Stage 0:
A slight change in the air. Dogs bark to dogs. An outbreak of yawns around the dinner table. The Lowcountry summer digs into its July raze. In St. Michael’s cemetery, the father and the mother visit their son’s grave with paintbrushes and Atelier acrylics, respectively. Every Sunday they paint his headstone anew: the Ravenal Bridge, horses, still life. They brighten last week’s colors. The father wishes a tree grew over the grave to keep off the rain. The church bell rings once. He leaves for Rainbow Row, she for Shem Creek, divorcées. And this new breeze, from pluff marshes, navigates the city like a germ in the branches of Charleston’s arteries.
Stage 1:
It’s color-blindness. Déjà vu in children as they yank on tablerunners. Their parents: “This is why we can’t have nice things!” On his porch, the father has a gin and tonic with a fresh key lime. If not for this one palmetto in his yard, he’d have a perfect view of the college sailing team mid-maneuvers. He thinks that he will always think of himself as a father—no matter what happens, think healthy thoughts.
The carriage tours’ horses’ shoes fall silent on the French Quarter’s cobblestone. Lit candles go out. Saltwater taffy sells out. Seagulls turn up their beaks at tripe handouts.
Stage 2:
It’s cavities. It’s the air. Domesticated cats go feral. Children don’t recognize their mirrored faces. Runs on bandanas, Magnum condoms, antibacterial gel. People claim they only see the color blue. When the father goes in for his yearly prostate exam, the doctor asks him if he’s up to date on all his vaccinations.
“Smallpox?”
“Check.”
“Whooping cough?”
“Double check.”
“Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever?”
“Doc,” he says, “does this look like the Rockies to you?”
“Things have changed.” Doc’s at the window blinds.
“Think I’d like to buy a ticket out of here. Somewhere nice; lots of fruit.” He fingers down a slat. “You know what they say.”
“Should I be worried?”
“A good doctor is always worried.”
The father calls the mother to say he needs to stay with her for a while—off the peninsula, until whatever this is blows over—and she answers the phone with a “Look outside.” On his porch she’s standing, on the phone with him, with an overnight bag at her feet and fresh scratches bleeding down her ankles: “I watched a narwhal abandon her calf in the Creek. Have you seen the cats around here? Plain vicious.” She moves back in. Onto his bed she empties her bag of Pop-Tarts, Tupperware, and paint tubes. On the radio they call it the “Holy City Hots.” Aquarium sea turtles won’t come out of their shells. Bars are packed before noon: a drinking town with more than a basketball problem.
Stage 3:
It’s dyslexia. It’s spits and phasms. It’s phantom limb syndrome: “I can feel an arm coming out of my chest. It’s squeezing a stress ball. But I’ve never owned a stress ball.” Children run away en masse and gang up in the public library. The gulls won’t eat anything but lobster thermidor and Baked Alaska.
So shoot the gulls. Use slingshots, nail guns, fireplace-mantle Enfields from a long-gone battlefield. Roast them in the streets over pit fires. From the Battery, a man fires paintballs at the swooping flocks. Windows latch. Gates lock. Sandbags line porches. She guards her Temples, Customs, and Laws. Call it “Chucktown Colic.” People see blue, yellow.
“Have another gin and tonic,” says the mother. “Have a hundred more.”
“We don’t have a hundred limes, dear: we don’t even have one.”
Packs of terriers and pugs are released to curb the booming feral cat population. A baby’s first word is “maleficent.” Somehow, the mail keeps coming in the doorslot, and donations to the Red Cross skyrocket.
Stage 4:
It’s scurvy. It’s tennis elbow. It’s jaundice. It’s necrotic encephalitis. They turn St. Michael’s into a crematorium and there bulldoze the pet carcasses. “Mt. Pleasant Miasma”; outside air, they say, is bad. So close the bridges. Line 17 with roadblocks and barbed wire and crucifixes. For key limes the father searches obsessively bayside, claiming a Vitamin C motive. Astraddle the channel, the new suspension bridge resembles a Holter monitor’s readout: two sharp heartbeats and then a flatline into the coast.
He detours, abruptly, away from St. Michael’s—the waxy, sulfurous smell of burning hair—through the Market.
Corner artists sell still-wet portraits of Spanish moss, fruit trees, lone palmettos. He buys one. Charleston’s Candy Kitchen hands out samples of the newest taffy flavors: “St. John’s wort” and “Panacea.” On the menu board at TBonz are tacked up pictures of Missing Persons. There, a photo of a boy sorting baseball cards. He stares for a long time; “Even back then, I looked like a father.” There, hundreds more like him.
At home, he’s forced to wait an hour—“You act like I’m already sick.”—for her to pull the nails out of the freshly boarded-up door.
“You didn’t say you were coming back.”
“I was; I am.”
“How do I know you’re not infected?” she asks. “You smell like dog-smoke.”
“Think healthy thoughts,” he prescribes, then hands her the painting of a rain-streaked lime tree and keeps the taffy for himself.
Aquarium sea turtles abandon their shells. Blue, yellow, and now pink.
Stage 5:
It’s impotence. It’s SIDS. It’s paralysis; it’s seizures; it’s death. One last tour through the French Quarter on carriage-turned-hearse. The crematorium’s no longer “domesticates-only.”
Sunday, the father and mother visit St. Michael’s cemetery. They’ve wrapped bandanas over their noses and mouths and ankles. She: paint tubes; he: brushes. Behind the far pierced brick wall, runaway children stand on library copies of Gray’s Anatomy, watching. Their faces are painted like unearthly rain: blue, yellow, pink, bright green. The churchbell rings thirteen times. He smells citrus. The slightest change in the air indeed.
She squeezes out one paint tube after another, but to him, they’re all damp gray. She asks, “Do you think it makes a difference how it started?”
The children’s faces, too, suddenly color-drained. He looks away, down at a shadey grave crowned with the state seal.
She says, “I always thought it would be water.”
“We’re below sea level,” he says, “but not for long.” He sticks his hand in his pocket for a brush but pulls out melted gray taffy instead. He thinks, can only think, of that painted tree in the rain. And only in the thickest branches of his brain is it still heavy with limes, which, too, he’s afraid, will quickly fall and fade. “Even the graveyards are rising. Just pile the new bodies on the old ones.”
“You mean us.”
“Aedes Mores Juraque Curat.”
“So that’s how cities work.”
The father stares at his hands, then back at the children. He pretends to pull down a single blind slat. “I’d like to buy a new one, I think.”
“The Market doesn’t sell boys.”
“A city.”
“I should’ve never pulled out those nails.”
“Somewhere fruity,” he says. “I’d donate it.”
“No one wants a city. Not a fruity one, and not like this.”
“I’ll give it to a charity”—he licks linty taffy off his fingers; what he misses most is bright green—“for people like us.”
The children leave, chasing with horseshoes a passing ‘dozer.
“You’ve got some gull in your teeth, dear.”
“You know I’m deadly with a nail gun.”
Alexander Lumans was awarded a 2018 NEA Creative Writing Grant in Fiction. He received a mention on the “Distinguished Stories of 2020” list in the Best American Short Stories 2021 anthology. He was also awarded a fellowship to the 2015 Arctic Circle Residency and was the Spring 2014 Philip Roth Resident at Bucknell University. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The Paris Review, Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, Guernica, Gulf Coast, American Short Fiction, among others. He has received fellowships to MacDowell, Yaddo, The Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Brush Creek, Jentel, The Ragdale Foundation, among others. He’s also received scholarships to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. He lives in Denver, CO.
Photo by Ava Tyler