Evergreens in an Endless Autumn

Six months have passed since the cool winds of September raked through the brittle grass of Valley Glean like fingers in an old, woolen blanket, yet the fall has not since ended. That same, cold breeze, as sharp and as bitter as a dagger at midnight, still cuts through the piles of shriveled, brown bodies that line the streets, and the deep, blue hue of the sky has saturated to a shade beyond what any of us could’ve ever dared to comprehend. It is an eternal blue.
The fall started, just as most often do, after a hot, wet summer that crescendoed into a clangy, thunderous lightning storm. Momma and I were out rocking on the porch step (we had exhausted the day plucking our small orchard nearly bare of fresh apples) when the air began to taste of oncoming rain and the song of the cicadas swiftly stopped like a spinning record without a needle. We watched and waited until the pitter-patter on the tin roof began, and then the crack of God’s whip licked the sky with a scab of light and down came the rest of the water. It was a heavy rain — heavier than any other that summer — yet from where we were perched, Momma and I were dry as bones. The cattle, however, were not as fortunate, and while the pigs might’ve had a field day in the fresh mud, all the other critters of the night were hunkered down as we were, including the chickens in their coop and the dog from the yard. Ol’ Betsy had found her way under Momma’s chair (after I had spoiled her with the rest of my half-chewed Honeycrisp) and continued in that position until we called it a night.
Thus ended the last day of summer.
When we awoke the following morning, a fresh September morning, neither Momma nor myself expected the harsh transition into the fall equinox that awaited us outside: the sky was now a bright, cheery blue — every drop of rain six feet under the dew-covered, browning grass — and the trees radiated the same yellow as the sunlight, spun with hints of red like Gala apples. We moseyed on down the steps and into the yard, taking Betsy with us, and there wasn’t a trace of humidity in the air to be found. It was a crisp air — nearly as crinkled as the leaves beneath our boots — and as cool and nippy as we had hoped for after the dog days had ended. The dog and other animals felt the same: ol’ Betsy was frolicking, the cows were grazing what little green grass remained, and the chickens were out of their coop. The mud had dried, but that didn’t stop the pigs from their play. Scattered across our land, and all throughout Valley Glean, were the shed leaves of maple and ash, same as the ones that snapped as we strutted. The children kicked them down empty blocks and rode them to school as passengers in their spokes. Despite the breeze that stung like a bumblebee, there was a certain warmth throughout our little town, and as soon as I had bundled myself in that gifted jacket from Momma that hung in the closet since Christmas past, I could feel it, too.
Thus ended the first day of Autumn.
The sight that beheld us the following morning was nothing shy of disorienting. In fact, I had mistakenly assumed myself to be drunk on rum when I had first noticed the color coming through the window blinds: a blue, nearly purple, shade that stretched across the room like a rug. I had hopped from my slumber in thinking I had slept well-past the morning dew, but the still-clicking clock swore to me that it was only a quarter past six. Peering through the window only furthered my suspicions: the sky was a near black, and the rising sun appeared to be setting already. The shrubbery along the window’s sill was also alarming: nearly kissed brown with splotches of bare branches. The entire landscape looked as if God had laden his brush heavy with the idyllic colors of an auburn twilight, only the day had just begun.
Thus, in the same way it had started, ended the second day of Autumn.
On the third day, just as all the days since, the darkness of night was broken by the unrelenting gaze of blue that swept throughout our land, only day by day increasing in its saturation. It is as if a sponge has been left to soak in a bucket of paint, and day by day what little hint of orange or yellow remained in that sky slowly rots into blackish blue. It is not only the sky that rots, however, but the trees, the grasses, and the rest of Summer’s flora. In their places, laced across the front and back yards alike, wrap the gangling vines of gourds and pumpkins that grow far beyond what God, Himself, had intended. One such, a great squash of the Connecticut fields, had, by that point, eclipsed the tire of my ’68 Chevy like it were the moon.
It has since engulfed it.
That afternoon, as the last of the summer’s warm breezes clashed against the howling winds of autumn’s birthing pains, there was a great storm that rattled the house and shook the trees, dumping a great many leaves into the yard and scattering them about. The continued gusts of cold air struck the windows and rolled some of the gourds down the hills like oblong bowling balls, and the surges of power they caused by snapped power lines throughout Valley Glean rendered my CPAP breathing machine useless, and I dared not sleep that night without it.
Thus ended the third day of Autumn.
