Orson could not recall the man’s name, only that he’d been foolish enough to give him a ride out of town. People were real friendly on the outskirts of Little Rock, Southern hospitality and all that, or perhaps they did so in a bit of a performance to uphold the reputation. Out in the sticks, where there were not so many cars to pass or eyes to witness, the Southernest of the South were less than charitable, he found. At least, to him.
When Orson passed by, people came in off of their porches and he could practically hear them shuffle across their worn linoleum to their phones, to warn the neighbors, Hey Cheryl, some hobo-lookin’ man is comin’ down the road and headed right your way.
Orson’s mother had been a Cheryl, he duly noted, as he laid the man out on his back. The man was a farmer, with big open fields around his little white house where he’d promised Orson a baloney sandwich in exchange for a few hours of honest work. He figured that the man might like to be stretched out in the sun, eyes squinting at the sky and circled by wreaths of tasseling corn, love-pecked by his free-range hens before a nosy relative stumbled by. Earl, I was comin’ by because you ain’t answerin’ your phone and I—
Orson figured the man could have been an Earl. He looked like an Earl.
The man’s very blue truck wouldn’t get him far, not in a town like this, so Orson knew he had to walk. You could see America like that. In the ward there was not so much walking, and the concrete food they fed you was reason enough to make a man need a walk. Make a train take a dirt road, Orson’s father had always said. Food like that would make a train take a dirt road, icebox government lasagna nine layers of bullshit thick and weak tea to wash out the taste.
He walked past far-flung fields, townhouses and trailers and aspirational living. Little boxes on the hillside, little boxes filled with ticky tacky and when the fields gave way to forest and the clouds rolled up, an empty castle kept him warm and dry. Cheryl, I know it sounds crazy. But I think somebody was in my deer stand. They left Hardee’s wrappers and ass wipes. What do you expect, Earl, if you leave that stand out there all year? People are bound to get in it, and racoons and crackheads and whatever the hell else.
Sometimes the woods let up for neighborhoods to push through the earth and bloom, little boxes on the hillside and they all look just the same. But it was not the time for blooming, and the cold became his constant companion. Orson stuck to the edges of the trees and the sides of the roads because the people in those little boxes would not like the fact that he was coming around, especially not Cheryl. Little boxes filled with ticky tacky and—
The woods ended in another field, another farmhouse, but this place was different than where he’d been before. Had the world ended?
Orson marveled at the expanse of ruin. Battered cars and twisted metal were a flaking fungus jutting from the dirt, scores of them, like the aftermath of a drive-in movie during the Rapture. Pine trees pushed through the roofs of cracked Cadillacs and origami El Caminos and hot rods with names beyond knowing. He leaned in to inspect a ‘67 Mustang, once gold, once roofed. Foam poked out of busted leather seats and rusty springs curled in every direction, modern art dedicated to spreading tetanus awareness. An old barn loomed above the phantom car lot, stuffed to the brim not with hay or with animals, but trash. Some of it was tied neatly into bags, but most was loose, scrambled together, the raw entrails of a landfill laid bare. There was a house a hundred yards from the barn, and still more, a metal shop, football-field in magnitude, motorhomes, trailers, campers, fishing boats, plastic Christmas trees, mangled bicycles, 60s, 70s, 80s metal, scrap metal, more metal, wheelbarrows, garden pots, burn barrels, storage buildings bursting at the seams, piles of lumber covered in shredded tarps that blew in the wind like funeral shrouds.
Earl? Yes, Cheryl? How many times have I told you to clean up the fucking yard? The neighbors are going to get the wrong idea.
The trailer seemed to him a swollen womb, and an embryonic longing overtook Orson. The back door was easy enough to open, but getting in was wholly another issue. Now a spelunker into unknown caverns, Orson shimmied on his back over piles of this and that, his belly scraping the ceiling while he floated in on a sea of newspapers, old shoes, birth announcements, Precious Moments figurines, Dollar Tree bags, empty backpacks, feed sacks, encyclopedias, and mummified lumps of what might have once been fruit. The smell of it was an assault of the senses, a thousand years of rot, of waste not want not, rat king in a glue trap, still-born-puppy, peanut-butter smears crusted on the chintz flower walls, dog shit, cat shit, a used tea bag afloat on a cat piss ocean, liverwurst logs, hogs, dogs, chickens, frogs. But then—nothing was alive, Orson figured, as he crab-walked down to the base of the pile to find his footing. This was not a little box, he realized, but a hidden kingdom of which he could be lord.
The grand hoard of it all flowed and devoured like sand dunes, the entire Sahara trapped on the insides of a double-wide trailer, a warm place for a dragon to nest. Footpaths had cut through the Himalayan clutter by sherpas long before him, and he was grateful for their work. He curled himself between a stained couch cushion and a Dallas Cowboy’s felt blanket, and stopped his walking for a while.
