A drone flies over what is left of Dilly Wisconsin. It takes about a minute for the footage to turn from high-def to grainy, because things like cameras no longer work there. Once you hit Main Street it’s a dead zone. The drone climbs higher, higher, until the town is a patchwork of rooftops and the military jeeps are green ants, but that dead zone extends into the clouds. Maybe to space. The drone breaks. The YouTube video ends. I restart it, the volume of my laptop at max. I’m desperate to hear a sign of life. An insect buzz or a bird chip. A dog barking, even if it’s in pain. Something. But there’s nothing, no animals or insects, no people. I bet if you took a soil sample, you wouldn’t find a single microbe in it. Hell, I bet in a few months, not even the plants will be around. A town of 500 people disappeared, and all that’s left are scattered questions and empty houses.
I hope the military doesn’t find anything. I hope they clean up, sweep up the glass and take down the prison bars, but I hope they don’t find anything. There are some places government and guns should not go.
Outside, a parrot taps at my window with its beak. Google says it’s a conure, a small bird that got hit with every color of the rainbow at least once, and twice with yellow. It is not a talking bird.
“Eat the glass,” she shrieks through my window. “In the cage! Eat the glass!”
“Go away.”
“Eat the glass!”
“Shut up!” I grab the T.V. remote and toss it at the wall, hoping the thud will scare her. The remote bangs with enough force to spill the batteries, but the bird doesn’t even blink. Just continues to tap at the glass and shriek.
“Eat the glass! I don’t want you to die! Eat the glass!”
“No!”
“In the cage. Eat the glass. In the cage. Help, help, what is that?”
The bird laughs a human sound, and I do too because there’s not much else to do. I get up and open the window. She flutters in and lands on my shoulder to cuddle against my neck. She’s affectionate, for a bird. I move to pet her, and she nibbles at my fingers before flying to the ground to knock around the batteries. Playful, too. Google says conures can live up to 15 years, and I don’t know what to do with her. Some days I like that she proves it all happened—that I’m not crazy—others I want her to fly away and never return. She always does though.
Sometimes I think about stuffing her down the garbage disposal.
“You ever gonna tell me your name?” I ask her.
“Eat the glass.”
“That’s not a name.” I look back at the Youtube video. The drone hovers passed a window, or what’s left of a window. There’s not a speck of glass left in Dilly Wisconsin. That disappeared with the people.
“Eat the glass,” I say.
“Follow the eye,” the bird says. “Follow the yellow-brick eye.”
I shake my head. “The eyes were blue. And it wasn’t bricks but concrete.”
The bird screams, a mimic of five hundred people dying at once. Today is one of those days I want to stick her down the garbage disposal.
“I want to forget,” I say.
“Me too,” she says.
Sometimes, I worry we’re both still stuck there and we don’t even know it.
*
My memory of getting to Dilly is hazy but not gone. I drove there. The weather was nice, the sky cloudless. I listened to country music on the radio. It took about an hour, because Dilly is out of the way of everyone, sitting almost smack-dab between Sparta and Mauston. It’s one of those Wisconsin towns that’s surrounded by farmland, all the barns round like little stadiums instead of red squares with pointed roofs. There are more bars than churches, and more lawns than houses. It’s the kind of place you dream of leaving instead of moving to.
It was early in the week when I drove there, so Monday or Tuesday. I was in my work van. But that’s where things don’t add up, because we don’t service Dilly. I do internet installs for local joint called Frontier Internet, and while we’ve branched outside of the bigger cities some, we don’t go much further than Hillsboro. We certainly don’t go near Dilly. That’s Charter/Spectrum territory.
The closer I got to Dilly, the more it all felt like a dream. I was driving the speed limit yet going too slow; I was moving to adjust the radio, and my arm was too heavy. About five minutes from town, it occurred to me I should get out and walk the rest of the way. Just leave my van and tools and phone behind.
That’s where the gaps in my memory begin—or at least, that’s where I started to notice them.
I think I shuffled more than walked to the gas station that sits at the entrance of Dilly Wisconsin. It struck me as funny, because that worn-down Gas n’ Grub reminded me of a front gate. Walking to it, through it, by it, it was like walking through the entrance to an amusement park. Come for the rollercoaster; stay because you can’t leave.
There was an old beat-to-shit car parked at the pump with its front door open. The windows must have been down, because I could see right inside. As I got closer, I saw that the windshield was gone. The gas pump was on the ground and sputtering money into the dirt, so I turned that off. That’s when I tripped over the shoes.
“What?” I said, and that kinda woke me up. I hadn’t talked in over an hour, and hearing a voice sent my nerves screaming. “Where am I?”
