We lived in the mud. Like worms or salamanders, ivory and eyeless. We was my brother and me. He was sick and didn’t go outside. I was sick in a different way, which did not keep me from going outside, but was part of why we lived in the mud. Before that, we lived in a house like this one, but it was next to other houses and a street and sidewalk where people yelled at cars and each other. Things happened that I don’t remember very well, but they said that wasn’t my fault.
The sky was lavender, and I’d know in a minute if it was dawn or dusk. I stood in the yard, ground cold and sucking at my bare feet. Bare branches sheathed in ice dripped onto a mat of dead leaves under the melting snow. The house waited behind me, tall and weathered and staring with empty windows. Dark water stains spotted the sharp roof, and dead vines wound up the chimney’s lichen crusted brick. The covered porch was rotting, wooden boards falling into the cave underneath. One two three four steps up from the mud and one more to the door.
Inside, the house was cold and full of shadows. Stale humidity that beaded on my shoulders. The fireplace in the living room was dead, full of dead leaves and dried char. Each room led to another and circled back to the door and the bottom of the stairs.
The hardwood stairs slid and squealed beneath my mud-covered feet. In my room, the window was cast navy, so I knew the sun was heading toward night and sleep. I sat on the edge of my bed and wiped the drying earth off my feet with a shirt from the floor.
Ear pressed to Jonathan’s door, labored breathing crawled to me across the air and through the wood. I knocked. He coughed. I let myself in. I couldn’t tell if he was awake—milky eyes sat half lidded. A candle on his bedside flickered firelight that danced with the shadows, shaking the room. His head rolled up and he blinked at me.
There are no more birds, I said.
I can hear them, he said, then closed his eyes. Bones bulged beneath his thin, pale skin.
You can’t. They’re gone.
I can, even if they are.
Stop it, I said, getting mad for no reason.
Even if they are.
I slammed the door and stared at the hallway floor until I finally stopped shaking.
I stood on the porch, left hand throbbing. The skin was red, knuckles torn and bleeding, the whole thing swollen. I tried to curl my fingers but couldn’t. They were broken glass.
Snow flurries drifted down into the mud. Plumes of breath filled my eyes. Behind me, the front door was open. Shadows tried not to move while I was looking. I went back in and up the stairs. Jonathan’s door was open. He was lying half off the bed, a long black gash in his arm leaking shine onto the floor. A bloody disfiguration in the doorframe mocked my broken hand.
I picked my brother up off the floor and laid him back, head on his pillow, candlelight playing over his half-closed eyes. I tried closing the door, but it kept swinging open.
The moon glowed off the pale earth and through the kitchen windows. I sat at the table, shivering with my swollen hand in a bowl of tepid water, formerly two fistfuls of ice from out the backdoor.
I think there had been electricity once. A long time ago, but maybe that was the other home. Over the years, the walls had changed to remind us of before. Doors came and went from frames. The ceiling breathed like an asthmatic.
I carried the bowl of water upstairs and into my brother’s room and threw the water in his face. He didn’t wake up. I put the empty bowl over his face like a ceramic shroud. His open arm lay stuck in a shining black splotch stiffening in the fibers of the bedclothes.
It’s snowing, I said, then drummed my fingers on the bottom of the upturned bowl. You should have waited until spring.
I put on a shirt with buttons that probably belonged to Jonathan, and combed my hair. Beat the mud out of my boots. I took the porcelain dome and smashed it on the floor. Before it exploded, it carved a crescent moon in the hardwood.
Jonathan’s skin had gone gray, his open arm almost white against its stain. His body was stiff. I flipped it and pored over the mottled, oily lesions pocking his back. Mouths that spoke infection through his body. I threw the sheets over him, then turned the body over again and again to wrap it in its cloth.
Down the stairs by his ankles, across the living room and kitchen, down into the basement. Mud-splattered slat-windows sat high in the foundational walls. Almost enough light to see by. Shadows flooded the corners. I laid my brother in his shroud on the stiff earthen floor, in a dim pool of light flickering from the top of the stairs. I opened my mouth to say something, but instead went upstairs and left him in the dark.
The wind blew sharp against my face. I couldn’t remember where the path to town started, but I think that’s what I was looking for. Frozen mud crunched underfoot as I meandered along the tree line, trudging in a clumsy circle around the house two or three times before I recognized the thin strip of clearing that ran through the woods.
When they came, it would be from this passage. It was always where they’d come from before. I could tell them that Jonathan was dead and maybe that would be that, but I doubted it. Shadows drifted back and forth past the dying wooden giants of the forest.
He’s gone, I shouted to the woods. There was no response.
I stood at the top of the basement stairs, listening to the nothing-sounds whispering out of the dark. Cold air scraped the wood in the walls against each other, creaks moaning through cracked plaster.
You should go down and check on him. Maybe he isn’t dead anymore.
Shut the fuck up, I said, knocking my swollen hand against the doorframe. Pain as a fog carried me into the living room. The flames must have been hiding between chimney bricks. They burned, low in the fireplace, as though they’d been there all day. I fell asleep in front of the dwindling fire, eyes in the embers watching me tremble. They read my dreams, spilling out in sweat and magnetic waves.
Jonathan, still dead, lies face down in the basement dirt, leaking into the earth. Fluids carving their way through cold ground, into burrows chewed away by worms. The ground beneath him stirs. A sinking swirl blossoming downward like a slow cyclone of stone shards and soil.
Time and memory are scraped to pieces and spread across the remaining electricity pulsing in his head. There were other people that are gone now, but their bodies are still in the house. Is that here, though?
