Unnatural Disasters

  Lucas got off the stool and went outside, pausing on the porch to make sure no sheep had strayed from the herd. The sun was almost gone now, the west streaked with purple and pink rags. It had been three weeks since Lucas had last watched a sunset without dread crawling through his bones. Three weeks since a sheep was just a sheep. Things go full-on berko real fast.

  He went up the street, his hand on the butt of his revolver. Something rustled in an alley to his left. He spun and drew, his hand trembling. A crumpled hat blew out into the street. He sagged in relief.

  He shook like a blue-assed fly in a windstorm. He pulled the brim of his hat low over his eyes, glad no one was around to see him like this. Word got around fast when a fellow broke down.

  A small rise of land to the left was bathed in the dying sunlight. A few wooden crosses still stood askew, but the picket fence marking off the cemetery had been trampled into ruin. Wadanetta’s boneyard had been plowed up by gut-hungry sheep. Lucas pictured a whole herd of them, pawing and snorting to bust into those pine boxes and get at the goods inside.

  He hurried to the general store. It was just as desolate as the knock shop had been. Cobwebs hung on the shelves, but he found a few blankets and a box of bullets for the revolver. All the rifles were gone. Some money was left in the register. Lucas didn’t take it.

  Camp staggered into the store, his Remington over his shoulder. “Could have told you they’d be no rifles,” he said, his words slurred. “I took the last one.”

  “Bloody hell? You been here before?”

  “We’d best get over to the jail. Sheep smell us, they’ll be going crazy. They might be able to climb stairs, I don’t know. But they sure as hell can’t bust through steel bars.”

  They went into the street again, Camp leading the way. A soft bleating swept in from across the plateau. It was followed by another, then more of the man-eating sheep raised their voices.

  “Ever wonder who’s riding herd on them things?” Camp asked, not slowing.

  Lucas looked behind them and saw a dust cloud roiling on the horizon. Appeared to be several hundred of them. The drum of hoofbeats filled the air. He hoped the jail was well built.

  “I mean, you figure it’s the devil or something?” Camp said, belching. “A sister from Lady of the Faith Church told me them which don’t repent would have the devil to pay someday. Figure maybe someday’s finally here?”

  “I don’t deadcert know,” Lucas said, his voice thin from fright. Darkness was settling like molasses, clogging Lucas’s lungs and tightening his throat. He saw the jail and almost wept in relief. It was brick, squat, and solid, with iron bars across the windows.

  Camp pulled a key from his pocket and opened the thick wooden door. A pungent odor struck Lucas like a fist. The stink reminded him of something, but the hoofbeats were so much louder now that they filled his senses, bounced around in his skull, drove every thought from his brain but the thought of sanctuary.

  He stumbled into the dark room, and Camp closed the door behind them. Camp dropped a crossbar into place, then shook it in its hasps. “Safe as milk,” he said. “Let’s see them woolly-eyed buggers bust into here.”

  Lucas bumped into a table. He ran his hands over its surface. Something fell to the floor, and glass shattered. Flies buzzed around his head.

  “Damn,” Camp said. “You busted my lamp.”

  The stench was stronger, so thick that Lucas could barely breathe. The herd was closer now, stampeding into Wadanetta, a hundred haunted bahs bleating from bottomless mouths.

  Camp’s voice came from somewhere near the wall. “I like to watch them come in,” he said. “They’s something lovely about it. ’specially when the moon’s up, and all them eyes are sparkling.”

  Lucas put his hands over his ears, squeezing tight to drive out the noises of the stampede. He thought of all the people who had filled those bellies, who had been stomped and ground into haggis, who had served as leg of lamb for this devil’s herd. The first of the horns rattled off the brick. The building shook, but Camp laughed.

  “They can’t get us in here,” the old man shouted over the din. “You’d figure the dumb bastards would quit trying. But night after night they come back. Guess I ought to quit encouraging them.”

  A match flared. Camp’s face showed in the orange circle of light. He sat beside the window, grinning, his rotted teeth like mossy tombstones. He pointed the Remington at Lucas’s heart.

