What Happens at the End of the Fall by Chase Dearinger

"Jack stood with his hands on his hips & looked up at it: black, thirty feet tall, slightly tapered until it terminated in a pyramid. Monolith is how he’d referred to it when he’d called the police."

We’re back! Took a little longer-than-expected summer break, and it was refreshing & energizing & relaxing & refreshing, and now now I’m so excited to dig back into this project, and especially excited to do so with today’s story and the next few already on desk! If you submitted during our last open reading period, I’m hoping to be all caught up with those by the end of the month, at which point we’ll open up submissions again, for the month of September (and maybe through October too?). But first…

This story is another that immediately grabbed me when reading it as a submission. It has this perfect mix of weird, unexplainable phenomenon (a monolith has appeared in the protagonist’s backyard one day!) that the story sometimes pushes front and center and other times just lets loom in the background while circling and unpacking a perhaps more traditional story about a relationship unraveling. It’s a mix that I’m so often such a sucker for, and handled expertly here, and I hope you all enjoy it as much as me!

—Aaron Burch

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The policeman who came said that he wasn’t sure what he was supposed to do about the monument, as he called it. It stood in the middle of Jack’s backyard, a square patch of grass surrounded by a wooden fence and bright blue hydrangeas. Jack stood with his hands on his hips and looked up at it: black, thirty feet tall, slightly tapered until it terminated in a pyramid. Monolith is how he’d referred to it when he’d called the police. There’s a monolith in my backyard, he’d said. There was a long pause before the dispatcher said, What?

“To be honest,” the policeman said, “it looks like it came from underground.” He kicked the base of it like he might have kicked a tire in a car lot. He was right: the turf at the bottom peeled back and away from the base of the structure. The policeman looked at Jack skeptically, and then looked upwards towards the sky, which was an empty blue except for the bright, edgeless sun. “If anything,” he said, “I ought to cite you. You’ve got to have a permit for this kind of art installation.”

“But I didn’t put it there,” Jack said, irritated to have to repeat it for the hundredth time.

“Yeah,” the policeman said. “That’s what you keep saying.” 

“Well what am I supposed to do?”

“I don’t know, buddy. I’m not sure any laws have been broken here, except, as I pointed out, maybe by you.” He stroked his mustache. “Best I can do is file a vandalism report, probably. Would you like to report this as vandalism?”

The monument was cut very roughly from a single piece of dimpled, black stone. On each side, strange geometric shapes stretched upwards—at least what had the appearance of geometric shapes. They were really something else altogether, something indecipherable that would ultimately drive Jack towards his dark and lonely fate. It was inexplicably cool to the touch.

“I don’t know,” Jack said. “I just don’t know what to do.”

*

They’d lived in the house—a green Arts and Crafts that his wife Jess called a cottage—for five years, ever since the whirlwind of their marriage and his offer to join the anthropology department as an assistant professor. The house was on a bumpy, brick street of cozy homes not far from campus. It had been too expensive for them, but Jess had insisted. He would have tenure and promotion in just five years, after all; they could be house poor until then. Since Jess had sweat and cried her way through five years of backing bar to put Jack through grad school, he felt like he owed her, despite the fact that he was now putting her through law school.

The day they closed on the house, Jess packed a picnic basket and they had lunch in the empty living room. She spread a blanket out on the bare, hardwood floors and pulled out egg salad sandwiches and potato chips, and a bottle of wine from a basket.

“We’ll plant hydrangeas in the back,” she said. “And a rainbow of pansies out front. That’s how we’ll begin to make it ours.” She was tall and thin and kept her dark hair cropped close to her head. She adjusted herself and one of her oversized hoop earrings stuck to her neck. “Now that we’re out of that awful apartment, I can finally feng shui the place. We’ll have energy flowing all the way from front door to back. We’ll put your desk in the dining room, facing both the doorway and the window—All of that harmony will help you finish your book.”

“I’m putting my desk down in the basement,” Jack said.

“How dreary.”

 “I guess I’m a dreary man.” He leaned across to kiss her but knocked over the wine bottle. Merlot spilled across the floor, pooled like blood.

