‘Rapture’

Photographer: HP Yater is a nonbinary artist and poet from Eastern North Carolina, where they were raised by two Northern parents, a white mother and black father. So their perspective is normally one that is not often thought of or even considered, but they are always there taking notes in various colorful notebooks. They graduated from Lenoir Community College in 2015 with an Associates in Liberal Arts, while also in high-school they were president of the creative writing club for four years.

Rapture

The lights in the sky hum, sometimes. Not always, and not loud enough to notice on a windy night when the dips in the valley begin to howl. But it’s there, constantly in the background, like the buzzing of cicadas or frogs in their cool, damp caves.

When the streets started collapsing, old mining routes crumbling under the weight of our town, there was nothing to be done. Most families got out, but Ma wanted to stay here, stay where her family was buried. Stay where Pa was buried. When the power lines fell, big oak logs crashing against the dust, she said it was a sign from God, a sign that we shouldn’t ever have had electricity. This was a purging of our sins, she said, and she was a good, God-fearing woman. 

Now that there’s only a few of us left here, the lights are louder. The lights are brighter. They hang in the sky like stars, but we know they aren’t. You shouldn’t be able to hear the stars. 

CJ’s folks refuse to budge, too. Their blood has been here since Sweetwater was founded, and their blood will be here long after there are no maps to remember this town’s name. It was a curse, he’d say, steel-toed boots scuffing up the dirt. Dust devils followed CJ like the Devil himself. He’d pull his bandana, sun-bleached red, up over his nose, shaking his head. 

“A damn shame,” He’d croak, throat used to nothin’ but whiskey and sand, “I was born here and I’m gonna die here, and ain’t nobody ever gonna know.”

He was right about that first thing, at least. Wasn’t for lack of trying. He used to talk about us getting work up north, being hired onto some farm, herding sheep or working the fields. We’d be a team, looking out for each other, is what he said. When we were kids, he made me pinky-promise him that we’d get out, go anywhere, be something more than the blood in our veins and the noose around our throats. Buck-toothed and bright-eyed, our spit-covered palms squelching together like the writing of our names in the history books. “Any way out, you hear me?” Damn shame. 

When the clouds started falling right out of the sky, we stood and watched out by his family’s farm on the outskirts. We figured it might as well happen, not much more could surprise us now. We passed his flask between us, staring as the atmosphere came floating down around our home. The wind came back though, made it all go away. When the clouds went back to normal, that didn’t faze us either. 

CJ’s dad just called from the house, telling him to get started brushing down the horses. Neither the Second Coming or the plagues would stop his daily chores. He sighed, pressed the palm-warm flask into my hands, and kissed me through my handkerchief, breath smelling of bad ideas and lowered inhibitions. He grinned, fuzzy around the edges, and pushed me down the hill back to my place. 

My cheeks burned. This wasn’t the first, nor the last time I’d have his face so close to mine. Blood red sunsets and the smell of the earth and his teeth cutting into my bottom lip. This thing that we’d never talk about, lingering eyes and wandering hands and noises swallowed up by the other’s mouth when the moon was big and yellow and high in the sky behind the mountains. 

The Pastor didn’t leave neither. The end of everything seemed to be his greatest wish realized. Folks started going back to the chapel with the broken shingles and scratched wood floor, hoping to save their souls for God. If such a thing as God existed, it couldn’t hear us. Perhaps it was worried about more important people, more important towns, forgetting about tiny Sweetwater and our troubles. 

Then the cattle started disappearing. In the dark desert night, they would vanish. There was no rhyme or reason to whose was taken, nor the quantity or frequency of these thefts. The animals were simply just gone when we went to check on them in the morning. No sign of a struggle, just feed left half-eaten and doors still locked. 

By then, there were only a handful of us left. Houses stood abandoned in the dust of the desert, the seats of the saloon crowd went cold, and the stream of travelers passing through trickled to a stop. Sweetwater became a ghost town with a few of us left to tend the land. People kept leaving, moreso when the irrigation pipes started to break and wasn’t nobody left who knew how to fix them. We started collecting water in bathtubs, in buckets, in mugs and bowls and whatever else we could drag out of the house the few times it rained. It had stopped raining for a while though, and the only thing we could rely on was the cheap vodka that Old Johnny brewed in his basement.

Me and CJ would stand at the top of Hangman’s Peak and look out over our home, at what was our future and our past and the place our bones would decompose. Every time we went up there, more and more things were missing. Small specialty shops, people we knew, living rooms and roofs that had welcomed us more than the ones we were born into. All of it, gone. Just like the cattle. 