  Lucas forgot about the sheep. He’d had guns pointed at him a time or two before. But never like this, with his guard so far down. He was in no shape for a quick draw.

  “Don’t try it,” Camp said. “You might be fast, maybe not, but you’re not likely faster than a bullet.”

  Horn and snout hammered against the window bars. Camp put the bobbing matchlight to the end of a candle. The room grew a little brighter, and Lucas saw what stank so badly.

  Naked bodies, three of them, hanging upside down from chains inside one of the cells. One of them might have been a woman, judging from the swells in the red rags of flesh, but Lucas couldn’t be sure. His heartbeat matched the rumble of the herd outside.

  “Remember out there, when I rescued you, and I said I don’t like to see a man get ate up?” Camp said, his voice as low and sinister as that of the sheep. “Don’t like to let good meat go to waste, seeing as how it’s getting so scarce and all. This free-range hunting is hell on an old man like me.”

  Camp sat on a chair, the rifle barrel steady. Lucas held his hands apart. He could see the tabletop, scarred and pitted, a dark and thick liquid on it. A nun’s habit was folded over the back of a chair.

  “Our Sister of the Lady of the Faith,” Camp said, picking at his teeth with a thumbnail. “Mighty good eating. Figure it’s the pureness of the flesh what makes it so sweet.”

  Lucas wouldn’t have minded going down from a bullet. In fact, he’d always suspected that’s the way he’d meet the Lord. Beat getting eaten by a Merino any day. But to know that this greasy bugger would be carving him into dinner portions was more than he could stomach.

  “Hell, it’s the way of things,” Camp said, tilting back in his chair. “People eat sheep, then sheep eat people. What’s so wrong about people eating people?”

  Something slammed against the door, and two horn tips poked through the wood beneath the crossbar. Camp turned to look, and Lucas knew it was time. He rolled to his left, filling his hand with his oldest friend the revolver, and squeezed off three rounds without thinking. Camp gave a gasp of pain, and the Remington clattered to the floor.

  Lucas lifted himself up and blew the smoke from the revolver’s barrel. Camp slumped in the chair, holes in his chest. The scent of fresh blood aroused the herd, and heads butted frantically against the brick walls. Camp’s eyes flickered, the light in them dying like the last stars of morning.

  Lucas wondered how long the herd would mill around. Daylight usually made them get scarce, but one or two of the orneriest would probably hang around. Maybe they’d get rewarded for their trouble if they just happened to find some fresh meat out on the porch. One thing for sure, Camp would be nothing but gristle and rawhide. Hardly worth fooling with.

  Lucas sat at the table. He’d heard that other people had turned to it, but the thought had sickened him. Until he’d run out of kangaroo. Hardly seemed unreasonable anymore, even for a man who followed the Lord. Camp’s logic of the food chain fit right in with these balls-up times. And Lucas’s stomach was squealing with all the intensity of a fresh-branded sheep.

  Camp had been a fine butcher. The meat was thin and tender. Lucas stuck Camp’s butcher knife into a slice and held it under his nose, checking its scent. Hell, not much different from mutton, when you got right down to it. His belly ached from need, and he wondered if that’s how the sheep felt.

  He chewed thoughtfully. The taste wasn’t worth savoring, but it wasn’t so terrible that he spat it out. He speared a second piece and held it up to the candlelight.

  “You kn
ow, Sister,” he addressed the meat. “Maybe you were right. Someday might just be here after all.”

  Maybe the Good Book was right, too, that the meek were busy inheriting the earth at this very moment. Lucas figured it would be humble and proper to offer up a word of prayerful thanks. He bowed his head in silence, then continued with the meal that the Holy Father had provided.

  Outside, in the dark ghost town of Wadanetta, the chorus of sheep voiced its eternal hunger.

  SOURDOUGH

  * * *

  RUTH FRANCISCO

  As Gillian Stabler stood among the tomato cages in her garden, picking green worms off the vines and squishing them beneath her clog, she thought she detected a change in the atmosphere. It felt like a warm breath, or that peculiar heat you feel when someone is staring at you from a distance.

  She straightened her back, her eyes sweeping over her neat rows of vegetables. The early morning sun beamed through the chard and eggplants, making their furcated leaves look like veins. Was that a pulse she felt under her feet? A heartbeat?