Almost five years later, just weeks before what would be Jack’s last semester, the monument appeared. He went out back on a Tuesday morning to drink his coffee, and there it was, towering over him. He dropped his mug in the grass, and hot coffee splashed across his socked foot. He didn’t notice. He only stared up at it; it’s shadow from the morning sun fell across his face like a sundial. His heart pounded and for some inexplicable reason his teeth felt loose. The sun seemed to spiral in the sky, and he almost fell to his knees.

The sliding glass door open and shut behind him.

“Jesus,” Jess said. “Jesus. What is that? Jack? What is that? Do you know what that is?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I just don’t know.”

The first to notice was the president of the HOA. She was there that afternoon, stammering, visibly mad. “Large structures must be approved,” she’d said. “This is just—just—too much.” Over the next week there was a string of neighbors, some at his front door, some peering over the fence from the back alleyway. A colleague of his, Dr. Angell, came and examined it—“It’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen before.” He took his glasses off and put them on again. A reporter with a camera came and he sent them away. Eventually he called the police.

Sometimes he just stood in the backyard and looked up at it. He was sure that it was a sign of something to come.

The pregnancy had been a surprise. Not an unwelcome one for Jess; she had been talking about a baby since he accepted the position. Wouldn’t a little family be nice? she’d ask. A little Jack or Jess Junior? He would smile and say One day. When they found out, she had claimed that it couldn’t be better timing. He was about to have tenure and they could settle down. But he didn’t feel the same way. He didn’t say anything, of course, but the whole thing made him uneasy. Someone had fired a gun at a race and there was no turning back. Jess’s body transformed. The way that they saw the world transformed. Everything was lurching in a single direction all at once and he resented the fact that he couldn’t decide for himself whether he was ready for it. He didn’t want to feel that way, off course, and the guilt festered inside him, made him grow distant with each of Jess’s reports on how big the baby was. Every time he saw a child on TV or in a stroller or a parent’s arms he came a little more unhinged.

And now it was due within weeks.

Before she was pregnant, their marriage was everything he’d hoped and expected: Cooking dinner together, towels over their shoulders, laughing and tasting sauces from wooden spoons, sitting on the couch, binge-watching a new show, watching old detective movies (Jack’s favorite). In bed at night they made love, and Jack would lie with his head in her lap, telling her stories about historical details he’d learned in his research. She acted fascinated, but he knew she wasn’t.

Now, with only weeks left in the semester and before their baby’s birth, when he went to the kitchen for a drink and she was there at the table, her law books and legal pads spread out before her, he tried to keep his back to her, not draw too much attention. Now, he stayed up at night, stared out the backdoor at the monument, and went to bed long after she was asleep. He spent more and more time in the basement. He tried as much as he could to still be down there when she came home from a day of classes.

Rather than doing actual work in the basement, though, he got lost in his own thoughts. He’d smoke a bowl, get stoned. He read paperback novels about detectives and crime stoppers. He stacked them on the floor; they were beginning to rise up the wall like a tide. He loved detective fiction, especially the noir stuff, because there was always a neat solution for complicated webs of problems. It took a clever detective, but he could always put the pieces together and delivered the truth—the whole story—to whatever criminal he’d caught. And he always, always, saved the woman in the end.

The last time Jess came down to the basement, the sound of her feet on the stairs quickened his heart.

“Hey stranger,” she said. She waved at the air in front of her and squinted her eyes to tacitly acknowledge the skunky smell of pot. She was coming right for him, but there was no escape. “I said Hi, stranger.”

He nodded at her, forced a smile.

“What are you doing down here?”

“Just a little reading,” he said, holding up the latest detective novel. A woman in a red dress pressed her back against a brick wall beneath a lamppost on the cover.

“Aren’t you working on your book?”

“I am,” he said, holding up the book.

“No,” she said. “Your research. Aren’t you coming home and crawling down here every night so you can work on your research?”

“I’m just taking a break.”

“So you can’t spend an evening with me, but you can take a break?”

“A break.”