It was one of these nights, sun hanging fat and drunk on the horizon, spilling liquid gold across the earth, that he told me he was scared. We sat on the edge of the Peak, legs dangling off, an untimely death only so many feet below us. I had made fun of him for that – stopped laughing as soon as I saw the way his normally grinning mouth was pulled tight at the corners. 

I reached under his vest for that familiar flask and asked him why, trailing warm hands against the fabric of his shirt. 

“I think,” CJ cut himself off as I lightly scratched his side through his clothes, pulling out the drink as I went. “I think we’re living on something rotten. I think we’re being punished for whatever, whoevers’ land this is that we took.” He twisted the ring I gave him years back around his pointer. Sometimes he’d put it on his ring finger and act like he didn’t know what that meant. 

“Oh, don’t tell me you believe all that superstitious stuff. You’ll start sounding like the good Pastor.” I took a swig, half-convinced I could still taste him on the lip of the metal container. He had filled it with the nice shit, top-shelf stuff he couldn’t afford but could talk his way into getting anyways. 

“Hey, quit it. I’m bein’ serious, man!” CJ shoved my shoulder, continuing, “Just watch. Whatever killed those dinosaurs is coming for us, too.” At that, I just dropped his flask into his lap, and shoved him back, careful not to push too hard. “Wait and see,” he mumbled into the humid air. 

On nights like those, I swear I could already picture the wooden cross placed on the pile of dirt he’d lay under, his momma’s rosary strung round like shackles. But CJ never got a burial, or a funeral, or a wooden cross or a place to become one with the earth. 

Up above us, the early moon blinked in the not-yet-dark sky. I could only stare as its silvery shape got bigger, got closer, until we both realized it wasn’t no moon. No, it was something else entirely. And it was coming straight for us. 

CJ always had better reflexes than I — he was scrambling to his feet and pulling me up with him while I couldn’t do nothing but stare at the thing flying towards us. “C’mon, c’mon, we gotta get outta here,” he was saying, grabbing my arm and running down the Peak. Slate slipped and slid, following us down the mountain like dogs at our heels. It was all we could do not to trip over our own feet, keeping our boots snug round our ankles, spurs squealing. 

The dry brush grabbed at our legs, ripping new holes through already worn-out Levis. I didn’t spare a look back at whatever it was in the sky, half hoping we were having one of those shared hallucinations the good Pastor was always warning about. CJ’s grip was tight on my wrist, the heat of his palm radiating through my flannel. He was dragging me along behind him, never losing his footing even with whiskey burning through his veins. 

The thing racing behind us hummed, louder than I’ve ever heard it. 

We scrambled down the Peak, red rock tumbling down around us like an avalanche. The sun had dipped down past the horizon, leaving Sweetwater golden and hazy in the dying light. The fires in the town had started burning, little fireflies in the night. We were too far away for anyone to hear us. Even the folks on the outskirts were miles out and whatever chased us was too goddamn loud to yell over.  

CJ stopped running suddenly, pulling me back as I nearly fell off the side of the Peak, momentum almost sending me over the ledge. 

“What the fuck?” CJ slapped a hand over my mouth before I could say anything else and I followed his gaze over to a little divot in the rock face. There was a cave we used to hide in as teens when we stole his parents’ liquor. We’d play hookey and get wasted, leaving the bottles there so no one could find the evidence. We were so stupid, thinking we were acting cool as shit with bright red faces and dopey grins. 

Ducking into the alcove, we held our breath as the thing following us passed by, loud as a truck with a blown radiator. Its shiny metal exterior shone in the night sky like one of those fancy jets that fly over the valley sometimes. But this wasn’t no jet – its shape was all wrong. Too round to be aerodynamic, and yet, it hovered in the air as if it belonged, natural as a bird. Lights flashed on the rocks around us, the noise rattling through my skull, making my teeth vibrate. All I could do was look at CJ, all grown up in our old childhood hiding spot – ceilings too low for him to stand comfortably, the latent smell of cheap vodka still lingering in the air. I loved him. It hurt how much I loved him.

We sat there, huddled together in the dark like those frogs we used to catch, waiting for god-knows-what. I was pressed into his side, the denim of our jeans slowly sopping up the damp of the cavern. Almost skin-to-skin contact. Minutes passed, or maybe hours, or possibly seconds. Only the sound of our breathing, harsh as a metronome and soft as hummingbird wings, could keep the time.

“Look,” CJ whispered, moving my head by the chin, “I think they’re leavin’.” Rope-callused hands felt like silk when placed that gently. 

