Backyard - Short Story by Jonel Abellanosa

 

Backyard

 

Luis strengthens himself. The bed has been holding him like a sick patient. Sleep an invading army, his overrun body quartered as colonies of tired settlers. He imagines gophers, great gerbils, groundhogs loving his innards, his blood vessels tunnels for beetles, salamanders, frogs. 

Sunrise has settled like a blanket. Light slips through the light blue curtain, diaphanous. By solar energy he wills himself to stand, his head like a balloon, as if air from his empty stomach alarms him with psychosomatic hypertension. He presses his palm against his forehead, opening his eyes after blood pressure surge breaks like a wave smoothing his scalp.  

He pushes his face out the window into fragrant air, surprised the tree’s crown has extended like a blanket, heavy with leaves, about to surrender to gravity, front yard shaded with a gray shadow having a pool of blood’s arc. Upon seeing his dalmatian barking at him from the frontyard, his bladder shimmers like a stone. On his way downstairs he picks up the last slice of pizza in the open box, sending a couple of flies to the air, ants scattering. 

The dog leads Luis to the wooden gate. Leaves underfoot have carpeted. Luis imagines salted fish fizzing in oil as he hears leaves crackle under his rubber slippers, smelling the halved fish’s sharp pungencies. 

He pulls the white-painted gate. The dog loves his morning runs. Luis nods at neighborhood joggers, their face masks making him crumple his brows. A bicycler with a face mask makes him wonder what’s going on. A tempura vendor, wearing a face mask and face shield behind his pushcart, puzzles him. 

But awe replaces short-lived anxiety. Upon his turn the tree’s humongous crown threatens to drop and drown him in dark green, wild leaves heavy with the weight of an avalanche, heaving like huge lungs. The tree has risen gigantic from the backyard. It dwarfs the starapple tree that holds the basketball board whose ring looks like a peeping tom to the window of his bathroom upstairs. The tree is like a giant hand about to grab his house. He remembers Jack and the Beanstalk. 

Walking by the starapple tree on the house’s side, he looks up at the bathroom window a few feet higher than the ring opposite it. 

As he urinates, he sees his dark violet towel, realizing he hasn’t bathed for days. He slept most of the time, not bothering to record in his notebook his lucid dreams - like he used to. It puzzles him why acedia and tiredness have been visiting him. The inability to leave the bed was overwhelming, heavy as years losing muscles. 

His hand’s numbness feels like his notebook’s absence, but strange that he feels the phantom presence of his pen in his other hand. Along the way, wild grasses and moss have overrun the pathway, the place full of familiar and strange smells, sounds of flowing water, dried and rotten mangoes and starapples on the ground. The backyard is his bottomless well of mixed metaphors - to him, the mind is always mixing metaphors. The mind works with surreal and strange juxtapositions. The mixed metaphor, to him, is the superimposition of dimensions. 

Summer is here, he tells himself as he smells the sewer. He imagines huge rodents. Food take shorter time to spoil when the sun is larger in the sky, garbage bins filled with leftovers. Luis loves to sit under the antique hanging lamp like a parody of the moon. He loves watching tailed lives scavenge through throwaways with sharp smells. His neighbors were puzzled why he asked them to throw, this time of year, leftover food over the fence into his rectangular steel garbage bin. They don’t know he also studies patterns of the feast. Famished rodents teach more about human nature. 

He remembers the mango tree in the backyard is dead, a leafless skeleton. Shadows elongate from smaller jackfruit trees, making summer burst with rottenness sagging the air with sweet smells. Phantom jackfruit flavors touch his tongue - salivating. His lower ribs heat with hunger. He realizes the crown has spread in all directions like Blunderbore’s blanket.  

Awe seasoned with fear stops him on his tracks. Luis raises his eyes almost 90 degrees to behold the colossus - the mango tree - resurrected into a glorious hybrid. The crown looks like a hollowed-out liver, throbbing with the wet smell of rust. Hirsute with leaves, the tree looks stained with dark blood. He imagines bile, smelling bitterness letting him see impaled chicken intestines browning over coals glowing orange like eyes. Uncleaned chicken intestines with undigested food taste bitter. Iced Coca Cola fizzes in his mind like sounds of an extinct dialect from Sugbo’s precolonial past. 

Sunbeams pierce the canopy that looks impenetrable, deep green crown like dark matter in deep time, columns of light iridescent, illuminating the ground where a carpet of leaves shimmers. He imagines photons traveling deep space. 