More than the baby and his impending sense of doom, there was the real problem: He was lying about his research. He had been for years. His plan had been to turn his dissertation into something publishable, a book that would ensure that he would get tenure. But he’d never touched it once. He’d spent his years in the basement, getting stoned, reading books and wasting time, surfing the internet, promising himself that it would be easy to get the dissertation in publishable form tomorrow or next month. But he hadn’t. And now he wasn’t going to get tenure. Which meant that now he wasn’t going to have a job when the semester came to a close. He’d even asked his chair if he could stay on as an adjunct. She’d said no.  

He carried the lie around like a hot coal at the back of his throat. It was a train speeding directly towards him, the timer of a bomb ticking down to zero. At some point he would have to tell her. At some point he would have to admit that they couldn’t afford the house, that the baby was going to be born into uncertainty, that the world was about to turn into a whirlpool, pulling their budding family down into the dark and murky depths.

Despite the fact that he was out of a job and that he had a massive message from another time and place in his backyard, he managed to keep it together at first. He marched on. Each day he dressed in his customary blue oxford, red tie, and brown tweed jacket. He’d always liked the idea of looking sharp, looking like a professor. He’d stepped into the cliché like a worn shoe. He felt the pull to abandon his classes, but he continued to move forward in his typical fashion: well-prepared but efficient. This semester he was teaching a popular freshman course that filled a large lecture hall, in which they were finising the semester with a discussion about Mexican Mennonites. He still got some encouragement from their bright faces, which were, he realized, beginning to dim as the semester wore on. His other course—a graduate seminar in research methodologies—was deep in the weeds of post-colonialism. He still brought doughnuts to the small group of doctoral students each class.

In the afternoons, though, when he was supposed to be holding office hours, he began to pour over books. He scoured his colorful bookshelves for volumes on the history of cuneiform, prehistoric religions, the ancient occult. When the well of his own library ran dry, he found himself more and more at the university library with its intimidating stacks and vaulted ceilings. He consulted studies of ancient architecture—Babylonian, Celtic, Mayan. He skimmed an entire volume about religious monuments. He got books on loan, stacked them on his desk. Finally, he searched the internet: monolith monument appearance, monument backyard, ancient relics appearing. He found dozens of examples, but all of them had turned out to be a hoax. Is that what this was? Was he the victim of some elaborate hoax? Yes, he thought. No matter what it was, no matter where it came from or how it was, it was a hoax.

The first day of dead week, Jack returned to find Dr. Angell waiting for him in his office. Angell was a short, paunchy man with thick glasses and thinning hair. He was always wearing safari shirts.  He was a full professor and the closest thing that Jack had to a friend. He gave Jack a concerned look, a flat smile. 

“How the hell is it going, Jack? Any news on the adjunct position?”

“She said no. I’m done.”

Angell looked at the floor, knitted his fingers together. “I’m sorry,” he said, “I would have done more, but there wasn’t a damned thing to do about it. The committee was never going to agree to promote someone without a single publication.”

“I get it.” Jack rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands. “Just stop it, okay, though? Let’s just drop it.”

“You still haven’t told Jess?”

“I said drop it.” There was an awkward silence between them. “By the way—any news on the monument? I can’t find a thing.”

Angell took his glasses off and cleaned them with cloth he pulled from his pocket, put them back on. “It’s fascinating, really,” he said. “The markings change the further they move up the sides.”

“And?”

“Well it’s bizarre,” Angell said. “The contours of the—shapes—they’re almost—non-Euclidean. If you look at them long enough, they seem to disappear as signifiers and reappear as something—else. I can’t seem to find any markings even remotely like these. Cuneiform, maybe, but those angles. The only thing even remotely close would be the etchings they found on those ancient tablets in that structure they found in Antarctica.”

“She doesn’t know,” Jack said. “I haven’t told her.”

*

He wasn’t sure when it started, exactly, but Jack had begun to dream of killing his wife. At first it was just an accident—the bright lights of driving into oncoming traffic, her body disjointed at the silvery bottom of a swimming pool, the panic that swam over him when he backed over her with the station wagon. Each time he woke up in shock, full of guilt. He would turn over on his side and watch her profile in the dark, thrilling at each shallow breath that brought her life.

