Corbin Muck

Pop. Pop. ---.

The first thing the world lost was the ability to pronounce a specific, teeth-sucking emphasis occasionally used in a long dead language of the central Eurasian steppe. But no one spoke that language anymore, nor cared to compare the events of the next three days with the notes of historical linguists, so no one ever realized the loss. It just disappeared. But, on the whole, there is very little difference between something being forgotten and something having disappeared. It was abstract, an unnoticed movement from one column to another in some ephemeral book-keeping exercise.

But the world was about to lose more. Thing after thing after thing. And for most of that day, Ducky and I wouldn’t notice any of it because they were small or distant or esoteric. But we did notice a few things. Firstly, we noticed that all of a sudden we couldn’t feel the gravel underfoot. I asked Ducky about it. He said he felt it too; or, more precisely, didn’t feel it. It was just like we were standing there on a gray cloud. Which was weird until we remembered that a lot of clouds were gray. We could see them out there, rolling in off the Pacific. So we kicked at the gravel and the ground for a while, feeling the mud beneath, but not the scabby skin of gravel. None of the rocks. Big. Small. Didn’t matter, couldn’t feel it. 

It was odd of course, but we couldn’t dwell on it. We had just waved off Ms. Lopez moments before and it wouldn’t do for us to be seen there kicking and kicking at what felt like half-parts of nothing should she need to swing back around and get a forgotten bag or something. After all, we had a job to do. 

An hour earlier, Ms. Lopez had given us the run of the house. Whole duration of the operation she had said all sing-songy. And this particular operation was going to have a long duration. Ms. Lopez was an acquaintance of mine from a few boozy brunches at the Silversmith Lounge. She had a winter’s worth of work needing done on her property. In particular, there were lots of trees that needed felling before the fall winds fully set in. Lots of branches to limb up, cut, split, and stack. But there was more to be done around the property too. She needed a new shed; she needed blackberries cut back; she needed her pathways cleared. Dark, rain stained logs in her woodbin signaled the need for a new roof to replace the turf covered canopy still in place. Ms. Lopez had laughed when I poked its underside and pointed at the streams of water that fell.

“Not much drying under this lean-to,” I’d said. 

She laughed again, closed one eye, and tried to look through some hole to find where the leak was dripping through. But there wasn’t any specific gap. Wood was just all rotted through. All the weather from October to May could pour through there but no light nor pencil lead nor dime could pass. A filter, porous and sopped. More mossy skin than timber bone. 

We had walked on, tramping through the morning dew. Two tours were happening in parallel: Ms. Lopez giving us the lay of the land and Ducky, after being asked, indulgently offering his own history and how he came to be called Ducky. I had told him that Ms. Lopez might be worried about someone she didn’t know staying in her house, so a good first impression was key. He laid it on thick, which Ms. Lopez seemed to find disarming enough. I’d heard all that shtick before so I kept mostly to my own quiet and my own walking, acre after acre. I focused on the narrow look of even the big trees. They were the thousands of haggard dance partners to the Chuckanut Mountain wind; doubled, a bit bow-legged, but with exactitude in their timing. They moved together. They swept at the chilled air. Smells of pine and clean-break cedar rained down with the needles. None had yet grown yellow or orange or brown or mud-beat on the ground. Little smooth-sharp greens sprinkling down onto us with each jostle of wind.

Ducky had tried to time the funny climax of his autobiography with the end of Ms. Lopez’s tour. But he had mistimed it. It wasn’t his fault really, Ms. Lopez had a lot to show us. Everything, it seemed. She moved slow, talked slow, and held her hand ahead of her as she walked like she was holding a candle. Something was coming, she said in between introducing us to her kitchen cupboards. 

“Winter,” Ducky’d offered. 

“Nope,” she hiccupped, “Something else.” 

And we three pondered that for a while. Those words were tarred right there on her forehead. Her eyes followed cue with her mouth, but that brow stayed crinkled. She put her free hand on everything as she showed it: gas canisters, sealed sour cream tubs, window caulk, even the charred bits left over in the stove. Laying hands. Mystic. Ducky liked all that. He got to following along in a way Reverence vibrated between them. Ducky felt for the things beneath things too, but there was a future to it in his eyes. Ms. Lopez looked down mostly, as if to avoid the horizon.

