Heavy Metal by Andrew Bourelle

Author:Andrew Bourelle [Bourelle, Andrew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Novels
ISBN: 9781938769191
Publisher: Autumn House Press
Published: 2017-01-01T08:00:00+00:00

The sky is cloud-covered from horizon to horizon, a hazy shade of light gray with wrinkles of purple and dark blue. The sun, lowering in the west, is a smudge of color behind the gray. Its shine is so dulled by the clouds that it looks more like an orange moon.

I walk through Beth's neighborhood and through town, my hands stuffed in my jacket pockets, my head held high against the cold. The walk is going by in a blur. My mind is so busy thinking about Beth that before I know it I'm to a field, taking the shortcut, and then I'm walking through the frozen, clumpy ground. My feet are floating above the soil and time is going by fast.

I'm coming up on a dirt road that runs between two fields, a couple miles from my house. There's a clearing back at the edge of a wood with mounds of dirt and a rusted backhoe sitting petrified like an old metal dinosaur. The tires are huge, almost as tall as me, with cracks in the rubber like wrinkles in an elephant's skin. When I was little, Craig and I snuck out here to play. I stop and stand and look at the backhoe, frozen in place just as it was then. I see us playing on the hills of dirt, climbing onto the backhoe. I see it like I'm watching a movie, and I'm a character in that movie.

The young version of me climbs up into the seat—cracked with foam stuffing coming out of the fissures—and puts his hands on the large steering wheel. I pretend to work the gears and make noises with my mouth like a revving engine. I am ten and Craig is fourteen. He is too old to be playing but he does it for me. We pretend we're in a post-apocalyptic world. I'm Mad Max, fleeing a gang riding motorcycles and armored muscle cars. Craig pretends to be the gang members, leaping from imagined vehicles and climbing onto the backhoe. I kick him off, then smash his car with the backhoe's claw, knock another off the road with the bucket. The grass disappears, and in the fantasy the stationary backhoe is flying down a desert highway. The apocalypse is adventure. In this time, Mom is home, lying in the dark, and neither of us knows that we will live through a real apocalypse, and it will be nothing like the movies, nothing like the games we played.

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