Luis walks to the stump. He’s entering inner space. As he sits he thanks the tree he never saw as a child but whose stump remains. He remembers his parents now American citizens, his jawbones shaking as tears brim. Mystery loses potency, memory like black panther climbing up to the largest branch with a deer. 

The line of huge finger-sized honey-coloured ants makes the bark their highway to the crown. The other line of ants, descending, leading his vision to the swarm disembowelling the mango on the ground that is much larger than the jackfruit left untouched. He pulls his gaze and looks at his foot, whispering to himself: 

“The year is 2021.” 

He wishes 2020 to be done trolling the human race daily like a much sicker version of the movie, Jumanji. He looks up as the growing sound of rolling nears. The sound steadily grows like a heavenly stampede. In a split second it impacts the crown with something heavy like water, flutters echoing drilling sounds, making him squint and ready to cork his ears. He beholds thousands of birds alight on the tree like chatty drunkards. 

“Dole of doves. Parliament of owls. Murder of crows. Company of parrots. Host of sparrows. Convocation of eagles. Cast of falcons. Colony of vultures.” 

The voice he hears is not his. Dozens of gigantic mangoes drop, wild birds plunging vertical after the fruits like Isaac Newton’s holed black chutes. 

They pierce the fallen fruits with beaks like knives, ripping and tearing like looting armies, leaving nothing unslashed. They claw like a vicious Edward Scissorhands, an amok Freddie Krueger. Woodpeckers attach to the colossus, beaks attacking wood layering cacophonies. His hunger transmogrifies and pulls out the raw like kidneys in his mind. Dozens of the hungry birds drop to join the feeding frenzy, insatiable and primitive. 

His gaze shifts, locking the word wolf in his mind. He sees it, reflecting his gaze. The wild’s equalizer emerges full-bodied from behind a jackfruit tree, takes a few tentative steps and then walks to a carcass. It treads without making a sound from brown leaves thick on the ground. It picks up with its maw the stiff raven. Instead of devouring it, the wolf digs the ground and buries his friend. Ravens and wolves share special relationships, Luis remembers. Ravens lead wolves to carcasses. Wolves leave portions of the disemboweled to ravens. The wild’s supreme gray disappears behind the giant tree, guiding Luis’ gaze up, where several of the birds attack each other, some falling to the ground dead, shiny feathers bloodstained. 

And then he sees one of the winged creatures with a young man’s face, garbed in white among doves, smiling at him. 

“Michael?” 

The Archangel flows down like a paraglider. In the crown he looked like a foot-long dove. As he glides down his white robe transforms into an ancient Roman soldier’s attire minus the helmet. As his sandaled feet touch the ground he becomes the 16-foot giant with the waist-length silken hair, his aura of light gentle as love. 

Bird noise intensifies, the boisterous crowd throwing its noisy calls at Michael, his midnight visitor. The angelic being from the Pleiades star cluster raises his hand for the congregation in the tree to hush. Luis considers wonder an act of beholding in timelessness; he looks down at his foot, his forearms on his laps, fingers crossed, as if hours have left. He remembers his most recent dream, looking up at Michael.

“You haven’t answered my question. What about us who are left behind? Nobody thinks of us. We suffer equally, we suffer more. We suffer the survivor’s guilt. Pain never leaves. We are lost in uncertainties. People lose loved ones, lose jobs. Billions don’t have anything to eat, nothing to survive on, hopeless. What about us who are still alive? How do we overcome? Why should we overcome? I yearn to be dead myself. I want the easy way out, because this has become very difficult. I’ve lost all my strength, with no choice but to just be quiet. I observe silence. Silence is visible. I see the absence of sound.” 

He looks down from Michael’s gaze, turning his head rightward, at the slither that impresses pit viper in his mind. Brown leaves move like dominoes, as the snake coils and tilts its head, its forked tongue testing the air. It locks its gaze on Luis. The serpent understands. 

“I’ve spent decades asking questions, but not anymore. I’m tired of asking. I’ve never been fighting it. I write quietly in my room. I let my thoughts be the absence of sound, silence a place. Too much noise sickens me. My body is speaking to me. My bones echo, my joints shimmer. My flesh is removing itself from me.” 

