Once again the boy did as he was told. He climbed up on the rock and lay down. Jim kept him in place with one massive hairy hand pressed down firmly on his chest. He unclasped the knife from his belt and held it above his head.
“Papa…Papa that hurts...” Joshua groaned.
“Now, don’t you worry about that, my little lamb,” said Jim. “I want you to really see that you can trust me. Trust in me and this blade cannot hurt you. Nothing can hurt you. Don’t you see? I want you to see.”
Jim smiled at Joshua.
“I love you,” he said.
Joshua smiled back.
Jim brought the knife down and annihilated his enemy. He did it over and over again, a hundred times at least. He hacked off this piece and he sliced off that piece. He laughed as he smeared the blood all over the stone. Then he threw what was left of the gory mess into the fire. All except for one piece—the same piece he kept from every sacrifice. He kept that for himself, and he put it in the burlap sack.
* * *
Jim had killed many times before. He sighed and looked up at the sky, happily caressing the dripping burlap sack. He had killed his father and his brother, and he had killed his first son, Devin. Joshua had reminded him terribly of his first son. Devin had been the most beautiful and logical of all his children. He had also thought he could challenge Jim Adiney, who now practically danced down the forested hilltop and floated back into his rocking chair on the porch. He sighed and looked up at the sky. It was finally finished. He was covered in blood. Oh, how impressed the people of the valley would be when they saw him like this! They would pay attention to him again and praise him for eternity.
Jim rocked back and forth as he thought about his grandfather, long gone and returned to dust. The old man was always hollering at snakes in the garden. He used to sit for hours, on a chair and a porch just like the ones Jim sat on now, chastising the slithery interlopers with mouth and walking stick. At every opportunity he would warn the children never to trust the words from the mouths of snakes. The old man really had been quite insane. Jim was glad beyond measure he had never lost his mind like that. He was glad not to be human. He was glad to be God. And he knew he was God because the sun had finally begun to rise, just as he willed it.
THE END
THE STILL
By George Alan Bradley
“What do you think?”
When she speaks she is not looking at him but at the trees. Birch trees. The kind with that peeling white bark that resembles scalded skin.
“I like it,” he replies, “it’s peaceful.”
The trees are shrouded in a fine mist, a fresh coat of dust on a recently cleaned window. They remind him of a case he consulted on as a young man: A birch whose roots had leached into the plaintiff’s neighbor’s yard, damaging several sections of tile in his brand new swimming pool.
“You can barely hear a thing.”
You had to be an idiot to build an outdoor pool in Massachusetts to start with, but this dude had been a real gem: A commodities broker, middle-aged, four kids and an Ivy League education. Rich too. More money than brains. But after 9/11 this rich idiot had been too scared to take the kids down to the timeshare they had in Clearwater, so instead had cemented over his family’s disgruntlement—literally—by building a pool in the backyard of their new-build mansion in Lower Waltham.
“That’s why I like it,” she agrees, “it’s... it’s so still.”
No expense spared with that damn pool. He’d seen the pictures of it. Marble trim and faux-gold handrails and a tiny waterfall and even a half-dozen fake palm trees. The perp had been a sapling at his neighbor’s fence just a few feet from where he had dug and the guy had not considered it might become a problem until after he’d gone and shed thirty-three thousand dollars on construction.
“I was thinking we could have the service here,” she goes on, “not in the main church. There’s a little chapel…”
Needless to say, he had snapped at the case. He had been hungry for it, the first-rate attorney he imagined he was. Committed two months of work to figure it out. Ten minutes later the judge had thrown them out, a reaction to the second-rate attorney he had actually been all along; an idiot attorney with his idiotic plaintiff, red-faced and angry with his collapsing pool and thirty-three grand sucked into the soil.
“...wake at my mom’s place.”
That had been...what? Fifteen years ago. Fifteen long years.
“It’s less fancy, I guess. But simpler. Dignified.”
Dignified, he thinks. Yes, those years had been dignified all right. The whole thing felt like another life. What the hell happened, he thinks, a question he has grown to meet every setback with. What happened? What the hell did happen? There had been some good, sure. She was a good thing. He still believed that. The problem was not the good. The problem was the bad that had taken its place. The problem was birch roots shattering through carefully laid tiles.
Robert, the name comes.
“Just family and friends.” Her voice is frail; the way voices always seem to go in graveyards. “Not too many.”
Just as well, he thinks, we don’t have many anyway.
“I know you don’t want to make a big thing. I don’t either.”
“It’s fine," he says, “whatever you think best, for you and for—”
Robert.
