Holes in the Sky
Talk about vanishing into thin air...
Hello dear readers, and welcome once again to The Moon at the End of the Road! It’s good to see you return to reading in these hot summer months. Are you melting? I am. I currently resemble a puddle of ice-cream: creamy, sticky, delicious.
We’re keeping it short and sweet this month with a flash fiction piece about mysterious vanishings that may or may not be blessings in disguise.
Image by Peggy_Marco on Pixabay
Anyone that says Hubert Grunter will be missed didn't know a damn thing about the man, but you try telling a cult not to worship your vanished ex-husband. The People of the Taken believe those who disappear through the holes in the sky are chosen by God, plucked by the scruff through an atmospheric pore to a world beyond; so Hubert, hauled drunk-ass on swiped bourbon out of this reality from the top of a scaffold he'd been threatening to jump, was enrolled as a new saint of their order. As his wife (estranged and biting at the leash to separate any bond, but the bastard was great at dodging divorce court), I've been asked to say a few words to mark his blessed taking.
This is what I have to tell them so far.
I didn't know Hubert's real name until a year after Elvis declared us "man and wife, thank ya very much" at a drive-through ceremony, reaching through the passenger side window for a tip. Arrest warrants aren't served under pseudonyms, which is how I learned that a) River Green had an exotic wildlife-smuggling habit back in Florida, b) his only friend had been a four-fingered moron, but still bright enough to rat, and c) his fucking name was Hubert Grunter. This came after a string of disappointments that had rattled behind our marriage like tin cans trailing us out of Vegas. Hubert was charming, handsome with his teeth in (knocked out in a bar fight in Tennessee, he'd remove his dentures three drinks in and set them in the beer cooler; someone grabbed them from the foot of the scaffold, so wherever he is, he's living ugly). Oh, and he'd love you people.
He told me he was a physicist, but really he was a hole chaser. Every vanishing spot, he'd turn up to stare at the sky with his bare eyes, while the real scientists stuffed long-stemmed cameras up every opening they could find, snaking the drain of the universe for lost inhabitants. We spent that first year on the road, travelling for his "work." I was writing a novel, meaning I daydreamed through the Midwest; there was something romantic about gas station rations and sleeping in the back seat by the highway. We traced the route of missing people like a scar. So many of them swallowed at the top of Ferris wheels, or yanked out of a harness mid-zipline. For every tearful family there was a crowd of you: sky-blue capes and absolute ardour for the freshly absent and the invisible cracks that had taken them.
By the end of summer, the rough sleeps were getting tiresome. Come winter, rolling along the east coast with the broken heater blasting cold air through River's old Mustang was unbearable. By the time he agreed to pull into a motel, my fingers were mottled blue. I counted pennies for the room, and it was then I finally asked why the university never paid him for all this travel, never put him up while he scuttled after people-eating vortexes. It was then some of the truth came out, leaking like a pinata with a slow puncture. It took until next spring for it to burst, splitting my life with the plosive impact of a baseball bat to the gut.
I don't know why The People of The Taken revere the absorbed. Hubert didn't worship anything but fate, but it became clear from all his chasing: he wanted to get taken by the sky. He kept moving, the bail always too close behind and the clouds too far ahead. But if you really want to know the secret to becoming a saint, here's how he did it.
Never stop. The holes are chaos; they despise static.
Keep climbing. Risk your life to reach for the highest point you can, and stretch.
Get an audience. The holes like to snatch while the world watches. Hubert's tactic was drunken acrobatics, but you can find your own way.
And finally — this is the most important step, the one that clicked for Hubert a little way outside of Vegas, right before he picked up a wistful blackjack dealer and drove off into the sunset:
Leave someone behind to look up and yearn for you; someone to scan the clouds when you're gone, aching with stupid hope. They don't even have to know why. Just make sure you leave someone behind.
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