street stinks like a nest.
A group has formed around my neighbour Jennifer, surveying the dismal scene. Her husband, Lloyd, is there with their baby, Margaret.
Are you okay? Jennifer asks me. What are you doing outside? Where are your parents?
There were some horses, I say. They kicked the shit out of my patio. I was lucky to get out.
A big bobcat got into the kitchen and scratched Lloyd on the hand, says Jennifer. We scared it off with a bar stool.
Lloyd’s hand has been hastily triaged with a towel. There doesn’t seem to be any blood, and he can hold Margaret just fine. They’re a fine young family. Many think they’re wise because they don’t own a television. When they first told me Margaret’s name, I thought they were making a joke.
This is it, Lloyd says gravely. This is our reckoning. We must think carefully about what we do next.
Are you sure it was a bobcat? I ask. What did it look like?
You don’t think I’d know what a bobcat looks like? When it’s right in my face, trying to kill me? You’re dumber than I thought possible.
I gesture for Lloyd to pass me Margaret, but he moves her further away.
Where are your parents? Jennifer asks again.
There are sirens somewhere off in the direction where the animals ran. Everywhere we step there are pieces of tile or splintered letterbox posts. Neighbours collect the larger debris and fortify the soft points in their hedgerows. They start fires to burn the dead animals. A team of children push together on the belly of a camel until its eyes bulge out. If not for the violence, you could mistake it for a street party.
I’m on my way to meet them now, I say, wheeling my bike around. They’re enjoying lunch nearby.
You’re going out there?
I am, I have some chores to do.
Nobody tells me that it’s too dangerous for a child; nobody thinks of stopping me, though Jennifer does look concerned. Once, I called their home and left a message—
Leave him, I said. Leave Lloyd. There’s so much we both have yet to experience. Bust me out of here; it’s time to start our journey—but as far as I know she never listened to it.
Take it easy when you see Kenneth, she says. This might be too much for his little body.
I leave the folks to comfort their families. The younger unsupervised kids chase after me, holding the bones of something small above their heads. Everyone I pass is hugging or whispering or weeping, talking with their heads close together, looking at the dirt, or at the clouds like they’re waiting for rain. They stare into each other’s eyes, doing the things strangers do when they’re alone, things I’m usually forbidden from seeing.
*
I ride slowly up and down Main Street, then Little Main Street, breathing all the new air. I turn left at the river and start passing the roads with river names. The morning is peaceful but for the signs of the stampede’s path.
A family sheltering in the branches of a planter tree shout down to ask me the time. Smoke billows from the library’s after-hours return slot. At an intersection, a school bus with fogging windows sits wrecked with a lacrosse team still inside, the players peering out at me from behind their black masks. The crab tank in the front window of the Chinese restaurant sits empty but intact, picked clean by bandits. In front of the hardware store, some white-haired, rotary club types, hands in the pockets of their windbreakers, debate what to do with a crippled ostrich heaped in front of them on the pavement. Its eyes are the colour of oil seep.
What news do you have? one calls as I pass.
No survivors, I say. I’m scouting ahead for the military. They’re going to come through and start icing anything that moves, so you’d better keep your heads down.
Military? another asks. What did he say? Are there looters? What are they doing about looters?
As far as I know, they’re treating them without compassion, I say. I’ll tell them to take it easy when they come through here.
The ostrich struggles to stand and the men all recoil. It is helpless, but still they fear it.
I know who this one is, one of them says. This one starts fires.
You’re mistaken, sir, I reply. I’m new here. Our house still has the sale sign in the front yard.
Just keep your hands to yourself and don’t cause any stink, he says. I know who your parents are and I won’t hesitate to bang on your door. We’re in enough trouble as it is. Begone from here, you evil little pig!
Better watch out, I say as I push my bike back onto the road. I had a teacher once who had a monkey. She pushed it too far. They’ll do what they can to make you unrecognisable, even the small ones.
*
For a long stretch there’s nobody to speak to, not a living soul in sight. The warpath leads out into the hills where the unpaved refinery roads begin out of nowhere. Here there is less to destroy. Some evenings, if my brother, Kenneth, is in a mood, my father will drive him out to watch the ceaseless movement of the trucks carrying in red sand and carrying out loads of something hidden under tarps.
A fire truck wheels past me with its lights on but with no siren sounding. I give a nod to the driver, but nothing is returned through the dark glass.
The only homes out this way are old workers’ cottages. I see an old man wandering between his yard and the shadow of his doorway, naked and filthy with blood. He has a grisly mess of a magpie in his hands, torn in two. He drops the bird onto a heap he’s collecting in his yard and then turns back inside. This may be the first of my tests.
Kenneth has always been applauded for devotion to Bible study, but the truth is he can’t read anything that doesn’t feature some form of outlandish magic. The dead pulling themselves from the sandy earth, God’s most heinous curses, cities lifted on foul winds and transported who knows where. He begs me to act out the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah—impossible, with its expansive cast and hefty action, not to mention all the emotional hubbub. If I refuse, he sinks into himself like a piece of fruit decomposing. I am treated as the caretaker of these vile turns.
Once I buried him to his neck in the woods and later led the search party that saw to his rescue. My parents, I know, think of it every time they look at me—every time I ask them to buy me ice-cream or to set me loose for a night. It follows me like a hunter.
You’re bleeding, I call to the old man.
Do you carry medicine for pain? he says. Anything for stress or the heart?
Sure, I say. But I gave it all to a family that was begging back there. They were just about on death’s door, so they were lucky I turned up.