Then she wished us good luck with the work and left for Arizona. She said she’d be gone two months, maybe longer. Had family down there, and again she grew ominous, “It is good to be in a place that can weather things.” 

We agreed. Why wouldn’t we? This job was a step up. I didn’t know what rattled in her bones enough to get her going like that, but it didn’t matter much for us. We’d made out a good gig here. Hell of a lot better than my room under the bar downtown. Never seen a thing like it. Places above bars, sure, but below? Hours and hours of stomping and scraping and scooting raining down on me from above. No wind in the branches, no green little needles shook free. Ducky theorized it was some old prohibition hideaway. But romance ain’t no kind of insulation, and liquor never seeped down through the floor. I had to get out much as I could. 

So Ms. Lopez drove off. We kicked that feel-less gravel for a while, and then took to the work. We nipped the bottle, and the back of my eyes smoothed everything out for two months of sleep. 

That night, while we slept, the world lost:

The smell of goose shit.

Grasshoppers. 

The sloppy feeling of wet leather. 

All the birds in Connecticut.

Thirty-two stars visible in the Southern Hemisphere. 

The feel of book paper scraped between your thumb and side-forefinger. 

And, around dawn, all the canned peaches. Peaches on the branch were going to be around until Thursday. That morning, it was just the canned ones. 

We started working early as we could. Our heads were sour and we took turns, while the coffee percolated, taking heaping gulps of water from a seagull mug. Ducky was the strong one that morning, the one who’d nudged us up and towards routine. We had talked a lot about building routines. You need routines when you’ve got a big space and a lot of time. We’re geared for the opposite; a little space and not much time. We’d been jumping for years like frogs between lily-pads, just barely making it before flying to the next small, half-sinking place. So when suddenly everything’s all flipped on its head like that, we had to aim to do things different too. If we dropped our routine, we reasoned, and got lost among the days or yards or land, we were liable to piss it all away. Besides, Ducky seemed to like the word. Routine. It rolled off his tongue with the beat of a bat’s wings at twilight. You looked somewhere else, the horizon maybe, and there was Ducky flapping that word into the air. Routine. Hammering, reaching, clattering. Routine. 

Finishing the coffee, I set out to start things off.

Ms. Lopez’s property was a mimic. I hadn’t noticed it so much the first day, but I saw it now. First, it mimicked the waves of the Pacific, rising, rolling, and keeping lines of contour that curved like the tide. Second, it mimicked me. I flung out my arms for balance as I moved through the tangle of the understory, holding the axe and saw far from myself, and the high canopy boughs swayed like I did. I took the mirroring as mockery but didn’t want to risk confrontation so early in on the job.

The loss of things was starting to pick up now, popping out all over the world. But I didn’t know about any of that. I’d forgotten about the gravel too. There was work to do. How could I have spent any more time pondering the oddity of that when there’s these other oddities to contemplate? Ms. Lopez for one. Owning land? Owning cabins? Some bunker of family to fly off to? These things were all just as unreal as soft, matterless gravel in that moment. When you march in the unobtainable parade like Ducky and I, you stop thinking about the floats and the people and the brass music. You think about the mileage. The turns. The steps. First you think about the route, of course, but then you realize you don’t know the end, and what good’s a map like that? So it fades, and it’s back to the intricacies of the march. The small bits. The grains. 

And so it was then too. I swung the axe and clattered the limbs apart. I grooved the saw and felt the low crack of timber. I dragged the cedar brush bit by bit and piled it. 

“Hey!” Ducky yelled up the ridgeline about midday. His voice sprang between strikes of the tools. 

“Hey!” I yelled back. 

“You’re gonna wanna put that door back on before you do anything else!” 

I crouched, head nestled in the greenery. “What?” 

“The door! The door! The door!” he intoned swiping at the air, “Put it back soon!”

“The hell you talking about? I didn’t do anything to the door. I don’t even know which door you mean.”

“The front door?” 

No. 

“Nothing?” 

No, I confirmed. 

Ducky looked at me with his mouth screwed up and his gloved hands looking heavy at his sides. His quiet brought me down. 

We went round the corner together and I understood him now. The front door of the house was gone. A single piece of oak, I remembered because it was too heavy for its hinges, was gone. The forest-deep dimness of the house within gasped in unbroken surprise. 

