Twilight

by William Gay

After the old man beat him he’d flee into these windtossed nights. Something in all this chaos seemed to find its counterpart in his own chaotic heart and he’d turn a face stained with blood and tears into the remote heavens and defy the lightning to take him, to char his heart and boil the blood hammering in his veins and seize and short the circuits in his head but this was not to be.

The way Tyler always imagined it God had been sitting before the fireplace with his feet propped up on the hearth. Or maybe just on midair—God could do that. He was reading an old hymnbook or maybe a seed catalog. Listening with one ear and trying to concentrate on his reading. Finally after years and years of this just getting totally fed up and throwing his book against the wall of Heaven and turning and fixing the old man with his fierce eye. God’s eyes flickered with electric blue light and the old man’s heart exploded in a torrent of black blood and corruption and he just dropped like a stone, dead before his body touched the stairs, and God went back to his seed catalog.

He went on eastward looking for some high point he might climb and search for a light. When he found one he climbed it and turned, unwilling to believe all this blackness to the four points of the compass, but all lay sleeplocked and dark as if in all this desolate world he moved through he was the first man awaiting others or the last man left mourning those who had gone before.