But then he pushed her into the pool on purpose. And then swerved the car at just the right angle (flying through the windshield, he suddenly felt free, weightless). Then it grew worse—guns and knives and rope. Sometimes his bare hands. All of the traditional forms of murder. The one that began to reoccur, though—the one that haunted him as he drifted through his days—was as simple as breaking glass. The dream always began with him waking—right there in bed with her, right where he’d gone to sleep. He pulled the blanket back from her nude body. Streetlight fell through the blinds in white stripes across her hips and swollen belly. He knelt beside her, and when he looked into her eyes he saw that her face was gone. It was smooth, mannequin-like. A jagged smudge of lipstick marked where her mouth should be, and a black marker had been used to crudely draw in over-sized pupils. Then, in his hands: a hammer and chisel. He slowly lowered the chisel until it hovered just between her drawn-on eyes. He swung the hammer back and brought it down with a crack onto the butt end of the chisel. Pieces of her broken face fell onto the bed, shattered on the floor. Some fell back down into the hollow space behind her face.

He opened his mouth to scream but instead sat up awake, his hands trembling before his face. She was there, on her side, breathing, snoring slightly.

And then the humming. It worked its way down into his head and made his teeth feel loose. The monument.

When he opened the back door the humming sound seemed to grow louder. He switched on the back-patio light. Three people knelt closely around the base of the monument. They wore dark robes with hoods that made them look shapeless. When the light came on they turned and looked at him, blocked out the bright lights with both of their hands as if to hide their faces. “Hey,” he said. All three of the cloaked figures stood and gathered their robes at the hem, ran for the back gate. “Wait,” Jack said, “I need you.” But they were already in the alley. “Come back,” he shouted. “There’s so much I need to know.” He followed them and opened the gate onto the back alleyway, but they were gone. There was nothing but the bright reflection of the moon in the windshields of cars, all of them looking at him like eyes.

What would he do without them?

*

After Jack and Jess got married, they honeymooned in the mountains. On the second-to-last day of the trip, they took a gondola up the side of a mountain to a small lodge that looked out over the valley and the mountains on the other side. They were the only two on the gondola; they both sat across from each other, framing a large window, where sun streamed through and warmed the space between them. Jess’s bucket hat was tilted back on her head and she nervously zipped and unzipped her fanny pack. She smelled like lavender and cigarettes (she wouldn’t quit for years). Outside the window, the grass gave way to deciduous trees, which gave way to an open field full of yellow flowers and more trees. Then the evergreens appeared and the valley began to grow into a distant map of itself. The gondola creaked as it swayed in the wind. Jack watched his wife.

“You okay?” he asked. He nodded at her zipper.

“Yes,” she said. “I just don’t do well with heights.” She peered out the window.

“Interesting,” Jack said. “It’s like I don’t even know you.” He looked out and down, too. “You know, we’re never any more than twenty feet above the ground in this thing.”

“It’s not the fall I worry about,” she said. “It’s what happens at the end of the fall.”

The ride ended where the evergreens stopped and the mountain’s rocky, snow-capped peak began. The air was filled with a fresh, sappy smell. In the midst of it all was a small lake that was somehow both crystal clear and such a bright blue that it was almost blinding. Glacial runoff. Kids skirted the edges of it, skipped flat rocks, dropped huge ones in with a kurplunk. Jess took him by the hand and squeezed it.

“There’s too many people,” she said, “but it’s beautiful.” The noise was oppressive—the conversations of dozens of people seated around the lodge’s concession stand, sucking down their sodas and laughing and shouting. She dug in her fanny pack—she came prepared for any possible scenario: hand sanitizer, a compass, a sewing kit—and pulled out a tube of sunscreen. “You need to watch your nose,” she said. She uncapped the tube and squirted some in her hand, wiped it across the bridge of hiss nose.

“Stop it,” he said, waving her away. He protested these sorts of affectionate displays of worry but inwardly loved them.     

“Wait right here,” she said. “I’m going to go get some water. Do you want anything?”—but she was already gone.

Jack found his way to a narrow stretch of shoreline and surveyed the lake. Newly married, the sun hot on his head and shoulders, there before nature’s wonder, he thought about how miraculous the world was. Full of little pockets of wonder and weirdness. He felt the urge to feel the world’s coolness, so he did something unexpected: he took off his shoes and socks, laid them aside, and rolled up his pant legs. He waded out until the waterline was just splashing his knees. The freezing glacial melt numbed his legs.  