The kitchen was fortified with larvae-laced pancake mix and a stove swimming in candy bar wrappers, tin cans of dubious contents, a sake set from Pier One Imports, and a tepid refrigerator that housed sticky, gray meats. He followed tunnels and game trails inside the house and studied walls that told ten-thousand tales, prom dresses and yearbooks and stained recipe cards and photo albums and magazines and cassette tapes and batteries frosted with corrosion and silent televisions and a China hutch stuffed with Box Tops for Education and bottles of Snapple in flavors that no longer existed and rabbit feet and plastic swords and starched jeans and winter coats and paintings not hung on the wall, a parakeet skeleton still in a cage, a posterboard painted like an Easter egg and yellowed newspapers that damned Bill Clinton from here to hell. A taxidermied deer was the cherry on the sundae, its ears cast down in melancholy and spun with cotton-candy cobwebs.
Cheryl? Yes, Earl? I can’t find my damned work boots. Have you tried looking up your own ass, Earl?
In one of the back bedrooms, there was a trove of twinkling crowns and tiny dresses fit for royalty, frills and sequins and scepters that sparkled even in the dimness, poked out of piles of twisted-up Barbie dolls, naked and soiled, binders of bad poetry, masquerade masks, dime novels, asthma inhalers, a hope chest full of cracking china, a tattered quilt spotted with blood. One of the few walls that were clear in the house had been scrawled on in garish lipstick, I am Ozymandias, King of Kings. Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair. And Orson had laughed and laughed and laughed, even if Cheryl and Earl didn’t get the joke.
The kingdom was his. Birds and the bees and the cigarette trees on the Good Ship Candy Lollipop, and everything in between. There were storybooks to tantalize and entertain him, cracked maroon vinyl full of the same faces over and over. The oldest one was a fairytale, Orson guessed, with a king and a queen raising their prince and princess, scrawny little things with big, hungry eyes. He supposed the princess had owned all those little dresses and crowns. Newer storybooks were few and far between, and held less souls than the older, fuzzier ones. Something awful had clearly happened. A curse? Daddy was gone, first, then Mommy and the kids. Whatever had happened, he reasoned, something had gone horribly, horribly, horribly, nine-layers-of-bullshit-wrong.
There was an arsenal in one of the closets, for those hearty enough to dig, guns and ammo and arrows and bows. Red Wings and duck calls and losing lotto scratchers, stratified layers of discarded lives. The only logical conclusion was that the world had ended and he’d been so busy walking that he hadn’t even noticed.
Hey, it’s me—I’m hurrying. If you don’t hear from me in the next hour, I’ve fallen in, so come get me—
“Cheryl? Earl?” Orson called out as he drifted to sleep, his voice as rusty with disuse as the cars in the yard. “Shut the hell up.”
A voice. Not an inside, Cheryl-and-Earl-voice, but someone talking outside his cave, his hoard, his kingdom. A woman, Orson realized, at the castle walls, coming at him quickly across a moat of chewed-up dog bowls and anthills and hedge mazes. He spied her through a sliver of mildewed window, her stomping assault through the overgrown lawn, tying her hair up as she pushed through bluestem bayonets and amber waves of grain. A conqueror.
She was clean beneath the messied patina of her recent hike in, and he vaguely noted the rumble of an idling car from the used-to-be driveway. Her cheeks bloomed red, kissed by the late-autumn chill, and the cockleburs and thorns suited her more than the yoga pants and expensive sneakers.
Orson bet she was from the state. Yes, she was too clean to be a burglar, too stupidly loud to be a cop, but what was—? Ah, there it was. The nose, that slope of the cheek, the ravenous eyes. Not a conqueror, then, The girl from the storybook. The cursed princess.
She was grown now, careworn on the edges, cracking like the heat-warped vinyl on the old storybook, and Orson wondered what sort of conditions could fracture a person like that, could grey them like old meat, to take the sparkle, and not the hunger, from their eyes.
He decided to watch. She was headed to the rear of the trailer, to the back bedroom. It wasn’t his favorite part of the kingdom, the decor a confusing timeline of yellowed Winnie-the-Pooh wall decals and a Scarface poster, ripped down the middle and emblazoned with a mysterious stain. This was where Orson kept his cans, once he’d cracked them open and feasted on the insides. The bed was long-covered, rounded out with more piles of treasure and loot beyond reckoning. A large shelf was covered by mangled, rodent-gnawed stuffed animals, the yellow polyester of a snuggly bear bright even in the gloom of approaching twilight. The closet was curiously uncluttered, and he was able to crouch beneath a row of women’s tops and dresses with the tags still attached, itching the top of his head while he crouched in wait.