The morning that followed, I had awoken with a strain in my eyes. Though the blinds were all closed, and the doors all shut, the house was bathed in the vivid hue of a vibrant blue and the cold nip of the outside air. I checked the thermostat: it was nearly forty degrees. In a place like Valley Glean, a temperature that chilly was only seen around Christmastime, never that early in the year. My wife had felt it too. She had awoken with a cough — a cold — and I fared my best to remedy her symptoms with a piping warm mug of coffee drizzled with the honey from the comb. She thanked me and sat before the foggy window, bundled in a blanket, until calling me over to make note of the outstretched vines that had traveled down the lonesome road toward Valley Glean’s square. The gourds were now the size of terracotta clay jars, and the pumpkins were as wide as haybales. Bent over them like crooked, jagged guardian angels, were the barren trees that spread their leaves far and wide — so far and wide that not even a blade of browning grass saw the sun. And that yellow specter, too, despite having only just arisen, reared his glistening head for what seemed to be only moments before ducking beneath the horizon again and shading the land in pitch, black darkness.
Thus ended the fourth, short, day of Autumn.
The fifth began, as the fourth had, with the sheer sheen of the cloudless, Autumn sky and the raspy coughing of my wife beside me. She had been gasping for breath all night and when we had both finally tuckered out from restlessness, it seemed that rest was only a short reprieve. When we both had awoken to the brightness through the window blinds, I had wrongfully assumed her complexion to be a result of the strange colors that emitted from outside. I was wrong; her skin was now the shade of a duckling as if she were ill from jaundice, and her sunken eyes were the deeper, richer, tint of the same color — nearly orange. Her hair was falling out in clumps, and she had lost a tooth in the night. She gripped me with one hand, coughed into her other and, as it trembled, extended the sprinkled red along her yellowed fingers to my eyes.
I had called Dr. Sampson not five minutes later, after bringing poor Momma a glass of cold water, nearly frozen despite being left on the kitchen counter the night before. Dr. Sampson answered abruptly, as if expected, and informed me of her symptoms before I even uttered a word.
My wife, it seems, was not alone to suffer her illness in Valley Glean. However, just as for the others, not much was there to change but to let whatever it was simply run its course.
For the remainder of the day, Momma sat silently — except for the whimpers of Betsy beneath her rocker — and watched as the foul, deep blue of the empty air, void of any fowl that must've migrated south prematurely, seeped into every corner of the sky above, and the orange and brown crept across the ground below. The only hint of greenery to be seen were those few, select trees that for, whatever God’s reasons, never seemed to shed their leaves: the evergreens.
It was that ever-so green that was a comfort in some strange way to the both of us, though the companionship of that tinge was only shortly lived. Before long, the screeching sunset, even earlier on arrival than the day before, burned every color of the earth and deep blue sky above into a molten shade of orange; like a Currier and Ives print if the colors began to bleed out onto the floor.
Thus ended the fifth day of Autumn.
There was a great squealing that had awoken me from my slumber the morning of the sixth day and, immediately, I had clutched the cold hand of Momma to make sure she was alright. It wasn’t her.
The screaming, instead, had come from outside, beyond the windows of which rich blue light seemed to ooze into our farmhouse. I had taken my coat from the rack and made it a step down the creaking porch stairs when my slipper slipped into a thick bundling of dried-out leaves: a pile of crackling orange and brown whose colors were far deeper than my foot. I lifted my shoe from its depths but, as I surveyed the rest of the yard, I realized rather quickly that there was no alternate footing. The entirety of our land was coated in fallen leaves: a layer of rustling litter at least a foot deep.
Then the squealing came again, this time louder and seemingly closer. I trudged through the browning colors in my pajamas and jacket until I reached the splintering fence which, beyond it, held in the likes of those chickens and their coop and the cattle and the pigs. No such creatures stirred anymore. Instead, the wailing of the hog which had awoken me came from beneath a dense pile of leaves, and I brushed them aside to see Clarabelle, our pot-belly, sputter a gurgle of blood and fall limp against the dead grass beneath her. There was fungus and a great many toadstools protruding from her skin and all around her — along the patch of earth — were budding mushrooms that stuck out from between mounds of leaves and the carcasses of the cattle who had grazed the grasses bare.
Clarabelle was always Momma’s pig, and I had taken the bell around her neck with me as I plodded back up to our home, reverently holding it in my shivering hands and wondering how to break the news to my wife: that all the livestock, including her prized pig, were now dead.
But there were bigger problems inside.
