A Shape and a Run

By Anthony Wong

Through the lens of the surreal and the mundane, author Anthony Wong explores what it means to be alone - and in the process, what it means to change.

Written at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, A Shape and a Run is a collection of short stories centered around the concept of isolation: its origins, manifestations

• Language: English
• Publisher: New Degree Press
• Release date: Apr 28, 2021
• ISBN: 9781637301487

Book preview

MIDDLETOWN

---

The ringing of the bell began shortly after sunrise, as it had every sunrise for as long as Casey could remember. It came in clearly through the broken window he had thrown a brick through after one particularly trying morning. There was a short pause, a tinkling echo, and then the clanging beat began again, rising up with an ungodly shrillness.

Casey was at the window before the last peal of the set had faded, pistol at the ready. Eyes bloodshot, he aimed down at the church courtyard below.

The cause of this early morning insanity was pleasantly humming to himself among the cobblestones. Habil padded a few steps to a flattened bedroll and plunked himself down. With practiced ease, he worked his jaw and rolled his shoulders before bending over backward into the beginnings of a doughnut shape. His head tilted back as far as it would go, his palms hovering just above the ground. His body achieved a slight curve but little else, so that he resembled a plank about to snap. It would have made a funny sight had Casey not wanted to kill him.

Could he do it?

In the days leading up, Casey had pondered this carefully. It was not a question of ability—more of a cost-benefit analysis, a teleological survey. He gritted his teeth and slowly, very slowly, eased his finger off the trigger.

Habil, oblivious, raised his rear end in a mountain peak and stretched as far as he could go.

Normally, the land around the coast of Maine was one of breathtaking beauty, of rolling hills covered in tamarack forests and landed by graceful deltas, of painted wood houses and quaint little docks. It was mid-September, and around this time of year the coastal village would be bustling with out-of-towners, taking on the overflow from places like Camden and Portland, from the retirees venturing beyond Kennebunkport or the hikers returning from Mt. Katahdin.

Visitors would’ve been greeted by the sight of catamarans slicing across the bay, red-brick storefronts, and a weathered, wooden billboard at the mouth of Main Street leaning against three decapitated metal struts. But now that sign was blasted through the middle, leaving two jagged edges grinning on either side. In the absence of a name, Casey had rechristened it Middletown, short for Middle-of-the-Pine-Sticks-Nowhere. There were no locals around to take offense.

The fires left by the missiles burned to the west, and there they remained. But the poisonous fumes raised by the eruptions in California still moved across the sky, pushing people to opposite hemispheres. While some fled into Mexico and South America, many headed north, chaos and death following them every step of the way.

When Casey first arrived, he came upon a diorama of bloody carnage. Bodies crumpled in the streets and slumped in doorways. Bullet craters in the sides of buildings. Boats either missing or disabled. The marina where tourists used to throng was partially collapsed, and the bodies floating underneath the shattered timbers consisted mainly of women and children, turned facedown as if they could not bring themselves to watch the slaughter. Yet there was no one else to be found. The perpetrators of the massacre, if there were any, had either gone north or died in the exchange.

Casey did not move the bodies. They gave off a stench like trash in an oven, and their rank authority made him gag, inviting him to lose control. Because of this, he refused to break down any of the locked doors he found. The period of human destruction had already passed, and what was left was the deliberate sealing away of all that remained. Whatever was locked away was meant to stay so forever.

If Casey had thought he could survive by moving up north, he would have. But he knew it was futile. Annihilation’s true harbinger was visible for all to see. The global, toxic cloud nearly covered the sky, advancing slowly but surely up the coast. Soon, it would envelop the world. There was nowhere left to hide. Nobody left to run toward or away from.

Until Habil came.

From his lookout post in a villa overlooking half of Main Street, Casey had noticed straightaway when the bodies in the church courtyard began disappearing. Some had been dragged off by scavengers, while others remained undisturbed. They were a horrible, overbearing presence, a pox on the otherwise pristine white stucco of the church walls… and then overnight, they vanished. Casey looked down the hill one morning and saw only the courtyard, the well, the dried bloodstains on the walls.

