by Terese Svoboda.
There’s no other depression around like the meteor’s for a hundred miles. Of course you never see any of the actual meteor, what you see is a small crater with meteor rocks all around it, rocks that drive a compass wild. The meteor itself, all dust or pebbles from its splash that long ago, made that hole with its drop, one that holds the trash of time on top of it, bones and arrowheads and weed remains. Sometimes dust storms empty it out. Other holes farmers, even ranchers, bulldoze flat, making the top of the land smoother for their operation, but some holes are too low and depressed to bulldoze, like this one, and some are even more meteored. I read about it in this book from the library.
Did you have to wake me up to tell me this? My father groans from in front of the grey TV, where I too sit, paging through this new book I’ve checked out and read out loud from, thinking he has an interest since he hadn’t answered, thinking he was awake.
It’s just like his death, I go on anyway. A meteor blazes across the blue of an evening or a morning the world is not ready for, a meteor that is just junk from some other blaze or maybe not, maybe it is thrown by a baseball-capped god out of telescopic-range—and that’s that, impact. Nobody goes in looking for a black box to answer why it crashes unless it’s a fat cat scientist on a government grant somehow relating it to usefulness, the trajectory of hand grenades. Nobody’s about to really investigate his death. Right?
My father looks into my teacup at that drowned thing, the bag. You didn’t think that much about him when he was alive.
I close the book and see a star lighting the back window. I’m going to sleep, I say. Good night. I can’t say more or I would say What did you care then too? Sobbing at the funeral does not count. Why didn’t you at least help him out of his miserable house, instead of collecting rent? But who shows how much goes into the care from a parent with a grownup child, or even a lack of care, how much Hands off is caring. I have a child. Maybe it even makes sense not to care. Sometimes.
I walk back to my room without turning on lights to make my father think, half-asleep, that what I said was a dream of his, and not me, talking: Why did he die?
It’s not true that scientists don’t want to know why things fall from the sky. Scientists are always wanting to know about what happens when things fall, especially if what comes down is from other places, alien places. I have told my son aliens are just people you’ve never met or come from another country, but a few people who live on this flat land here don’t say that, they say meteors are vehicles for aliens and that aliens have landed with them and probably killed a lot of people in doing so, not to mention while wandering the world after their landing. If scientists don’t want to know what happened with regard to a hole like this, these people do and will tell them.
What my father believes is that aliens for sure killed my brother.
Years ago, my father drove his pickup straight across some snow-blown flat road that the land has here, his spread at this point as much white land as you can squint into at one time, and my brother was riding with him, eating peanuts instead of breakfast, which is what you do if you haven’t been on the inside of a grocery store for the last goddamn week because you’ve been working late digging postholes the way your father likes you to dig and because it is winter and no grocery is open at that hour except peanut dispensers around the gas-up. The way my father tells it, when they get to the land beside the meteor hole and are driving along the fence line eating peanuts and checking posts, a horse-trailer-shaped something comes hovering off the ground not a hundred feet away where there is no road, hovers higher and zips off.
My brother, to the day he died, did not contradict him.
My father says, did say, the government is up to something, it’s one of those scientific tests they like to make, with dummies at the cockpit or helm, and barrels of taxpayers’ money get burnt to a crisp in the flash such a horse-trailer makes exiting. He would say that and swear by it and forget it except for what happened at the Snake House – what they call it instead of the Steak House because of the writhing can curlings you get in the soup if you aren’t looking too close. The light where the waitress seated them is always great for pitch, but a little low for newspaper reading although my father does try to read one right off, to see if there are any articles about government waste-of-money testing publicized in any of the back pages where they like to hide those things and say See, we published it. Over the top of the paper he notices two complete strangers take the booth behind them.
My father doesn’t comment on the strangers at first, just sips the gritty coffee very quietly, just says Pass a couple of times, putting his paper down since it is honeymoon bridge they have taken to playing instead of pitch between newspapers. He listens and my brother begins to listen too because when do two total strangers ever come to the Snake House if they don’t have to, if they can drive on by and eat anywhere else. These two are talking about government testing.
Swear to god.
They say, stiff as anything, What did you think of it, Herb? or someone else’s made-up name. And the second guy says, kind of loud but everyone is quiet so it could have been in a reasonable tone, just regular talking, They’re going to test five more like that this winter.
Then the two men go quiet too, eating the special that makes everyone quiet, looking for what might not be so special in it, and the waitress gets their desserts that the special requires although she gets them mixed up so they have to talk again in their strangers’ voices and then they stand up to pay, reaching for their wallets in their behind pockets.
That’s when everyone turns to get a good look at them.
My father anyway, and my brother.
They were just two strangers says my father and my brother who used to nod there too in his retelling as if why wouldn’t they be, given what they saw that morning? Then the strangers walk out and are never seen again.
And why would they be ever seen again? asks my father. They came to the Snake House to allay fear, to stop rumors. My father is sure they are not government plants, he is sure they are aliens trying to cover up their invasion. As my brother’s death has to be covered up. So many strangers came to the funeral, that’s another sign, says my father, sure after seeing that alien take-off that he and my brother were always in great danger, especially my brother, and that the aliens would come to check to see if he were really dead. My father wears a copper bracelet to protect himself—from arthritis according to the quack he met who sold it to him but my father swears it also works to keep off the intense radiation that sometimes aliens beam.
My brother would never wear one.
Took it upon himself, says my father. I went back to the crater to see if there were tracks—nothing. He shakes his head as if this is confirmation.
There wasn’t a mark on him.
All those aliens have long memories says my father. Time isn’t the same for them as for us. He could be caught in time. They have accordion time.
Whenever he gets to this part, he pretends to play an accordion and it is some sweet sad Bohemian song that has a polka inside it that no one can resist, especially since time and death are all that’s worth singing about even if you can’t sing. He hums and we hum, the accordions of our lungs living synchronous and no doubt on the wane.
This is how he sees it:
An alien like some big ugly guardian angel has been lurking around my brother for a while, long enough so nobody’s bothered, nobody notices anymore, least of all my brother. My brother goes to sleep one fine day to the next, then my brother does something stupid—or doesn’t, like he stops going to the irrigation ditch that we know he does for no reason that we know of, except to pee, where he could be offering gin or food to the aliens or even to a god who, it must be said, like all gods, carries the odor of the alien on him, being that no one ever sees them or knows them too well. Or else he pickles up an offering and eats it instead of leaving it or drinks one of the beers he puts in the sand to cool for them. Or he just pees there and that is the wrong place.
Anyway, my brother does something stupid and the aliens pull the plug on him.
Not a mark on him.
It was a dark day, says my father.
It was late winter, I remind my father. No moon had crossed the sun nor was anything else blocking it. It was seasonally dark.
Time is all you need, all you have, says my father. That’s what they wanted from him. At least his medical bills were paid up, he likes to add.
Excerpted from Dog on Fire (U. of Nebraska Press, March 2023), Terese Svoboda’s eighth book of fiction. The order link (with a little discount): https://bookshop.org/p/books/dog-on-fire-terese-svoboda/18680846
A recent brief interview/review: https://blog.superstitionreview.asu.edu/tag/dog-on-fire/