That silver thing, too close to be a star and too loud to be anything from this earth, slowly drifted across the night sky. It arched around tiny Sweetwater then ran away, zipping across the night’s canvas like a meteor shower. How had we never seen it before? I unclenched my jaw, shifting the muscles back into place. 

We headed down Hangman’s Peak slowly, shale shifting under the lightest of movements. The slightest rustle of the brush or the very imagination of noise stopped us in our tracks until we finally made it to the trail leading up the mountain. Sweetwater was only a couple miles’ trek away, and we were safe. The sun would be rising soon, and there would be animals to feed and errands to run and parents to please. 

We walked back home in silence. The howling of the wind was our only company, and CJ pulled out his harmonica to sing along. He played a few notes, low and slow like melted wax, sliding its way down my spine. In the crisp air, storm on the horizon, we could pretend nothing bad had ever happened. We could pretend our town wasn’t dying. We could pretend we were just two rural boys shooting the shit, not living through the end of it all. 

CJ ended his song, wiped the mouthpiece off, and started in on a different tune, one I’d never heard before. Up above us, shooting stars sprinted across the night. Up above us, the dots in the sky, like freckles, twinkled. (They couldn’t hold a candle to the splotches that dotted CJ’s cheekbones – sweet as cocoa powder or cinnamon or coffee.) Up above us, the lights shifted, faster now, spiraling and swaying like I’d had too much to drink. 

A beam of light, brighter than all the lights of Sweetwater combined, shone down on CJ, harmonica still held tight to his lips. That thing was back.

It was my turn to be quick on my feet, grabbing CJ’s belt loops and tugging. The light held onto him, pulling him up into the air like a giant hand. I grabbed onto his arm when the belt loops snapped in my grip. 

“CJ!” My nails sank into the soft skin of his forearm, little half-moon wounds weeping blood in their wake. 

CJ looked calm, almost resigned, almost hopeful, as he started to pry my hands off of him, even as his feet no longer touched the ground. “It’s–It’s gonna be okay, you hear me?” He smiled, toothy, his fillings glinting gold in the harsh beam.

I couldn’t think as he continued to pull my fingers off, one by one. I dug my nails in harder, not caring as I split skin, red-gold coating my hands. My fingers slipped and scrabbled until I got ahold of his hand. I looked up at CJ – trouble-making, reckless, drunk, kind, stubborn, fearless CJ. 

He smiled, fuzzy around the edges, “Any way out, remember?”

In that moment, I hated him. I hated him for leaving me behind. I hated him for all the times he got me in trouble with my parents and for every time he kept me up too late at night and I hated him for letting what we had go on so long and yet, I loved him for all of it. I hated how much I loved him. 

“Wait!” I held onto his hand until my knuckles dislocated and tendons snapped. Something tore in my shoulder. I swear I broke his fingers. “What about me?!”

When the light had disappeared and the humming had stopped, the thing was gone, taking CJ with it. I was alone in the middle of the desert, home only a little farther away. I could see the gas lamps of Sweetwater, flickering on as dawn broke across the town. The harmonica lay on the ground where CJ had dropped it. I kicked it, cheap metal warping upon contact. The instrument sang while cascading through the air, a ghastly, disturbing scream, choked out by the dirt as it landed. Two boot tracks became one. The sky cracked. It finally started to rain. 

All that was left of him was his ring, pulled off as he got tugged into the air. It sat, silver covered in blood, in the center of my palm, like proof he had existed. I put it on my ring finger, like I didn’t know what that meant. 

That was the last time I ever saw him. His parents put up missing posters for him. I told them he had run away, asking me to come with. It felt like the kindest thing to do. They’re leaving soon, can’t keep up with all the work now that CJ’s gone.

Sweetwater is slowly turning back into regular, old dirt. Nobody passes through. There are no grocery stores, no hospitals, no schools. Johnny’s Salon closed down, and that place was open on Christmas and Easter. Maybe a few of the older folks will stick it out, sure, but all the brightness of youth is gone. Boarded the first bus out, nothing but the clothes on their back and a wad of cash stuffed into their soles, no idea where they were going. My mom’s even looking at moving, talking about going to a place where there’s more work to be found and new people to meet. Soon, there will be no one here at all, once everyone else dies out. Just some smashed bottles in a cave, a harmonica lying abandoned somewhere in the desert, and a valley with lights in the sky that are always silent. 

Kote Lien is a recent college graduate, having obtained his BA in English at the University of Utah. He loves Star Wars, his cat named Phish, and the Oxford comma.