All Fall Down

There’s a framework on which John hangs his ideas, a scaffold of sparrow bones tied with strings of seaweed and goldenstalk grass. From these he makes his grand plans, from timid to bold they go, from chthonic to sun-exposed.

Mira’s mind withered over the placement of the rock in the garden. It grumbled like a lump amongst the apricot foxgloves and blush-dark peonies. The family heirloom, her father said, but no longer. The rock is ungainly, with knees and armpits, and encrusted with dried moss, and now with more mud and grit than she remembered. Her father used to have them play “ramble rock” on holidays, his version of rolling your pastelized egg, where the child who got it the farthest across the field before tiring out or getting bored, won.

Falling over the cliff, the stomach of an airline drop, a slow rending of his chest as first his clothes peel away, then each layer of skin, past fascia, past breastbone, enclosing heart, squeezing, releasing only slightly as John takes in a breath to sob again.

He unfolds his hands, opens his eyes, and looks up. He hopes it had all been a mistake. There were digital glitches in computers that disappeared as suddenly as they had come. Why not the physical world?

Before he’d closed his eyes, before his heart had gone bloodless, John had seen his scaffold collapsed at the foot of his workshop. Here was where he had hung his plans, tentative to explosive. Here was his secret path. Children not allowed to touch, much less see. Here was where he’d get the family onto the better path, the one where their entertainment wasn’t pushing a rock around in the sodden, barren fields. He had hung the strands of his fiancée’s hair there once, and now they were married. He had woven her toenail clippings into blankets of moss from the family rock for the healthy birth of Mira. And last, he had balanced intentions and grape stems in a mobile, suspended precariously off the side, to get them a place in town, a place where he would upgrade their lives, add value, sell wine instead of grapes.

He had the shopfront picked out. He had sold the last hay bales for two barrels as his start. There were townsfolk who smiled at him, who would be his first customers. But the spots had appeared this morning, not just grape must, not just dust, but a cream-colored powder, sulfur yellow in the dawn light. The vineyard would die. Unless, upon re-opening his eyes, the scaffold remained.

Anthony St. George lives on an island amongst ravens and river otters and is currently working on a speculative fiction novel set partially in Patagonia. More of his published flash and literary, experimental, and speculative short fiction can be found at: https://anthonystgeorge.com 

A Song for Anthony