Emily McMehen
BLACK METAL
It was mostly dark. There was a little slice of morello cherry sinking into a sticky amber twilight that was seeping out onto the mountain, clinging to the edge of the world. Everything else was blue.
In the distance, you could see the undulating lights of the cruisers mimicking the Aurora Borealis that were about to appear, like hunters using uncanny animal calls to draw them out into the open. The taiga was a lot like the desert this time of year. There was no grass, and the permafrost meant that you were sandwiched between layers of ice and snow. It made me feel small in such a vast space. Small, but never invisible.
Someone had written BLACK METAL 4 DEATH in liquid paper in that font that always looked like spilled milk in the black metal top of the housing for the radio transistors. I could hear one of the cruisers barking into a megaphone, his voice breaking apart and tumbling over the uneven ground, fragments of phrases colliding in the air. Broken out of time. You couldn’t hear what was being said, just a hard-edged, unintelligible diatribe being softened at the corners, like a man thrown from a motorcycle into powder and asphalt. Whoever was on the receiving end of that announcement was having the worst day of their lives.
Absently, I scratched out BLACK METAL and thought of the cruisers. It takes only a few months for disruption to stabilize, and become normal. Joyrides, once relatively harmless acts of civil disobedience involving underage drinking and briefly misplaced vehicles, had taken on a menacing new meaning. Joyrides now bracketed home invasions, loss of life. Sometimes the threats that followed went on for months. The cruisers I could hear over the ice were on a Joyride. They were sending a message.
THIS IS OURS NOW.
It started off innocent enough. The security detail sent a bunch of guys from Irkutsk up to the outpost in our winter camp. They’d get drunk and tool around in amped up vehicles doing donuts in the salt flats or out on the dunes. At some point they got territorial. Like the four months they had been there meant that the whole taiga was theirs. Those of us who had always lived here were suddenly interlopers. Suspects. Suspected of what, it was hard to know. It could be anything. Normal life things. Justice was swift. Sometimes the results were dire. Sometimes there was bloodshed, sometimes worse. Rarely were the cruisers bleeding.
I liked to sit by the radio tower. Its signal fucked up their equipment. It was gratifying that such an old installation, its original function both unknown and obsolete, could still so effortlessly pull down signals from space, and smash them into pieces in the radiosphere. The tower was still transmitting information, too. Song fragments, bits of old weather forecasts in Russian and Kazakh, ominous coordinates that were always incomplete, read out with solemnity and purpose like psalms.
Before the sun bowed into the snow, it was warm enough for bare legs and shirtsleeves. Three tiny kids from the mixed encampment of cruisers and locals sat one behind the other on a modified one-seater dune buggy. Cruisers in training. They whizzed by, hucking eggs from inside a military helmet one of them carried like purse. You could see the helmet had bullet holes, because of the mottled albumin and broken eggy ballast leaking out in a fantail behind them. I was sitting more or less where I am now, behind the transistor box. If the kids saw me, they didn’t hit me. Maybe their aim was no good, or maybe they were still frightened of what was left of us.
Regardless, they would have been thrashed for wasting eggs, whoever they went home to.
Two whole, thrown eggs had landed in the powdered snow beside the box of transistors. I watched a family of foxes slither in on quiet bellies that hovered just above the snow, tails dusting their pawprints behind them. First, they followed the tire tracks and ate the trail of egg mixture that had gone spilling in arcs out the helmet, seasoned with gunpowder and old blood.
As they got closer, following the trail of protein and adolescent carelessness, six citrine eyes fixed on me, two by two. Their movements slowed, but they rose up from the ground. We saw each other. No point in hiding.
In a clandestine utterance of chirps and low whistles, the adult female held her kits back and approached me with caution and fearless readiness. Her eyes trained on me, she approached one of the eggs, and without breaking her gaze, bared her small row of top teeth between her canines. In two passes, she sheared the top off the shell and passed the pieces around in her mouth until she could expel them. She reached her delicate tongue into the cavity. It looped around the egg’s yolk without breaking it, extracting it neatly from the hole she had cut in the top of the egg.
My foot shifted, breaking the silence, and the vixen froze, her body a perfect electric arc from hunger to satiety, a golden sac of impossible futures caught oozing from the edges of her curled purple tongue, intact.
She tilted her jaw up, and let the egg yolk slide down her throat, still whole. She made a move to leave, but paused. Not looking directly at me, but not looking away, she trotted back to the drift for the second egg. Taking it by the same narrow tip, and sinking only her upper front teeth into it enough to get purchase – a gift to her kits – trotted back the way she came, shoulders hunched, ears raked back so both were pointed at me, bracing for a response. Her kits greeted her where she had left them, bouncing up and sliding their ears and the backs of their heads over her neck in eager greeting. Aware that she had brought them a gift, they were careful not to touch it. Her gait remained unchanged, ears fixed, until she was out of sight.
With my key to the transistor cabinet, I scraped away all the paint where BLACK METAL was written, leaving a silver slate clean. In the negative space, with a permanent marker, I wrote GOD. GOD 4 DEATH.
A theme for tonight’s transmission of obsolescence, maybe.