The wind is kind to his perspiration, like iced mineral water to his sudden thirst. His head feels heavy, as if he’s falling asleep. Dreamy to think of his parents, unreal the day they left more than thirty years ago when he was barely out of his twenties. Surreal, like life’s signposts, memory’s landmarks and stopovers leading to his parents granted U.S. citizenship. He was working as assistant in his mother’s thrift store, helping raise money for his father’s advocacy of planting trees, educating younger generation on ecological preservation. His father was like the mythological Sisyphus, rolling up the proverbial hill, balancing salaries of his workers with growing expenses for seedlings and saplings. His elder brother, Luis’ uncle, had migrated to Europe, sending boxes of used clothing, which Luis’ mother resold in her pioneering ukay-ukay store. Middle class Cebuanos flocked in for sartorial discards from Greece, Malta, Cyprus and other countries in the Mediterranean basin. The small business brought them extra money enough for food on the table to be varied and plentiful. An only child, Luis by tradition was expected to help in the family business after college. He earned his keep, but his savings he squandered on drugs after his parents migrated to America. The money they sent back to Cebu barely covered Luis’ expenses, because a huge chunk of it he used to feed the habit - with opioids, cough syrup and meth - that he justified as necessary to his self-taught understanding of his mind’s dormant powers. He at last realized it was dumb to justify hallucinations and inebriation as fueling creativity. After his final rehab, years ago, he concluded that he doesn’t regret anything, because his decades of drug addiction have opened mental and dimensional portals, making his clean and detoxified mind access temporal and spatial realms, or so he thinks. 

A breath of light smooths across his forehead. Luis looks up, surprised Michael the Archangel is gone. He squints at sunlight’s sudden harshness, standing upon the shocking realization the colossus is gone. No giant tree, no blanketing crown, no cacophonous birds, nothing. He looks around. Jackfruit trees are all that’s left, the ground carpeted by years of unswept leaves, covered, not by neglect but, by his improvisatory mind’s desire to understand processes, how decomposition reverses composition. He remembers his promise to himself never to sweep the backyard, never to let human intervention stop natural processes. He recognizes light entering his body through his head, rejuvenating, as if living has become overwhelming again. 

He hears faint echoes, animal sounds. The wind hums, light susurrus of leaves. He nods at the inner emotional surge. He will live on in hope, he will trust, he will be grateful for what remains with him, what remains as his. He won’t give up on humanity in times of extreme adversity. Alone, he will always be spiritually taking part in what is common and shared and good. The thought that he isn’t alone in the herculean task of overcoming gives him hope, towards self-healing. 

As he returns to the frontyard, he sees a gathering outside his house. He picks up his pace. On his way to the frontyard, he counts eight early-morning exercisers on the other side of the picket fence, looking up at something over his house. They are wearing face masks, a couple with face shields whose binoculars are propped on the head. They are all pointing cell phones, in landscape mode, videotaping what appears to be above his house. 

He gains the perspective to see for himself what has attracted the attention of passersby. Nearing the gate, he turns and looks up, puzzled seeing only the blue sky. He never takes his eyes off the phantom he fails to see above his house as he unlatches the wooden gate behind him, pulling by a balustrade and slipping out onto the asphalted road. 

Brows crumpled, he walks to the nearest lady in violet jogging pants and white long-sleeve sweaters. He stops behind her to see what she’s videotaping with her cell phone. 

Luis is shocked by what the cell phone shows. He looks at the space above his house but sees nothing. 

He rushes to the nearest person with a cell phone - a lad in sports shorts and sleeveless shirt. He moves his gaze up and then cell phone level, seeing an empty sky and then, at the cellphone, a twirling disk. The cell phone is able to capture what is invisible to his eyes. 

Shock grabs him like a beam of light. Astonishment hovers like an object that defies gravity. Words like Antigravity flash in his mind, unidentified aerial phenomenon, alien abduction, cattle mutilation, crop circles. He remembers the movie Independence Day starring Will Smith.

Jonel Abellanosa lives in Cebu City, The Philippines. His poetry and fiction are forthcoming in The Cape Rock and Poetry Salzburg Review, and have appeared in hundreds of magazines and anthologies, including Chiron Review, Invisible City, Thin Air, The Lyric, The McNeese Review, and The Anglican Theological Review. His poetry collections include, “Songs from My Mind’s Tree” and “Multiverse” (Clare Songbirds Publishing House, New York), “50 Acrostic Poems,” (Cyberwit, India), “In the Donald’s Time” (Poetic Justice Books and Art, Florida), and “Pan’s Saxophone” (Weasel Press, Texas). He is a nature lover, with three companion dogs, and three other beloved dogs who have passed on beyond the rainbow bridge. He loves all animals.