Long fingers rise from the earth, clawing to the surface, spidery hooks sewn to alabaster limbs that unbury themselves like saplings. Arms haul the lich out of its cavern. Blind eyes like white glass roll around the darkness. Nose hooked on the putrescence, drinking out of the dirt like a mosquito. A slit in the thing’s underside dripping ichor; thick pools collecting on soil, blooming in a black corona that spreads toward Jonathan’s open face.
The sky was gray and bright, and I stood barefoot in the mud with a kitchen knife, staring at a smiling face carved into the bark of a pale tree. The tree stood at the start of the path. With eyes, it had become a guard. There was a gash in my right hand. Drying blood glued the knife’s haft to my palm. I went back to the house.
Char from the fireplace was spread across the living room floor in dark, dusty dregs I couldn’t remember dragging. They became train tracks that carried me into the kitchen. The basement door was gone. Pale sunlight breached the windows and stretched down the basement stairs. Ice crystals grew in my lungs, sharper with each step. At the bottom, the air became a stricture. Jonathan crouched on the floor, shoveling fistfuls of dirt into his mouth, saliva turning it to mud. His eyes rolled from side to side. I stood in the doorway, words stuck in my throat. He glanced at me, dark-brown gruel dribbling from swollen cheeks, then returned to his meal.
When I woke, there was no more sun left in the windows. I sat at the kitchen table in the dark. Jonathan across from me, black stains all down his front. Moonlight glowed off his cloudy eyes. My swollen hand throbbed on the tabletop. Thick swatches of mud dried on my skin.
So, are you dead or not?
Jonathan didn’t speak, but his jaw worked like a cow’s. He brought a handful of soil out of his lap and stuffed it into his mouth. A small rockslide occurred, loosening earth from his thighs, spilling it onto the floor. His throat bulged, working to swallow the dirt he kept packing in.
In the living room, I sat on the floor and tossed pieces of charred wood into the fireplace. Their soft dust painted my fingertips black. A cold breeze blew through the open front door and across my shoulders. I tilted my head back and stared at the ceiling. High and shadowed, a map of cracks and water stains.
Born slimed and limbless. Blind and burrowing. Drooling. The taste of metal. Crashing out of the sky. An arrow through the egg of dirt. Thick hairs sprout across your back and read the way the world around you shivers. Mouth working on its own, segmented body swelling, blooming protrusions, tumors becoming arms. False face tattooed in pigment across new shoulders. Your pores gape like dead maws, filling with soil. You breach the surface like a whale, an eruption of earth that rains stones down into the mud.
I sat on the floor of my room, back to the wall, knees to chest. The window was broken and the sun was too bright to look at. Light twinkled off shards of glass strewn on the hardwood. Tendrils of fog waited at the window, twirling inside themselves, a cloud settling in the dooryard.
I collected some of the glass in the palm of my broken hand, then went downstairs. The front door was open to a wall of impenetrable vapor. A trail of dirt on the floor stretched through the living room and into the kitchen. Jonathan wasn’t there anymore. I stepped outside.
A film of moisture beaded on my skin. Shadows from the trees swam in the mist, spiraling the house like a flock of crows. My hand tingled, relief taking over as abrasions inhaled the cold smoke hanging in the air.
My feet sank into the mud, and I forced my way through the cloud-wall. Thick sloshing somewhere ahead, like the dirt swallowing itself. I knew what it was before I saw.
Jonathan lay in the mud on his stomach, his bottom jaw stuck in the wet earth like a trowel. He slithered forward, half swimming on the surface of the field. Mud swelled his chest and throat, bubbled his cheeks, funneled up his nose. There were no shadows near him. The lesions on Jonathan’s back were gaping black eyes, rotting craters, white in the center, gasping in wisps of fog. I crouched in front of him. He didn’t acknowledge me. A thin film was growing over his eyes. Dark veins sank beneath his pallid skin.
The couch that had once been in the living room lay across the head of the trail. Dark moss filled in the tree’s smiling face. It tried to say something to me, but its voice was muffled. I sat on the couch for a moment and looked at the shards of glass in my hand, then got up and started down the path.
Shadows hid in the trees, watching me pass. Hundreds spoke at once, making new words of melted nonsense. I didn’t need to understand the words to know what they wanted, but I didn’t know what to tell them. He was dead. He might still be dead now. They could go look if they wanted. I honestly thought they were already there, but maybe those were shadows from a different place.
Wet earth clung to my feet, tangling in half-dead brush, pulling me face first into the mud. I squeezed my hand closed around the glass. Crimson rivulets leaked between my fingers. I pushed myself up and kept going, chewing the soil in my mouth and bleeding a breadcrumb trail.
Most of the other houses looked like ours, except they slouched in fields of dead grass that passed my waist. Their windows were broken, with doors hanging off crumbled hinges, collapsed roofs spilling into the husks of living rooms and kitchens.
I don’t remember this one, I said to the shadows that nudged me off the path and into the yard of the smallest house. The shadows weren’t concerned with me and didn’t respond. The air did not move there, but the fog was thin enough to see through. The blood dripping off my hand flung itself in the house’s direction. I followed it, and halfway across the lawn, I heard them.
They filled the collapsing, waterless swimming pool in back. Beaks agape, cawing through thousands of obsidian feathers. The surface of the birds shimmered like tar. I sat down in the mud and stared through the space to where the house’s backdoor had once been. The darkness inside danced like water. I took a handful of mud into my bleeding hand, and stuffed it into my mouth, then started digging. 
Max Restaino is a writer from Poughkeepsie, NY. He has work featured in anthologies by Filthy Loot and Inside the Castle. His first book, Coyote, is available from Amphetamine Sulphate.
Illustration: Trevor Henderson
