STREAMERS

A Short Memorial Story

May 29, 1989

Billy’s bike sparkled in the sunlight, streamers glinting off the handlebars in the colors of Old Glory.

“There you go, son,” Steve said. “You ready?”

Billy shifted where he stood, watching the oncoming flood of other kids on bikes, leading the parade. He’d only just learned to ride in the fall of last year, and hadn’t much since the extended winter broke the last couple weeks of April, the days heating up in a hurry.

“It’s alright to be nervous,” Steve offered, clasping a hand on his boy’s shoulder, his green and blue striped t-shirt already damp with sweat in the early heat of the morning. “You’ll be fine once you get going. Promise.”

Steve realized in that moment he probably sounded like a carbon copy of his old man—only his father had prodded him to the edge of the high dive, and when he refused to jump, shoved him instead. It broke him of his fear of the water, but the fear of his father never really broke, like a fever that kept roiling right up until the moment the old veteran was lowered into the ground ten years earlier, stars and stripes draped over a cherrywood casket that cost more than he’d ever bothered to spend on his mother.

“Look, son, if you don’t want to, you don’t—”
“No,” Billy said, a gentle defiance creeping into his normally tender and tentative tone, his voice still nearly as high as it was when he spoke his first words: “son of bitch,” which he’d overheard one night when he tiptoed out of bed while he and Debra were watching a movie in the small living room.

They tried and failed not to laugh, and it became his favorite phrase on repeat for a week.
“I’m gonna do it,” Billy said, strapping on his helmet and assuming the position atop the glittery blue bars of the bike.

Steve glanced across the road and down the sidewalk, where Debra stood and waved an encouraging wave, standing next to their friends and neighbors, Stan and Jenny. “Okay, just ease out slow and—”

Steve didn’t have time to finish before Billy had rolled down the slope of their driveway and merged into the traffic of bicycles, being trailed down Riveredge Dr. by fire department vehicles, marching WWII vets, floats, and the marching band playing ‘Yankee Doodle Dandy.’

It was the same jubilant affair he remembered growing up, but it had only been in the last fifteen years they’d started letting kids ride along in the parade—and this was six-year-old Billy’s first time.

Steve wanted to yell out for his son to “be careful,” but figured he’d spare himself and his boy the embarrassment. When there was a long enough gap, he ran across and rejoined Deb, Stan, and Jenny, and they started trailing the parade down the sidewalk, following the left path as it forked around the brick two-story Westville Light and Power building, the parade route forking around the other side by the post office.

“Told you he’d be fine,” Deb said, jabbing Steve in the ribs.

“Yeah, guess so.”

“Wouldn’t even know he was nervous,” Stan affirmed.

Steve stifled a yawn and blinked against the brightness. He’d been up later than he meant to, putting the finishing touches on Billy’s bike—tightening bolts, re-taping the streamers, adjusting the brake cables just right. It felt good, in that quiet, solitary kind of way. Until around midnight, when the flutter hit—just a quick, irregular beat in his chest, like a skipped step on a staircase. He’d paused, hand to his chest, waiting. Then it passed. The meds were working.

Still, it had left a faint thrum of unease to linger.

As they passed the brick building and came parallel to the fenced-off transformers, coils and slate gray boxes and wires sailing to telephone poles in all directions above, Steve craned his neck to see if he could catch sight of his boy.

There was a buzzing sound, and then a cracking pop. He jolted around to see if the vets were already firing off the salute mid-route, which didn’t seem right. They were still marching steady.

“Did you hear—”

Steve turned back around. When he did, the sky had gone from bright blue to a dank, brown-gray. The buzzing sound was suddenly louder, and a sparking blue arc spouted from the top of the transformer coils—blindingly bright and harsh, sparks raining down.

He shielded his eyes, and when he opened them, blinking through the purple-yellow spots left by the afterimage of the lashing electricity, Debra was gone. Stan and Jenny were gone.

Everyone was gone.

Steve felt a lurch in his gut, like icy water being shot down his throat, missing everything but the bottom of his stomach.

He jerked his head to the road and ran ahead of the transformers, to where the bikes and his boy should be.

There was no one. Just an array of empty, discarded bikes, confetti, candy, and streamers littering the street under a sky so dark and strangely off-color it seemed the sun was setting somewhere behind the inexplicable onset of these acrid plumes of cloud.

