The Deadheart Shelters by Forrest Armstrong Page B

want is to be comfortable.

One night I woke up with that feeling like your bed is tilting forward and you’re about to fall off, then you’re not moving. To the heart it’s as if fallen. It made me so uncomfortable I couldn’t sleep and started sweating through the pillowcase, turning from side to side then on my back, turning again… until I could see the sky slacken, in that way that preludes the next day. I got up and put on a shirt, which dampened immediately against me. Then I undid the locks and went outside.
    At night you can see the searchlights from the gunmen on the roof. They follow your sneakers no matter where you go as if to say It is never dark. Then I went to the harbor, where their lights don’t reach. I saw the boats coming in to the left like bright rabbits and heard steam whistles. Packages exploded into the pattern of ladybugs on the dock.
    It seemed you could go nowhere to be alone, not even at night when things should sleep, not even in the mind when outdoors is banging against it.
    I wandered until I got to the place we sit to skip rocks. I sat on the cubed granite and tried to skip rocks again, but they just went to the bottom. A moth-sized fire turned on and off underneath the bridge, and I remembered the old man from before.
    The fire turned on again. It stayed, burning into dark pebbles and making them bright, then dissolved through them. I heard coughing and it looked like gunpowder in the air, against the dark. I walked up the staircase with the broken railing and crossed the bridge.
    I walked down the staircase with the fixed railing and he shouted, knocking over the milk crate he was sitting on. I could see him this close. His skin was tinted like elephants by the night but his eyes were daytime-colored, the white as if windows with lamps inside them. “What the hell?” He was stuffing a pipe in his pocket and backing up.
    “I won’t hurt you,” I said, advancing.
    “What do you want?”
    “You might know me. I come to skip rocks sometimes.”
    He paused, looking at the water as if rocks were bouncing off it now. “Yeah, of course I know you. You know how many times I get woke up by you idiots? A rock bounces off my forehead and kaput… there goes my dream.”
    “Oh. I had no idea—”
    “You know how important dreaming is to me?”
    “I like it too.”
    “It’s all I have.” I didn’t say anything. He took the pipe out of his pocket and the moth-sized flame turned on and off, draining into the pebbles.
    “Those are the black rocks, huh.”
    “The black rocks?” He laughed. “Guess so…”
    “They make crazy things happen.”
    He laughed again, harder this time. “You bet. Now get the fuck outta here, kid.”
    I walked up the staircase with the fixed railing and down the stairs with the broken one. I got to the part of the city where the mechanical gnomes build airplanes and the sheep lay on the haystacks to watch. I sat on the haystacks beside them; our ears drowned by drills and jackhammers. Blue sparks shot from machinery like blood-drained thumbs and then another sound chewed through the construction, breath through a hollowed antler exasperated and coming near.
    “Stop!” the man shouted when he got to us. “You have to hide. Go inside the airplane. The apes got loose. They’re running loose with guns and shooting through windshields and storefronts! Hide!”
    The gnomes filed into the airplane and I ran up to the man, grabbing his sleeves. “What will you do? Where should I go?”
    “Run home, kid!”
    “My home’s too far!”
    “Hide!”
    I ran to the airplane and tried to stand in line. The gnomes kept going robotically and calm and finally when it was my turn, one started to close the door.
    “Let me in!”
    It shook its head and kept closing. “No,” I said. “Let me in.” It pressed its cold metal hand against my face and pushed me back, slipping down each ladder rung sloppily so I spilt backwards and had to just watch the door close.
    I