The Brief History of the Dead

presumed that the conversation was over. He walked home by way of Park Street and M.

When he got back to his apartment, he opened the window and turned his ears to the sound of a flock of birds that were roosting in a nearby tree. The birds whistled and cooed to each other, efficient little one- and two-note songs, until a car with a broken radiator passed beneath them and they gave a chorus of fluttery peeping sounds. A couple of kids dashed by, smacking the tree with their palms, and the birds took to the air with a sudden explosive snap of their wings. How wonderful it must have been, he thought – to run with a body meant for running, to see with eyes meant for seeing, to fly with wings meant for flying. Sometimes he thought that the most joyful sound in the world would be the sound of the birds taking over the city after everyone else was gone.

It was midway through the next day when the blind man's own building disappeared. He was standing in the colonnade when a man who had spent the last few hours circling the edge of the city stopped to give some of the people around him a report. Another few blocks were gone, he said, and when he listed them off, the blind man recognized the name of his own.

His building had still been there when he left his front door that morning. He was sure of that. How closely behind him had it been extinguished? he wondered.

A group of rollerbladers went skating by. Someone dropped a rubber ball.

There was nothing in his home that he truly needed. He could always find someplace else to sleep the night. But it was disquieting to know that for the moment, at least, he had nowhere else to go.

'Where's your cane, little man?' his mother had asked him the day the boys on his block took it away from him. And he had answered her, 'I don't need it anymore.'

For a long time it had seemed to him that there were more people on the streets, more people in the park, than ever before, but it was only now that he understood why. As the city became smaller, they were all being drawn toward the center. They were like pieces of bark and foam caught in a giant whirlpool.

And at last he apprehended what was happening.

When the walls came together and the bubble finally collapsed, this was where they would all end up: right here, between these benches and rustling trees. It would happen in a matter of days or weeks. There would be no way for them to avoid it. They would gather together in the clearing around the monument, however many thousand of them there were, and they would stand there shoulder to shoulder. They would listen to each other's voices, and they would breathe each other's breath. And they would wait for that power that would pull them like a chain into whatever came next, into that distant world where broken souls are wrenched out of their histories.

Acknowledgments

I owe thanks to my editors, Edward Kastenmeier and Anya Serota; to my agent, Jennifer Carlson; and to Carin Besser at The New Yorker for her skillful reading of this book's first chapter; as well as to the Arkansas Arts Council for its generous financial support and to Chris Columbus, Michael Barnathan, and Angela Cheng Caplan for their interest in the story I've told. In researching Antarctica for the even-numbered chapters of this book, I turned first to the anthology Ice: Stories of Survival from Polar Exploration, edited by Clint Willis, which led me directly to Apsley Cherry-Garrard's unparalleled memoir of Antarctic exploration, The Worst Journey in the World, portions of which Laura's own journey recapitulates.

About The Author

Kevin Brockmeier is the author of The Truth About Celia, the story collection Things That Fall from the Sky, and the children's novel City of Names. He has published stories in many magazines and anthologies, including The New Yorker, The Georgia Review, McSweeney's, and The Best American Short Stories. The first chapter of The Brief History of the Dead appeared in The O. Henry Prize Stories and The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, and was nominated for a Nebula award. He has received the Chicago Tribune's Nelson Algren Award, an Italo Calvino Short Fiction Award, a James Michener – Paul Engle Fellowship, three O. Henry Awards (one of which was a first prize), and an NEA grant. He lives in Little Rock, Arkansas.