The day Beryl Logan became a god was just a regular day. She dropped the kids off at school, came home and cleaned up the kitchen from Toni and Dante’s exuberant lunch-making, took a shower, and went around making a list of things she needed to buy at the store. She let Hogan out for a while, started a load of laundry and then, letting the mutt back in, headed to the store. She didn’t feel any different than normal. She woke up with a slight headache, but that was becoming more common. She went to bed with a large, stainless steel, double-walled water bottle filled with cold water on her nightstand every night. She stayed hydrated. Otherwise, though, she felt pretty good. Despite the dull ache she felt particularly clear in the head.
When she got to the store, she realized that she left her list and her shopping totes on the counter by the door to her garage. That was frustrating, but she found that she could remember everything she needed to get, almost as if she could see the list in her mind. She also anticipated and added some items to her buggy that weren’t on the list. Beryl wondered briefly if this meant that she was developing a photographic memory, but she doubted it. 39 was too late in life to figure out that trick.
As she swept her buggy into the frozen case aisle, she saw a woman—probably her own age—slump against the freezer doors and slip down onto the floor. She rushed over and, stooping, recognized her.
Lopez, she thought. It was Anna Lopez, mother of Jenny Lopez, Beryl’s daughter Toni’s best frenemy. Anna must have been trying to get some shopping done in the short part of the day when the kids were not dominating all time and energy, just like Beryl. Anna was also a single mom but staying with her parents. She had been one of the few moms in the swirl of maternal storm clouds that congregated around elementary schools that Beryl had found mostly tolerable. Most were either trad-mom wives, or ritzy-titsy stay-at-homes—both groups judgy, either because you didn’t believe the same things they did or because you didn’t have a husband who made so much money you could afford to buy a new Mercedes SUV every two years.
Beryl tried to avoid all the moms, but it wasn’t easy, especially on the days when it was required that students bring treats. That had been when Beryl met Anna and they had formed, if not a friendship, then a loose solidarity with one another and against the others. Beryl wasn’t a friend-making person. She worked for an ad agency and set her own hours and didn’t always have a commute and so was managing to get her kids raised and doing it while earning a fairly hefty paycheck. Still, having two kids and no husband was tough and it left her with no time for fraternizing.
Anna was ashen, but her lips were turning blue. Her eyes were half closed and there was a strange lethargy about her features on one side. Beryl tried to think if this meant a stroke or not. She put her hands on Anna and there was a sharp, almost electric snap as her palms touched Anna’s shoulders. Anna’s eyes fluttered open, she flushed and then appeared totally fine. She sputtered, was confused and a little disoriented, but her deteriorating condition improved immediately. Later, Beryl would use the word “instantly” when she reflected on that moment. It took almost all she could do to keep Anna from getting up and running off, but one of the stock people called 911 as soon as they had seen her go down and in just a few minutes, the paramedics were there.
After a fairly brisk exam, Anna was cleared, but told to follow up immediately with her primary care doctor. Feeling somewhat surreal and replaying the events over in her mind, Beryl rose to finish her shopping. Anna hugged her and gave her an adoring look, and then it was all over.
After she put her groceries away, Beryl went for a walk down at the park. Charles Patton Park, together with Lake Patton, formed one end of a central greenway that stretched from her neighborhood in Tamerlane Heights, across downtown and along a wooded trail to Wellington, where the big houses were. It was three miles, down and back and in the middle of the day during the week, almost no one was on the trail. There were always at least two police officers riding their bikes, so she felt relatively safe. Her favorite part of the whole loop, though, was a fancy bridge that stretched over Patton Lake at a narrow point, where she often stood and looked at the water and the view. During the school year, unless the weather was too rough, this was her one place to pause and reflect and it had become part of her routine.
She was resting there when the second terrifying event of the day happened.