I reached for my phone. It was in my back pocket. “Who am I?”
Bill. My name is Bill Schindler. Not sure why I almost forgot.
I clicked through my phone. Reception was bad, and I couldn’t pull up the internet at all, but I figured I could make a call. I found my boss and tapped his name. Maybe he could help.
The call connected, but instead of Lee’s bored, drawling voice, all I heard was T.V. static.
“Oh,” I said. For just a bit, everything made sense. Then it didn’t again. “Huh.”
The gas station was full of stuff but empty of people. I found another pair of shoes on the ground, these for a woman, and a purse on the counter. Someone had broken the front window from the outside in, because glass covered the floor. I crunched over it as I made my way to the fridge. That was broken, or at least, the sliding glass door was.
I grabbed a water. It was warm, but I didn’t care.
“Hello?” I called. I opened the water and took a swig. It didn’t taste funny, probably because it was from a bottle. Later, when I had to drink from a tap, that water tasted funny. Dilly had grainy water.
“Hello?” I tried again, this time louder. I gave the glass on the ground a little nudge. “Where am I?”
I poked my head behind the counter and found another pair of empty shoes. I also saw more broken glass. Some of it had price stickers on it, like it was for sale.
There was this nagging fear that I needed to go back to the van, but I couldn’t remember where I parked it. Like, I knew it was on the side of the road, but I couldn’t remember which road. I checked my phone again, this time for the date and time, but the numbers didn’t show. Just T.V. static. It was still pretty bright out though. I think only an hour had passed.
Unless I had been there more than a day already.
Dilly’s Main Street is only a few miles long, if that. Roads are pretty wide. I remember the yellow lines separating traffic were blue instead of yellow. Fire hydrants were also blue, as were the curbs marking places not to park, not that there were many of those. The first house I walked to, or maybe it was the third, someone had spray-painted the sidewalk out front blue. It was fresh too, because I could smell the paint. Must have been done yesterday or the day prior.
Part of me wondered if I helped. I checked my hands for paint but they were clean.
The house wasn’t much to look at. Small, old, and in need of some new windows. All the glass was gone, replaced with metal beams that looked like electrical conduit. Or prison bars. I jiggled the front door but it was locked; I then headed to a bedroom window and looked in. Was a kid’s room, painted mint green and covered in toys, mostly plastic figures from stuff I didn’t recognize. Few books. Seemed normal, if you ignored the make-shift prison bars on the window.
On the kid’s bed were his shoes, sitting next to each other like they were put away.
I walked to the neighbor’s house and found about the same thing, only he had a blue eye drawn on his front door. That was locked, but the prison bars over the window were pretty far apart. I wormed my way inside.
“Hello?” I called. “Anyone here?”
It was strange how normal the house looked. Clean, dusted, stuff scattered about because people lived in it, or used to. The T.V. was on but the volume off. It displayed static. Reception in the whole town must have gone and died. There were pictures on the walls of the people that lived there, but someone had taken a Sharpie to them. Everyone had blue eyes now.
I walked by a bedroom but didn’t go in because it smelled so bad I almost threw up. Instead I rounded to the dining room. Found a square table with four chairs. Everyone was set to eat, chairs pushed in, empty shoes where feet should be. Salt and pepper within easy reach. But the plates were covered in broken glass and dried blood, and the big serving pot in the middle of the table was filled with glass instead of food. Even had a metal ladle wedged in it, all scratched up.
But I think what made me real scared wasn’t the glass or the missing people but the dog’s food bowl. It was filled with glass too. Glass and blood, and it made me wonder what that smell from the bedroom was.
I ran out the house, but I went out the way I came. I didn’t like how that blue eye on the front door looked at me.
There’s a big gap in my memory after that, but I have this muscle memory of checking more houses. Of searching for people and pets and finding nothing but shoes and T.V. static. Personal belongings were defaced with blue paint. Light bulbs were missing, only to be found in microwaves or blenders. Every house had a pair of empty shoes.
It’s not quite right to say I woke up, but my next real memory is walking through a cemetery. Only it wasn’t a cemetery but a forest. All the trees grew in straight, perfect rows, mostly bushy pines but some oaks and maples too. Their branches all crowded together and snarled like a big ball of yarn. Each grew from a grave, blocking headstones or knocking them aside. I couldn’t read any of the writing on them. It was either defaced with blue paint or filled in with T.V. static.
