This Magnificent Desolation by Cara Shores, Thomas O'Malley Page A

slivers in the darkness as they catch the lambent light of the town’s flickering streetlamps.
    Duncan and Billy walk the streets and the dead children from the Festival of Lights Holiday Train follow them. When Duncan glances back, they nod and smile, their skin shining with beatific opales-cence,and he is filled with contentment; he senses that he has known them all his life, in the way that he knows Billy and Julie. Perhaps it is the affinity of abandoned children to know nothing other than a singular longing that transfigures all other needs and desires and makes them what they are, and, in this way, makes them kin to one another.
    For a moment Duncan almost expects them to break into song and for their song—the song of dead children—to echo and reverberate throughout the empty streets of Stockholdt. Would the sleeping adults hear them? What would their song sound like? Would it be joyous and elegiac or plaintive and soul-wrenching, a caterwaul and baying that would make men and women of the town sit up in their beds with their hearts thrumming in their chests in sudden fear for their young ones. But the dead children’s footfalls are silent upon the streets of Stockholdt and their voices are mute. Together, they move without sound from one street to the next.
    One of the children, a young girl with wide, bright eyes and thick strawberry blonde hair, which is woven into two braids that swing from each side of her head like whips, points to a glowing light that spins nebulae-like above the town at the black edge of the tracks, the abandoned stockyards, and the plains beyond: the undulations of the aurora borealis, and at its center a fully formed new moon surrounded by a fine nimbus of phosphorescence. In the strange, shifting light, the moon’s cratured and shadowed surface seems to move and coalesce until a face takes shape, and Duncan gasps because he knows it is the face of his mother.
    An angel, the girl says and smiles, and Duncan smiles also and takes Billy’s hand, and the face of Duncan’s mother smiles over them as they move on through the streets of Stockholdt, the dead children of the Holiday Train skipping at their heels.
    There is a rectangle of four streets surrounding the railroad depot, and six cross-streets intersect these. The street that runs alongside thetracks is lined with wooden row houses from the turn of the century. Most of the steps leading to the front doors are crumbling. The posts are rotted and the foundations cracked and shifting. Each house caves and presses into the other and, in this way, the brick and mortar settles and secures one house to the next and the next all along the street. Duncan imagines that if one house were removed from the center, all the others would topple to their sides. Many of the houses still have Christmas decorations: sun-bleached brown-plastic reindeer and soot-stained potbellied Santas balance precariously on the small, slanted awnings over their porches.
    It begins to rain and they move toward a porch, but before they step upon the broken wood slats, Duncan looks up at the plastic Santa peering down and it is as if they have been transported to the Home’s chapel and from the apse he is staring toward the altar and the body of Christ. From above Santa and the peak of the roof, the moon briefly pushes its ghostly, milk-white head through a black cloud.
    A car’s tires hiss through the rainwater close to the curb, its engine motoring slow and heavy, and Billy tugs on Duncan’s arm and they begin to walk quickly down the sidewalk. Duncan keeps his attention on the buildings to the left, but there is nothing there but empty, peeling, and withered storefronts and boarded and abandoned textile warehouses. He pulls his hood tight against the rain. His boots are swollen with rainwater. The car keeps pace with them and before the voice calls to him, he knows it belongs to a cop. I’m not going back, Duncan, Billy hisses, his