The Raven Post

by the Editor

The last day of September fell like a guillotine. October, the executioner, performed its duty without pity and with much rushing of cold, damp wind. Dresden Township, the neck, shuddered and shook from the blow.

This was a monthly routine, and one the small hamlet’s residents anticipated with bated breath. The final day of the new month was but four weeks away, weeks that would be—must be—spent in preparation of the next incident.

Their preparations were thus: Doors must be checked periodically (at least thrice per evening) for cracks, splits, splinters, or gaps. Roofs, the same. Many completed this latter task with one large, overhanging tarp, though the folks who’d been around longer knew better than that. Baseboards were sealed with shellac, calk, or putty, whichever was cheaper that year; this was done seasonally but had to be checked monthly, just in case. Window panes were washed the first day of the month, then painted over the second-to-last; were any cracks sustained, those panes were to be mended or replaced through whatever means necessary, for glass knows no privacy.

These precautions were not written down in any ledger, not codified as law or custom—they simply persisted through sheer will of the residents, spread through whispers and adopted by example. A family only had to be nicked once for precaution to mutate into instinct, compulsion.

The Semple family was not acquainted with this mutation, not firsthand—not yet, anyway.

The Semples were simple, a semantic comparison they resented but never spurned publicly. Audrey Semple, the eldest of the family’s three children, was practical, as many eldest siblings are. She mostly kept to herself but could be quite affable—at least, as affable as someone whose primary characteristic was “practical” could hope to be. The middle child, Nelson, was middling, and he knew it. Fortunately, he didn’t mind. He, too, was practical in his own way, if only by virtue of his realistic expectations; he wanted to be an accountant not for a love of numbers, but simply because he thought it the most attainable position for someone of his aptitude and economic standing. The youngest, Maude, was untamable, as so many youngest children are. She was impractical not by nature but by choice, and as such, her parents—especially around the last day of each month—became exceedingly worried about her.

“We might want to send her away,” her mother said every month (but in this month, in particular). Eve Semple was starched, pinned, and pressed, and she hated her married name. She never said so, though, perhaps hoping that keeping this fact quiet would make it untrue. Her hair was yellow, her mouth red, her eyes creased. She wore heels indoors.

“Can’t do that,” Maude’s father would chime in every time (but this time, in particular). “Can’t afford it, and besides, never know what she’ll get up to if we’re not there.” Steve Semple was detached, easygoing, and liked his last name just fine—but of course, he didn’t have a maiden one to compare it to. His shoulders were slumped, his nails groomed, his eyes most often cast down. He wore his jacket indoors, as if always prepared to depart somewhere. Perhaps he was, or perhaps the furnace was broken.

The Semples’ house was small, rather dingy, and inexpensive, but not inexpensive enough, even for Dresden prices, which were famously low. This was why they came to Dresden to begin with, why everyone came to Dresden. Unfortunately, due to the job market and the housing market (and really any other market you could think of), no one ever left—unless, of course, the found themselves out and about after dark on the last day of the month.

*************

“And what will happen? What will happen if we’re out after dark, Audrey?” Maude had pressed several weeks prior as all three children lay in their shared bed. She said this directly after one of their mother’s terse “Good nights,” followed by its addendum, “And don’t you dare sneak out, children—you’ll regret it. Not to mention you’ll be in a great deal of trouble.” After this speech, Eve Semple had looked at each of her children pointedly, then closed the door even more so.

“Something awful and horrible and all-around unpleasant, that’s what will happen,” Audrey answered her little sister before nodding decisively and turning over as if she’d settled something.

“It could be something bad,” Nelson suggested, his shoulders wedged between his sisters’, “but it could just as easily be something spectacular, or something disgusting, or just a total shock. Really, it’s impossible to tell.”

“It isn’t,” Audrey insisted, craning her neck back to relitigate. “Of course it’s something bad; people disappear when they go out—that’s bad.”

“Where do they go?” Maude pressed, discontent (but not surprised) to be pushed out of the conversation.

“Well, no one knows, of course,” Audrey said as though Maude was very stupid for even asking. “If we knew, we might be able to fix it, or formulate a plan to stop it, but we don’t have one, do we?”

“Do we?” Nelson asked with complete neutrality. (This, more so than his hypothesizing, frustrated his eldest sister to no end.)

