The Singular Sense

Lucas Flatt

That fall rolled cold into his valley, winter runoff killed his gardens. I found him pulling fence wire from the barn. He didn’t recognize me with a beard. Came to meet me in the barnyard, not quite brandishing the post hole diggers, but with a good grip by both hands.
          Then he squinted and asked if I was Brian, and wasn’t sure when I told him yes. He asked why I’d come again after more than a year without an email or letter.
          “I called.”
          “I don’t have a phone.”
          “You used to.”
          “Yes.” He looked past me long enough that I thought he was trying to remember his dear old telephone, but his face went loose, his eyes forlorn, and I felt embarrassed. For him or for me. I wanted to get in my car and go. I should have.
          It didn’t occur to me then where he was looking, up the eastern rise, chewed up pitch pine in the talus expanding upward, everything glassed by icy rivulets so that you’d tilt back your head and still not take it in, like another planet. You’d wonder what could live up there. Maybe nothing.
          But that wasn’t how he looked. He was seeing something there.
          “So,” he said, back to Earth. “You’re back.” I let it slide. He’d gotten screwier over the years. That’s artists. We swaggered and circled a little and hugged too hard. I got the feeling he didn’t trust me, which was going to be a problem.
          I wasn’t there to spark anything back up. He hadn’t been much interested in sex the last time I’d come, had aged a lot fast in a scary way. I thought I knew why–somewhere on his property two kids wrecked four-wheelers and one died. He found them. This was just before the last time I came out. Then, he kept telling me every detail, how the boy had looked dead against the tree.
          And honestly, lately I’d been fixating on death, accidents, that sort of thing. I went through times like that. I tried to run away from it, but there I was.
          “I don’t like the way we left it.” I told him the truth. “I think you needed someone to talk to and I left and it’s been bothering me.” Maybe that was less true. I’d recently decided to put Dad in a home, had my heart broken. “I’m moving back home and I thought I’d come by and check in. It wasn’t too far out of the way.” That was a lie–his valley was on the whole wrong side of Tempe, but what’s long, what’s far, when you don’t know where you’re going anyway?
          He put his hands in his back pockets and swayed, some affected kind of cowboy thing, but I liked it. He winked at me. “Let’s have some tea.”