I remember … it took a while to find my way out, because the trees were so close together and thick, like they’d been there for dozens of years. I kept getting lost. Everything was damp and smelled like dead leaves, but I couldn’t find anything growing. No mushrooms, no mold, only grass beginning to brown from lack of sunlight and rain. The trees drooped. Few had bark flaking off, like they were hit with that emerald ash borer infection from a few years back.
I guess it’s weird now, but it wasn’t then—but almost all of them trees had pieces of metal hanging from their branches. Thick pipes that dragged their lower limbs to the ground. They clanged together like dull wind chimes when the wind picked up. I figured the whole town had metal hanging from places it wasn’t supposed to, why not the trees? But now I wonder, maybe they weren’t hanging from the trees. Maybe they were growing from them. Like fruit.
By the time I stumbled out the forest, it was getting pretty dark. Clouds were wooshing across the sky, going too fast to be from wind. It felt like the whole town was moving. I wanted to sit down, but I was afraid I wouldn’t get back up. Everything was all heavy again.
There was a Lutheran church next to the cemetery. It wasn’t very big, taller than it was wide with a really pointed roof. More like a spike than a steeple. All the windows were missing, and the big front doors were burst open. Inside, it was all blue. But I could hear something moving around, something still alive and upset, so I marched for it.
“Hello?” I called. My voice cracked. I was so thirsty. “Anyone in there?”
“Hello!” a cartoon voice squawked. “Help! Help! Hello!”
“What’s going on?”
“Eat the glass!”
I stopped outside the door. My inner ear did a summersault, because all of a sudden I wanted to throw up. I wanted that more than I wanted to go into that building. I could smell dead things in there. T.V. static and blood. It was a good place made bad, and only monsters remained.
But the voice called, “Help!” and I needed help too. I stepped inside.
*
I found the animals. I don’t want to talk about it.
*
There’s another gap in my memory, and I think that one wasn’t Dilly’s doing but my own. Some things you need to forget or you’ll kill yourself. Stuff your own wrist down the garbage disposal and turn it on. The bird remembers though, and it’s those times I throw her outside and scream for her to die. My throat turns to T.V. static.
I woke up inside another house. I, or we I guess, broke in through a window. The bird was trapped in a metal cage all welded shut, and without my tools I couldn’t get it open. She seemed happy to have me though. She rubbed at my fingers when I put them through the little bars, and she cawed a bunch of happy bird noises too. I don’t know how long she had been alone in that church, but it must have been days. She was so thin and sorry looking. Missing feathers and covered in bird shit.
“Let’s get you some food,” I said.
“Eat the glass!”
“Water too. I’m thirsty.”
The faucet still worked, though the water tasted bad. That’s when I found out Dilly had grainy water. It gets stuck between your teeth. I drank it anyways though, because I was so thirsty I didn’t know what else to do. The bird drank a bunch, too.
I raided the pantry and the fridge next. Both only held glass. The food was in the garbage can under the sink. I had to dig passed moldy cheese and spoiled fruit to find the stuff in boxes, but at least they were still good. SpaghettiOs don’t really expire. Also found some snack bars, which the bird ate. I stuffed a bunch in my pocket just in case it took another few days to walk the last half-mile out of Dilly.
“I think we’re lost,” I remember saying as I ate cold noodles out of a can. “Do you know where we are?”
“No,” the bird said.
“Oh. What about the people?”
“They ate the glass. Ate the glass and took the elevator.”
I shook my head. “There’s no elevators in Dilly. I bet the tallest building here isn’t even three stories.”
“You can’t wear shoes in the elevator.”
“Oh. Well that makes sense.”
We had a pretty good talk, me and that bird. I just wish I could remember what we talked about.
We left together, and this time we took the front door even though it had a blue eye on it. With the bird, I was less afraid of the eyes. She made them seem more like drawings than people. The driveway was painted blue, and there was a pair of shoes in the middle of it, with footprints leading to them but none leading out.
By this point the sun was basically set, and Dilly was all black. Not a single light in the whole town. Not even the street lights worked. There were cars everywhere, and none had windows or windshields. I thought about taking one, but I didn’t have the keys and I’m not sure it would have started anyways. Things just didn’t work in Dilly Wisconsin anymore. No electricity, no internet. I’m not even sure a fire would have started.
I do remember breaking into another house, this time to steal a sweatshirt and a winter coat. It was nice during the day, but still pretty cold at night. Wisconsin weather always bites a little bit, no matter the season.
“Huh,” I said when I found the elevator. “You were right.”
“Eat the glass,” the bird said. “Eat the glass, and get in the elevator.”
I shook my head. “I don’t think we should do either.”