Momma was sitting at the table, the steam from a piping cup of Joe rising from her grip. She turned to me with a faded, cracked smile, and I stopped cold in my tracks. My wife was orange, and the thin skin that surrounded her beady, sunken eyes was a sickly brown. They were the same, saturated, tones as the leaves that fluttered across the lawn.
Immediately, I tried to hoist her to her feet, but her weight nearly snapped between my arms. She fell back into the seat with another, tired cough and shook her head a silent ‘no.’ I clutched her cold hands in mine, still holding the bell. She took in a breath, which was increasingly harder to do as the fall continued, and gazed up at me tearfully, her lips cracking audibly. I began to weep as she fell into herself.
Thus ended the sixth day of Autumn.
I failed to rest all night; merely sat up in bed and watched as the blackness brightened into blue outside but was awoken from whatever stupor may have clutched me by the hideous odor that penetrated my nostrils. The air was thin enough already, but when the stretch had seized me, I gasped and burst into a fit of coughing and nearly vomited out on the floor. I grabbed the nearby CPAP machine resting beside the bed and pressed it to my lips as if it were a gas mask from the Great War and huffed and puffed. I could, for once in many days, breathe again.
Downstairs, my wife or, rather, the husk that my now dearly departed had left behind, was rotten — withered in that chair in the kitchen. Ol’ Betsy had smelled her too; only the soft, white fur from her coat was now the shade of cinnamon as she whined at Momma’s shriveled feet. The mug of coffee was still placed beside her on the table, frozen over as the temperature only grew chiller, and I reached out to touch her brown skin. Her fingers snapped upon the lightest brush of my hand and crumbled to the floor. I gagged into my mask and ran to the other side of the room, where the only comfort to be found was the basket of apples that never made their way into one of Momma’s pies. They were all a putrid brown and writhing with worms.
That afternoon, I had called Dr. Sampson again after covering all the doors and windows — wherever that blue light leaked through. It now hurt to stare at for long periods, and the mere color dug into my jaw and rang the drums of the ears. When the doctor finally did answer, he sounded both excitable and terrified all in the same breath. He begged of me not to go outside, not to dare smell it, and I questioned him “why?” but he never gave a cohesive answer. He rambled on about leaves and lungs, the mutual exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide, and how the earth, itself, was shedding. I then asked of him “why, then,” both of us were still breathing what little air we had, but he didn’t know. I did, however:
We were the evergreens.
Unfortunately for Ol’ Betsy, though, she was not. Before the day was through, that cinnamon-colored fur had completely fallen off like needles from a larch, leaving behind only the wrinkly skin of a now baldened bitch.
Until, at last gasp, that had fallen off too.
Thus ended the first week of Autumn. Before long, despite how grueling it might’ve seemed, that week became weeks. Halloween came and went, the most frightening of them all by mere virtue of the season, and then those weeks became months — six terrible months, so much as we can tell.
Those of us who dared to step outside, perhaps with no alternative, our eyes covered, and bodies wrapped in what warmth we had, took to throwing as many bodies as we could manage into the warming bonfires that crackle, now, day and night along the hills to rid Valley Glean of the smell that keeps many of us awake. The ones that remain, left on curbs of which children no longer walk nor ride their bicycles, merely seep back into the earth, and keep the corn stalks and gourds and pumpkins ever growing; their scent so potent that a whiff of the wind tastes of one of Momma’s pies and goads me to gag and cry every time. Every autumnal meal, the same squash day in and day out, elicits the same reaction.
Everything outside our windows remains frozen in place just as the fall has been, and we often collectively contemplate whether or not the strange season of the valley lingers beyond its borders, especially where it is not yet autumn. The clocks, however, have lost all purpose of their ticking, and therefore we cannot tell with any certainty whether or not we have even reached the winter months as we suspect. All we know is that the days grow ever shorter, some seemingly less than mere hours — what used to be hours.
Father Briggs, now, raves on at the pulpit — foaming at the lip — about the “end of days” we have found ourselves in. He swears that “death’s harvest will be plentiful,” and that, perchance, the colors of hell have fallen onto the earth in shades of fire and brimstone.
It seems that even Dr. Sampson believes his rantings.
We pray daily that the warmth of a radiant spring will thaw the once lively town of Valley Glean and end this endless fall. I only fear, if an impending spring buds what fauna and flora lie in the wake of autumn and winter’s chill back to life, perhaps this eternal autumn is sparing us from whatever — whomever — else may spring along with it.
Category:Halloween
Category:Lovecraftian
Category:Nature
Category:MakRalston