Irony Poison

It is my birthday,

and the family has gathered to celebrate on the shore of a lake I have never heard of. Squinting through the bursts of wind that force themselves into my mother’s open window and make my eyes water, I can’t make out a word, the same word, over and over, flashing by on green and white aluminum.

As I stretch my legs, the faded plastic informational plaque at the trail entrance whispers softly to be read. The wooden beams that mark each parking spot, it says, as my brothers’ voices fade into the trees, were hewn to be ties in the first Black-owned railroad in the country. The man who owned it glares out from a flat, colorless prison. He is not angry with me, just disappointed. Somehow that is worse.

I learn that the town traded its name and several acres of land with the Muscogee, who parted with it for two mules. The dam which sank the village was first called Cherokee Bluffs, then renamed to: a divot gouged out by cheap pocket knives. It is the same word from the road signs. I do not look back at the photograph but I know his eyes follow me as I jog to catch up. The sky is the color of gravel dust, dirtied by puffs of fatty charcoal. The smoke carries a message in a language nobody speaks.

The clouds should clear up soon, says an uncle, as the five of us tumble listlessly into the crowd. They are splayed out on the rickety dock attached to our picnic reservation, lot number 23. The forecast shows heavy rain within the hour.

Arranged on a long folding table with an impossible number of sections are meats, confections, snacks, sides, and treats of every variety. We have every flavor and every color offered at the concrete supercenter down the road.

We have Cheese-Blasted Dorito Curls™. We have Lays Crinkles™, Lays Classi©, Lays Lofat, Locarb, Losodium™. New Cherry Diet Coke Lite Zero™ (Scan the QR code to enter the limited time raffle to WIN! WIN! WIN!) to wash down Ben&Jerry’s Über Chocolate Infiniswirl AmeriCone Dreamboat Core Caramel Blood in the Battle of Vanilla Bay. For the main course, USDA Prime Enhanced® Grade A+++ Yale Grad™ Ground Beef burgers or Lean Mean Grass-Fed Flu-Free GMO Ultrasized Chicken Breast Fillets in Pepperidge Farm Standard Regular Average Everyday Simple-As-Can-Be Whole White Wheat Buns, with Kraft™ MegaSquare-cut Recycled Plastic-Wrapped One Hundred and One Percent American™ Cheese slices and Heinz Ketchup.

Plates sag like the spine of a fat man’s horse, each one a totally unique combination of potato salad or curly fries, coleslaw or kale chips, spare ribs or brisket or, or, or, or, or. Each one tastes exactly the same. Red sauce, dark red and still warm, drips onto the splintered planks and blends in with the grain.

We are about to cut the cake, a miniature replica of the rectangular building it was bought in, complete with frosting walls and chocolate sliding doors, when the birthday boy’s mandatory conical hat is yanked away by a savage wind. I turn toward the invisible culprit to see, unnoticed to the distracted partygoers (but close enough to be caught by a careful eye), a storm cloud of unfathomable depth breaking over the endless horizon of evergreen peaks. Its utter darkness is pierced sporadically only by paroxysms of shattering light, swallowed up as instantly as they appear by the ravenous abyss.

Slowly, unwillingly, my neck bends back to gaze at the crowd of flushed, greasy faces. Not a single one has noticed the maw gaping across the lake, nor even that I have seen it. Their indifference spawns a doubt that I have somehow hallucinated the doom bearing obviously and relentlessly down towards the bank.

I tap my mother on the shoulder as she unsheathes the family Serving knife. She ignores my gesture, the faint jerk of the head only we understand, so I draw close and whisper my incredulous discovery.

“Don’t spoil the mood!” she replies, “We’re doing this all for you, you know.”

She begins to light the candles, deliberately, one by one. Her shoulders shake as she rejects the urge to turn and look. When the final candle refuses to light, encouraged by a persistent breeze, she moves on as if nothing were wrong.

The lyrics to the birthday song seem to drag, elongate into an incomprehensible drawl, a low hum without form or substance, until it resembles a baritone roar. There is nothing else to do, I figure, than bear Witness to the awesome storm as it makes its final approach. The song is over. It is too late even to save myself. It is time to cut the cake.