Slowly, eyes darting from side to side, he entered the nave through the back way and came out behind the altar. The bodies were scattered all over the floor, on the stage, and in the aisles. They were stacked neatly side by side as if the crowd had decided on a sleepover and forgotten to wake up. Beneath the glowing, colored windows, Casey had hopped from pew to pew, careful to avoid the bodies, and when he had reached the back, he laid his ear against the vestibule door and heard a voice murmuring on the other side.

Bursting in with his pistol drawn, Casey had found Habil sitting at a table, his legs nonchalantly propped up on a retro stool. He didn’t move when he saw the pistol, only sat there nursing a mug of tea, cupping it around its middle like a child. He was dressed resplendently in a rainbow-patterned sweater vest and tapered, purple jeans. Around his neck hung a heated thurible, its burnished surface catching the light like an ancient jewel.

Habil was not one of the architects of the massacre. He’d happened upon the town as Casey had. He was not a priest, no longer Muslim, but had taken the bodies out of the courtyard to give a quick funeral service using a Bible from the pulpit. He confessed to taking the thurible from the vestments room and a few scented oils from the sacristy for their resinous smell. It reminded him of the woods back home in Minnesota, which had been spared the missiles but was still covered in stinging, ashen darkness, nonetheless.

Even after everything that had happened with the world, Habil seemed like someone unacquainted with loss, a screwball emissary from a distant past. The end of civilization was a wispy hypothetical. Ghosts did not exist. He relived his family and friends through memory, recounting their antics and tastes and eccentricities that were mild in comparison to his.

After traveling alone for so long, Casey thought he would welcome a bit of company. But this was different. It didn’t take long to get used to his presence and less time than that to be bothered.

Never mind Habil’s early morning Pilates in the slaughter ground of the church. Never mind the ridiculously stylish outfits he somehow cobbled together from his hidden wardrobe and the scattered remnants of the town clothing store. Never mind the storm of heavy metal he blasted in the evenings from the church vestibule, when it was all Casey could do to close his eyes and try to sleep. It was his attitude that was so devastating. He carried a cloud of hope that did not dissipate, and Casey was violently allergic to this madness, this persistent and compulsive exuberance, that seemed to have infected Habil to the marrow of his bones.

As such, Casey made no proactive effort to cross paths with him, straying deeper into the woods and venturing into town only when he needed to restock his emergency canned supplies or the odd battery for his flashlight. Habil inhabited the area closest to the marina, where the corpses bobbed in the swells of the tide. He slept in the church too—his own personal mausoleum—and every morning, Casey heard the bell ring the day into session. If he happened to look down into the courtyard, he would see Habil stretching by the drainage grate. The tiles around him, where the dead had lain, were still stained with the rusting of blood.

Again, Casey considered moving. Farther up the coast was the Levering summer resort, situated on a bluff and walled off by the cedars and pines. In the evenings, Casey could just make out a huge marble patio ringed by black, Victorian lampposts powered on when darkness fell. Traveling there held the possibility of dying in peace, or at least some quiet. But what would be the use? By the time he made it there, the toxic cloud would have engulfed them all. At that point, it made no difference whether he was in Middletown or further up the coast.

Another obstacle to the operation was the alarming shortage of food. The birds had long since fled or been exterminated, and the game left was either too small or too hard to catch. Yet Habil, with all the resourcefulness and instinct of a pig snouting for truffles, had managed to in a day scrounge up what Casey gathered in a week, and which he stashed in multiple hiding spots around town. In one spot down by the marina—a low storeroom made of rowboats leaning against each other in a misshapen teepee—Habil had shown him bags full to the brim: beef jerky, canned peas, canned corn, pinto beans, dried cranberry, bouillon, Chef Boyardee… a king’s larder. Logistically speaking, it was hard to do away with somebody who held the keys to your stomach.

Those were the things he told himself. But it really came down to a simple question: Could he do it?