Where was Jess? He pulled his shoes and socks on over his wet feet and made his way back around the shore to the crowded tables outside of the lodge, but didn’t see her. He went inside, scanned the line and the people crowding the soda fountains and sandwich refrigerators, but she wasn’t there. His heart began to beat a bit faster as he checked the crowd out front again. He held his hand over his brow to block the sun and scanned the edges of the lake. He made his way back around the back of the building and found a short line outside of the women’s bathroom. No Jess. His heart grew even faster and he felt a cool sweat breaking out across his face. He checked the crowd again, but nothing. He checked inside the concession stand again, but nothing. Then he walked the trail around the lake, frantically, closely checking the faces of others on the trail.

On the other side of the lake, he found her. She ran to him, hugged him. “Well there you are, thank God.” She smiled, but his heart was racing. Then her smile quickly faded. “What the fuck?” she said. “Where did you go?”

“Looking for you,” he said. His heart was still pounding. “Where were you?”

“I got a drink, then went to the bathroom, and then walked the shoreline looking for you.”

He brought her in and hugged her. He kept the side of his face pressed up against hers so that she wouldn’t see that he’d suddenly begun to cry. “Listen,” he said. “Don’t do that to me.” He wiped his face away with his sleeve and smiled at her. “I literally have no idea what I’d do without you.”

More and more he drifted through his days. He began to wear t-shirts to class, then his jean shorts, too, and tennis shoes and sometimes even his flip flops. He would kick them off, put his bare feet up on the corner of the desk, turn off all of the lights but his lamp, and stare at the ceiling for long stretches of time. The research had slowed considerably. He would breathe in through his nose, out with his mouth with a whooshing sound. It was an exercise Jess had taught him so that he could get centered and stop his racing mind. It didn’t work anymore, but he did it anyway. When he taught his courses, he saw the black monument at the back of the classroom, out the windows, radiating magnetism. He sometimes thought that his students could see it, too, were a part of some bigger conspiracy. He rambled through his lectures, diverting his energy to anecdotes about growing up on a farm or the intricate ins and outs of good detective fiction. He let them out early. Between classes he would go to the station wagon and smoke a bowl, hotbox the car, watch students and faculty float between buildings. In the afternoons he would sometimes stroll around campus, his hands in his pockets, smiling maniacally at anyone who would make eye contact.

On the Friday before finals week, he saw his wife while returning a book about medieval semiotics to the library. After dropping the book off at the circulation desk, he wandered the stacks, casually running his finger along the spines of the books and trying to guess which section he was in based on the titles. On the third floor he saw her, Jess, her tall profile masked in shadow. The swollen stomach and short hair gave her away. She was balancing a stack of what must have been law books. His impulse was to go to her, to help her, but instead he turned down the row next to hers. He stood and watched her from a distance. His heart began to pound for some reason, and he wondered at the strange separateness of their lives. As she came down the row he stood back, nothing between them but rows of books. In the dim lighting she didn’t see him, so he simply watched her through the small space between the shelf and the jagged spines of the books. He followed her from a distance until she left the library, and he watched her walk away.

*

That night he dreamt of murder again. He woke up in bed and turned to Jess, who was facing away from him. He pulled on her shoulder to turn her on her back and there it was again, that face, the same crooked blood-red lips and crooked spiral eyes. She was enormous. As if she had carried the baby months past its due date. He pulled the blanket back and looked at her stomach. It was smooth and engorged, and what Jack thought was just a shadow at first began to move, and then he saw that it was a shadow, the shadow of something moving. Something pushing itself outward from underneath—an arm, a leg?—and then there were two spots pressing outward. They pressed unnaturally against the inside of her belly, and the impressions pushed outward an inch or more. There were two and then three and then four spots and he lost count before her stomach was alive, pulsating, a thousand little somethings trying to push their way out. A ball of writhing snakes. He looked to his hands and there they were, as always—the chisel and the hammer. He couldn’t look to Jess’s face this time, so he did the only thing his strange dream logic would allow—he placed the chisel on the center of her stomach, held the hammer high above his head, and swung with all his might.

