Killing Pale

Fiction Friday

Where the blight touches the land the people never leave. The roads to them are blocked and they become mice in the gullet of a snake. Government orders suggest with kind words to stay indoors. Jeeps filled with men and rifles will come to enforce those words.

For Mateus, the man whose grandfather bore the name of the town, blight changed nothing. His thin livestock and crops never grew well, but the blight brought the other farms far lower than his. He was availed of consistency. He occupied the same chair on the porch each day. He shared whatever he could, but neighboring families died by the dozen.

Mateus had sores on his hands the color of tobacco and eyes pale as the underside of a cloud. As he gazed across his fields I could not tell if he realized the blight was there. Unlike the other last men in Almira, he did not smoke.

“Used to be four hundred people here,” he told me, his eyes never leaving the bare horizon. “I still remember most of them.”

“What happened to your family?” I asked.

“Wife, two grown sons, two daughters,” he said. He seemed to fight a smile. “Where do the years go?”

“But what happened to them?” I asked.

Behind us, the hollow house groaned. The blight affected every part of the town and even the houses were frail. Mateus’ looked especially fragile, the sagging eaves and toothless windows.

“What are you asking?” Mateus said.

“I’m only curious,” I said, shifting my feet. Mateus had not offered me a drink or invited me inside, and I began to fear he would chase me from his porch. “A man knows where his line ends, if it ends.”

His attention drifted over the crushed houses along the road. “You will find no graves behind this house. I will not leave this town, but I swore I would not bury any kin.”

“Your sons and daughters? Your wife?”

“They never saw the blight.” Mateus leaned back in his chair and his house sighed with him. “Ten years ago. They live far away still, on the coast.” His eyes landed on me anew and turned a shade darker. “You must go before the blight touches you, too.”

We were instructed not to shake hands with anyone inside the quarantined zone. I do not think he wanted to shake my hand. I nodded to him and threw my rifle into the jeep that waited by the road.

Mateus was a strong man that demanded respect. He was also an old goat standing in ashes, too stubborn to see his hearth swept clean. In my report I would note his calm and resolve even though I was another death come for him when so many others yet waited.

The men who came after me, and those who would track his family — they would have to use their rifles. I had no personal wish to see his house burn or his life ground out. The blight chooses some to live, some to die. But death does not distinguish.