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A Novel
by Cebo Campbell
Book Reviewed by:
Excerpt
Sky Full of Elephants
They killed themselves.
All of them. All at once.
* * *
We unsealed the jails first.
Folks showed up swinging bolt cutters to liberate their lawless relatives into a world different from the society out of which they were exiled. No one was guarding anything anymore.
All banks closed down. Their silent, towering buildings became mausoleums, having been worshiped long enough.
Time slowed down too. Sauntered like hours did in places like Chattanooga and Charleston and Savannah. A notoriously southern phenomenon now spread like honey over everything. Ask the time and folks just looked up at the sky, mumbling, "Quarter 'til," because gone was the appraiser of hours into wages. Gone was the gaze evaluating for its resource every minute ticking inside a body.
They killed themselves. All of them. All at once. You could feel their absence in everything. On the subway. In the streets. In all the places the wild reclaimed. Where sunflowers grew through office buildings, over golf greens plagued red with ant mounds, where the earth crawled black up the sides of monuments, where all those Chihuahuas and cocker spaniels scavenged and begged in packs, their dog sweaters ragged, bedazzled collars dulled of sparkle.
They killed themselves. One morning, every white person in the world walked into the nearest body of water and drowned.
On every shore from southern gulf to northern sound, crosses stood like the skeletons of those old beach crowds. Water crushed in waves, lapped and babbled, unwilling to respect in silence what was otherwise a graveyard.
No one expected the event. No one was prepared.
Some people were angry, cursing God for doing the business of gods. Some were quietly contented, seeing the horror as penance. Some longed for the world before, settling into movie theaters to watch Ferris Bueller's Day Off and Titanic, sharing in the awe of misshapen memories.
Howbeit that we remained breathing on this earth at all, after such a thing, terrorized the conscience. Tortuously complex. To feel lumps of shame at being able to sleep at night, yet still relish in the gentlest fold at the off of dozing. Cursed to be among those still waking up each morning, even if rising to easy sunshine warm on the skin. Some nights were worse than others, some mornings better. A year later, Charlie couldn't say which emotion grabbed hold of him the morning he swiftly, and finally, pulled down all their photos.
He'd found himself a nice house out in the suburbs. Two stories tall with fat white columns and a skirt of porches. Only browned in patches, his front yard grass sparkled green except under the shadow of a great big oak where, innocently, a tire swing bolted to its arm whined on every breeze. His home, of course, added to the sum of thousands taken over as we hollowed out city tenements, spilling into the outlying neighborhoods of Germantown, Rockville, and Bethesda. To hear Al Green's voice drifting over aboveground pools wasn't uncommon out there anymore. Charlie, and he suspected many others, tried to keep the photos and memorabilia from the families who'd once owned the houses.
For his part, and for months stacked on months, Charlie kept the birthday cards and perfume bottles, jewelry, and golf clubs. He left portraits hung up on the walls and photobooth strips magnetized to refrigerators as a monument to their lives, hoping the solemn act might absolve him somehow. Maybe looking at all those blue and green eyes every day, those easy, easy smiles, might make him feel things he didn't.
But Charlie still felt what he always felt.
A husband in a suit, a blond wife, two children, and a yellow dog. Charlie did not want to know their names nor what became of their dog. When he finally took their pictures down, he did not cry. Wedged in a box, packed into the garage, Charlie put away every article in that house that made him feel who he was before all the oceans went from waving to wailing. Photos, of course, and stuffed animals and unopened mail. He unstuck the souvenir magnets on the fridge making caricatures of Paris, London, and Rome. Even the small library of self-help and sci-fi books, which for him held together a watchful consciousness, he stowed deep in boxes. Anything that hovered and pulsed like memory got set aside. And when, finally, the house was empty of character, quiet but for the crickets playing symphonies in the yard, Charlie could nearly convince himself he deserved that which he could never quite bring himself to accept.
Excerpted from Sky Full of Elephants by Cebo Campbell. Copyright © 2024 by Cebo Campbell. Excerpted by permission of Simon & Schuster. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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