When he awoke: the hum coming from the monument, radiating through the walls, gripping him like a hand. He tongued one of his teeth and it almost came out. Then, above the humming: a peal of thunder. A pause and more thunder, louder, closer. He checked on Jess—sound asleep, turned away from him—and then threw the blanket off, got out of bed. He went to the back door but could hardly see anything out back. He flipped the light switch for the flood light, but it didn’t come on. And so he did what he at once knew he shouldn’t do but also that he had to do—he slid open the door and stepped outside. Lightening flashed and all at once he saw what he’d been hoping for but feared the most: around the base of the monument, bodies in dark robes were kneeled down, their faces and palms pressed to the ground.

And then he saw what they were bowing down to. High above them, centered above the monument, was a massive storm—a supercell, the walls of its eye slowly rotating like sooty cotton. And from the eye of the storm: A great appendage—a tube, an umbilical cord, an artery of some sort, as wide as a car—descended to the top of the monument, where it glommed like a mouth. It tightened around the top in slow contractions, and something, some thing, was making its way from the monument back up to the storm through a string of slow-pulsing bulges. The appendage was ribbed and wet, glistening along its curved edges every time that lightening flashed and illuminated the whole mad scene unfolding before him.

One of the robed figures at the base of the monument turned to Jack, beckoned to him to come join the circle. Thunder cracked. Jack simply shook his head, stepped backwards slowly, away from it all. The storm spun more aggressively and the sky darkened and he was glad to be back in his house, a sliding glass door between them. He reached for the switch for the flood light and clicked it; this time it came on, revealing nothing but the green grass, Jess’s hydrangeas, and the monument, now quiet and peaceful, reaching towards a calm sky.

They talked less and less. He knew that she knew that there was something wrong with him (though he was beginning to believe, more and more, that something wasn’t wrong with him; rather, he was just at the beginning of something great). He also knew that she believed it was result of an imbalance in his chakras. Jack began finding obelisk crystals around the house, and not in their usual places. There was a deep red one in his bedside table drawer—the root, he believed. He found a green one, for his heart, at the bottom of his leather satchel. It wasn’t working, though. Despite her attempts, he began to do everything he could to avoid her. When he heard her car pull into the driveway, he would race down to the basement and act as if he was deep in his studies. He would say he had errands to run and then drive the station wagon around campus, circling, watching people. Late at night, when she wanted to watch just one more episode, her face pleading in the blue light of the TV, he would tell her that he needed rest. When he couldn’t get to bed and shut his eyes before she crawled in next to him, she wanted to talk. She would take his hand and put it on her belly, tell him to wait for just the right moment. When he felt the baby move, cold terror washed over him.

On Thursday of the last week of school, he came home to her sitting on the couch so rigidly that he immediately knew that he’d done something wrong. She sat cross-legged with her hands on her knees. Before his mind could reel long enough to realize what he’d done:

“Where were you?” She pointed to the coffee table, where a black strip of photographs—all of them ghostly imprints of an unfinished human—made him understand. The appointment. Her stern, almost morbid look slowly softened into a look of concern. “Look,” she said. “Can you just talk to me? Can you just tell me what’s going on? If you’d just tell me—”

She had the right to know. She should be afraid of the future but was oblivious. She would obviously find out about his job at some point (although, at this point, was it just about his job anymore?). But what would happen as soon as he opened his mouth? Surely their little family would come apart at the seams. The guilt was crushing him and he needed out from under it.

“Honey,” Jess said. “Please. Just tell me what is going on?”

“Nothing.”

She followed him to the basement door, where her face turned from concerned back to sharply angry. “By the way, what do you plan on doing with that damned thing in the backyard?”

He said nothing.

At his desk he found a white obelisk threaded with the lightest of purples: The third eye. He wanted badly to take it in his hand, hold it to his chest. He wanted to take it to her, thank her for it, fall at her feet. But his mind was overcome with the thrum of the monument coming through the concrete walls. What was it beneath the ground? He could feel it drawing him in. He went to the wall and pressed himself flat against it, held both of his arms out to the side, felt for the hum with his fingertips. He imagined each one of his teeth uprooting, his jaw dislocating, his vertebrae stretching out one at a time. He saw himself as a skeleton, suspended in the air, his bones slowly spaghettifying, being drawn into the blackness of the monument.

