Picnic Benches
no poem's a balm
The man heard the harsh blare of the sirens returning and cut from the road into the nearest house, a dilapidated clapboard bungalow, the lawn grossly overgrown. He could feel the hairs on the back of his neck standing in alarm, giving him a shiver despite the cloying summer heat.
The front door—originally a bright red but now more of a sun-faded pink, the paint peeling away in large, curled flakes—stood partially open. The bottom corner of the door was stuck and the man had to lean into it to get it unstuck. As he put his shoulder against the door, he noticed the grooves dug into the hardwood flooring from the door’s long-neglected edge.
The floor entryway was dusty and flecked with trash and soil and bits of crushed leaves. The frontmost rooms were all empty save for the random detritus spread about on the floor. The man’s anxiety soared as the sirens warning echoed across the urban landscape.
He was searching frantically for a basement entrance, someplace to take refuge, going room to room, when he stopped at the entrance to a large room, the setting sun casting a dim haze in the dusty air. He recoiled in horror to find the entire surface of the room’s floor in a jumbled mess of human bodies. There were so many people on the floor, his mind struggled to place which limbs were whose. Many of them turned their heads towards him (if they were able), others turned just their eyes. This knot of glassy-eyed humanity implored him with silent, desperate longing, as if he somehow would be able to save them from their uncanny situation.
Reflexively, the man took a sharp step backwards, but before he could exit the room fully, a hand reached out from the mass of bodies and grabbed his ankle with startling strength. The man tugged at his his leg with frantic urgency, but it was useless. The hand held firm.
“No! Let me go, goddammit!” he cried out.
The man stomped on the grasping wrist with his free leg, almost losing his balance and falling to the floor, no doubt doomed to join the mass had he done so. He placed his hands on either side of the doorway, bracing himself, and just managing to keep himself upright. Eventually he was able to free himself, stomping the arm so hard he heart the wet snap of breaking bones. The bile rose in his throat. But there was no time for this. He needed to find safety.
Escaping the house, the man began running again down the road, the sirens continuing their piercing wail, and the far cry of car alarms going off reverberating all around him. He passed under an overpass, cutting through a dry and dusty trash-strewn no man’s land dotted with rusty shopping carts and abandoned furniture.
An older man dressed in rags, his long grey unkempt hair hanging in matted clumps, called out in a ragged, husky voice, “Hey boy, c’mere. Right now. NOW!”
The man, unaware of the old man until almost running into him, picked up the pace, sprinting under the overpass to get away from the strange old man.
He came across a wide, brick commercial building, the identifying lettering on the wall faded to the point of being unreadable. Making a split-second decision, he turned for the building. He found the door unlocked and went inside.
The door opened into the length of a hallway spanning so far in either direction, he was unable to see either end. Without stopping to think about it, the man randomly took the right side of the hall. His footsteps echoed along the empty space, and the distant sound of the sirens kept up their cries in the distance, keeping him tensely vigilant. He knew that the coming attacks would likely level every single structure for miles in every direction, and that if he didn’t find shelter soon, he might well die terribly, just as so many others already had.
When he came across a pair of hospital-styled swinging doors, he pushed through them and discovered a smattering of people lined up against the walls of another long hallway, some were families from the look of them, several were elderly, clinging to their earthly belongings, and a number of visibly alarmed pets.
A terrible rumble began to emanate from outside, and the building abruptly started to violently shudder, causing many of the people in the hall to cry out.
Fuck, the man thought, it’s begun.
“Quickly, everyone, we need to get the fuck out of this hall, let’s go,” he shouted, waving his arms at the people lining the walls.
The people rose to their feet, following his direction, all but one small boy who clapped his hands to his ears, frozen in fright.
Just as the man was about to pick up the boy and carry him himself, there was a massive explosion directly outside and an ensuing shockwave that violently blew the doors off and into the hall, knocking the man to the ground. He felt the sharp stinging bite of thousands of pieces of glass and debris raining across his back.