  She scanned the yard and looked deep into the swamp behind the house. She saw no one. Nothing appeared out of place.

  Gillian was seldom subject to bursts of panic. She prided herself on being pragmatic and levelheaded. She believed that a well-planned, orderly life brought domestic happiness and that any conflict could be resolved if people simply sat down and discussed their differences sensibly.

  Gillian and her husband, Tom, lived in a small affluent suburb outside of San Francisco. Tom was a research scientist at UC Berkeley—something to do with organic compounds—and spent most of his time hunched over a computer. Gillian taught high school English and took the summers off. As a couple, they were well suited. They argued over the daily paper to their mutual enjoyment, often collaborating on long-winded letters to the editor. Tom was faithful (except for that one incident with a French exchange student), and still surprised Gillian with flowers and gifts. Nearly every week, he kidnapped her (as she called it), whisking her off to a special restaurant or to the theater. Once even to Hawaii.

  A nearly perfect life for a nearly perfect couple.

  But this morning at the breakfast table, Gillian had read in the paper that the hole in the ozone over Antarctica had expanded to the size of North America. Gillian, like any careful reader of The New York Times, was concerned about the melting snows of Kilimanjaro, the disappearing glaciers in the Bolivian Andes, the disintegrating Arctic ice shelf, the soggy permafrost, and the vanishing rain forests, but this hole in the ozone made her uneasy to the point of distress. Then Tom—her husband of fifteen years, a man whom she thought she knew—had the gall to say, “Media hysteria, my dear; nothing to worry about. The world is always changing. There’s global warming, global cooling, global expanding, global shrinking. It’s perfectly normal, sweetheart.”

  Gillian was stunned. She and Tom never disagreed about such things. She looked at him disdainfully, not recognizing this stranger in her kitchen, this confident middle-aged man with thinning hair, in a crisp starched shirt and khakis, who chomped noisily on his bagel, eyes glued to the sports section. Without replying, she took her coffee into the garden.

  As Gillian stepped between the rows of carrots and radishes, she pictured the earth as a leaking balloon that might suddenly zip off its orbit, deflating as it shot across the Milky Way. She looked into the sky, half expecting to see clouds swirling into a dark blue hole, like water down a drain. What if something dropped into the hole from outside, like asteroids, or aliens? When she leaned over the lettuce, she thought she detected a slight lifting in the air, as if she and everything around her were being sucked up.

  Earthquakes, tsunamis—freakish weather patterns seemed ever more frequent. The tectonic plates at the bottom of the Indian Ocean had slid beneath one another. The earth was smaller, spinning faster. There were holes in the sky. The planet had shifted on its axis by an inch! The world was out of balance. How could Tom possibly say that nothing was wrong?

  No, no, she mustn’t let herself get all worked up about something she couldn’t change. After taking three deep breaths, Gillian picked up the colander she had brought from the kitchen and set about gathering salad greens before the wilting heat of the day. The rhythm of the work calmed her some, yet her uneasiness lingered.

  A little before noon, Gillian’s neighbor, Mrs. Gunther, dropped by. Mrs. Gunther was an attractive woman in her sixties, a piano teacher who looked after her paraplegic husband, a socialist poet of some renown. She brought Gillian a white ceramic bowl of sourdough starter. Friendship bread, she called it, because the tasty starter was shared between friends. It made excellent sourdough pancakes, Mrs. Gunther said, with just the right amount of tang. She gave Gillian several recipes, but, she warned, every seven days the starter had to be fed and then used.

  “You save a little bit for next time,” she explained.

  “What happens if you don’t use it after seven days?” asked Gillian.

  Mrs. Gunther didn’t know. She had always baked up something before then.

  Gillian was pleased with this new domestic project. She first used the starter to make sourdough bread, then tried pancakes, muffins, cakes, and breakfast rolls. Tom loved everything, particularly the sourdough pancakes.