*

He smoked a bowl in the station wagon and went to his graduate seminar, sluggish, underwater. He had nothing prepared and hadn’t brought the usual donuts. He wasn’t sure what he was going to do, but he felt compelled to carry on, as if one last vestige of his former life was still holding on as tightly as possible. Their faces were blank. Didn’t he know? It was the day of the final. We refuse to take it, a tall kid at the other end of the table whose name he couldn’t remember said (he remembered all of their names). He hadn’t even shown up for class the week before to review for the exam. He hadn’t? Had he been missing class? He pulled photographs of the monument out of his satchel and spread them out on the table.

“You’ve got one hour to write an essay on what the fuck these are. Bring the essay to my office before you leave. Good luck.” They stared at him wide-eyed, almost afraid, and he left.

On the way to his office he saw Angell at the other end of the hallway. Angell turned to him, but Jack quickly moved down the adjacent hallway, shut himself into his office. He locked the door. He cracked the window and put his feet up on his desk and he smoked another bowl. He felt a certain nostalgia building as he watched campus through the window. He thought about the fact that this was the last he’d see of the university. The Last Day. The promise of a whole career, a whole life, had existed within the walls of this campus, the halls and classrooms and offices. These spaces and people would go on without him. If he could just find some way to get his shit together, some alternative to what he was currently doing, he could tell Jess the truth. There was her tuition and the nursery they were putting together and the daycare and the too-big house. He just needed to keep the wool pulled over her eyes until he had a solution, until he could pull everything together all at once. A hail Mary would present itself.

And that’s when he saw a man in a black robe pass along the sidewalk beneath his office window. Jack leaned against the window and watched the man disappear around the corner of the building. Jack scrambled to the door. He was down the front steps of the building and onto that same sidewalk, which cut across the quad, where students laid out on towels and threw frisbees to their dogs. The man was ahead of him, approaching the library.  

“Hey,” Jack shouted, drawing everyone’s attention but the man’s. He stopped and took his flip flops off, held them in his hand while he jogged after the robed man, who was making his way past the library to the parking lot. When Jack came around the corner of the library, the man was crossing the parking lot to a group of a dozen or so others who were also all in their robes.

“Hey,” he shouted again. As he got closer he saw that their hoods were pointed at angles, were all wrong. He came up behind the man and put his hand on his shoulder. “Wait,” Jack said. “We need to talk. I need to know—”

When the man turned, though, he saw that it was the dean of his college. His gray moustache twitched beneath the question on his face. He was only wearing regalia. And then he saw all of them: Professors and administrators, all in their regalia, mortar boards and puffy hats, tassels hanging on their faces. 

The dean looked him up and down. “Jack,” he said. He paused as if he were looking for the right words. “Are you—are you ready for commencement this afternoon?”

And there, in front of the dean and his colleagues, Jack broke down and cried.

When he got home, the backdoor had been left open and he could see Jess at the base of the monument, looking up, her hand shielding her eyes against the blinding pink of the setting sun. Jack came outside and saw what she was looking at: Angell, at the top of an aluminum ladder, hammering away at a chisel. Jack’s blood boiled.

“What the fuck are you doing?” he shouted, running to the monument.

Angell looked down at him nervously. “I was going to take a sample, but, and it’s the damnedest thing, the material won’t breakaway.” He hit it directly with the hammer. “Not even a chip. I started at the bottom and have been—”

“Stop it!” Jack shouted again. He grabbed the ladder by the base and shook it. “Get the fuck down from there.” Angell had to windmill one of his arms to stay balanced at the top.

“For God’s sake,” Jess said, pulling Jack away from the ladder. “You’re going to kill him.”

“Jesus,” Angell said, climbing down, “I’m sorry, okay? I’m sorry—I just thought, while I was here, I might—”

“While you were here?”

Angell forced a smile. “Listen,” he said, “the real reason I’m here—the actual reason I’m here is because I want to check up on you.”