He regained his senses and stumbled to his feet and then felt a tide of liquid wash across the floor of the hall, soaking his feet and almost causing him to slip and fall again. And then he was hit with the acrid smell of ammonia, choking his lungs as he inhaled and causing his eyes to water and burn.
He squeezed his eyes shut to keep out the noxious fumes and shouted “Run!” down the hallway in case anyone else remained stuck in place, too scared to move.
After what felt like an eternity but was only a matter of seconds, the man reopened his eyes. The air still smelled faintly of ammonia. The power had gone out in the building and he couldn’t see anything in front of him save for broken pieces of the building and a swirling cloud of dust particles backlit from the outside light now shining from behind him, no doubt due to the outer wall being blown away.
With nowhere else to go, he turned around and climbed over the rubble and eventually found himself engulfed in a radically transformed landscape. All of the buildings within sight were either completely obliterated or damaged to the point of being unrecognizable. Random portions of walls stood mutely, inexplicably having withstood the blast. Broken aboveground roadways dropped to the ground, some of their spans now meaningless towers jutting into a lethal sky.
It dawned on him that he was surrounded on all sides by total silence. No sirens, no alarms, no anything. Just a deafening silence so total, he thought he might lose him mind if he continued to pay attention to it.
Having no idea where to go, and with no remaining identifying landmarks to guide him, the man stumbled off into the debris field. The acute terror he’d felt prior to the attack was now replaced with a resigned numbness. Every once in a while another person would crawl out from the rubble and wander about aimlessly as he did, lost and broken. No one spoke, himself included. Each lost in their own personal hell.
He came to a collapsed building and came to a halt. The sound of frantic, muffled voices came from somewhere beneath the heap. He went to the mess and began to locate where the voices were coming from hoping to rescue those trapped, but the rubble was an impassable tangle of brick, wire, and wood, all precariously jumbled together in a terrible puzzle. Before he could even locate the people trapped beneath the rubble, the whole thing groaned and then shifted to one side, causing a chain reaction in which the entire mess collapsed into itself, coming to rest in an even tighter mass.
The voices had stopped.
The man moved on.
He followed what remained of a highway, the shattered pavement of multiple lanes his only guide.
He walked for so long he lost track of time. He passed miles of destruction. The city was now an impossibly vast hellscape. Eventually—he had no idea when or how he found himself there—it dawned on him that he was now passing through an empty but intact section of the city. There was no damage to be seen. It was as if he’d left one kind of nightmare for another. He came to an area where the highway he was following rose up, arching over a chaotic tangle of other routes in various directions. There was an unending clot of cars, gridlocked on the highway, bumper to bumper. An exodus of humanity all heading away from the center of the city. The heat and heavy exhaust from the running vehicle’s engines was stifling. The man walked between two of the lanes, occasionally having to twist to the side to avoid the mirrors of the cars which were too close to each other. Never once did he effort to peer into a single car, never taking even a glance at the people locked inside. He simply continued his silent march, ever forward.
In time he found himself someplace else, again utterly unaware of how or when he got there. He was now walking through a suburban neighborhood at night. The delicately fragrant blossoms of the pink powderpuff trees and thick waxy magnolia flowers filled the air. There was an occasional house whose rooms gave off a subtle amber glow that lit portions of the otherwise near-total darkness from the dense canopy of mature trees. The hum of air conditioning units kept up their constant song.
He started to notice the sound of a voice blaring from a loudspeaker of some sort, far enough away to fade in and out of earshot. The sound grew louder, putting the man on edge. Whatever it was was on the move and getting closer to him. Finally the yellow beams of headlights edged into view several blocks down from him. A large flatbed truck turned in his direction, hopefully too far to spot him. The man reflexively knew that he needed to avoid being seen by the people in the truck so he ducked into the darkened driveway of a large two-story house, its lights mercifully extinguished.
He made his way into the back yard and then crouched down behind a tool shed along the fenceline.
