Ain't Talkin'

After several more swigs from the vodka, Roche was taking long steps into the desert, swinging the bottle with wide arms like a town drunk, singing a song he barely remembered from a radio recording that played over from long ago.

“Are-ee espee-ee-sea-tea! Find out what she means to me. Are-ee espee-ee-sea-tea, flounder, ee-sea, tee-pee-tea!”

The walker remembered the old records. The black discs that played through the cornucopia-shaped machine. The record-player. The sound came out with a resound of static and age but the colored girl on the record could sing so beautifully.

From somewhere in the wreckage of the world someone had pulled a small black and white television and a box of tapes that played through a similar box that was little more than an extension of the tapes. The box had been engraved with Panasonic.

That was the first time he’d met Mollie Groux.

A boy of eight sitting alone amidst stacks of books in a decrepit library with holes in the roof so that half of the old manuscripts were moldering and rotted, their leather covers stripped away for food long ago and their chapters torn out as fuel for the burning times.

He’d sit there most days. Reading, learning things from old books, watching and rewatching tapes, listening to old records. When the old woman who watched the building was there she would teach him small things. She had been alive through the end. She had seen the end of the world and heard the ripping of the universe pulling itself apart at the seams. She was brittle and aged the way she might have been a part of the old library itself. On this day she wasn’t there.

The boy Roche had been sat with the television playing a silent film, one that had been made with no noise or words, such that the actions of those involved spoke for themselves. A man in a dapper jacket was convincing a woman of far younger to dance with him in the belly of a great building with marbled columns and a staircase that filled the background.

Electricity was a gift. And what meager wattage was put from the windmills atop the nearby hills was funneled into the small town where Roche had been born. The librarian was tightly-lipped about the little bit of electricity that she siphoned from the grid, but she believed that there was knowledge in those old tapes as well, and they ought to be experienced to understand with the eyes what came before.

Mollie peeked out from behind a stack of books. A sinewy little thing with dusty hair who ran like a boy. Roche had known she’d been watching him for some time. He knew the sounds and smells of the library better than any place, and he could sense when someone new came by.

She never said a word, and neither did he. The little girl sat with the little boy and together, in the gray light of the small black-and-white television the two children watched a pair who’s bones were less than dust dance across a mansion so extravagant it was the stuff of scripture.

He never heard her leave but one moment the boy was watching the television and she was there. When the tape ended and he removed it from the player he looked again and she was gone. The sun had been too low for another tape. The little boy took a book home for the nights reading and petered out of the library.

Somewhere over a century later, the walker in the long jacket with revolvers at both hips and a sawed-off on his thigh swung to and fro in the sand and the winds of the wastelands, his hat hanging on it’s leather thong and his boots full of dust. His cheeks were wet and his mouth had curled down in sobbing. He drew again from the bottle and sat down too hard.