The Axis

for Peter Carr

The professor didn’t call himself an artist. Not when his colleagues sneered at the smudges on his fingers or the streaks of black ink down his shirt cuffs. Composition and literature—tenured and tidy—meant a life of papers and syllabi and wine-stained seminars where the same arguments circled like drain water. It was all form and polish. Dead words, dead men, dead minds.

But the professor, elbow-deep in his notebooks, knew one thing alive.

The scratching. The scrawling. The hairline fractures of ink ripping into paper like broken nerves.

Art wasn’t the word for it. It wasn’t romantic. It wasn’t tidy. It was urgency. His hands jerked across the pages as though jolted by unseen currents. Pencils snapped, fountain pens bled, and the graphite dusted his knuckles gray. And everything was there, wasn’t it? Doom, despair, and the burn of nuclear light hanging over his head like some terrible sun, ready to peel flesh back from bones.

Nuclear reactors churned, cooling pools steamed. There were men in suits—neckties tugged too tight—clicking buttons behind locked doors, and somewhere, far off, something called a kill radius.

The professor spent his mornings lecturing on The Iliad, voices of the past calling war glory. He spent his nights carving chaotic runes into sketchbooks. Marks that were tangled and wild, black-on-black, like human hair plastered to shower tiles, alive yet dead. Spirals of scribble. He’d stare at the pages, feel his heart thrum behind his ribs, and swear it was this close—just a breath away—from making sense.

“You need help,” a colleague told him, sliding a flyer for a university therapist across the cafeteria table. “They say you haven’t been to committee meetings in three weeks. What are you doing in there?”

“Making maps,” he muttered.

“Maps of what?”

“Doom.”

The colleague sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose. “Just eat your sandwich, Peter.”

He never finished his sandwiches anymore. Bread tasted like chalk, lettuce like plastic. He’d started chewing on pencils instead.

In his office—a windowless cube where the air tasted sour—his floor disappeared under notebooks. Pages of it, scrawl upon scrawl, a language no one else could read. Human desperation pressed into paper. He tried to show one to a student once, the eager sophomore who kept asking him for life advice.

“Tell me what you see.”

The kid stared. “...Scribbles?”

“Not scribbles. Life breaking.”

“Oh.”

The professor pointed at one jagged line. “That’s us, the axis. See? We’re cracking. The earth’s falling one way, the sky’s tipping the other.”

“Okay.”

“Okay,” he echoed. Then threw the notebook across the room. The student left and didn’t come back.

But the marks were life breaking. He knew this the same way you know when you’re falling in a dream—an instinct in the blood. The reactors, the warheads, the suits at their control panels, all of it pushing—pushing—until something in the atmosphere cracked. He could see the light already: a pale flash, a momentary second sun, before the air itself blistered.

And what would remain? Not literature. Not culture. Not art.

Just marks. Just lines. Just hair-thin proof that someone had been here.

One day, he stopped showing up.

At first, the department didn’t notice. The janitor found the office door ajar, a shaft of light falling onto a room full of paper. So much paper. Piles and drifts of it, filling the air with the dry, chemical smell of ink. It was on the floor, pinned to walls, on the ceiling where it had been taped with trembling hands.

No one knew where the professor had gone. Someone said they saw him on a street corner, screaming at pigeons. Someone else swore he boarded a bus to nowhere. The rumors spread, each more ridiculous than the last.

The university sent a team to clean his office. Two undergrads in dust masks stuffed his life into trash bags—bag after bag of notebooks that weighed nothing and everything.

“I think he died in here,” one of them said, shoving papers into a bin. “Like, his spirit or whatever. Evaporated.”

The other kid looked at him sideways. “What are you talking about?”

“I dunno. Just... look at all of it.”

He pointed at the drawings.

The lines twisted and curled, dense as storm clouds, tangled as roots. A hurricane, maybe. Or a map. Or a scream.

Years passed. The professor’s name disappeared from departmental plaques. His office became a broom closet. His scribbled apocalypse lay forgotten in a landfill somewhere, ink bleeding into dirt, mixing with rain and decomposing lettuce and someone’s baby shoes.

No one remembered him. No one but the dust.

And then—

A fire at a nuclear plant overseas. Chernobyl, again but not quite. A warhead test off the coast. Mushroom clouds on news reports. Kill radius calculations on prime-time television. People watched, wide-eyed, and something new hung in the air, vibrating the backs of their skulls.

Outside the city, a child crouched in the yard, scribbling in dirt with a stick. Lines and spirals. Chaos.

In New York, a man coughed into his handkerchief and left a black smudge.

A woman sat on the subway, eyes half-closed, and felt her pulse quicken at the sight of a poster—a swirl of jagged black on white, hair-thin lines crisscrossing like lightning veins.

They didn’t know the professor. Didn’t know the notebooks.

But they inhaled him.

Through vents, through windows, through cracks in the earth.

His art had risen with the dust, floated into lungs and bloodstreams. He had not vanished. He had dispersed.

The marks were everywhere now—unseen on surfaces, under skin, on windshields fogged with breath.

A virus of urgency. Of recognition.

People said nothing. But they picked up pens and pencils. They scratched at pages, at walls, at bathroom mirrors with trembling fingers.

They didn’t know why.

But they felt it.

The cracking.

The axis breaking.

And the professor, unseen and everywhere, whispered through the dust:

Wildness or death.

Tyler Stallings, a Southern California-based writer, is the author of Aridtopia: Essays on Art & Culture from Deserts in the Southwest United States, along with contributing to and editing anthologies, including Whiteness: A Wayward Construction, Mundos Alternos: Art and Science Fiction in the Americas, and Uncontrollable Bodies: Testimonies of Identity and Culture. His stories and essays have appeared in Southwest Contemporary, Los Angeles Review, PBS SoCal’s Artbound, Citric Acid, and Tendon. Stallings' commentary on Black Lives Matter in Huntington Beach recently appeared in the Los Angeles Times.