The elevator was parked in the middle of the road, on a patch of freshly-poured concrete. It was pretty nondescript as far as elevators go. A sliding silver door, buttons for open and close, and a little sign to say which floor we were on. The buttons had eyes drawn on them, but that was pretty normal for Dilly. We were on the first floor.
As we got closer, the elevator doors opened on their own. There was a working light inside, and more paintings of eyes. The floor was covered in overlapping footprints, most blue from paint, others red from glass.
The bird screamed, and I guess I did too. We ran away.
We’d come back the next day.
*
It took another day to reach the end of Dilly Wisconsin. I don’t remember much of it, only that I spent most of it hungry and thirsty. The bird talked, but she didn’t have much to say. I guess I didn’t either.
Main Street turned into one of those back-end county roads, which eventually found its way to a highway. I figured once we got out far enough, we could make a phone call. Also figured I might find my van, because though it didn’t make any sense, I knew it would be at the end of the journey and not the beginning.
“Almost there,” I remember saying.
“You can’t leave this way,” the parrot told me. “We tried already.”
“No we haven’t.”
“Yes we have.”
I rubbed at my face. I had more than two days worth of stubble growing. I only had two days worth of memory. The rest was T.V. static. Sometimes, when I look out the window now, I see the T.V. static. Black and white noise that crinkles in a meaningless hiss. It hides in glass, like windows and cups, but it’s not in the windows and cups. It’s behind them. I think if you try really hard to find it, you’ll see it too. It’s not a Dilly thing but a universe thing.
We hit the end of Main Street. The town came to an end, but instead of a county road surrounded by forest and dirt, all we found was concrete. It was a parking lot desert that went on forever, as far as the eye could see in every direction. The clouds continued to move too fast, and the sky was the wrong color, and I was crying and my tears were grainy like the water.
“Told you,” the bird said. She sounded like she was crying, too.
“I didn’t want to believe you.”
“Eat the glass.”
“We’re out of food again. I don’t know if I can spend another night looking for more.” I stuck my fingers in the bird’s cage, and she rubbed against them. “I don’t think you can either.”
“Take the elevator.”
I shook my head. “What if we just run back, down the road as fast as we can? It’s only about a mile. Maybe two. If we don’t stop, we can hit that gas station and then we’ll be out. It’s a door.”
The bird squawked. She tried to fly but couldn’t, because she was in a cage within a cage.
“We tried that,” she said. “It doesn’t work.”
“But I don’t want to take the elevator!”
“Eat the glass, take the elevator. Help! Help! What is that?”
We stood there awhile, just looking at that big, concrete wasteland. It never moved. The hours ticked by, and my shadow shifted with the sun, getting longer behind me, but the concrete was always the same. Light grey, flat, no cracks. It was like looking at forever. I wondered how far we could walk before we died. I rubbed at my face and wondered if we had already tried that.
“Let’s go,” I said.
“To the elevator?”
“Yeah. To the elevator.”
There’s another gap in my memory, but I don’t think that one matters much. We found our way back to the elevator. The doors opened as we approached, and it was like walking towards the light. Dilly was pitch black with midnight again, not a star or moon in the sky. No lights anywhere else. But that elevator shined for us, and the air warmed as we approached. Even the smell got better. Less dead animals and dried blood and more blue paint. Blue paint smells better than dead animals and dried blood. I guess it’s like this: If you want to make friends with a starving man, give him food; if you want to make friends with a terrified man, give him comfort. Clever trick. We marched in without a fight. I even took my shoes off.
Inside it was just an elevator, but I got the impression it was bigger on the inside than the outside, if that makes sense. Like if we had to, we could fit all five hundred people in there and not be cramped or dead. The floor was still footprinted with blue and brown, and eyes stared out the buttons, but they were only drawings. A few were pretty lifelike. I guess Dilly Wisconsin had at least one good artist in her before she disappeared.
“Now what?” I asked.
“Eat the glass?” the parrot asked back, but she was just as confused as I was.
There were normal elevator buttons. I could go up or down. Fingerprints stained the up button. I guess Dilly disappeared into the sky.
I saw what happened to Dilly. I didn’t want to follow in those shoeless footsteps.
“Let’s go down,” I said. “Maybe the basement has an exit.”
“Okay,” the bird said. “I think down is up today.”
“That means forward is back.”
“To the van?”
“Yeah.” I nodded. “To the van.”
