“I know the scriptures, Paul.”
“But does she?” He jabs a hand at the frail woman in dirty coveralls tending her vibrant pets. “Are any of our parents strong enough to live the hard truth? Or are they trying to make it softer?”
She prunes the leaves off a particularly bright bloom, and it’s hard not to see love in the smile it brings to her face.
“You heard the sermon last night,” Paul says. “The world wasn’t made to be loved. It was made to test us. ‘Not a home but a battlefield.’?”
I take the last puff of the cigarette and flick it away. The dry grass smolders.
? ? ?
I wake to the roiling red of the sun against my eyelids. I open them and glance around, gripped by a sudden guilty fear, but no one is watching me. No one can see the young man growing inside my head. I have woken from a nap in the sun, my friends are all around me—I have done nothing wrong.
I straighten, rubbing reality back into my skull. The air is hot. The city is quiet. Abram is clattering around in the nose of an ancient plane. M is sawing something.
“Marcus,” Nora says. She’s sitting on the runway with her legs crossed in front of her, her back against the plane’s tire, watching Sprout play with a screwdriver.
M pauses his work, leaving the square of aluminum dangling from the bottom of the plane. He looks down at Nora from his perch on the landing gear. “Yeah?”
“How much have you filled in?”
“Filled in?”
“Do you have a whole life now or is it still just sketches?”
I hear a raven croak in the distance. I wonder what it eats in this barren urban desert.
“It’s sketches,” M says. “But a lot of them. Like the ones for movies.”
“Storyboards?”
“Storyboards.”
He resumes sawing. A breeze whistles through holes in the terminal building, harmonizing with his saw.
“I haven’t watched a movie in ages,” Nora says with a melancholy smile. “Not since I was a teenager.”
“What was the last one?”
She thinks for a moment. “Return of the Living Dead?”
M chuckles.
“I know. Wasn’t my choice. I lost my taste for zombie flicks when they became real life, but I was in a prison pit and the guards were watching it, so . . .”
The sun has begun its descent, casting the airport in a surreal red-orange glow. Julie sits just outside the invisible border of the group’s company, beyond the range of conversation, staring into the rippling city. She hasn’t said a word since her last argument with Abram. I wonder what she’s thinking. I wonder if the dreams that trouble her are anything like mine.
“So tell me about your sketches,” Nora says, watching M cut his way toward her. “I’m curious.”
He completes the cut and the square drops out. It produces an eerie wobbling noise as he hands it down to Nora.
“Piano,” M says, staring into the plane’s exposed guts. “Loved playing piano.”
“Really!” Nora says.
He starts cutting another square. “Family was surprised too. Said I was too big for it. Said I looked like a circus ape.”
Nora is quiet.
“Never liked sports much,” he says over the whine of his saw, adding a gruff stiffness to his voice. “But in my family, big guys were wrestlers. So I wrestled.”
Fine bits of metal rain down from his saw, piling on the ground next to Nora. He glances down at her. “You should move. Don’t want to get it in your hair.”
She scoots out of the way. She watches Julie for a moment. “You okay, Jules?” she calls across the awkward distance.
Julie nods without turning around. It’s not reassuring. Nora raises her eyebrows at me and I realize I’ve been put on boyfriend duty. I approach my girlfriend, unsure of what I might be dealing with, and sit down next to her.
“Julie?”
“I’m fine,” she says. “Just thinking.”
She keeps the side of her face to me; I can’t quite get a look at her eyes.
“About what?” I ask, and cringe at how trite it sounds. Hey Julie, whatcha thinkin’ about?
She shakes her head as if to warn me off this ill-advised reconnaissance mission. I shut my mouth.
“What was your family like?” Nora is asking M. Their conversation seems safe enough, so I return to it, keeping Julie in my periphery.
“Mom left early. Grew up with Dad and two brothers. Don’t remember their names yet.”
“And I’m guessing they all died?”
She says it absently, twirling a bolt between her fingers. M stops sawing and looks at her, a small smile on his big lips. “Um . . . yeah. Probably.”
Nora nods. The typical modern family: deceased.
M finishes the cut and climbs down from the landing gear, drops the second square on top of the first: new windows for our battered aircraft.
“What about you?” he says, settling against the tire next to Nora.
“My family?”
“Yeah.”
Her gaze drifts out into the city to join Julie’s. Broken buildings. Buried streets. Ruins rippling in the queasy orange haze like a fever dream of loss.
“Never had one,” she says. “I grew out of the ground.”