by Andrew Kozma
(740 words)
The neighborhood was going to shit. Houses were disappearing on a daily basis, and in their place sprouted the black domes, polished to a mirror-shine. But when we looked in that mirror we didn’t see ourselves, but people dressed like us, in our own clothes, but who were definitely not us.
“Who is that?”
A bald, white man with a six-pack like Mt. Rushmore pointed at us and mouthed the words slurring from Greg’s mouth. Instead of a bottle of Lone Star, the stranger’s hand held a hammer. The expression on his face was best described as supercilious.
“What does that even mean, Harris?” Greg sneered at my vocabulary. The stranger smiled. “You’re saying he’s some sort of hero?”
Where I was supposed to be in the reflection, instead there was a large dog, some sort of wolf half-breed with its tongue lolling out in hunger or exhaustion. I shook my head, and it shook its head as well. When I drank from my own beer, the dog’s lips pulled back in approval. Its eyes weren’t human at all. The black dome before us seemed to grow as we stood there, the noon sun tanning our hides and adjusting the shadows around us like a fiddly, detail-oriented and very bad painter.
“Why are you a dog, Harris?”
“Ruff ruff,” I said.
“Say again?”
Greg wasn’t paying attention to me, like always, which was fine because it meant I didn’t really have to pay attention to him, either. He was the lightning rod for trouble, and with him around I didn’t have to worry about getting into any myself.
The streets around us were wrecked with flattened, rotting trash and dented, metal trashcans that rolled in the occasional breeze like tumbleweeds. Down off Main Street, a scattering of people were attempting a block party, a hydrant drooling forth water for the kids to play in while a boom box rasped out last year’s hits. A gutted car had been reworked into a giant grill and the burned smell of hot dog flesh reached us even this far away, and my mouth watered like the hydrant. Out of the corner of my eye, the dog in my reflection eyed me cautiously, saliva pooling on the pavement under its mouth.
“What are we even doing here?” I asked, not expecting a response, and Greg didn’t disappoint me.
I was here because Greg was here, but who knew why Greg was here. We lived in run-down houses on the far edge of the neighborhood, new condos being built around us like fences. It was in the center of the neighborhood that the black domes were rising up like blisters just begging to be popped. Where had the houses gone that the domes replaced? What about the people who’d lived there?
“Like mushrooms, Harris?” Greg asked.
“Yeah, just like them,” I agreed, startled by Greg’s assessment of the domes. They were like mushrooms, and what did they contain? Would they burst and shoot spores to the most distant corners of the city?
“No, Harris, do you want a mushroom?”
Greg shoved his fat hand under my face, a collection of dried mushrooms resting in his palm like dirty scabs. I downed one, wishing it was a bite from a hot dog. The smell of cooking meat from the grill settled around us, a fog of desire. A fleet of construction vehicles crossed Adlai Avenue far enough away to be completely silent.
“What if that’s the way the world ended?” I asked, the last yellow vehicle disappearing from view.
“What are you talking about?”
“What if that’s how it all ended. Construction vehicles just breaking everything apart, carrying all the rubble away.”
“You just took the mushroom, Harris. Stop pretending to be already high.”
I shrugged. From where we stood, black half-moons rose from behind a dozen different houses. It was a plague, that’s for sure, but no one was dying.
When I turned back to the mirror-black surface, Greg was looking away. The white man in the dome stared at Greg’s face, an Elvis jag to his lips. He reached out to Greg, his fingers nearly touching the inside of the dome.
But the dog who stood in for me, he sat back on his haunches with his jaws hanging open as a suitcase. He knew he didn’t have to reach out to me. Given world enough and time, I’d come to him.
END
Andrew Kozma’s fiction has been published in Escape Pod, Daily Science Fiction, Lamplight, and Analog. His book of poems, City of Regret (Zone 3 Press, 2007), won the Zone 3 First Book Award, and his second poetry book, Orphanotrophia, was published in 2021 by Cobalt Press.