We got sharp things and patrolled the house for thieves. A bold break-in it would have been, we agreed, but possible. We found nothing. It became strange. We couldn’t find the door, and the hinges were bent with age but otherwise undamaged. In fact, their pins were still driven through them, as if the door had just melted away. But there was no pool of melted oak, no scorch or viscous slop or nothing. Just motionless shock looking to us for answers. 

Ducky mused for a bit. Quacking as he liked. Mysteries were his breadcrumbs, big or small. They’d grip him right out of placidity into a frenzied, waddling mind. 

“Wind,” he declared. 

I looked downhill. It gusted up at us, affronted at the accusation. 

“It’s blowing towards the house.” 

“Yep. Right at the house.”

“No, I mean, the door woulda been blown inwards. Into the house.” 

“Blew hard, loosened some part of it and then when the wind slackened up, it came loose and rolled down the hillside.” 

The hillside didn’t grow to any kind of steepness for about twenty yards. No door tracks neither. 

But we didn’t press it. Just sat with it for a while longer nodding at one another. The parade was marching on without us. Rain spackled down through the canopy. If it had gone down that ravine we’d never find it, so we put up a few layers of weighted tarp and called it a morning. Onward. Routine. 

While we felt the rain, all the seeds of the world’s watermelons disappeared. Then the color orange; then certain species of beetles in South America, then all of the hemp rope in Hokkaido, then boat propellers, then any clock made before 1982. 

While we put up the tarp, a longer list of things clicked away into nothingness. By this time, people were beginning to notice. By this time, things were being talked about. By this time, the rest of the world, too, was looking for the oak door. 

We went back to work for a few hours. Ms. Lopez was on my mind. She’d surely be upset about the door, even though there was nothing we could have done about it. But, then, there was all the laying of hands she’d been doing. She’d done it all over before she’d left. I couldn’t remember if she’d done it to the door too. Probably. Be hard not to. I just kept thinking about it. Did she touch the door? Did she say goodbye to the door? Because somewhere I knew that door wasn’t coming back, and it wasn’t coming back because it wasn’t down a hillside somewhere. It tumbled, but far off from what we could see. It must have fell clumsily. End over end, but off-axis, something that isn’t designed to fall or slip or really move in any ways but two. Open. Shut. It did open, I suppose, there at the end, but to something else. Something that couldn’t then be closed. 

The wind billowed against the tarp, dragging the stapled weights over the carpet. Forward it pushed and then went limp. Little by little, creeping inward. 

We laid off the whiskey that night because Ducky started reading the news. It hadn’t been his plan. He just glanced at it, but the breadcrumbs were laid thick on the screen so his attention was lost. I’ve found that engrossment is incompatible with liquor. Not like those detective movies with the shadows and hard angles; the ones where the private-eye mulls and drinks in his office. No, Ducky couldn’t do that, and there was no revolver to finger on the desk, so we stuck to beer. 

I sat, Ducky talked. 

“Shit’s going missing,” he said crustily. 

“What? More doors?” 

“I guess. That kind of stuff.”

“What kind of stuff?” 

“Just stuff. Things. There for a bit while people look and then they’re not. Here. Gone. People are talking about it.” 

“What’re they saying?”

“That it’s odd mostly.” 

“It is odd.”

“Yes.” 

He read on. I ran my finger over the thin aluminum of the beer can. It felt light. Empty. I stretched my face and wondered if I’d just downed the whole thing without noticing. While Ducky snapped at the trail winding forever offwards in his hands. I held the beer can up to the overhead light. It was almost full. I lifted it again. Almost weightless. I jostled it. No enclosed sea seemed to storm inside. I tipped some out onto the table. 

The beer trickled out, splashing gold under the lamp.

“Hell you doin’?” Ducky said, still distracted.

“It felt empty. I was checking.” 

“There’s a better way to do that, you know,” Ducky took a swig of his own beer. I moved it with my finger. I traced a circle that spread then dried in the wake of my movement. Shaped and then gone, as if it were never there.

“All kinds of stuff has just disappeared,” Ducky declared and set down his phone, “Who knows about it all.” 

“Not me. It’s odd, sure enough.”