A cold, sudden sense of terror crawled from Jack’s feet to the top of his head. What was this? “What do you mean?” he asked. He smiled broadly again, determined to show that everything was okay.

“Well, after our strange conversation the other day, I thought maybe—”

“Thought what? I’m fine.” He slapped his hand down roughly on Angell’s shoulder. “I’m fine, Angell. Fan-fucking-tastic.”

“Jack,” Jess said, stepping forward. “Don’t be that way. To be honest—” she and Angell exchanged glances— “I asked him to come over. I’ve just been so worried, and I thought maybe someone else might be able to—get—through to you. Something is wrong.”

“Nothing is wrong.” He turned to Angell. “And thanks a million for sticking yourself in the middle of my business.” He clapped him on the back again, but this time left his hand there, pushed him towards the door. “And I’ll thank you to get the fuck out of here.”

“Jack,” Angell said.

“Jack,” Jess said.

“No, no. Just get the fuck out.” He walked him to the backdoor, shoved him in his back, and slid the door shut.

He turned back to Jess and the sky had become black and starless—a wall of clouds.   

“Let’s go inside,” Jess said. “This thing makes me feel—weird.”

Jack sat at the kitchen table, exhausted. Jess lowered herself in the chair, exhaled sharply, clutched her stomach. He could no longer remember when the baby was due. She placed both arms on the table, reached towards Jack as if to take his hands, but he left them in his lap.

She spoke in a slow, patient voice. “I know that something is going on. I’m not a fool. He told me that you had something to tell me.” She paused as if waiting for a response and, when she got none, continued. “I know it. You can’t lie to me any longer. You need to tell me. I promise you, Jack. I promise you that I won’t be mad.”

Jack felt like he might burst. “It’s nothing,” he said.

Great tears welled up in Jess’s eyes but none fell. She held her hand to her mouth and then wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, looked at the ceiling as if to clear away her tears. “I won’t judge you, Jack. I don’t know what it is that you’ve done, but I know it’s something. Just tell me. You know you can just tell me.” She wiped at her eyes once more and then used both hands to hold her belly. She seemed to be thinking to herself, calculating.

Jack would never be able to articulate how he felt in that moment.

“Please, Jack. Please.” She was openly crying now, then sobbing, her thin shoulders heaving with each breath.

All he wanted to do was explain everything. He wanted to tell her about his research, the lies, his job, his insecurities about the baby. He could tell her even more, plumb the depths of his life of woes and lay them at her feet. He would beg her for forgiveness. He would finally be empty, light, transparent.

In that moment, though, he could say nothing. He closed his eyes and lowered his head, breathed in and out through his nose. When he opened his eyes again, her face wasn’t there. Instead there was the crude imitation of a face. He could tell that she was saying something, but he couldn’t make out the words. As if language suddenly made no sense to him. He reached for her. And there they were, right there on the table: Angell’s chisel and hammer.  

*

When he stepped into the backyard, the hooded figures were already there, kneeling before the monument. Above them a storm cell swirled at a maddening rate—almost unreal. One of the figures turned to him and beckoned with their arm, pointing to the empty spot next to them. Jack went to them, collapsed to his knees. He could hear and feel the hum emanating from somewhere deep in the ground. His teeth and jaw felt loose, ached. He looked up to the monument but couldn’t find its top; its blackness simply faded into the black skies and the storm above. He could feel that there was something coming down from the storm, something they were all waiting for expectantly.

He fell on his face and he worshipped.  

STORY:
Chase Dearinger’s fiction, nonfiction, and poetry have appeared in magazines around the country, including Bayou, The Southampton Review, Short Story America, Eclectica, and Heavy Feather Review. His novel, This New Dark, will be published by Belle Point Press in 2024. He currently serves as the Chief Editor for Emerald City, a quarterly online fiction magazine, and directs the Cow Creek Chapbook Prize, an annual poetry chapbook contest. He is a professor of creative writing and literature at Pittsburg State University. He lives in Kansas with his wife and daughter.

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ART:
Meghan Phillips is a writer and collage artist from Pennsylvania. You can find her writing at meghan-phillips.com and her collages on Instagram at @mcarphil.

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Next Tuesday, we’ll feature a bonus interview with Chase about this story!

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