A-Void by Babak Govan (phonics readers txt) 📕

scraped to its silver guts hypnotizes me. But the scent of death is fresh inside. Maybe it’s different here—maybe people’s bodies didn’t disappear!

Pencil sketches of horse saddles and chaps peer down from the wall on a red rug bordered by geometric shapes in the living room. I turn into the hallway and discover a dried, fat cat spread along the floor. He must have been trapped in the house. It’s good Cleveland remained outside barking at the crows.

Suddenly, a reverberating squawk chills me. I track the sound to the master bedroom, where game skulls ornament a canary-yellow headboard. I jump again at another squawk.

In the next room, a mynah bird studies me like a detective from within a domed cast-iron cage. The light switch is inoperable but I can see that the bird is huddled beside an empty seed tray at the base of the cage. Its water cup has white resin along its glass, and it pants quietly.

TIME 2

“Come on, keep moving.” The man was armed and wearing a tight red bandanna and oversized military jacket. I counted about fifteen people in front of us and there were a handful behind us too. Apart from coughs caused by kicked-up dirt, everyone was silent as we marched through the hills.

“Hold my hand, honey,” Jasmine instructed Isabella, who instead gripped Jasmine’s forearm with both hands.

“Now,” the armed man yelled as he signaled with his palm for us to stop, “from here, those of you who will be returning, you must memorize the directions to our base camp.” He pointed to a narrowing trail. “First, we will make a left there.” He repeated the directions incrementally until we arrived at a clearing I knew was base camp by the large camouflaged tent.

“Okay, everyone line up!” the armed man said. “Line up!”

After the armed man had checked each of us for infection, a hand slapped away a flap of the tent, revealing a beefy man. As he arose, some gasped at the sight of his one yellow reptilian eye.

“This is the Lizardman! He will take you to New Jamestown!” As this Lizardman sauntered toward the line, a thinner and shorter man, with a dragon tattooed over his balding head, exited the tent. “And that is Dragon.” The guard retreated behind them as the two men stood in front of us.

“So, you have come for our help,” the Lizardman said in a voice slurred and partially muted by his forked tongue. “We will help you, but only if you want to be helped.”

“What he means,” interrupted Dragon, “is that if you want our help, then you will do everything and anything that we ask, and if you don’t, we might kill you.”

I covered Isabella’s ears.

“You have a problem with that?” The Lizardman motioned at me with his head.

“No, no problem at all, sir.” My chest deflated.

He did not respond, but I noticed Dragon notifying the guard to grip his gun with both hands.

TIME 1

KINGMAN, AZ

3:17 PM

I unhook the cage from its hanger and carry it into the kitchen; the bird does not move. I roll the desiccated cat carcass into the rug where it died, place it in the backyard beside the swing set, and bring Cleveland inside. I fill the bird’s water tray, and fill its food tray with sunflower seeds and dried fruit cubes I find in the garage. The bird eats quickly and flies to a perch.

I extract the few potatoes I found in the garage from their branching sprouts and boil them.

I open the bedroom windows to let the house breathe and lie down on the low-slung bed. Thick rain begins to fall on the roof and the air turns very cold, forcing me deeper into the sheets. Jasmine would be stretching her feet into the corners right now.

The arches of her feet, rising out of her flats, were as sexy as the arches of her breasts under a blouse.

“Where could she be?”

Cleveland, Isabella’s unicorn, Steamboat Willie, and M_____’s box have a new mate, who is now fluffier. To clear space for his cage, I remove the debilitated box of tennis shoes and racquets in the backseat.

It had been nighttime in my dream and I was walking on a street, maneuvering past war wreckage. A few individuals in the distance were running away from something.

I walked to the seashore. Petroleum globules had infected the sand. A few people waded there, searching for something to eat, but somehow I knew that sea anemones were the only sea life remaining. Then, after medic helicopters flew by, I ran across the street to a restaurant boarded up with splintered wood; its torn red-and-white awning exposed its metal lattice.

A friend was suddenly with me. We hopped over an iron gate into the restaurant’s patio and knelt to enter the cockpit of an old Spy Hunter arcade machine. It felt like the most treasured thing on Earth.

I fail to find any clues from my dream. Readying for the night abyss, I chug heavy doses of vodka and kill the aftertaste with potato chips I share with Cleveland and the mynah bird. Searching the town, all the houses look empty.

Kayla, wearing a long, cream chiffon dress that illuminated her tan skin, entered first. She carried a white cake on a pink stand. She was a beautiful girl. I loved how the tops of her cheeks pressed softly against her mischievous eyes when she smiled, the dimple between them blushing.

Her mother, behind her, wore an ocean blue housedress that almost concealed the pouch of fat at her belly. Pointing to the cake with the knife’s tip, she said, “I made a Peruvian cake for you, so you can see what we had back home.”

Kayla reached for a pen to put up her hair with, sat beside me, and pressed her thigh against mine as her father asked me questions and suggested the correct answers; from his face, most people would have thought he was angry.

“They liked you,” Kayla reassured me. She looked back at the house before