“No!” And with this exclamation, Audrey turned back to face the wall, reached her arm up under the dusty shade of their bedside lamp, and switched it off.

*************

This was all the children knew about the matter, for their parents never volunteered a word, and they knew better than to ask. They knew that their mother’s hand-wringing increased in the last week of each month; they knew the shops began closing their doors even earlier than usual during this same time, and that their neighbors—all of them acquaintances, not friends—began mending their houses’ cracks and crevices and leaky roofs during this exact week. The window painting Maude despised, in particular. She loved the sunlight, the way its beams cast squares of warm, glowing gold upon their otherwise dingy carpet, the way it pierced the ever-shifting leaves outside with incandescent color. Or perhaps she adored the sun because it meant safety, normalcy—what little her family could afford in Dresden. She hated the dull, blacked-out squares that turned their home into a cave from the last week of one month into the first week of the next.

“Why not clean them first thing on the first?” She once asked her mother, who peered down her sharp nose with an even sharper glare and refused to answer.

Though she knew no different, Maude resented the precautions her family had to take each month—she was most often tasked with scrubbing the baseboards alongside her older sister so as to dislodge the dust and grime gathered in the corners, only then to fill in those corners and cracks with calk or putty; Nelson and their mother usually attended to the painting and patching of windows, and their father saw to the roof and basement. No matter how thoroughly they scrubbed, and no matter how many supplementary cleanings they performed in the in-between weeks, the monthly routine never seemed to pass any faster. If anything, it seemed to grow longer, more tedious, and Maude couldn’t help but think that this was on purpose: The more they cleaned, the more exhausted they became, and the less likely they would be to venture outside. What’s more, she suspected the strenuous nature of their tasks was meant to impress upon them the gravity of their situation, for no one could scrub baseboards with such ferocity and not fear that which might attach itself, dirt-like, to the corners.

For all these reasons—not to mention the overzealous curiosity of youth—Maude secretly promised herself that this month, in particular, she would indeed sneak out past dark on the last calendar day. She simply couldn’t be expected, she reasoned, to continue with this charade of scrubbing and painting and scrubbing again without knowing what, exactly, they were trying to wash away, and if no one was willing to tell her, she would find out for herself. Fortunately, despite her abominable stubbornness, she was not a foolish child, and so planned her clandestine outing with the utmost foresight.

She would, of course, wait until everyone else in the house was asleep (she could determine this easily by her siblings’ breathing, her father’s next-door snoring, and the cease of her mother’s frustrated sighs in reply). As her side of the bed was closest to the bedroom door, she could slip out from under the covers, grab her note-taking book and pencil from the bedside table, and exit the room with no trouble. She would then creep down the hall (taking extra care at her parents’ door), quietly open the living room’s coat closet, grab the boots and clothes she had stashed inside beforehand (all of them brown or green in color—she considered black but guessed it would be too conspicuous), pull them on over her pajamas, and slip out the front door.

And on October 31, just when the stars began gleaming their brightest as the final house on their street doused its lights, she did exactly that.

The night air cooled her instantly, and her clouds of shaking breath hung like cigarette smoke. The bone-deep chill that so often accompanies the trough of autumn nearly sent her back inside, but the taboo nature of her errand—not to mention the thrill of discovery—pushed her onward. Street by street, she slunk through alleys and back gardens, crawled under fences and leapt over gutters of gray, rushing water in search of something unusual, something that might explain the town’s distress. Each house was locked up tight, its windows blackened, its roof freshly patched and re-patched. Maude had only visited a few cemeteries in her ten years, but the houses’ cold shells made her envision an unending row of mausoleums, and she shivered.

Then, something caught her eye to the east: On the horizon, several mile-high smokestacks towered over Dresden like obelisks, marking the town’s edge. She flinched as their cluster rose in her peripheral vision—she had only seen them in daylight, had only thought of them as landmarks, as an unwavering compass needle. Their darkness, their malevolence, was new.

She felt seen, watched. She felt doubtful.

Even still, pulling up the too-big collar of her father’s green utility jacket, she slunk deeper into the night.

