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The Curtin Seer

Christopher Flakus


His house stood on a paved asphalt street, sprinklers chittering over his perfectly manicured lawn under a sky the blue of a child’s crayon. The other houses, white and shingled, were identical to his. The cars in their driveway: blue carapaces with fat round wheels, like brightly colored dung beetles. Each the same down to the last detail. Jeremiah had one of his own parked in the driveway. 


He stood on his porch drinking coffee and watching the street. Despite his best attempts to appear normal, to wave and smile at neighbors as he usually would, his hand shook and spilled burning coffee over his fist. 


The Curtain Seer was stopping by that morning. The Curtain Seer.


What had they done for him to come? 


Jeremiah’s wife and children worked diligently to adhere to each rule of their living community. They went down the list daily. Their venetian blinds were tilted to exactly 45 degrees, laundry done and pressed according to code, shoes cleaned daily and set outside for inspection. 


Jeremiah mowed his lawn often and according to regulations. His wife, Martha, had made friends and found a job teaching at the small, local Kindergarten.


Martha, a gentle woman whose warm smile and sharp wit enchanted Jeremiah from the moment they’d met. She seemed happy here. And their two children, David and Tascha. They’d been keeping their grades up. David even made the soccer team a few days before. They hadn’t caused a stir. They’d kept their heads down and tried to fit in.


So why this sudden visit from the Curtain Seer? Jeremiah’s heart thumped in his ribcage, an angry bird scrambling to escape.


The car pulled up to the curb. Exactly like every other vehicle but for its color, a pitch black that gleamed like the segmented exoskeleton of a black widow spider.  


A short man stepped out. His wrinkled skin shone with a perspiration that seemed to lend to it the look of damp rice paper. He closed the door with a slam. His body, an old bent question mark. He’d a face like a buzzard with a long nose and a wisp of sweat-flat gray hair at the back of his head. He set a battered old hat on that nearly bald pate and walked up the driveway, his oddly fitting brown suit hanging from his frame as if from a hook.


Jeremiah noticed that several neighbors had stepped out onto their front porches to watch. 


“Hello,” the Curtain Seer said, extending a bony hand, “I’m the Curtain Seer.”


“Yes,” Jeremiah smiled and took the hand, feeling cartilage covered thinly by disturbingly soft skin, “I’ve been expecting you.”


“And your family?” he asked flatly.


“Kids at school, wife at work,” Jeremiah’s sustained smile had begun to hurt.


“And you, what do you do?”


“I work carpentry down at Al’s. My father taught me the trade.”


“Yes, we’ve got several very talented carpenters here, we’re quite lucky,” the Curtain Seer said dismissively, walking past Jeremiah into the house and beginning to run his hands up and down the living room curtains, occasionally pinching or flicking them as if expecting a reaction. 


He held a little leather-bound notebook in which he occasionally scratched words with a bronze fountain pen. 


“Of course,” Jeremiah chuckled. “I’m lucky to have the work.”


“May I see the rest of your curtains?” the Curtain Seer asked. 


“Y-yes,” Jeremiah felt his stutter sting like a hot iron, “make yourself at home!”


The Curtain Seer gave him a look, as if to say, “is it really your home to speak of?” 


Or perhaps that’s just how Jeremiah interpreted it. Fear rose in him with an icy pressure. A cold ran through his veins that remained on the inside because, despite his best efforts, sweat had begun to bead his brow. 


He followed the Curtain Seer upstairs past family photos, the soles of their boots whispering over the carpeted floor. 



In the bedroom the Curtain Seer stopped suddenly at the window. He pulled once, with surprising strength for a man as frail as he, and the curtains came tumbling down. 


“My God!” Jeremiah shouted.


The Curtain Seer scratched something into his small leather notebook. 


“What are you writing?” Jeremiah heard himself plead.


“I’m simply here to observe.” The Curtain Seer said. “In fact, the least amount of contact between us would be best. Would you mind terribly waiting in your living room?”


It’d been the way he said it that bothered Jeremiah. Almost mockingly. Your living room. 


Jeremiah felt the sweat pooling beneath his arms and trickling down his back as he waited on the couch. The Curtain Seer could’ve been upstairs an hour or ten minutes. Jeremiah lost himself in the panicked slowness of time. 


At last, The Curtain Seer descended the stairs. 


“Thank you for your time,” he said, unsmiling. 


“Is everything, um, up to order?”


“You’ll be notified of our decision shortly,” The Curtain Seer told Jeremiah, then slammed the door behind him. 



“The whole thing felt off,” Jeremiah later told his wife as she chopped vegetables for dinner. “I mean, I felt like I just couldn’t say the right thing to the guy.”


“You checked the curtains, didn’t you?” Her voice was serious, the sound of the knife coming down clack, clack, clack, and her words tinged with a fear she obviously tried to suppress so as not to frighten the children should they be listening. 


“Honey,” Jeremiah sighed, “about a thousand times! I checked them myself and he pulled one down, I mean, no curtain could withstand that!! How am I supposed to interpret that shit?”


“Calmly,” his wife Martha smiled, an expression he’d come to understand as both a warning and a sign of compassion. 


“You’re right.” Jeremiah rubbed his temples. “How are the kids?”


“Probably upstairs, playing,” Martha tried to smile. 


“How fast it goes by.” Jeremiah said, warmly embracing her. 


“All too fast,” Martha replied. Then she began to shake with silent sobs, her face pressed into Jeremiah’s chest. 



That night Jeremiah awoke to the sound of the front door being kicked in. He leapt out of bed and began to run down the staircase. But the hall was already full of dozens of men in white, doll-like masks standing, identically garbed in black military gear, holding shining rifles with scopes and long, curved ammo clips that caught the moonlight from the single blindless bedroom window like a razor.


“Gather your family and enough food for two days' travel. Any delay or attempt to resist will result in your execution.”


“Why? Why is this happening?”

  

“You know why this is happening,” the familiar voice of the Curtain Seer said, though Jeremiah couldn’t see him among the bulbous masks and dark uniforms. 

   


They dragged Martha and the children from their beds. They treated them roughly. Jeremiah had no choice but to watch, filling a pack as quickly as he could with meager canned supplies and water while the masked men held gun barrels pressed to the flesh of his neck, the metal cold as cubes of ice. 


They escorted them to the gates of town, each identical house with its windows lit and silhouetted neighbors watching from inside. 


“Roll them!” one of the masked men shouted to a guard atop the gate.


The gates groaned open onto a lonely stretch of highway that led into dark nothingness. 


Jeremiah and his family were prodded aggressively beyond the border. 


The slamming and locking of the gate behind them resounded like an earthquake in their souls. 


They’d spent so long out here. Years scrounging, surviving. Moving as best as they could through a half-dead world, from one place to another in a nearly foodless, lethal earth. 


Then they found this place. They had resources, food, and infrastructure. Enough people to live. To simply live.


Jeremiah thought, at last! Somewhere better. A chance. When they came to this community, it felt like a place to begin fresh. Somewhere they might be safe. 


How foolish, he thought, gathering his family and beginning to walk into the howling darkness. How foolish he'd been to believe it would be different from any of the others before it. 

   

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