—ever lie to me again!”
father said.
I was airborne, mid-consequence of his punch: feet off the floor, pain just beginning…
I fell.
Standing over me:
“I’ll burn your books queerboy. I’ll burn you.”
I heard the words upside-down.
Such was life.
Mother was gone, and in the morning I went to class swollen and mis-hued, hoping my bones were whole.
I lived in a small town, dry as cremation, speared by church towers, anchored by the factories.
Father worked in one.
Big fists.
I read books not to become him.
There was a spot overlooking town, looking down on it, that I went to learn the exit routes.
Escape as horizontal lines of printed symbols: being sounds: being ideas.
At night: the stars.
When Orliss bought the property nobody knew anything about him except he wasn’t from around.
He kept to himself and rarely went to town.
First time I met him was before the church. “You believe in that?” he asked. I said I didn’t, and he said he didn’t either. “I’m an astronomer,” he said.
He started construction of the lighthouse then.
Though nobody knew what it was.
“Somebody beat you?” he asked the second time we met. I told him who and why, and he said I could go to his place and read all his books. I said father wouldn’t let me. He said I could say I got a job. I said father would check for earnings. He said he’d pay me.
So it was.
One day I showed up purple with a tooth loose.
Orliss told me he was building a lighthouse. “Not a normal lighthouse—a cosmic lighthouse.”
“To disperse the asteroids,” he said.
So it was.
One day father hit me so hard he broke my ribs. I was away awhile, and when I went back, Orliss sat with me under the stars, looking down at the world, and said I should kill my father and work as a cosmic lighthouse keeper.
He gave me poison, which I gave father; and father died, crawling on the floor, scratching at his own suffocation foaming at the mouth like a rat.
It was mixed feelings I had.
Then I was alone.
Spending more time reading myself to myself.
Orliss taught me how to work the lighthouse, how to detect the asteroids and disperse them.
One day, when Orliss was old, an alarm went off in the lighthouse. It was like nothing before, and was pain in my ears like a wallop, but Orliss smiled. “It is becoming,” he said.
I did not understand.
Orliss laughed and explained the lighthouse wasn’t a lighthouse at all but a beacon: a magnet calling asteroids to slaughter the world.
“The end approaches,” he said.
I said we should be salvation for the world.
“What world?” he asked. “The one in which fathers beat their sons, and sons murder their fathers?”
“Bad world deserves slaughter. There be goodness only in its blood,” he said.
So it was—