All was quiet, all was empty. Oak trees formed cathedral arches over tarred roofs, and each vacant street reflected starlight in its rainwater sheen. All was damp, all was dark. Though the air smelled of cold and wet, she sensed rot, she sensed burning, a singeing of the senses she couldn’t quite place. The inside of her nose tingled, and her lungs soon after. She coughed to clear them, and the sound echoed like a gunshot. She scurried, animal-like, behind a bush in someone’s front yard—a stranger’s front yard. She half expected them to turn on their lights, to open their door and investigate the unfamiliar sound. They would find her, accuse her of trespassing. She would be whisked away to a far-off juvenile prison. Her family wouldn’t be able to afford to visit.

She waited. But no one came. Of course they wouldn’t, not this night. No one would find her.

She hoped to feel relief but didn’t. Unease hung in the back of her throat like an extra set of tonsils. Since there was nothing left to do, she pressed on.

For what felt like hours she walked, eyes peeled, ears perked, but nothing came—no monster made of reeking fur and snarling teeth (her own personal theory until this night), nor suited men with guns and stern expressions (Nelson’s hypothesis that he only recently rescinded). She was alone, and despite her devotion to her surreptitious cause, she began wishing she was back home in bed, Nelson and Audrey asleep at her side, hogging the covers and throwing careless limbs onto her third of the mattress. She paused in the middle of a street; she didn’t know its name. The cold persisted, as did the dark—even the stars had by this time retreated behind smoke-like clouds, their nightlight repealed. She had decided not to bring a flashlight so as not to draw attention to herself, but now, with the stars gone and the streetlights out and the homes tomb-like, it was hauntingly, blindingly dark. Not to mention that the strange sense of burning from before had gradually turned to a bitter, acrid smell, a wrongness, stronger by the minute. The ground beneath her seemed to rumble.

Perhaps her nighttime expedition wasn’t as pressing as she’d made it out to be.

With her first decisive step of the evening, she turned for home. She knew the way—Dresden wasn’t so large as to allow even a child of ten to become truly lost—but still she hurried, leaping over potholes, cutting back through untrimmed yards and around barren rose bushes, breath catching in her chest.

She was about halfway, she guessed, when the coughing began again. First, the coughs came individually, then in incremental bursts, then in a barrage. The burning returned, a stinging sensation rushing through her nose and mouth. She slowed. Her body’s shuddering brought her to a halt, then down to the pavement where she sat for some time, limbs seizing. Her coughs echoed up and down the street, across the neighborhood, perhaps all the way back home, shattering the town’s carefully kept silence in a hail of gunfire. Between bursts, she looked upward, seeking air—or perhaps just the briefest glimpse of the stars, of hope.

Instead, through the blur of burning eyes, she saw clouds. Not those shrouding the town in darkness, but bulbous clouds of iridescent green billowing from the cluster of smokestacks in the distance. They reached ever higher as she watched, dumbstruck—for a moment, even her coughing ceased. In her watery vision, the structures topped with neon clouds looked like enormous trees, taller than any redwood, greener than the half-fallen leaves of any tree in Dresden had ever been. The swelling smoke reached higher, wider, past the flat gray clouds, past the stars, even, blotting out the sky, sucking up the air. She could almost hear them rumble as they rushed ever upward to claim more territory.

Maude had stopped breathing, from shock or lack of oxygen or both. Had she the chance to explain what she was seeing, she likely would have been incorrect, but what she knew for certain, deep down, was that she had—for better or worse—found what she was looking for.

Still, the final leg of her journey, her return home, seemed so long now, its reach so distant. And the sky was so wide, so green—her limbs were so heavy. As she stared upwards, she thought she saw figures moving far in the distance, yellow and rubbery against the green. She couldn’t see their faces, couldn’t focus enough to try, but in her blurring peripheral vision, their eyes looked enormous, bug-like. They seemed to be drawing closer. But she was too tired to care.

*************

On November 1, the Semples would wake to find Maude gone, to find themselves yet another family nicked, another scarred. Unfortunately for them—unfortunately for Dresden; poor, beleaguered Dresden—this was merely standard, merely the status quo.

Life carried on in Dresden as it always did: Residents went to work and school and the local market, they cooked meager meals and watched television on tiny sets, and in the evenings, they checked their baseboards and windows and roofs and patched the cracks that went on spreading. In the distance, the smokestacks towered without a hint of smoke. November rose with the sun, and the wind gusted, and the trees’ branches shook, and October, now the blade, fell.

END.