As the truck approached the voice on the loudspeaker become clear. A strong, confident male voice bellowed forth, loud even from his hiding place well behind the house.
“We’ve already seen you. He has seen you. We know you are here, and we will find you. Don’t anger Him. It would be,” the voice paused a beat, “unwise.”
I need to get the fuck out of here, the man thought. he could feel beads of sweat running down the sides of his face and neck. He need to move. Now.
He began to climb the slatted wooden fence around the perimeter of the yard. It stood around 15 to 20 feet tall by his estimate. It took considerable effort, but he finally lifted one foot over the top edge and let himself drop into the adjoining yard, landing hard, momentarily knocking the breath out of him.
The yard was large and manicured to the point of being obsessive. Fashionably modern decorative lights lined the paved walkways, and densely-planted flower beds were planted throughout. A warm yellow light cast out across the yard. The man peered inside the house and saw a large living room with an arched and vaulted ceiling. Bright recessed lighting sat in the sloped ceiling.
The man tried the back door to the house, finding it unlocked, and went inside, finding himself in a large nicely-appointed kitchen. The dishwasher was running and he could smell the clean scent of the detergent. Passing through the kitchen and around a corner, the man now stood in a large formal dining room. A long glass dining table spanned the space. Four people sat at the table. A man sat at the foot of the table, sipping from a glass of red wine. To his right, an elegant middle-aged woman was serving a young boy something from an ornate serving plate. Across from these two sat an even younger girl who was playing with her food, absentmindedly pushing it around her plate with a child’s fork. The man at the head of the table saw the man first, putting his wine glass down on the table. The woman and boy looked up at him in turn, a cold, unnerving blankness on their faces as they regarded him with seeming indifference. The girl turned around and regarded the man as well. She smiled, almost imperceptibly, and the sight of it filled him with fear.
They all sat there for several seconds in silence, no one moving or saying a word. And then the man ran from the room and found his way to the front door. He exited the house and ran out into another tree-lined street. He bolted to the right, clueless where it led but hoping to avoid the truck.
He ran until he had exited the neighborhood, passing along the outskirts of another unnamed city. He kept going until he reached a bar sitting in one corner of a four-way intersection. The faint sound of music could be heard from inside the bar. Stepping over a muddy puddle in the gutter along the curb, the man made for the bar entrance.
He stepped into a dark room, devoid of people. The stale smell of old beer and cigarettes seemed to radiate off every surface. A row of dartboards lined a side wall. He followed the sound of the music, leading him past the bar and into a low-ceilinged nook with the entrance to the bar on his right, a commercial kitchen with stainless steel appliances and sterile fluorescent light to his left, and a spiral stairway leading down before him. The music wove its way up the stairs, its draw on him irresistible.
He wound his way down the stairs into a dank storage room filled with restaurant, bar, and cleaning supplies, and stacks of unused chairs and tables. The wall facing him had a heavy-looking metal door, through which he could make out the music. He made his way through the storage room and pushed the bar to open the heavy door.
He stood in an outside patio area. A number of well-worn wooden picnic benches were scattered throughout, most topped with napkin dispensers and plastic ashtrays. There was a small stage covered with a wooden awning, just above ground level and lit by numerous candles of varying size. Four older men sat in a semicircle playing strange instruments. The music had a pleasantly lilting folky sound, putting the man immediately at ease. A portly, flush-cheeked elderly woman with a soft, kind face was singing in a language the man couldn’t place. She stood in front of the band, one hand held aloft as if she were conducting the men. The gentle sway of her oddly beautiful voice held the man rapt.
The band continued to play as the woman stopped singing and glanced at the man standing before them. A slight smile barely lifted the corners of her mouth. Her eyes twinkled in the candle light. And then she spoke.
“You have arrived,” she said, and then she gestured towards the closest table, urging him to sit. He sat.
She picked up the song once again, and the man sat there at the table and cried.