Steve caught sight of him at last, a thick molasses of relief slowly coating the jitters of panic and forcing them to still, his hand still shaking.

Steve waved and stepped off the curb, and ran across the street to him. “I can’t keep up,” he said, a whinging tone that his own father would have, at the very least, scolded him for—more likely grabbed his arm in that rough way he sometimes did and told him he was being a wimp and a pussy.

“You’re doing fine, kid.” He smiled down at his boy. “Here, I’ll give you a boost and you just keep going.”

Billy nodded, readjusted his red helmet, and they were off. Steve clasped one hand on the handlebars and the other on the small of his boy’s back, pushing him ahead. He coasted on and caught up to the pack.

The firetruck honked loud behind him, sending a fresh, false sense of alarm through him as he stepped up onto the curb, waving at Deb, Stan, and Jenny.

“I’ll meet you up on Harrison,” he shouted across, not sure they could hear, and kept going, pushing through the already dispersing crowd as the band and vets and then the line of emergency vehicles passed through Main Street—most of them making their way to Elmwood for the Memorial Gun Salute.

His dad had been one of the riflemen, now dead and buried on the same ground he used to stand and fire ceremonial shots into the air from.

By the time he got to the dam, the rushing waters abated the fading sound of the parade marching ahead. He crossed the street, tracing Debra down the Riverwalk on the other side of the road.

A crackle and flash.

The world was dark, gray, and the clouds a fetid yellow. Time seemed to slow. The soothing relief of having found his boy melted away almost instantly, his heart pounding like the marching bass drums—now little more than distorted echoes in his mind.

He stopped dead center in the road and looked both ways. Shreds of confetti, faded streamers gone of their luster, and a smattering of abandoned vehicles parked haphazardly along the street.

The town was deserted.

He was alone.

He glanced around and up, and a flicker of movement caught his eye in one of the upper Main Street building windows. An afterimage of black and red. Nothing there.

But it slowly bled back into view. A figure, standing, watching him. Featureless and dark, arms at its sides. But something else—spreading. Tatters of wings.

And red eyes burning in hidden sockets.

A ringing filled his ears. A sharp pain in his skull.

He was tripping forward, the world bright again, and he stumbled onto the Riverwalk. He shook his head and turned around, looking into the window where he’d seen the figure, above the old State Bank.

Boarded up, like it had been for years.

What was happening to him? For a while, he hadn’t slept well. But it had gotten better. He’d stayed up later than he meant to, getting Billy’s bike ready.

He kept walking, and jogged a little to catch back up to Debra.

They walked and chatted on the way down, stopping to visit with his aunt who lived just down from the cemetery, hosting her annual Memorial Day get-together—which they’d gotten out of the habit of going to the past few years—and fifteen minutes later got down to the end of the road where the parade route ended, the kids dispersing and walking their bikes over to families.

Billy’s face was bright and alive with a proud smile.

“Great job, buddy,” Debra said, giving him a hug and pressing him to her side, scruffing his hair as his helmet swayed wistfully by the strap in his hand.

Steve came alongside and put a hand on his shoulder. “Told you you could do it.”
“Yep, and I could keep going too.”
“Good boy.”
“Can we stay for the guns, Dad?”

Steve’s first instinct was to try and talk him out of it—maybe bribe him with the alternative of going for ice cream. The past couple years he’d avoided it. Stayed and listened at a distance to the bugle playing “Taps,” echoing down from Devil’s Peak. But Steve figured that if his boy had been able to push through and ride—even when he hadn’t wanted to at first, when he could’ve stopped and given up—then he could push through too.

“Sure,” Steve said.

They walked toward the cemetery and set Billy’s bike on the grass.

Deb grabbed his arm. “You sure you want to stay?”
She had that knowing tone, and the flickering grin she offered when she knew the real answer but didn’t expect to get it.

“It’s fine. It’s a day to remember, right?”

She nodded, then her gaze flickered to Billy running up to a couple boys his age he went to school with.

Stan walked up beside him. “You feeling alright today, Steve?”
“Yeah, why?”
“You just seem a little out of it. Just worried about Billy?”
“Something like that, I guess. He did fine. Of course he did. You know how it is with kids.”
“Yeah, I do. Just don’t let your mind run away with you. Worrying can do that.”