  Several weeks later, Gillian jolted awake in the middle of the night, her heart pounding loudly. She sat up in bed, listening. Tom, asleep beside her, hummed quietly as he exhaled. A cat yowled several houses away. She swung her legs off the bed, carefully, so as not to disturb Tom, slipped on her slippers, and went downstairs to the kitchen.

  Moonlight poured through the windows, polishing the fixtures and countertops.

  So beautiful, she thought. So orderly and clean.

  Her eyes followed the contours of the appliances, all in their assigned places. She delighted in the symmetrical shapes, which in the dramatic light created a Mondrian composition.

  But something was out of place. The bowl of sourdough starter was in the middle of the counter. She had been keeping it out of the way in the corner under the hanging pot of Boston ivy. But there it was, a circle in a perfect square of light, basking like a moon flower. Why would Tom move it there? He almost never came into the kitchen.

  Then she remembered that tomorrow was the seventh day since the last time she had used it. Perhaps Tom, now fond of the sourdough flavor, had moved the bowl there to remind her. But Tom could never keep track of temporal cycles, and was always surprised by monthly bills, her periods, dentist check-ups, birthdays, and anniversaries. “Is it that time again?” he would say astonished. It seemed unlike him to remember about the sourdough.

  Gillian lifted the plastic that covered the bowl, feeling a little apprehensive, as if she were violating its privacy. The dough was nearing the rim; its dimpled top looked indecent. Spurred on by a delicious surge of malevolence, she stuck her finger in the middle and watched the dough shrivel, leaving long strings of dough attached to the sides of the bowl.

  They look like stretch marks, she thought with revulsion.

  In a panic, she grabbed a rubber spatula and scraped down the sides of the bowl until the dough was a neat little mound in the center. She rinsed off the spatula with hot water and put it in the dish rack. Then she covered the bowl with clear plastic and shoved it back into the corner under the ivy.

  She was breathing rapidly, and there was a metallic taste in her mouth, almost like blood. She sat at her cozy pine table and chuckled nervously. Imagine, getting so upset over a bowl of bread dough! She realized she was bored of the seven-day routine, bored of baking, bored of having her life dictated by a yeasty mixture of flour and water. Tomorrow, she would make one last recipe and use all of the dough.

  With this decided, Gillian felt at peace. She shuffled back to bed with a pleasant sense of expectation.

  • • •

  The next morning, Tom woke her to a breakfast tray with coffee, orange juice, strawberries, and a croissant. He was in a playfu
l mood. It was their anniversary, he said, and he was going to take her on an adventure.

  Of course it wasn’t their anniversary, but Gillian, delighted, threw on a denim skirt and a sweater and let herself be led by the hand to the garage.

  They drove north up the California coast and stopped at a state park where they rode horses on the beach to a small seafood restaurant. They drank beer, ate clams, fed each other morsels of bread drenched in marinara sauce, then napped in the dunes. Later they drove back in the dark feeling relaxed, completely satisfied with their life together.

  It was only after Gillian had slipped on a lacy peacock-blue chemise (a present from Tom) that she remembered the sourdough—she had forgotten to use it.

  Oh well. A day or two couldn’t make that much difference. At worst, the starter would be spoiled and she’d have a good excuse for throwing it out. She was still slightly tipsy from the afternoon’s beer, and Tom was nibbling on her toes, so she decided to deal with it in the morning.

  • • •

  A little after midnight, she awoke feeling anxious. She smelled a cloying perfume in the damp night air—something like hops, but sweet and light and sexy. Like a night flower blossoming in the swamp. She went downstairs to the kitchen for a glass of water. The odor was more pungent; it tickled her nostrils. As she opened the kitchen door, she glanced at the bowl of sourdough. She sighed with relief to see it in its corner.

  Still tense, she sat down with her favorite Italian cookbook—reading recipes always calmed her. Perhaps she would make Tom a special dinner tomorrow and announce it was his birthday.

  Soon she was lost in a recipe: quail with Gorgonzola and prosciutto. She heard something that sounded like a burp and looked around. The windows were open. Perhaps there was a frog in the garden. She tried not to look at the bowl, but she couldn’t help herself. The plastic stretched several inches above the rim. She decided to ignore it and turned a page in her cookbook to a recipe for rabbit in caper sauce.