Kathe Koja
A third straight day of steady rain, the studio driveway is a slurry and only the jeep can get through to the main road, but the crabapple blossoms are still intact, white on the branches against the line of windbreak trees, the field’s brown tapestry of mud and weeds, the trio of tents sitting sodden and determined, as if they have grown up from the ground.
The building’s back door creaks opens, Gussie stepping onto the puddled concrete steps, zipping up a yellow fleece jacket, frowning at the rain, glancing at his phone—
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—and “Quick smoke?” Karim appearing behind him, propping open that steel door, lighting up a ragged blunt and “Mess out there,” peering at the rain and the tents. “You know they bury their shit out there? Never thought Ilias would let them stay.”
“If they weren’t Minos-people,” Gussie’s shrug, one thumb aimed toward the road, “they’d be gone. But that’s Illy’s religion too. Keeps him going through everything that’s flying around.”
“Like booking Julian Zero?” and Karim’s laugh half humor, Gussie shakes his head; they smoke in silence until “Religion,” Karim says, “my aunty used to take me to church, for the singing—‘I will meet you/Meet you in the middle of the air,’” chanting, tapping time on his hipbone. “Her church was all about the rapture.”
“What kind of rapture?”
“The end, you know. End of the world.”
“How’s it end?”
“I don’t remember.”
A slow puffed explosion of smoke, the wind blows that smoke back into their faces, the fine edge of the rain and “Probably should get back to it,” Gussie says, handing back the blunt.
“I won’t lie, it’s hard to stay focused. Remember how it was on Forking Paths? Nothing hits the same since.”
“I know. Not for anybody. I tried to tell Suze that, but . . .” and Gussie shrugs, Karim gives a comradely nudge, hand to the door as Gussie takes one last glance at the rain, at his phone—
1 in 4 now believe in human resurrection
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—then follows Karim, the door closing behind them with a little audible thunk. Slowly the rain lessens, then stops, the drops trembling on the blossoms, the branches, the ragged rusted lines of the machines left to die in the yard. A tac light flashes bright and brief from inside one of the tents, as three people in anoraks and boots emerge and begin to dance, dancing without audible music in the mud and the weeds, they are dancing still as the unseen sun goes down and the early moon rises, rises in the middle of the air.