“Goddamn it, goddamn it, goddamn it!” He could hear the woman hollering to herself outside the window. Then the scrape of a ladder, and a visceral wail as she tried and failed to lift the window.
Breaching his palace would not be so easy. Orson smiled and wrapped his hands around the butt of a forgotten gun, crusty with rust. How had that gotten there?
“You really should be more careful with where you store your guns,” Earl told Cheryl, and Cheryl told Earl to shut the hell up.
Glass shattered, again and again, even once the hole was large enough for her to begin to calculate entry. He wanted to tell her to shimmy through the shelves of the old computer desk that had fortified the window, but she didn’t have to be told. He listened with glee as her fingers grazed the swollen particleboard of the desk, brushing glass shards away until she could just manage to wedge through. A celebration of ratshit confetti filled the air as she plopped onto a pile of clothing and backpacks and suspiciously soggy newspaper.
She moved like a veteran despite the unmarred white of her shoes, knowing where to step and how to lean, creeping like a cat on snowshoes to avoid collapse, taking in great, gasping sobs beneath her pitiful paper mask. She wept and wheezed as she sifted through piles, illuminating inches at a time with her cellphone flashlight, crying and cursing and coming up short. Her wails faded as her breathing became rhythmic, deliberate, pushing through to the other side of some torment Orson could not deduce. Six inches of light here. Six inches there. Closer and closer until—
She froze when her light glinted off of Orson’s open eyes and the wet brown of his rotten smile, too stunned to even scream. He crawled out of the closet, shotgun in hand, to the nearby crest of a pile, taller than her, even as he remained crouched. Her eyes went from him, to the empty cans, to the shotgun, and back to him. To the hole in the broken window, so very far away. She gulped. Removed her mask.
“Who are you?” she trembled.
“I am Ozymandias, King of Kings,” Orson declared, and sat back on his haunches.
“Uh-huh.” The woman swallowed again before her breathing leveled and she tilted her chin up, obstinately. “I don’t care that you’re here. I won’t tell anyone. I just came for—”
She didn’t take her light off of Orson as she cast her eyes around, to the miracle of the oldest storybook at the top of the pile nearest the door. “That. Please.” Those hungry eyes bored into him as she begged. She eased backward to grab the storybook with her greedy fingers. “I will never come back here. Had never even planned to before—”
“I killed the last person who looked at me too long,” Orson informed her, and she flinched as he crab-crawled down the pile to come nearer. He tapped the storybook with a soiled knuckle. “They’re your people? The king and the queen and the prince?”
Her mouth moved on its own, trying the words out, tumbling them around to find meaning, until at last, she understood. “Yes. And no. And…the prince is dead. I just wanted…these are the only baby pictures we have. For the…funeral.”
Orson nodded, even as Cheryl and Earl screamed in his ears. Orson grabbed both of her wrists and leaned close into her face, savoring the lingering aromas of hazelnut coffee and graveyard dirt.
“What went wrong?” he rocked her hands that still clutched the storybook.
“Everything. Obviously. Um. The king and the queen and…a curse. There was a curse on the kingdom. And the family who kept everything saved nothing.”
“Did you break the curse?”
“I wanted to.” The woman began to cry silent tears. “We were supposed to break it together, him and me.”
“Maybe you can stay,” Orson pondered. “Maybe you belong here. Pieces of you are already all around.”
The woman shook her head, softly at first, and then with a ferocity that made him dizzy.
“Let me go.”
“Your things are here.”
“Let. Me. Go!”
She broke free of his grip, the album in tow, and her feet sent up rivulets of dust and spores and excrement with each step as he watched her leave.
Her laugh cracked like a felled tree when she got down the ladder and tasted fresh air, the raw madness of it blended with primordial cries. She sank to her knees and the tall grass whipped at her tears. She clutched the photo album to her chest, careful to keep the blood off of it. Then she remembered who she was, everything she had to do, and the stark horrors she’d only barely escaped. She ran back to the idling car without glancing back.
Orson breathed in the tendrils of cold that eked in from the broken window. The world outside the hoard was electric as day slipped away, the sky aglow with radioactive reds and oranges that burned for the living as much as they did for the dead. He knew he’d just watched someone be born.
Perhaps that blazing sky would burn her up for her trouble. Or maybe she was the sky and the paint and the colors and the old papers and the photos and dresses and the china and the rat shit and the grey meat and the—
Orson, dear?
Yes, Cheryl?
Come back to bed.
So he tucked himself inside the nest and luxuriated in the filth until his bones rounded out the hoard.
