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

discover frozen chicken breasts that I cook and we enjoy with ketchup and peas. A new Mercedes-Benz-Audi-BMW recharges my Organelle v463.2. Still, there is no signal. I wonder if I die and return, will it still be like this? Would I return to Jasmine and Isabella? Or Kayla? Is this a return visit? Does God exist if no one is here to imagine him?

It’s late afternoon when we enter Collinsville. Spires of fire smoke rise from within the suburban valleys. We scan the Gateway Convention Center, the Fairmount Park Racetrack, and even try boarded up mills, but still we find no one.

I pull into a shady street roamed by large houses, resting in one and waking mid-morning. Through the bedroom window, I study the fog hanging over the verges and crawling between the furrows of the hills beyond. Rainfall slowly fills the dips in the street.

On the border of Collinsville, we begin traveling along an old dilapidated shelter for displaced workers. I pull the car over at what seems to be its entrance and read the posting.

I see the sun behind me and hope we will reach Ohio before nightfall. The mynah bird calls for food again. I slow down to squeeze the last two apricot chews into his cage. My Organelle v463.2’s Radio plays static. I try to sing but I cannot think of a happy song. “Baby, where are you?” The bird sings along.

The I-71 toward Mansfield, our last leg of the day, is open, allowing us to make the ninety-mile trip in the afterglow of the sunset. I park the car in front of Carousel Magic and step out. I imagine the dead pink, yellow, and purple balloons, with their shiny ribbons, rising from the gravel and floating once again.

The mist digs out scents from the grass. In dusk’s matte blue light, I admire the carousel’s bejeweled toads, lions, and stallions as I run my hand over the meandering red tongue of a dragon. I imagine the sweet aroma of warm tomato and mozzarella cheese pizza passing through.

I approach one of the bronze nickelodeons, retrieve a quarter from the car’s coin tray, slide it into the machine’s coin slit, and lower my eyes over the eyepiece. A glittering gold woman dances inside. She reminds me of Jasmine dancing and lip-syncing around our bedroom, looking adorable as she tried to finish a line in the song while applying lipstick in front of the beaded bathroom mirror. Then Isabella came in and, entranced by her mother, attempted to follow by bouncing up and down.

It’s relieving to be awake despite feeling more tired than before I slept. I had nightmares of Jasmine yelling from inside the smuggler’s-camp cave.

To exorcise the curse, I splash icy water on my face, and then mix the cold water with instant coffee. I make the mistake of opening the fridge and the decaying food inside fills the room with its stench. How did human activity just stop?

We drive past a few more towns and merge onto the I-76 toward Youngstown, at Pennsylvania’s border. New York is only one state away and my heart beats faster.

After about sixty miles, we arrive in Youngstown, and we drive through Mills Creek Park in search of breakfast. I scan the fields. No children swing in the playgrounds. No one eats from the picnic baskets on the tables or over blankets on the grass. The top of a golf cart sticks out of a pond on the golf course.

As I drive over the iron bridges, I study the woodland’s rocky divides, and the dark streams and ponds below, but I find no one sitting, sleeping, or hiding there. I pull over beside a royal white bridge dirtied by old rain. The short waterfall beneath it both calms and terrifies me.

We continue on to Bloomsburg, almost 400 miles away, and pass under a constellation of covered bridges. As we drive over the ridges in them, for the first time since childhood, the loud noises from our Mercedes-Benz-Audi-BMW frighten me from entering the next covered bridge. After we’ve made it across the last one, I enjoy seeing the few red flowers that are scattered among the frosted grass carpets of the sycamore forest—its lone horse, with ivory hair and chocolate blemishes on its noise, made magical.

Then, entering Clarion, the forest is broken into trunks, branches, and mulch, a fleet of mammoth gray machines with exposed canines waiting to prey. Trailing them are GREATCO plastic turf sectionals. I pull over. The machines remind me of the stuffed saber-toothed tiger Isabella and I saw at the Museum of Natural History. The moving sidewalk sped past the displays, but we noticed that the tiger was missing a tooth and its tail.

The next morning, in Bloomsburg, 145 miles outside of Manhattan, I throw the sunflower shells of my breakfast at the murky ice water of the fountain in the center of town. Three Clydesdale horses munch on weeds on the opposite side. Cleveland runs at them sloppily over the snow, and their nostrils steam as they pace and trot down the street. Cleveland defecates watery feces.

Did I sleep at all last night? I rub my eyes with my wrist and forearm; the network of veins is becoming more visible.

A ruffling noise comes from afar, growing and crashing. From far down the street, a massive brown flood is headed our way! Cleveland runs to me and I follow him into the car. I slam on the accelerator, but hit a curb and worry I have broken an axle. The water is two stoplights away. I’m able to free the car, the mynah bird screams, Cleveland barks, and Willie and Zebra fall to the floor.

The dead cars in the middle of the street luckily slow the flood. Beyond, I see foothills, and the sign “Endless Mountains” points to them. We enter a street embanked by the Susquehanna River, over which ice sheets flow down. In my rearview, I see the flood slam into the embankment,