We cracked more beers. We sloshed the weightlessness of each of them without comment to one another. But we drank all the same. The air cooled, the Pacific got its nightly ideas, and the tarp portal sang.

More. Gone. Toothpaste. Cold shudders. The wings of yellow jackets. Bathroom light-switches. The twinkling rainbow gasoline makes in the sun. The feel of marbles on skin. The smell of lavender. Granite in Scotland. Any piping between 3 inches and 8 inches in diameter. The sound of hoof beats on a city street. Algae.

Faster and faster things were going. Like flashes of lightning, until, around 2 AM, lightning went too. 

Again. Up. Sour. Coffee, gulps of water, and we trudged out into the wet morning. Full rain now, wind too. The ocean, ever moving through the gaps in the trees, kept an eye on us. Watched too closely, too pointedly. The wind carried its voice loudly and a hint of its brackish breath. I cracked fresh wood against those sensations, sent them reeling with the smell of cedar. I moved quicker than yesterday. I poured over the hill as fast as I could. The gloves were useless along the slippery wet hickory handled tools, so I removed them and felt the suctioned, warm mixture of sweat and rain on my bare hands. 

Bits at a time, I saw Ducky. He flitted around the house like a hummingbird. Moving. Checking. Prodding. Peering. Doing everything to no clear purpose. He stepped quickly. He stomped, really, stomped with excitement. It made me think of a horse being led downhill; trepidation followed by quick almost reckless movement. 

His nervousness was contagious. It spread to the nearby scrub maples clustering around a small creek. They whipped in the wind harshly. No stillness longer than a short, distracted breath. I kept looking back at the house, back at him, trying to see what his eyes saw through the angle of his head or the arch of his back. Maybe more had gone wrong. We hadn’t been paid up front. If Ms. Lopez came back to a shaken apart ramshackle I doubted there’d be any money in this whole venture. We couldn’t have that.

I walked down the winding trail and caught him back by the woodpile. 

“What the hell’s going on, Ducky?” 

He was looking up at the lean-to roof. He prodded it with his finger and a whole section, big as his fist, tore up like a scab. 

“What’s the matter with you? Fuck you doin’?” 

“No moss,” he replied. 

“What?” 

“This was covered with moss yesterday. All on top. Like a blanket. And now, I don’t see any. It’s just gone.”

“Wind, Ducky. The wind took it.”

“There’s no moss anywhere. Not on any part of the roof, or the grass, or any of the logs lying around. None of it.” 

“Wind,” I said again.

“Wind’s been doing an awful lot, don’t you think? First the door, now the moss.” 

“You’re the one who thought the door was done in by the wind!” 

He nodded. He poked upwards again. The flap he’d loosened hung down. 

At lunch, Ducky read more on his phone. He sat quiet at the table and didn’t give me anything. Just read and read. I had to ask him. Had to get something out of him. 

“Craziest thing,” he said not looking up. “Things just keep disappearing. Little stuff, big stuff. It’s like some practical joke, but the whole world.” 

“What kind of stuff?” 

He listed some. Showed some pictures. Electric lines laying on the street because the towers had gone. Wheat fields strangely colorless. A frog without eyes. It was hard to think about and see that way because of the pictures. It just seemed like these things had always been like that if you looked at the picture long enough. Seeing made it normal. Ducky said that was stupid.

“And then there’s other things that are gone too,” he continued, “like, not thing things, but… I don’t know, things you know?”

“Things?” 

“Smells!” he almost shouted, “Smells. Or tastes. Or you know, things! How else would you say that?” 

“I don’t know! I ain’t been reading it!” 

He fell back in his chair. We listened to the wind and rain. We felt the cold changing of pressure. We ran our hands over the glazed table. The quiet between us had so many sides, and on some instinct we made a point to look and to feel each of them. But eventually Ducky’s eyes grew hungry again and he turned back to the glowing banquet in his hands.

It took some doing, but I got him up and working again. He steered clear of the house. Something about the trail he’d been tracking extended away from it now. The house was a known conspirator. Other leads stretched out over the property for him. 

I retook the ridge. I picked up the axe I had nestled under some thick ferns. 

I felt the weight of it, which was expected, and that momentum carried me forward for a bit. Then, swing by swing, I started thinking about it. I started thinking about that feel, that warmth, that grip, that water which burned away with the hot effort of each stroke. 