A man wearing an all black hood, a face mask pulled up and sunglasses obscuring his eyes, came and stood a few feet away from her. He was breathing heavily and Beryl could tell that he had been running, but she wasn’t sure how she could know that. She carefully, but not too obviously, moved a bit away from the man. She hoped that one of the cops would be coming along soon. Just as she thought it, she saw a bike police officer riding toward them both. Beryl, wanting nothing to do with the situation, turned to walk away and was struck from behind by the man in black attempting to flee the cops. She was bashed into the railing and flipped over it, though she did see the man try to grab her and miss, and went flailing through emptiness toward the cold water. The cop hopped off his bike and climbed the fence to jump in and save her, radioing the situation in police-speak as he gingerly topped the rail. He was positioning himself to leap, when he stopped short.
Looking up, she wondered why he was no longer attempting to rescue her. Then she had the absurd sense that the man was frightened half to death as he gazed down at her. She looked down at herself. She wasn’t actually in the water. For a moment, her mind constructed a very strange, but very reasonable-seeming solution to the situation; she had landed in a net designed to keep people from going into the water. That made sense and it seemed quite rational.
The reality was far from reasonable. Beryl looked down and saw that she was, indeed, standing on the water, which yielded under her feet as if she was walking on a memory foam bed or particularly loose trampoline. Her shoes weren’t wet. Her clothes weren’t wet. She was just on top of the water, instead of in it. She wobbled and threw her hands out to either side to catch her balance.
The cop yelled down to her, “Ma’am?”
She looked up at him and saw incredulity on his features. Then she looked over at the man in black and saw that he was also staring at her. Then, he glanced at the cop and took off running. The cop shouted for him to stop, but then, didn’t seem to be able to leave the scene. Beryl took advantage of the distraction to maneuver herself to the shore and up the bank and slowly, having to reach down and walk on all fours now and then, eventually climbing back up onto the greenway and onto the bridge. The cop was still staring at her and looking over the bridge to the place where she had not gone into the water.
All at once it seemed to dawn on him that he ought to have gone after the man in black. Beryl told the cop the man’s name, his age, his weight, his brief but engaging history since becoming a criminal and where he was staying. It all poured out of her, though she didn’t know how she knew any of it. The cop called it in and then left, glancing back at her in a way that made her very uncomfortable—the way that Anna Lopez had looked at her.
Beryl went home and laid down on her bed. There was an hour before she had to pick the kids up and it had been a shaky morning to say the least. Before she closed her eyes, she reached for the water bottle and took a sip and then spit it out onto the hardwood floor with a shocked gasp, coughing and choking. She opened the bottle and looked in. Dark red liquid sloshed around inside. She didn’t drink wine, or alcohol of any kind, so her first instinct was that her son, Dante, had somehow gotten hold of a bottle of cheap wine and placed it in her drinking bottle as a joke.
Right away she found this too elaborate for her sweet-natured and gentle hearted son. She frowned and went to the kitchen and dumped the potent-smelling drink into the sink, rinsed the bottle and filled it at the tap built-in on the fridge. She pushed the ice-maker and got a few cubes down into it and then put the lid back on. She took a sip and gasped again. Opening it, she found that it was once again red wine. She threw the water bottle into the sink, where the wine splashed and then chuckled down the drain.
She sat down in her chair in the living room, her mind alive and awake to all that seemed to be happening to her and the realization that she was apparently going insane. Too antsy to sit there, though, Beryl decided to get up and drive to the school and pull into the car-rider pickup line. Even as early as it was, there were several cars in front of her. That irked her, because she knew, had she had an ordinary day, she wouldn’t have wasted any time just parked and sitting. The thought coalesced into a strong sense of vengeance on the parents sitting there. Here were the moms with nothing better to do; wealthy, bored, snobby. Dara Mortenson, Navy Blue Land Rover, 38, trying to look 28, and having an affair while her husband Robbie (also having an affair) worked 70 hours a week and paid no attention to the kids. Leslie Foster-Davis, the hyphenated hypochondriac. She and her lawyer husband had threatened to sue other families in the school because their son, Bannister, was intellectually delayed and they couldn’t stand that he had been placed in a lower-level class. She drove a huge Cadillac SUV. Karolyn Crosby, mother of the Crosby twins, Vanessa and Contessa, hateful bully children of a hateful and alcoholic mother was also parked. She drove a fancy EV that only Bezos could afford. Beryl’s car slipped neatly to the head of the line as these thoughts populated her bewildered mind, as if the other cars weren't there.