I pushed the down button. The doors closed with a little swish, and the elevator made a dull chime. I felt us move. It was almost pleasant, in a way. Relaxing. Except this primal, lizard part of my brain kept screaming that the elevator was alive—that we weren’t in Dilly anymore or anywhere on Earth. No. We were inside something, like we had marched right into a mouth, and now it was swallowing us whole. If it was human, then stomach acid would come next. The elevator would fill, and we’d drown and melt at the same time. Turn to mush and nutrients, though there wasn’t much to eat by that point. Me and the bird were half-starved to death.
The thing is though, we weren’t in a human. We weren’t even in a monster, because monsters make sense. No, we were in Dilly, and Dilly was inside T.V. static.
There was an emergency stop button on the elevator. I slammed it with my fist. The elevator squealed to a halt, and my ears popped from the pressure. The bird howled a bunch of noises birds aren’t supposed to make.
“Sorry,” I croaked.
“That hurt.”
“I know.” I pushed the open button. “But I want to check something. Something important.”
“I want to go home.”
“Me too.”
It took a bit, but eventually those doors opened. They were slow, grinding and pissed off, but we were in an elevator and it was stuck with elevator logic. The doors slid aside, and me and that bird, we looked out to a universe of T.V. static. That’s all it was; that’s all there ever will be. Just hissing, visual noise. Black and white. No people, no up or down, no nothing. I waited for patterns to form, and I waited for a message or words. Maybe God would talk to us, say He was sorry. Maybe the static would stop, and we’d be able to see the real picture, whatever the T.V. was supposed to show. Heaven or Hell or the Big Bang. We waited, and we screamed, and we cried, and then I pushed the button to close the doors.
There’s nothing. It’s just static. Just formless noise, and maybe it’s alive, and maybe it isn’t, but that’s all it is.
Sometimes I lay awake at night thinking of what might live out there. There were so many eyes in Dilly Wisconsin, so many staring, glaring eyes. On the doors and the buttons and the roads. Something must have looked at that town from the T.V. static. Something must have made all of this happen. But whatever swims through that world outside our own, I don’t want to know it. It’s not kind. It’s not God.
I closed the elevator doors, and it continued to descend. Hours passed. Maybe a day. I was so hungry it was hard to focus. I stank, and the bird stank, and the whole room heated up like we were in an oven. The air cycled up and down like it was breathing. I thought we were gonna die, and honestly, sometimes I think we did. But eventually I stopped screaming, and the bird went to sleep, and the elevator dinged. We were on the first floor again. The doors opened.
We stepped out into a sunny, Midwestern day, about six feet from my van.
I don’t remember driving us home, but I did.
*
Sometimes the bird shrieks for no reason, and sometimes I see things I don’t want to. It took about a month, but eventually the military left. They walled the place off barbed wire and threats of violence. Called it a gas leak. Nothing makes sense. The internet is awash in rumors and conspiracy theories, and at this point, any one is as good as any other. They’re all lies, but so is the truth. Up is down. Dilly is gone. Planes don’t fly over that area no more. I know because Sparta has a little airport, and once when I was over there working on CAT5 hookup, I heard one of the pilots talking. Said they had to change the flight patterns up a bit. Have to head straight south to Viroqua before turning east to Madison.
I’ve spent hours searching the internet for information, trying to find accounts for every person that lived in Dilly. Even if the adults didn’t use Twitter or Tiktok, the kids must have, right? But they’re all gone. Deleted or removed or vanished. I guess the big companies are cooperating with the military. Tonight on the news, they’ll show more footage of tanks and jeeps leaving, and someone will blame a cult. They all went crazy. They all killed themselves. In a decade, we’ll find the grave.
But you can’t dig through that concrete. I know. I was there. You can’t dig through nothing.
I tap at my leg, and the bird flutters over. She likes to be petted. When she isn’t screaming or telling me to eat glass, she’s a nice pet. She doesn’t chase the shadows away, but she makes the eyes look less real. Like drawings instead of people. I like having her around.
“What should I name you?” I ask.
“Follow the yellow brick road.”
I shake my head. “It was blue. And it was concrete.”
“They screamed, at the end.”
“I know.” I let her nibble on my fingers. “We did, too.”
There’s one thing I did find, on my searches through social media. Dilly had one good artist somewhere within her, and I think I found her Instagram account. Her name was Annabelle Shivers, and she was 55 years old. She liked to draw and paint, but mostly she used water colors.
Her last painting was of a broken, old-timey dumbwaiter floating above a forest like a helicopter. The sky was hazy with clouds, but there was a break in them, a place for light. She called it I Think I Found God.
None of her other paintings look like that. She mostly stuck to portraits of her grandkids and the flowers in her garden. Sometimes the neighbor’s cat.
If you stare at her painting long enough, it turns to T.V. static.
Nonsense 