Birds got me in the shower, he says. Melissa is still in there.
In the shower?
We were bathing. I don’t think she should move.
Well, I say. What do you want to do about it?
His home looks ransacked, every window broken. A terracotta dragon lies shattered on the kitchen floor. Blackbirds hang snapping and trapped in the flyscreen as we enter.
Melissa’s heart’s no good, so don’t act like a stranger in case it sets her off, the old man warns me.
The woman is sprawled in the shower with her legs stretched out on the bathmat. She is tall and wasted. Pink water collects across the tiles.
Keep your eyes closed, honey, the old man tells her.
Who’s that? the woman says without looking up. What’s happening? I need water.
The man leaves to find a cup and the old woman raises her hand from her face and grasps through the air. I take her hand quickly, feeling the thrill of touching a stranger dying in her bathroom.
Tell me something, she says. Speak, George, I shouldn’t sleep.
Okay, I say. I read that just before a tsunami hits in Japan all the dogs start acting funny, like they know what’s about to happen. They go insane and bite people and try to kill their owners. They haven’t been trained to do it.
God in heaven, the old woman says.
It happens with earthquakes too and maybe fires. Near-miss comets, financial disasters. I think they know something we don’t and they’re trying to tell us. That or they’re getting their own back before it’s too late.
A dog bit me, she says. They’ll want to give me a shot for it. I won’t let them. I can’t do any more of those.
A bird got you, I correct her. There are no dogs here, they’re all gone.
The old woman opens her eyes and looks at me for the first time. Her eyes are the same bathwater colour all old folks have. She tries to release my hand, but I grip hers tighter. She begins hiccuping, wide-eyed in fear.
Is it your heart? I ask.
*
I crawl under the playground slide at one of the refinery’s onsite childcare centres to hide out and sleep through the worst of the heat, getting dust up my nose. I dream that I’m still in the school orchestra, waiting for my big moment when I get to crash the cymbals together. I can feel the audience waiting, too. Hundreds of them, longing for me to do something incredible, something they’ve never seen before.
*
I wake sweating, starving in the dusk. The evening is breathless and for a moment I can’t make sense of who I have woken up as. With a brick, I destroy one of the last unbroken windows of the childcare and climb carefully inside.
All have fled, leaving behind backpacks, art supplies and posters about how to tell the time. The orange quarters in the kitchenette are pitiful—they make me feel pitiful—and the tap water tastes like cement. There aren’t even any animals to smash with my brick.
There is no breeze here, but I can hear wind whistling far away in the hills, signalling something. All is done for, it says. You have trespassed too far.
And what do you have to show for your transgressions? Your mother’s hair is grey with worry. What grace did you show her? What can be salvaged at this late hour?
I have tried, I say.
Put down your brick. Find someone who can love you.
I have tried to love my brother, I say.
I know.
*
Across town the power is out and the streets are long with menace. It’s late by the time I manage to navigate my way home. Embers from little street fires still smoulder and the stink hangs in the dark branches of the oak trees on Little Main Street. Inside the stranded school bus, the lacrosse team chants.
One house still has light. As I approach I see that the neighbourhood has gathered at Lloyd and Jennifer’s home. A generator sits in the driveway and I follow trails of party lights out into the backyard. Folks sit around on blankets, eating food from paper plates and chatting like it’s any other summer night. They ignore me as I pass inside.
In the kitchen, quiet and crowded, all attention is on something going on in an adjoining room. Jennifer and Lloyd are leading a prayer circle around someone misshapen lying in the centre of the room, barely breathing. It takes me a moment to realise it’s my brother.
Look who found his way home, whispers Jennifer when she sees me. He came back through everything.
Kenneth is laid out with flowers around him. There’s a juice box gripped in his little hands. His eyelashes flicker in the candlelight.
Are my parents here?
Jennifer shakes her head and motions for me to lower my voice. Kenneth couldn’t say what happened, she whispers. He was so tired.
He’s alive?
He came a long way.
I’ll watch over him, I say.
This goes down about as well as you might think. Lloyd clears his throat. Some of the praying folk look at each other. But Jennifer nods.
You will stay with him? she says. You will keep your brother safe through the night?
I will.
You will keep the beasts from taking him and the birds from tearing his clothes? You will wave away the flies who try to lay eggs in his hair?
The animals are gone, I say.
But you will keep watch for their return, forgoing all earthly needs except maybe the toilet? You will keep us safe?
I will. Anything.
The men and women praying appear relieved. Folks who’d once looked at me like I was a scrap of paper clutch my arm warmly as they filter past to the party outside. Is it really this easy? They take with them their party supplies: picnic baskets, loaves of white bread, jugs of cordial. I watch from the doorway as they laugh and fall into one another. I ache for it. I want my parents’ hands. My brother’s body glistens in the light like it’s made of wax. His tiny breath comes and goes. I fall asleep almost immediately.
The animals will return but they will not find Kenneth. I’ll be half-dreaming when they first appear and will keep my eyes shut as they tear through the house and annihilate the guests, ruining the garden party. I’ll rise long after everything has turned quiet again and any survivors have fled. The blood will be appalling.
Outside, I will find baby Margaret crying beneath a picnic basket. She will seem heavier than she should be despite consisting of barely anything. The only other baby I’ve held is my brother and he was already six months old before it was safe enough to do so. Otherworldly.
Was there something wrong with him? No, they assured me, he was perfect.
What dream was I dreaming when the animals came? If we lie down and concentrate on it, we can see it again. If we close our eyes long enough, it will begin. Right from the start, long before things went wrong.
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