Strangely, no one seemed to notice that she was suddenly first in her beat-up red minivan. It took quite a bit of effort to stop the many thoughts about the other three women from filling her mind. She glanced at her watch, then in her rearview mirror and noticed that it was cracked.
Someone, she thought, had struck it with something heavy enough to cause it to shatter. Pie shaped wedges of mirror seemed to crack into the windshield and then into the roof panel and dashboard. Beryl realized that the mirror wasn’t damaged, but that this was a crack in her vision, possibly her reality. As she tried to focus on the nexus of the crack, she saw five different realities playing out in each fracture.
Fred G. Clemmons Elementary school sat in the shadow of a sweeping on-ramp to highway 78. The lane swept down off an overpass and wrapped itself along the back of the school like a warm and embracing arm. For years, residents of the quiet neighborhood surrounding the school had petitioned and objected to the construction, but had failed to accomplish anything of significance. The once quiet, secluded school was now under the shadow of a rising embankment that slunk down to Otterman’s Hill Road intersection, and caused a traffic backup that sometimes occluded the ramp and slowed traffic all the way back to Exit 27.
Today, Theodore “Ted” McEwan was speeding down 78 at more than 78 mph. Deannie King, the waitress at the J-Burg Rooster Lounge had been flirting with Greg Lindsey, that long-haired hippie piece of shit. She was sitting on his lap and putting her tiny fingers in his hair and pushing her big bazongas against his shirt, flirting hard with him. That had been Ted just last week.
Today was the culmination (though Ted would not have used the term) of a long and agonizingly frustrating week in which other people got the attention he deserved. So, he finished his ‘one and done’ at the Lounge and went by the Musselman Road BP and bought a 12-bottle box of Coors Gold and had three bottles guzzled before he pulled back onto the road.
His red Chevy slung gravel as he peeled out onto the road, slapped roughly onto the onramp at Exit 31 and took the three mile bypass toward Exit 27, past the school and to the turn off for his trailer park. The highway was surprisingly clear of traffic and he slammed his foot down on the gas, slashed into the far-left lane and set the cruise control on 80.
Before her in the five realities (she somehow knew that this was what it was she was seeing) Beryl watched five timelines unfold at the same time, but was able to understand each series of events as if she was watching them individually.
In the first shard, she saw the man (again, she somehow knew his name was Ted) very drunk and very angry, driving too fast and taking the exit, but failing to correct his red truck. He bashed through the guard rail, zooming out into space and careening through the air and smashing in a fiery wreck into the school. In the second shard, much the same thing happened, but Ted’s truck burst into flame and exploded while in the air, smashing down into the school as a hurtling fireball, incinerating a whole section of classrooms and the preschool hallway. The number of dead and horribly injured loom up in her mind, but she forces it away.
In the third shard, Ted doesn’t see a tanker in front of him. He smashes into the back of it, causing an even larger, heavier ball of fire to barrel down the embankment and plough through the school, leaving a long trail of wreckage, destruction and screaming horror in its wake. A second explosion, when the cab blows, detonates the main office of the school. The number of dead creeps into the low hundreds. In the fourth and fifth shards, Ted smashes into the back of a cement truck and a vehicle carrier. Both blunder down the embankment and into the school, spreading massive chaos and death. Finally, in the last shard, though, Beryl sees something that is more terrifying and mind-shattering than any of the previous versions. In an instant she decides on the last shard and the world slows down.
When she was a little girl, Beryl’s grandfather, PopPop Bill, told her a story he had heard from his own grandmother, a lady who had known a thing or two, he said. PopPop Bill called his grandmother—back before he was PopPop Bill he was Billy—Granny Two Trees. This was because she had two very tall pine trees in her back yard and she told little Billy that they were ancient gods, far older than any modern gods, that had stood there since before anyone lived in these lands. They were twins, brother and sister. Long before the wind knew which direction to blow, she said, the boy and girl had wandered into this part of the world, where it was still quiet and stood to listen to the song of the sun and the birds and the water, the rain and the mist.