The kitchen of the big house was dug in partway like a cellar, bermed on one side, and the facing windows were high up in the wall and long, so the light came in broken up by high-hanging philodendron. He must have hung those plants with a ladder and the effect was too chiaroscuro to find anything, unless you knew the space. But he did, and put a kettle on the woodstove. The shadows played across his back and it was cool as a cave.
          I peeked beyond to the back rooms and the house was a mess, which wasn’t like him at all.
          “You fired your housekeeper.”
          “Oh,” he said, embarrassed. “She can’t drive and I guess I forgot to get her.”
          For a moment I thought maybe she was wasted away on a bench somewhere, skeletal. I laughed and said so, but he shook his head. “I told her I wasn’t coming back.” He never turned around, poured some kind of awful shit that might have been tea.
          We didn’t talk about our last visit. He’d found the body and the other kid, the girlfriend, banged up, in shock, staring where the boy had sort of melded himself with a big tree. His head was pretty much gone, spread like jelly over its trunk.
          “Are you feeling better?”
          He knew what I was asking, but didn’t answer.
          “Are you working?”
          He said he had been, all the time. He gestured around with his mug, as if to say everything was his work. He didn’t ask me the same, but it didn’t matter. I don’t think he ever asked me a thing about myself.
          “I’m selling vacuums,” I said. He nodded as though he expected as much.
          He’d been my professor at the community college. I had no talent, but that didn’t matter, either. I don’t think he ever thought about any art but his own.
          “Well.” He put down his cup. “I’ve got something to finish. Make yourself at home.” He left me there in the kitchen. I looked around for a light, but when I found the switch, nothing happened. The electricity was out.
          I knew somewhere he had a set of Morgan Silver Dollars, and I also knew someone who might pay a premium. I could be middle-man, or anyway, I was going to have to borrow some money and it didn’t seem like he had cash on hand. I used my phone as a flashlight and headed back through a hallway to the studio, where he had storage, but got lost among a lot of easels he’d set up, plus pieces piled in corners, everything spattered navy, cornflower, royal–his work gone monochrome like the world was out of paint, save blue.
          I heard a whine, a series of booms, and the lights came on.
          I looked closer at the paintings; here and there were peach daubs, they looked like hands.
          “Come on,” he said behind me. I think I’d been mesmerized, didn’t know how long he’d been there quiet behind me. “Need your help.”
          We passed a chicken coup with one lonesome bantam pecking sand. Inside the coup were feathers. I knelt at the ramp and leaned inside, reeled at the stench. Blood and feathers, something withered–a chicken’s claw. I picked up a feather like some kind of chicken detective, chicken physic.
          I could picture it–the coyotes slinking in under cloud cover, rattling the chickens and snapping their hollow bones. I could see it like it was happening just then.
          “Guess no omelets,” I said.
          “Guess no omelets.”
          A quarter mile past into a field of sage and nothing, really, we came upon a blue tarp stretched taut, low to the ground. I knew it would be some weird shit underneath, and I wasn’t wrong.
          He uncovered a big linen canvas, ultramarine with those hands in different colors, ochre and peach and tawny. Hands like you’d have a kid make for Thanksgiving, maybe.
          “It’s their symbol. It’s like ‘Hello.’”
          I took a couple big steps back. “Who is ‘they?’”
          He laughed and looked around and then threw back his head, threw up his arms, and I swear to God the sky crackled and was, for several seconds, that same ultramarine.
          “What did you put in the tea?”
          He laughed. “Just a microdose.”
          We’d tripped together lots of times on his farm. What else was there to do? Drink tequila, feed chickens, fuck. But he’d never spiked my drink. “Microdose of what?” I didn’t feel high.
          “Nothing. I was joking.” He shrugged. “It’s just tea I buy in town. But when you were looking at my paintings, I hypnotized you. Or they did.”
          I ground my teeth, felt a clicking in my throat. I dry swallow when I’m anxious. “What are you talking about?”
          “It isn’t hard, if the subject is…suggestible.”
          “Don’t do that again. Cover that shit up.” The wind picked up and sand scoured his canvas. I tried not to look at it directly. He drew the tarp and secured it with tent stakes. I didn’t help.
          We had a few shots before dinner. Some residue, something like dried grass, covered most of the surfaces in his kitchen. That and dust. I wiped off a corner of his long myrtle table and pulled the stool back to the wall so I could keep an eye on everything. “So you’re into hypnotism and UFOs?”
          “Yes, and Tex-Mex.” He had on an apron, worked with his back to me, pressing tortillas and chopping a big turkey breast. He let me inspect the tray, called them his Thanksgiving leftover taquitos with a flourish and olé–had he always been swishy? This seemed new–but then again I hadn’t seen him happy in a long time.
          The tequila was cheering me up, too. He still had strong arms, strong hands, let his fingers linger inside the stove, knew I was watching him. He lit a candle, set the table. We ate–or I ate and he watched me. His fridge was empty except for the turkey and some yams. The cabinets nearly bare, so he seemed to live on dusty tins and nothing. Dust. His ribs poked out in his flannel.
          After dinner, I tried again to bring up the accident. I figured, get him talking, maybe that was the way back for us. “Have you talked to anyone?”
          He shook his head and poured himself more tequila. “What is there to say?”
          “You can’t let one bad thing ruin your life.”
          “One bad thing? I didn’t know you did the accounting.”
          I didn’t know what to say to that. He offered me another drink, but I passed it back.
          He darkened. “Do you think I’m out here alone because of one bad thing?”

Before he could make up the guest room he had to cart out loads and loads of canvases–watercolors, collages, mostly all in solid blues. We said goodnight without looking at each other. I tossed and rolled too warm under the blankets and gave up and went to his room.
          He was sitting up with a book, looking stately in his steel-rimmed readers, had the sheets pulled down on my side, where he patted, ran his hand over the sheet in the counter clockwise, not looking up from his book on UFOs.
          “Is this another hypnotism thing?” I sat on the edge of the bed.
          “Sorry?”
          When I turned to look, I caught genuine confusion in his face. Then he seemed to remember. “I was only joking, Brian. Why? What did you see, before?”
          “Nothing.” I lied. I’d been lying about most of it. I wasn’t moving anywhere or selling vacuum cleaners. I was living in my car. I hadn’t really slept in a week. I was seeing things, more and more. “Why UFOs?”
          He put down the book, stretched out his arm and I lay next to him. “That’s the wrong question. Why me?”
          “In what sense?” I liked the way the tequila smelled on him, how warm he felt. I’d been unfurling for weeks, who knows, maybe more–thought maybe he could keep me together another night.
          “The singular sense. The only one.”