The icing is still cold and the first slice glides greasily around my palate. Its sweetness puckers my lips and teases the inside of my cheek with a cruel tingle. The base is now room temperature and nearly formless compared to the impenetrable layer of Crisco and corn syrup. I smile and thank my father for picking it out. While the rest of the cake is rationed out, I plan my words carefully and wait for everyone to be seated.

At the start of my pronouncement, my brothers roll their eyes in unison. Relatives exchange glances which claim to know more than they really do. My mother sighs, and my father wants to, but smiles diplomatically instead. I think I hear the word spoiled. All this and his head is still in the clouds. One particularly friendly relative advises that I quit being so ungrateful and trying to rain on my own parade. I murmur to myself that the rain will come either way, and he pretends not to hear me.

My outburst is quickly forgotten, written off to finance more good times. The breeze has grown into a steady wind that carries off a Frisbee, only for a ratty baseball to take its place. Paper plates flutter across the rocks like obese butterflies and land on the now agitated water. I help the women, only the women, scoop them up into black plastic bags big enough to sleep in.

The surface of the water is whipped faster and faster over the chins of obstinate swimmers. A man I don’t recognize shakes his head as tiny dark blotches appear on his peach-colored guayabera. A drop lands on his peeling nose and he wipes it away without thinking.

It is now obviously unsafe to be on the dock. It groans louder and louder under the steady rushing of pine needles. We should already be inside, I say, to nobody in particular, since everyone is too preoccupied helping Grandma out of the water. She really is getting clumsy, they say as lawn chairs start to slide across the deck and over the edge. I know there are still people in the water from the frantic splashes under the ladder.

Wet globs the size of bumblebees pelt paper plate shields, pinecones and needles scratch at carelessly exposed ankles, and everyone is glaring at me as if somehow, merely by mentioning the storm, I had conjured it into existence. As if it were of my making. As if I hadn’t tried to warn them.

But I don’t notice their accusing stares. I am facing the vortex as it whirls towards the beach, faster and angrier than anything flesh and blood, and yet its size takes on a slowness as if trapped in wax. Layers of debris ring the open mouth of fury and screams begin to fly up, sucked mercilessly from the mouths of barbecuers on the opposite bank.

The water is spinning like a bathtub drain, and the epicenter has revealed the skeleton of a modest church, draped in a burial shroud of moss and algae, at the bottom of the lake. Its iron steeple points upwards, aimed like a pike at the heavens. Boards begin to splinter and snap away from the deck, vacuumed up into the gasping throat. My aunt, still gripping a solo cup with white knuckles, admits defeat and is impaled unceremoniously by a flagpole. Piece by piece, the entire dock shears off from the foaming lakebed and carries off a handful of stubborn stragglers. Cars hum feebly to life in the parking lot, but they are blocked in by the metal corpses of those who have already vanished into the endless pit, who have joined the seething mass of death grinding away in the center of the doomcloud.

My father and I are the only ones still standing on the shore, facing the all-devouring hatred of Nature, the incontinent wrath of a million drowned trees regurgitated into the air and made solid by formless air. He turns to me with a wry grin, and says,

“These things come in cycles, you know.”

And then I am free.

The air is so loud that it might as well be totally silent. At first I see only a blur of colored blotches and gray spirals. Ozone and smoke fill my nose and mouth, though my throat is a vacuum. After a moment that drags on for days, the entire forest unfolds before me like a filthy shag carpet. Veins of asphalt radiate outward from a throbbing red heart of steel and concrete, roadsickness worming into dusty, barren, fields of graying flesh. Dunes of stone roll away into an endless plain of neatly portioned wastelands. Pillars of ash rise from a wave that gushes across the map, the territory, moving gently through static lines and shapes that have lost their way. Mindless insects pour over each other in desperate torrents, swallowing each other up in fruitless escape plans. Warm fungi grow slowly up the paper of reality and mimic Eiffels brighten the sky with lightning flashes. The map is beautiful, and the beauty chills my spine. Finally, I am engulfed by the core, the writhing black heart of the End, and my worries are no more.