None of it was there. I stopped. I pushed my thumbnail hard against the graining of what I knew was hickory, and felt nothing. My nail glided over it as if it were waxed glass, but without feeling. An empty, sensationless, hollow thing. I tried not to think about it at first. But it nagged at me. I knew what it was supposed to feel like and that switch, that hollow socket of a memory started to fill up with thought after thought after thought. I needed to shake myself loose.

I threw down the axe and tore down the hill to find Ducky. As I went, I noticed the patch of scrub maples were entirely gone. There wasn’t any anywhere. Gone.

Ducky stood in a hillside depression near the backend of the house. He was looking off towards the distance. 

“Ducky! Hey, Ducky! The hell is going on out here? I’m noticing all kinds of weird shit, man. I don’t know if you’ve read any more but you gotta tell me what’s going on,” I finished out of breath. 

“Ocean’s gone.” 

I felt my stomach drop and was grateful for the feeling, for the tangibility. But I couldn’t turn. 

“What do you mean?” my words sounded slow. 

He didn’t speak again. Just shook his head.

I turned. 

The trees, with their moving branches, still cracked and revealed a distance beyond them, but that was all it was: distance. A long stretching horizon. Some kind of somethinglessness stripped of color and movement and smell and body. Paste, maybe. Dirty, shapeless paste. 

Lots went with the ocean. Not only things in it, or on it, or near it, but things far from it. Things on mountains, sounds in valleys, colors in jungles. Pop. Pop. Pop. 

Well, not ‘pop’ exactly. Because that has something; it’s a sound or a click of air, or symbols written down. It has heft, even if in the grand order its heft is small, all but unnoticed. But holes were being punched all over the hierarchy of notice, so even pop could be looked upon, inadequate as it was to describe a true halt to being. 

Pop. Pop. Pop.

From the inside, things don’t end. From the inside of the popping, there-and-then-notness of a thing, there is no ability to define, or comment, or reframe the changed state. Oblivion has no retrospective platform. Things do not end from the inside. They barely even pop.

Until they don’t even do that.

Pop. Pop. Pop.

---. ---. ---.

Ducky and I tore through the tarp and into the house. He took up his phone so quickly he almost cracked himself in the head with the swing of his arm. It would be a long while before he had satiated himself enough to share his meal, so I went through the house. I put my hand on things as Ms. Lopez had. I felt them for the sensation I expected. I was often disappointed. More slick, filmy nothingness instead of their usual feel. Each time, panic rose in me. I thought of what it would have felt like to Ms. Lopez, what should be there now, what it was for skin to fall on wood or lacquer or cloth or plaster. I brought plates, a flashlight, a pillow and more over to Ducky for a test. He didn’t feel anything either. The sensations we were supposed to feel didn’t leave behind a replacement or some new, changed thing – they were just empty. Burgled like the door. 

One minute I was inspecting the underside of the table and, when I stood, all of the glass in the windows had gone. But the bedside desks, the couch legs, the rolled up wrapping paper in a wicker basket, and the electrical sockets had all disappeared before it. Each. Gone. 

Ducky looked up. His phone, now without its glass, had been drained of life. A hunk of plastic and wires was all that remained. At least for now.  

“Guess that too,” he said with his mouth almost curling up into something. His expression just hovered there across the air from me. I saw it. I watched it. There was some kind of almost watery glimmer to it, but that couldn’t be, because the water was gone. We thought about it. The rain had left too.

“No rain,” I confirmed.

He looked out the window to see if the silence had backing, “Yep.”

“Whole ocean. Just gone. You saw it, right?” I felt incomplete, parts of me that would normally be at the forefront of my mind were just not there. Like when I was a kid and a bunch of us grabbed one another’s hands, leaned back, and sort of spun. We were all kept up by the movement, by the unbroken grip of the person next to us, we stayed up that way. But these kids weren’t kids, they were feelings. Fear was in there, so were his milder cousins, and also a confused day-drunk excitement, but missing between them was surprise. Just wasn’t there. Couldn’t feel it. Ducky didn’t seem to feel it either. He just eyed his phone, half-jumped out of existence, with a look like smoothed out velvet sitting on his face. As we went, the kids kept spinning. The circle stayed up, but the connectors, their hands locked hard, flew suddenly and forever away. 

