Sumptuous Atrocities by Eric Richer
from Windmills: a PUNK NOIR Magazine series
Me and my brother spent our time racing each other that day, him on the quad and me on the horse. We were zigzagging between all the dead cows but we didn’t care. The last one had died the day before, pissing blood out of its nostrils.
We got used to it eventually. Not our father. He would leave the carcasses out in plain sight to shock the neighbors and the mayor. It stank like crazy.
Back then we were just two little shits. We only came here during holidays since the divorce, and all we were interested in was playing online all day. Our dad got us the latest Playstation to piss off our mom and he didn’t put time limits like she did, so we played until our eyes watered and we had migraines.
We’d go out more often when our father bought that horse with his last savings. Tornado. Coal black, skin and bones. Cool beast. Plus, the nag wasn’t afraid of the three giant fans churning the air five hundred meters away, the killer wind turbines, these “sumptuous atrocities” as our father called them, the source of all his problems.
According to him, his milk production dropped as soon as the underground cable connecting the three masts was energized. Then cows began to die due to the electromagnetism and the infrasounds emitted by the structures. He had started to suffer from headaches, nausea and tachycardia, no longer sleeping because of frequencies coming from nowhere, and after that his relations with the neighborhood and the municipality deteriorated just as much. The mayor, however, received 80,000 euros for hosting this wind farm in his town that year.
“There is absolutely no correlation between your concerns and the installation of the turbines, and if there’s anything to question it is the particularly disastrous management of your farm!” Those were the mayor’s words. Our father wanted to kill him after Tornado died unexpectedly.
It’s been ten years today.
Behind me my brother is panting like an ox on the path. He’s been smoking too much lately but I stopped telling him because it’s no use. He knows it and doesn’t care anymore that I worry about him. We were close, but that shit broke everything. I was surprised he agreed to come with me. This is the first time we’ve been back here since.
We traveled at night and I drove the whole way, so when he complains about being exhausted I tell him to shut up. The moon slips away to the south but still lights up the fog around us, and suddenly we hear the screeching of the propellers, the tops of the masts flashing like red diodes in the murk. A dry, icy wind painfully turns the two turbines perched on the hill, but not the one in front of us, of course. This one is doomed. The pylon is clearly visible now, a long milky white snake falling from the sky, then the mist swells and lifts and I see him hanging beneath the rotor as if it were yesterday, the rope digging into the flesh of his neck.
I shake my head and focus on the entrance.
Remnants of police yellow tape still crisscross the small oval access door. Without thinking, I pop the padlock with the bolt cutters I’ve been carrying since the parking lot. My brother hesitates to follow me, so I give him my worst look to get him in. By the time I set up my headlamp he’s here, finds a switch inside and turns on the light like he’s at home.
An aluminum ladder faces us, stretching endlessly into this shitty white tube. My brother sits on the ground to light up a cigarette. He takes five long drags, then throws the cig away and we go up.
The feeling of climbing into an immense tapeworm takes hold of me. “Like two parasites in a giant asshole”, says my brother. Fifty meters further, he complains that he can no longer feel his arms. I tell him to be quiet, to push harder on his legs and above all not to look down. I hear him sigh, then I rush towards the top without ever stopping.
The effort warms me up. The bars pass by like the graduation of a mercury thermometer and soon I reach a rusty hatch that reminds me of an old tank. I wait for my brother to enter the generator itself, a cramped and completely trashed engine room with metal debris everywhere. I imagined our father smashing everything here, his eyes wild.
My brother finds his sledgehammer with the handle broken in a corner. His face changes completely. He reminds me of our dad at that moment. I avoid his gaze, focusing on the transparent trapdoor above us. I manage to unlock it and fight the cold air entering the turbine to get out.
My brother asks me if it’s safe but I don’t answer him, holding out my hand. I hoist him up and immediately he rushes on all fours to grab the tripod of the weather vane. He doesn’t care about the scenery and neither do I. All I see is the railing where our father tied his rope, the knot still in place.
One afternoon he wanted to teach us how to tie sailing knots. We watched him for three minutes then returned to our gaming frenzy, and there I am like a fuckin’ idiot trying to undo this thing, so I cut into the rope with the bolt cutters and finally free it. It was our mother who insisted that we both come here, “just to close something”, but I feel more like something is opening when I see the light breaking on the horizon. Then the sun butchers the dawn and throws it to the four winds and my brother puts his hand on my shoulder, crying like a child.
This story appears as part of Windmills, a PUNK NOIR Magazine series.
Bio
Eric Richer was born in France in 1971. He grew up with 7 dogs, read a lot, studied cinema, worked in movie theaters as a projectionist and went to Japan. There he made a documentary (Kamo River), came back, returned to the darkness of the projection booths and started writing. His first two novels, La Rouille (The Rust, 2018) and Tiger (2021) were published by L’Ogre Editions. He is currently working hard on the next ones.
PUNK NOIR, the online literary and arts magazine that looks at the world at its most askew, casting a bloodshot eye over the written word, film, music, television and more.
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