Why I’m in Baltimore by Noah Elliot Blake

The first time I killed a man I was eight years old. He cried incessantly while I kicked at the back of his head with my brothers doing the same. My father watched as the man said, “Not me, god not me,” over and over, trying to stress, I suppose, that we were confused about who we were killing. We weren’t. We killed to watch the gore and test the limits of our breaking world. Who wasn’t something we were interested in. We were scorpions scuttling in the sand, benthic kraken pups, empty, empty.

Things change. Two years ago I counted four of my brothers dead, one by his own will (and a stretch of rope tied to a burnt black street sign) and one from diphtheria. The other two gone in the night, which is dead enough by our account, and dead again by anyone else’s. Two others joined the army when it was still taking, when it was still around. My father wandered into West Virginia sometime after that, climbing a hill and waving his .38 at us, threatening to bleed, to maim. We knew not to follow. The youngest three looked at me, their eyes turgid with an astonished desolation I was not too gone to grieve for later, alone. They were twelve, eleven, and nine. I was twelve too. We continued alone.

We don’t make it long. We crack up, we bare skin to the rain, hallucinating, we eat from cans of paint and laugh at our nude bodies. The nine year old lives the longest but dies too. Starvation I think. Exhaustion I think. I survive skeletal, a thing of gloom living under rocks and rubble, drinking gasoline, making dinner of crickets that have learned not to sing.

A woman sleeps under a dying tree and I find her. She tells me about a boat leaving from the East because I make her. I feel punctured as I strangle her in the dusk; a lambent ceremony I am not more wretched for.

It was nice once, I say.

Yes, she nods.

The gratitude in her expression is replaced by the gravel hue of death. I don’t eat her. I begin walking to Baltimore.

No one is here. The water is crowded with garbage and decaying fish while the great boats line up half-submerged in the harbor, rusting and moaning in the waves and wind. I consider what may lie underneath the surface; know it to be terrible, know that knowing so is the same as knowing nothing. I think about jumping in but don’t. My legs are reeds, my head mash.

She might have meant New York and I’m not dead through. Yet. Now a grey seagull comes in from the grey sky and rests on the pier, its curiosity emaciated like mine. It won’t look at me so I throw a piece of glass at it that skips across the rotten wood and right by its calloused legs. It doesn’t move and I move on.

When it comes I barely even notice it: a flicker of light then a deep thud in my stomach then a pop barking in a pack of echoes. Then quiet, then unconsciousness. I come to sitting against stone steps but I don’t try to stand up. There’s no chance of it. I hope to pass into a coma before he comes for me. Wouldn’t want to hear his voice. No luck.

He comes over a blasted brick wall with a rifle over his shoulder, a crooked black hat obscuring his face but for his tongue, which licks his dried lips languorously.

“Thought you looked young,” he says.

The day is spent. The tattered sun moves on to torture the other side of the earth. The wicked moon replaces it, the clouds lashed and lashed.

“What will remember this?” I say.

“First no one, then the dust. But not long after that, nothing,” he says.

I follow his crumbling words into the harbor dark, out to the coast, beyond the spans of flora rotting in the water, and up, where they are lost over the pitiless sky, the place that I, reciprocating, proceed to remember nothing.