We noticed the colors now, or the lack of them. Like water running over paint, but instantly. More firehose than faucet. There and gone. Less drenched than just punched through. We watched it happen in real time once. It was the lush green of grass on the mountainside. There. Gone. We had been walking out of the house when it happened. I felt again the hand of fear on one side, but surprise remained absent. The sudden change landed dully against me. 

And there was more besides when we looked. Gaps pierced everywhere in the landscape of sight and smell and touch and feeling and everything. 

“-at should -e do?” Ducky said puckering his face stumbling over the –ords. 

“-hat?” I said. And I felt it too. I’d tried for that sound. That “–” sound. It didn’t come. -ouldn’t. No matter ho- hard I tried. Ducky and I stood there, making faces at one another, trying to coax the sound out. Our mouths flapped helplessly. I felt nothing. Surprise should have been total at our difficulty, but that feelings foundational absence left our thoughts an empty, starless sky.

More. All of it. Not just the bones of the –orld, but the tissue, the sine-, the speckled drops of blood rolling together in thousands to make liquid. Fast. Gone. Fast. Out. Faster. 

And then the cedars -ent. Flash. The gray clouds s-am do-n at us like sharks after their prey. But there -eren’t sharks anymore. Only clouds in masquerade. 

Ducky ran back. I –atched him go into the house. I sa- him through the lidless eyes of the -indo-s. He made noise. Lots of it. Then silence. Then a different noise, grabbed and hurled up, until that too dropped a-ay. He hammered on the countertop no-. Just over and over and over. He beat at the mystery. He couldn’t pursue it as before, couldn’t get a handle or a scrap of something to mull over. So he had to go hard at it another -ay. Making sounds that -ere expected again and again and again until he could no longer, felt like gathering information. Clues, he -ould have said. But I couldn’t –atch the hunting, the sleuthing, the private-eye-running-the-back-lit-alleys. It -as jagged. Too jagged. Some kind of screaming into formlessness. 

I ran up the ridge. Kicked through hard nothings. Stepped over a sea of moving colorlessness. I -atched the light blue of the cloud cracked sky kick off. Empty no-. The clouds melted against empty fire -hile dropping nothing to earth. 

I cast around for my tools. The hickory handle of the axe had gone. The head -as -eightless in my hand. 

There –as a crash from the house’s direction, but I didn’t register it immediately. I stared at the axe head in my hand. Lifted it up and do-n. It -as like I held nothing, like my fingers touched nothing, like my arm lifted nothing. By chance, in the corner of my eye, I sa- -hat had happened to the house. I remembered its explosion of noise. The -hole thing had collapsed -ith Ducky inside. Roof and beams and –alls –ere all folded do-n. No scre-s. That -as my guess. Ducky had to be dead. Or hurt. Or unconscious. But I didn’t feel any of the heft in those –ords, they’d been clipped free from any connection. He –as just gone. Just a pop. There. Gone. Instantaneous. I continued non-lift lifting my axe. I felt its change, its end, and I –aited for my house to fall. Things don’t end from the inside. 

Over and ov-r. Again. Focus. That -as l-ft. Som- scanning light.

Pop. Pop. Pop. 

I stumbl-d. Th- rub-r of my boots -as gon-. My shirt had no color. I ripp-d it a-ay. Couldn’t hav- it on m-. It –asn’t cold any-ay. Couldn’t b- anymor-.

Gon-. Gon-. Gon-. 

Dripping out and quick. 

Th- m-tal of th- ax- --nt too. 

It –nt, and no lightn-ss r-plac-d it. Just gon-. –ach thing, small and conn-ct-d and holding hands pok-d through by a pin. But no light sho-n through. Nothing backlit th- diorama. 

Lik- fir-crack-rs, b-ing blo-n into nothing on- chang- at a tim-. 

F—lings drain-d off. Surpris- had b—n follo--d by f-ar, rag-, -xcit-m-nt, and th- -hol- long sl— of oth-rs.

Drip. Out. 

Drip. Out. 

Dr-p. Ou-.

Dr-p. Ou-.

-h- sharks -n th- sky surfac-d out of s-gh-. No-h-ng up th-r- no-.

-r-p. Ou-. 

Gon-.

-r--. ---.

G---.

---.   

Aram Mrjoian