One day, Habil shot a lone goose out of the sky and fished it out of the harbor with a pool net. They butchered it together in a backyard with an old barbecue grill. Casey stared into the smooth pebble of its eye and wondered what it had seen on its wayward, migratory path—its flock succumbing one by one to the noxious air; burning cities crumbling into embers; a sea made gray from the light coating of ash that fell from the sky. Maybe it was already dying from the fumes, and Habil had saved it a bit of trouble. Casey could only speculate these things, but was certain it had survived alone, which was bad enough to justify its end.

It must have been strong to last the whole way here, said Habil. Can you imagine? Going for miles and watching your friends fall from the sky?

No, said Casey.

Habil nodded companionably. He died well. I thanked him afterward for flying so low for me. He got up and took away the goose head for soup, leaving Casey to flip shoulder bones on the grill.

They dined on roasted wings and swallowed rangy meat that stuck halfway in the throat. They guzzled Gatorade from a half-submerged icebox Habil had found at the marina. Then they drank the soup, Habil in great slurping gulps, sucking out the eyes from the goose head like gumballs.

Habil filled the backyard with his chatter. He told Casey about his mother’s creamy seviyan at Thanksgiving, about family Monopoly nights at Christmas, how he worshiped the Vikings and loathed the Packers. He told Casey about the time his brother broke an arm after sledding into a tree. He spoke in detail about how his father’s sabbatical trip to Toronto was cut short by the eruptions, how he phoned home to warn them to move east while they could. He reminisced over the weeks his mother began coughing up black phlegm and when his brother drowned in a deep river crossing near the Michigan border.

It was quite a time, he finished, with a detached mistiness that could’ve been mistaken for nostalgia.

Casey said nothing. He was mostly fixated on the food and so failed to notice Habil carelessly wiping his hands on the back of his button-down after relieving himself in the woods, how he had then casually dabbled his unwashed fingers in the pot before serving Casey another bowl of steaming broth. It turned out Habil, cheerful envoy of limitless sustenance, regularly failed to wash his hands in the bay after dropping a deuce.

That night, as Casey curled up in his sleeping bag to keep his insides from spewing out from both hatches, the question entered his mind once again.

And the resounding answer was yes. Yes, he could.

Eight days later, within the ruins of Bard’s Express Coffee Shop, Casey sat at the counter, watching the front doors of the church. It was early in the afternoon, and Habil had yet to show himself. The shadow of the encroaching cloud pressed the town starkly into view. The surrounding woods were a stricken palisade of black and white and dull greenery.

Finally, Habil stepped out in his usual getup (today was a blue sweater, peppermint-colored scarf, and brown chukka boots), carrying a plastic container of amber liquid in one hand and a pink stove lighter in the other. Spotting Casey in the cafe, Habil waved. Then he shook out a few splashes from the amber jug, switched on the stove lighter, and bent down to ignite the dark trail of gasoline that led from the interior of the church and dribbled down the stone steps. Casey’s eyes snapped up as flames roared up the doorway in a blistering howl.

Habil calmly screwed the gasoline cap closed, hopped back over the gate, and surveyed his handiwork. Casey watched as a ruby glow began to build up in the church, like a fireball gathering in a dragon’s throat. Timbers began to groan and crackle. A loud hissing rose up from within, and Casey thought of all the stacked corpses among the pews, thought of their clothes wilting and their fluids boiling. A sweet, sickly scent trickled into his nostrils, like a side of pork on the grill, and he realized it was the smell of skin charring.

Then came a dull crash from inside, and with a searing flash of light the windows blew out in a spew of glass, releasing smoke that had furled up within and now billowed out in undulating waves. A tidal wave of heat battered the chill air. In no time at all, the church was consumed in its own miniature cloud of annihilation, all the way to the tip of its roof-mounted cross.

From across the street, Habil turned and met Casey’s shocked gaze. His voice was loud over the screaming of the fire.

They’ve gone proper, he said. For sure.

Then he walked away and