Read Online The Deadheart Shelters by Forrest Armstrong - Free Book Online
Authors: Forrest Armstrong
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was alone. I could see them looking at me through the airplane windows. The sheep started to moan on the hay, kicking their hooves in it. Then I heard a crack and squeak like mouse-trapped mice and a sheep’s head blew out in baseball-sized circles of red. The apes were shooting at the airplane.
The airplane tried to take off with missing parts and exploded. Like a stumbling horse made of stovetop flame. It was beautiful in a way, until my head banged off the blacktop and the apes were on top of me. Then I don’t remember things in the actual motion of their occurrence, but parts disorganized in reverse and fast-forward. They knocked stray shots all near me but never hit. They weren’t interested in hitting, only getting rid of obstacles. They held me down and outturned my pockets and I remember them half in and out of the night behind them, sometimes just stars like sugar cubes on a black seal with no faces standing in front of them or gunshots making me deaf. I couldn’t hear until the next day. On my walk home, I could see the spotlights on my shoes from the gunmen, but they couldn’t protect me now. I came to understand I was broke.
I lay in bed, staring at the paint gooped on the ceiling like Braille and pretending my pillow was a fish in a boat, with a heartbeat unwinding into mouse footsteps and then that un-stuttering buzz that doesn’t beat. Something else suffering I could burden myself to without being afraid of blemishing. The covers were over me like I was going to fall asleep, but I spoke to the fish until I believed in it. I said, “Nobody would know how hard it is until they have it; I never woulda guessed it would be so hard. It makes everything be there. Then the things stay because you think you’ll always be able to give to them, and then a bunch of monkeys break out of their cages with guns and take it all away from you and who will believe it! I have nothing!”
The fish wasn’t listening. I blinked, and opened my eyes in an aquarium, levitating with an oxygen tank and knots of computer mesh in the water. Bullets were pinging off my helmet, like when a nickel drops in the sink. An octopus burst from the engine of a drowned car and pushed over to the gunmen, strangling them snowfrost-blue, one at a time, and then the roof opened up and it felt like putting eye drops in—
“Come up!” a voice said, distorted by its travel underwater to sound like a tremolo pedal. “That thing will eat you all!”
“Throw a rope down!” I said, my voice I imagine equally obscured.
“There is no rope, there is no time. You must make your own way up.”
“I’m too far down!”
“Turn your money into boxes, and make them a staircase.”
“What?”
“Your money. Your money will free you.”
“I have no money!”
“No money?”
“The apes took it!”
The voice stopped talking. I looked up at the face, formless like an amoeba on a microscope slide. Then the roof closed and it was dark again.
I remember I was throwing up into my pillowcase. I didn’t think it was a fish anymore. From then on, I started to keep my money in the bank, where nobody would touch it but the tellers in surgical gloves.
They told Dirt and me to go alone into a new part of the mines. This area was empty, so we walked disappearing through the frictionless gloom.
The black was what we all took home from the mines, but in one of those coal rooms with six men wearing head-flashlights it happens that we make white in between the black. Here, alone with Dirt, that white was anorexic.
The dark folds over you and you dissolve.
“You notice how mechanical this is?” Dirt said.
“What is?”
“All things.”
“I bet I notice it less than you.”
“Why don’t you ever talk about the slaves? You never talk about the slaves.”
“I don’t like to.”
“But it’s just us today.”
“It’s always just us. Don’t you think I’d talk about it if I wanted to?”
“I want to know about them. Do you think
The airplane tried to take off with missing parts and exploded. Like a stumbling horse made of stovetop flame. It was beautiful in a way, until my head banged off the blacktop and the apes were on top of me. Then I don’t remember things in the actual motion of their occurrence, but parts disorganized in reverse and fast-forward. They knocked stray shots all near me but never hit. They weren’t interested in hitting, only getting rid of obstacles. They held me down and outturned my pockets and I remember them half in and out of the night behind them, sometimes just stars like sugar cubes on a black seal with no faces standing in front of them or gunshots making me deaf. I couldn’t hear until the next day. On my walk home, I could see the spotlights on my shoes from the gunmen, but they couldn’t protect me now. I came to understand I was broke.
I lay in bed, staring at the paint gooped on the ceiling like Braille and pretending my pillow was a fish in a boat, with a heartbeat unwinding into mouse footsteps and then that un-stuttering buzz that doesn’t beat. Something else suffering I could burden myself to without being afraid of blemishing. The covers were over me like I was going to fall asleep, but I spoke to the fish until I believed in it. I said, “Nobody would know how hard it is until they have it; I never woulda guessed it would be so hard. It makes everything be there. Then the things stay because you think you’ll always be able to give to them, and then a bunch of monkeys break out of their cages with guns and take it all away from you and who will believe it! I have nothing!”
The fish wasn’t listening. I blinked, and opened my eyes in an aquarium, levitating with an oxygen tank and knots of computer mesh in the water. Bullets were pinging off my helmet, like when a nickel drops in the sink. An octopus burst from the engine of a drowned car and pushed over to the gunmen, strangling them snowfrost-blue, one at a time, and then the roof opened up and it felt like putting eye drops in—
“Come up!” a voice said, distorted by its travel underwater to sound like a tremolo pedal. “That thing will eat you all!”
“Throw a rope down!” I said, my voice I imagine equally obscured.
“There is no rope, there is no time. You must make your own way up.”
“I’m too far down!”
“Turn your money into boxes, and make them a staircase.”
“What?”
“Your money. Your money will free you.”
“I have no money!”
“No money?”
“The apes took it!”
The voice stopped talking. I looked up at the face, formless like an amoeba on a microscope slide. Then the roof closed and it was dark again.
I remember I was throwing up into my pillowcase. I didn’t think it was a fish anymore. From then on, I started to keep my money in the bank, where nobody would touch it but the tellers in surgical gloves.
They told Dirt and me to go alone into a new part of the mines. This area was empty, so we walked disappearing through the frictionless gloom.
The black was what we all took home from the mines, but in one of those coal rooms with six men wearing head-flashlights it happens that we make white in between the black. Here, alone with Dirt, that white was anorexic.
The dark folds over you and you dissolve.
“You notice how mechanical this is?” Dirt said.
“What is?”
“All things.”
“I bet I notice it less than you.”
“Why don’t you ever talk about the slaves? You never talk about the slaves.”
“I don’t like to.”
“But it’s just us today.”
“It’s always just us. Don’t you think I’d talk about it if I wanted to?”
“I want to know about them. Do you think
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