A knot formed in Steve’s stomach then. His mind had been running off all morning—more than it had for a while. It hadn’t been like this since—

The first shot went off. Steve tried to mask his startle with a cough immediately after.

Stan glanced over and then away.
“It’s funny…” he said.

A second shot. Steve glanced over to where Billy had been. The boys must have run off.
“What is?” Steve responded absently.

The third shot. Three of the riflemen lowered their weapons—three more rounds to go.
“Memory. It’s a funny thing.”

Something in Stan’s voice had changed. Doubled. Lowered.

Steve’s brow furrowed, and he turned toward his friend, who was gazing off toward the rise of the woods beyond the cemetery.
“Sometimes it won’t leave you alone. Other times, you won’t remember until it’s too late.”
“What are you—”

The final three rounds fired off—and the world changed.

Stan was a shadow now, his head cocked too far to one side, like it had been dislocated, eyes burning with a steady red glow that pulsed like a heartbeat.

Steve stumbled backward, his hands scraping on the sidewalk, tumbling into Billy’s bike. It fell as if through water, teetering slowly until the handlebars cracked into the pavement, the streamers flourishing joyfully beneath the static-darkened sky.

Shadow Stan—or whatever it was—flickered in and out of view. Steve breathed harder as those tatters of wings flared outward.

Then it was gone.

Steve pulled himself to his feet, the cemetery and the houses and the streets shrouded in that strange shadow beneath the roiling clouds, moving impossibly fast—the way they did in his dreams sometimes.

Was that what this was?

Was he dreaming?

Was his sleep invading his waking mind?

Were his nightmares seeping through?

He turned and walked into the cemetery, where six rifles lay abandoned, as if dropped by the veterans who had been firing them. But when he got closer, he saw their polished sheen—glinting just moments earlier in the sun—was gone, and a thick layer of rust and corrosion had taken hold.

When he glanced back, his panic rising to a peak as seconds turned to minutes and he didn’t return to the bright day, he looked toward Billy’s bike.

He watched as rust ate away the blue glittery finish. The handlebars slowly bent and broke away, as if watching a tape fast-forwarding years at a time.

Steve heard the ringing in his ear again. Heard warbled echoes of ‘Taps’ from the hillside in the woods.

Then he heard a scream.

Debra’s voice. He was sure of it—coming from down Harrison.

He ran down the empty road, dirty with debris from the tattered houses, each one rotting away before his eyes as he sprinted.

“Debra! Billy!” he yelled, panting.

His own voice echoed back at him in harsh, reversed sibilant tones.

Then he heard it again—Debra’s scream, yelling for Billy.

“I’m coming!” Steve called. He ran on, following the echo of her voice.

Then he heard Billy.

“Daddy! I can’t see. I can’t…”

“Billy, hang on! I’m—”

Steve turned the corner of Main Street.

He saw the banner of red, white, and blue streamers falling to the ground, floating like a feather.

And beneath it was Billy, his back toward him.

Steve ran down the road. “Son, I’m here.”

He grabbed his shoulder.

When Billy turned, his bright eyes were gone.
Replaced with blackened pits.

Steve reeled in revulsion—immediately rebuking himself. This was his boy, no matter what.

“Billy,” he said, voice weak and quavering. “What happened to you?”

“It’s okay, Daddy,” Billy said, his voice doubled—lower and warbled. “It’s better not to see.”

He pointed up to the window above the State Bank.
“He told me so.”

Steve glanced back at the window—into leering scarlet eyes.

He remembered voices, and the faintest hints of light, as if it were trying to break through the thin flesh of his eyelids.

“He must have forgotten to take his meds. He was up late last night getting the bike ready and—”

“It’s alright, Deb.” Stan’s voice. “They’re doing everything they can for him.”

Someone else entered the room. A doctor, talking about head trauma.

Brain damage.

Possible eyesight loss.

“So he can’t see me?” Billy’s voice.

“Oh honey, we don’t know yet, sweetheart.”

Steve tried to remember what happened.

He tried to raise his hand, to reach out toward the sound of their voices.

Time passed.

It might have been seconds. Minutes. Hours.

Someone pulled up a chair. A warm hand on his arm.

“Seems like you finally remembered, friend.”

Steve craned his head toward the sound of Stan’s voice—
the darkness blacker where the silhoutte loomed over him.

He recalled the feel of the streamers on the handlebars, and they the blue and white shined.

He tried not to remember the color red.