Strangely Enough #6

From now on, Not Strangely Enough will be released on Fridays, and will include the strange news of the week--and that's all it will include. Because, on Mondays, I will be posting Strangely Enough, the first pages for each of my fiction stories inspired by the previous week's NSE. 

For the last few weeks, I've been presenting the two as one piece, side-by-side, but I think this format will be easier to digest and enjoy. I do this for you, the reader, so if you have a preference, let me know! Use @ChadFiction on X, NSE@ChadFiction.com, or the comments below.

Richard tried to look, but he could barely see. A cloud floated overhead, darkening the ground closest to him, while highlighting the blue of the water and the red of the hills in the distance. Just vague shapes, blurry colors, both far away and up close. He looked up, but he couldn’t even see a cloud; he looked down, and it simply made him dizzy. What’s this shadow all around me, then? Richard managed, after some time, to think to himself.

After that first coherent thought, Richard tried to form another, of a different shadow, of a shadow of something in his mind, part memory, part imagination: a silhouette of small man lying on the ground with silhouettes of children gathered around him. No, he thought, there hadn’t been children standing around him. Then the shadow changed, to the children lost in some crevice or rocky valley. Richard looked harder, like a near-sighted man looking into a vast distance, but the vision of the children huddled in a crevice vanished. He grew nauseated and bent down slowly, making sure he wouldn’t fall off the cliff—then he realized he was standing on a long stretch of dirt with patches of scorched grass. He knelt all the way down, slowly, until he could smell the freshly burnt grass. He placed his hands on the ground to steady himself, and the black and brown threads of dead grass radiated heat.

The concrete sensations brought Richard back to reality. He remembered his general location and he could see, finally see, and he looked around himself, he saw the charred circle from the lightning strike, he saw the man lying on the ground in front of him, he saw a red wall of dirt past that. He looked back down at the man, remembering that he was alone with this man, that this dead man was all he’d had, as it had been for at least two days, except that now the man was charred and dead and—

Richard began to rub his hands all over himself, seeing if he, too, was charred. But his body felt normal, cool in comparison to the burnt grass, and his skin felt smooth. He laughed to himself, but doing so made the backs of his eyes throb with a dull pain and his nose felt like he’d snorted chlorinated water; his forehead bulged, and he checked with his palm, sighing when he felt the smooth and normal texture. He didn’t know if he was okay or not, and he thought of sitting down, or of looking for a water bottle, but he didn’t; he had just remembered that he needed to find the children.

He walked to the shore of the lake and looked around its rim for the landmark, the one high hill with an S-shape. That would be Northwest. And then he could remember how to get due south, back to where they’d left the children. To where he’d forced the man to leave the children.

He didn’t see the S-shaped hill. Then he remembered, whirled around, and saw it past the dead body in center of the circle of the lightning strike. He realized it hadn’t been a cloud that broke him from his reverie; it had been the shadow of the hill. The hill to which he’d come to atone for everything. To which the man, now dead before him and under the shadow of the hill, had brought him for his revenge.

Or, at least, that’s what Richard had deduced. That’s why Richard resolved to get the children away. But he couldn’t remember exactly where. South. Back there and to the left, a quarter circle around a small lake, then through—

His memory was still fuzzy. He wasn’t even sure why he felt the way he did. Lightning. Something to do with lightning. Was he sure it was south? Or had the S-shaped hill been a reminder to continue past it? Or… It is a big red S, Richard thought. S for STOP. Stop and think. 

Go back to the start, trace the steps to when you and he left the children, then you can make your way back to them. You have to get back to them. You took the chance, and now you have to follow through. It all started with a little wish…

Danielle stepped on a snake and kept moving, her eyes on the little laminated map directing her to the consulate. She looked up, seeing a few more snakes ahead on the little cobblestone path winding up the hill, but she looked back down at her Spanish dictionary without a concern for the snakes. Just a couple weeks earlier, she would have been walking briskly in any other direction upon seeing them—and darting the opposite direction upon stepping on one—but things had changed.

It had been a vacation at first. She loved these quaint Spanish towns, their food, their language and accents, their peace and quiet. She loved to challenge herself to traverse the entire town on foot, to learn as much Spanish as she could, and to fuel herself for the next day with a new dish and a new bottle of wine at night. It was a drastic change from her life in New York, and she needed it every year. It was a ritual.