When he was asleep, I went back into his office with all the easels and stacked canvases. Quiet as I could, I moved some stacks and looked inside his storage closet. I knew what I was looking for. Maybe it was why I’d come–he had at least twenty coins, in pretty good condition.
          Instead I found shoeboxes full of photographs. And in the last box, underneath sepia landscapes with a bridge, I found pictures of the accident. I’d sort of guessed that’s what he’d done. He always had a camera–it was his process to roam his land, take photographs, sometimes he’d paint these or he’d color the prints. But these were unaltered.
          I was pissed, maybe because of the coins, but also, it wasn’t right to have something like that, when the boy was a stranger. I took the box back to his room and shook him awake.
          “You need to burn these.”
          He honestly smiled. “Would you believe I forgot all about these?” He took the photos of the boy’s head crushed, fused to the tree. The blood so dark it made a portal in the trunk, and glittering teeth in the bark, plasma foam, the crushed hulk of the four-wheeler and his body folded over like an empty suit of clothes. He held one–there were three, identical so far as I could tell–to the bedside lamp.
          “OK,” he said. “OK. Let’s burn them. I’ll get some matches.”
          “What about the paintings?” All of it was getting to me. I had a feeling like everything would end badly. I knew to trust that feeling.
          “One thing at a time.”

The farm past his porch was dark, the path through the garden dark and the ghostly chicken coop quiet. My teeth chattered in the cold. Two things in my periphery: blue light dropping through the sky; his eyes looking up.
          I said, “What the hell was that?” The sky above the valley was open like a bowl and across it cut red flights. Six, seven, ten red and white blinkered paths. Blinking east and north and west and south.
          He said it was airplanes. The blue flash, he guessed, was a blue flash. A satellite, maybe. Behind him to the east I saw another burst of blue. It belled and dropped and faded. I said, “Turn around.”
          We watched a third blue flash and a fourth. The fifth flash hovered on a ridge halfway up the eastern cliffs. We crossed the road toward the light, scrabbled up an icy creek bed until we couldn’t see the flashes through the treetops.
          I stopped in a clearing, knelt and tried to catch my breath. It toiled out huge and cloudy. He crashed ahead through brush and climbed up into the moonlight on the first of the rocks that become true cliffs. Stood there with his back to me and put his hands on his head. The moonlight through his crooked arms shone spots and to my left where one fell onto needle and leaf a blue flash blossomed, another to the right. These were the last flashes.
          From the ledge above me he called, “Hey!” He looked back toward the farm. He said, “Damn.”
          I thought it was over, asked him if he’d seen this before and he shook his head. “They talk to me but I haven’t seen them yet except for lights.” I asked who and he pointed up. I said, “UFOs?” and he nodded.
          He said, “They’re coming.” The blue light settled down—all the thin trunks of white oaks and pine were back-dappled blue and then backlit and then overcome by blue, blue radiating everywhere.
          “They’ve called you here and I’m sorry.” He reached for me, and here it was, a chance, but I wasn’t ready for it, I stepped away. It was instinct. He looked hurt. Something creaked above and hissed like steam exhaust. He was hollering up and tearing at his shirt buttons. Then he looked so happy, said, “I’m going up,” stripped, glowed and vanished in a cloud of vermillion sparks that kindled brush. I stamped it out. I had to hold to branches my way back down, thought I might float out over autumn.

It took an hour to drag out all the canvases, to pile them over the tarp and burn it all. I kept glancing up into the night, overcast, no lights to speak of, but I still felt watched. I brought kerosene to douse the pile, but there was no need–the whole thing went up like crazy, and I could feel the heat most the way back to my car. I loaded up what seemed valuable, but couldn’t find those coins. Somewhere in the backseat too I stashed the box of photographs.
          Easy to miss, in the lower left in every print, are reaching hands. Maybe it’s the girlfriend, warding us away. Or they could be someone saying, “Hello.” They could be saying lots of things. It gave me something to think about, leaving the valley as dawn broke, its light throwing everywhere off the verglas on the eastern rise, lancing up into the blue.

Lucas Flatt‘s work has appeared in Breakwater Review, X-R-A-Y Lit, Pithead Chapel, Maudlin House, and Puerto del Sol, among other fine establishments. He has been longlisted in the 2026 Jeanne Leiby Chapbook Award and won the 2016 Larry Brown Short Story award at Pithead Chapel. He teaches at Volunteer State Community College, and lives with Merry, Ira, and Susie in Tennessee.

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