They stood for so long that their toes slipped into the earth like roots, and their arms grew out like limbs and their hair grew bristly like needles. The harder they listened, the taller they grew. The longer they stood there, the rougher their skin became. When the wind blew hard across their faces, their tears flowed like clear sap. Soon they were the largest things to be seen around and they were so still from long standing that they almost couldn’t move.
When the first peoples came from the west to live in these lands, they saw that the brother and sister were already very old and they worshipped them as gods and gave them names, now long forgotten. The brother and sister loved the people and they gave them many strange songs to sing so that they could share their power, but mostly so that they would also learn to love the sound of the sun and the grass and the wind and the rain.
The people learned and heard all that there was to hear and they brought gifts to the twins and the twins gave gifts in return. For many thousands of years, it was a quiet and peaceful life of births and deaths and the people learned how to listen in each generation. But then other people came, and they did not have the speech of the long-living things. They cut down trees and hunted the animals and drove the first children from the land. Only they did not cut down the brother and sister, now so old and gnarled and wrinkled that they hardly remembered their first days in the land. And Granny Two Trees had three grandmothers before her that all learned the language and the land passed from them to her and from her to PopPop Billy and he had learned that the trees would be cut down to make a shopping center. So in the deep night, in the dark, he had taken the words that Granny Two Trees had taught him and made a special drink from the sap of the trees. When Beryl was young he had made tea of that sap for her to drink.
Beryl had been sent to Catholic school, and when they told her the story of the man who could walk on water, and turn water into wine, she remembered the stories of the tree sap tea and of Granny Two Trees and of PopPop Billy and she believed that she had the blood of the twin gods in her and also the blood of the man hung on the tree. She was young and the stories spoke to her imagination.
The last shard showed Ted speeding, too drunk and too fast down the highway, but there was something rocketing from the ground just past the place where he broke through the guardrail. Huge, dark roots, massive and smooth, like tentacles, pushed up out of the earth and lifted his truck up and away from the school. Soon they broke under the weight, but Ted’s truck rolled harmlessly away from the school and trundled to a stop.
Beryl closed her eyes, but the image remained and she concentrated hard on the roots.
The twins were there. She could hear them. They had long since been removed from the place of their origins, but they had also infused Beryl with their tears and the power they once had that now lived in her. She did not know that she was the same age as Granny Two Trees when her grandmother told her the story of the twins, on her death bed. That’s when Granny Two Trees had learned of her own power. She could make the wheat and corn grow in her garden even on dry years. She could call down snow and fog and speak to the foxes and crows and mice. PopPop Billy did not have the power, but he could see it in his grandmother and he knew that his only granddaughter would have the power, too.
Ted’s truck smashed through the guardrail, empty bottles clanking and smashing behind his front seat. Huge brown, dirt-covered roots wrapped up around him and slowed and then turned his truck from the course toward the school below and let him roll harmlessly into the gym class field, where he promptly opened his door, fell out and vomited.
Beryl watched the unfolding drama from the uncracked rearview mirror of her beat up red van. Toni and Dante came out with the other kids and she was the first to pull out and drive home. As they went along, she felt the distinct sensation of not being able to see everything at once, or know all the facts about everyone. She somehow knew that, when she got home and filled her water bottle, the contents would not mysteriously be transmuted into wine. Anna Lopez was alive. So was Ted—whatever his last name had been.
Her children and the many others at the school were alive. She felt gratitude, but she couldn’t quite remember what for. When they got home, the kids did their homework and then, for some reason that she didn’t really understand, Beryl decided to take them to Rick’s Diner and bought them each an ice cream sundae. She had one too.
That night, as she sipped her herbal tea, she thought fondly of her PopPop Billy and the stories of Granny Two Trees, but she did not know exactly why.