The first disruption came as soon as she arrived this year, but she didn’t take it as a sign of a disruption, not at first. At first, the region’s new incentives to tourists seemed to add some optional activities without any drawback: non-Spaniards could perform little tasks throughout the city, tasks engaging with and beautifying nature, and they’d get vouchers and other incentives. She didn’t worry about the compensation, had plenty of money, but she enjoyed the tasks for their own sake—at first.

She’d taken to walking even more than usual, avoiding ride-shares or the little busses. She’d helped plant some trees at a community event, and she routinely picked up trash, as always, in honor of the pristine antiquity preserved in this little town of escape from the Big Apple. She even helped rescue an injured bird.

And that was when it all started to get out of hand. That’s when the city no longer offered a fun opportunity to benefit the local environment, but began to request, somewhat adamantly, environmental assistance. She wasn’t a biologist or a veterinarian or even a doctor, merely a chemist with a doctorate—but they wanted her help the moment she brought that bird to the government run animal clinic. 

“Senora Doctor, espera!” the little old vet had said, his eyes squinting in pain or from a smile or both. He had hurried after her, all the way outside. “You brought the bird. That is a great thing.” 

“It was nothing, really,” Danielle said, stopping and smiling down at the man. “I do love those birds, they’re so beautiful in the trees in the mornings.”

“That is,” the vet said, trying to think of how to articulate his thought. “That is not that bird, Senora.”

“No?”

“That is a foreign bird.”

“You don’t say.”

“Yes, ma’am. Many animals are here now. Foreign animals.”

“Is that a good thing or a bad thing?” 

“Muy malo, Senora,” he said, and she didn’t know how she ended up beside him, walking with him back towards the vet, listening through his think accent as he explained how the town needed foreign help with the foreign animals. She didn’t know, not then, not after, and not now, walking to the consulate, stepping over dozens of foreign snakes—how they kept managing to get her to go along with it.

But it was almost over, she was almost certain of it; she had finally found an alternative to the endless capturing of foreign wildlife, however bountiful the capturing had become for her and other foreigners; she had found the cause of the influx of critters.

Johnny Smolt liked to ride his bike by the glowing boxes in the strange expanse of concrete up the hill, but he didn’t like to be called Johnny. He was 12 now; he wanted to be called Johnathan. And he wanted to learn math enough to work for the company with the glowing boxes, the mine, as the people in town called it. His mom and dad didn’t talk about it except in whispered tones, usually about mom’s time of the month or dad’s headaches. “It’s that thing,” he’d heard them say a few times, and he knew what they meant; it was the only thing they didn’t name when they complained about it.

Johnathan didn’t care about that, he didn’t believe what his parents said. He didn’t believe what anyone said about anything; instead, he looked it up. And the evidence suggested to him, as ignorant as he was and knew himself to be, that the mine simply did as its name suggested: mined. It didn’t cause problems and illnesses and foreclosures and divorces and—it mined, that was it. So he rode his bike around the several hundred yards of fenced in concrete boxes, admiring the porous design leaking out light of alternating, vibrant colors.

Except that, on this night, Johnathan didn’t make it to the facility, didn’t even get close enough to see that it was shut down. Instead, as he rode up the hill, standing up on his bike for the extra leverage and to see the lights of the facility as soon as he could—Johnathan almost ran over a baby crossing the road in nothing but its diapers.

Reacting just in time, Johnathan jumped off the bike, shoving it one way, leaping himself the other, making space for the infant obliviously crawling on the pavement. He ran back over to the child. He had never picked up a baby before, had been looking forward to the arrival of his new sister in a few months, but it felt natural for him when he leaned down, carefully placed his hands around the boy, whispered something unintelligible and soothing, and lifted the baby near his breast. 

It was so natural to him that he casually checked for the source of blood coming off of the baby and onto his T-shirt. He sighed when he could tell, to the best of his ability, that the blood didn’t belong to the child, and he walked down the hill to his house, where he had left his phone. 

His phone. He just now thought of his phone. But he had left it, he recounted, because going up to the facility was his alone time. But he had also left it because the facility interfered with cell service. And now there was this baby... 

Johnathan stopped for a moment and looked over his shoulder, up the hill. Then he looked down at the baby. Then he laughed, returning to his brisk walk to get to his parents and to get help.

“Nah,” he said, reassuring the infant in his arms. “That can’t be why you’re out here.”