Sun filters down through the ceiling cracks. I see a green tinge to it, dust floats like spit particles in absinthe. A storm is threatening, winds will soon scour the bomb scars, spill radioactive blood across the land. A crack of thunder rolls in the distance. In December before, I associated thunder with warmth. Watching rain lash against my bedroom window while safe among the cocoon of my bed, my books and my holotapes. I can still remember the smell of drenched bitumen, steamy during a summer downpour. The musty scent of belongings, Dads cigar smoke out on the front porch, mothers rose scented perfume. Maybe she left a row of washing on the line. I see her from the kitchen window, her floral dress flying backwards and sculpting her front like a death shroud, the clothing whipping in the wind as she frantically yanks it all down, bundles silk and cotton into a weaved basket.
In December during I associated thunder cracks with weapons. Bombs, gunfire, violence. When it rumbled across the wilderness I froze or else cowered like a prey animal. I'd clutch the bulge on my stomach, imagine men with jagged knives nearly the size of swords coming over a ravine, their black tar-pit eyes screaming with the want for blood. They'd gut me with ease, thrust the knife into my stomach, open it up like a cherry smile. My bulge would spill out, cradled in a coil of my innards. Lifeless, barely human. Pink and naked like a newborn animal.
Now in the December after, I look at thunder like an old nemesis. I move with its savage melody, this is my life.
Moving even an inch is taxing on my body. I wonder about that word right then, taxing. Who Is tolling me each time I move from a corpse-like stillness? Life I decide. It couldn't be death, that realm hedged closer each time my bones were dragged into action. I crawl across the wooden floorboards and sidle down into the square opening leading beneath the house. Is it a house I wonder, is there room for such sentiments anymore? I prefer the word shelter. Like bus shelters, a temporary roof before moving on, no attachments but maybe an etching in the wood, evidence that you existed at one point in time on that very spot.
I close the heavy hatch over and grope around for the unlit lantern left on the stairs. My fingers brush against the glass canister, a rattle as the thing balances on edge. Panic, reflex shoot into my clumsy fingers and the lantern jumps about in my hands until I secure it close to my chest. My heart thumps against the inanimate object, beats out to the pitch dark of the cellar. I remember the thunder, it died to the west and I was left in the dark with her kicking my stomach like a swollen second heart. Those days were gone. These days I still have sentiment for what I can carry. My backpack and its contents, my lantern and rifle.
The storm comes rolling in, thrashes through the house. Upending it all, tearing the furniture to kindling sized splinters, scattering bones across the land like burial debris. The hatch bangs up and down as if a giant is trying to get in. I wonder how much will be left once its safe to stick my head out. The ceiling might collapse and entomb the exit, a thought I didn't much care for but I couldn't conjure any alarm within the empty pit of my stomach. That's where my feelings once surged from, like electricity that lighted my face. Now all that came from there was pain.
In these moments the memories come back. Images against the darkness, projector photos of the aftermath and my family. Photos stuck at the back of my eyeballs, a blinking sideshow of what was, what is. I lay on the sleeping bag, turn on my side, a zipper juts against a shallow rib. My stomach burdens itself with the maneuver. Pain like a knife twisting through the belly button, a growl rockets up the abdomen. My body was punishing me for neglect.
I hug my knees, the knees of a stranger it feels like. A fetus within a concrete womb, once this is all over I will crawl into a brand new landscape of ruin.
This evening I go back to the start.