Sun Of Brass, Moon Of Tin
BY LEONARD ONIONHOUSE
This Leonard Onionhouse story won an honorable mention in last summer’s competition. It was ahead of it’s time—but not by much. We begin accepting submissions for our Fall contest on August 1.
There were four lights in those days; four lamps that lit the farm country of my youth:
The greater light of the Sun,
The lesser light of the Moon,
The pearl glow of Kerosene, and
The dim flicker of Candles, vague and shadow-wrought.
Electricity was a mere curiosity that we read about in the papers. The cities blazed with arc lights and incandescent bulbs. But on the prairie we had few barriers to the dark. And when night came, it settled in with the immensity of an ancient flood.
I was thirteen that summer. A thin and silent, black-haired boy. Yet, a strangeness gathered in me. An odd quickening in the blood that I felt and that I feared. Mother noted it soberly, as she scrubbed me in the galvanized metal tub. That black mop of hair, so wild and resistant to combing, was no longer confined to my head. Manhood had begun to creep into my flesh.
Ours was a small family. Father, Mother, Sister, and I, in that lonely clapboard house. And a brother, drifting dust-like in the memory-haunted quiets. Dead ten years and still his fingers traced fresh lines on Mother’s face.
Typhus took him. Typhus: that name like some mythic Greek king. Typhus, lord of drawn curtains and darkened rooms, of camphor and soiled linen. Typhus of the tiny caskets. And now Typhus had returned . . . or was it something else? Cholera perhaps. Or Diphtheria. Or another, more dreadful death. The rumors were indefinite. We only knew that sickness stalked the prairie, stealing away the living, leaving corpses in their place. And neither prayer nor medicine could assuage it. Families sought refuge in isolation. The farms grew into islands. Back in that distant plague summer, west Kansas became an archipelago of quarantines. . . .
Want to read the full story? Here you go.