Through the bonelike trunks of the trees he finds himself regarding the thin wisps of wintry mist. A tired sky for what was quickly becoming a tired conversation. Tired like he never left the hospital. Like a part of him is still there in his unwashed trousers and crumpled work shirt all wild-eyed and locked in a nightmare. They have already discussed this once.
Robert.
Say it over and over until it becomes real.
Robert.
But she has already taken his hand in hers and he feels the late February cold clinging at her fingers. We should head home, he wants to say, but when he thinks about home he sees the same mist again. There in the ceiling and walls, in the air that is somehow colder even than this air is. He imagines birch tree roots. Sees them buckling their floor like dog teeth. He wonders if she keeps talking about the funeral just so they have something to talk about, just as he keeps thinking about the trees so he has something to keep thinking about besides the roots through the floor and the still that waits for them both in nightmares.
“I’ll handle the catering." Turning his face at hers. “I was thinking Magnolia’s.”
“Could do.”
“Or Pasquale’s. You know, where we went that day?”
“Pasquale’s is good.”
She looks older, it occurs to him. Like some witch had cast a spell to make her age a year with each passing hour. The mist makes her look old. Both of us, it does, like the way cobwebs do old houses. She is thirty-five but looks close to fifty. An old woman. He remembers they had referred to her as old in triage. He had been unaware of it before. A risk factor. A statement that has become prescient.
If only she hadn’t been old, Robert might still…
still... still...
The knitted sweater she wears is loose enough to hide the stretched skin of her belly. The skin that just three days ago had been slathered with black blood and mucus as she had screamed. He sees her crowded by ashen-faced nurses fussing with their bloodied hands and sweat. He hears that scream. Distant and dreadful, like she had fallen down a canyon, every bone shattered by a hammer.
“I love you, Richard.”
Maybe now you do, he thinks, seeing the empty bassinet on wheels. Maybe now, but she did not love him then. Not in that moment. In that moment there was no love. Seeing the tiny diaper in the sanitized glass basin, a stuffed bear from the hospital gift shop stricken on the floor, her face twisted up in agony and anguish and shock at what had come. How could this happen? How?
“I love you too.”
She squeezes his hand tight until he feels the faint tremor of her heart inside her wrist. A lonely sound,
fragile, the rattling engine of an old car driven days into a desert. She is not a fragile person, he reminds himself. It occurs to him then he has been the one to inflict fragility onto her. Knowing this makes him close his eyes, then salty water forms under the lids, and when he opens them he is looking back to the earth-square marked out with those small stakes into a rectangle. Much bigger than seems necessary.
“I’m ready,” she says. “Do you want to go now?”
He thinks about how he never wanted to come in the first place.
“We can stop somewhere, if you want to. Get something to eat. Something nice.”
There is no nice. Not anymore.
“Hon?”
“That sounds wonderful.” Pressing his teeth, he hands her the keys and the metallic jingle is loud. “Give me... five minutes. Why don’t you go back to the car where it’s warm?”
“But what about you?”
“I’ll be fine. I'll be right behind you.”
She stares at him, uncertain. There was an unspoken agreement they would not isolate each other. He had broken that agreement many times, but had the decency to wait until she was sleeping or online shopping or whatever the fuck they used to do with their lives. “Just five, I-I need the air.”
“Are you sick?”
“No," he says, "no. Just a little, uh, nauseous. Fresh air helps.”
She nods slowly, then leans up and kisses him. “Don’t be too long, okay? I don’t want to be here after dark.”
“No. I won’t be.”
“You sure you don’t want me to stay?”
He shakes his head. “You shouldn’t be on your feet this long. Remember what they said?”
The corners of her mouth twitch. And then: “Oh shit, we have the paperwork...”
“Paperwork?”
“For the Reverend, remember?”
The Reverend, he thinks, suddenly and with a burst of aggression. Who the fuck cares about the Reverend? “Yeah, okay. Five minutes tops.”
“You did bring the checkbook, right?”
“Checkbook...”
“Uh-huh.” Her lip twitches. “We talked about it, the parish donation?”
“Oh yeah.” Oh yeah, a donation. Six hundred bucks for an old man reciting mumbo-jumbo. “I think it’s in the glovebox. If not, there’s the corporate one. They won’t care.”
“Alright.” She sighs. “Well, guess I’ll meet you in the office. Don’t be late.”
Fuck the Reverend. Fuck him in his shriveled old asshole. Fucking snake.
“I’ll be there in five minutes.”
“Love you.”
He listens to her footsteps fade. A thud and a scraping of the fossilized leaves left since the fall. Among them, wasted seeds from the summer. Nature’s version of the still.
* * *
When she is gone he takes out a flask of Jack Daniels and a half-spent pack of Camels. After taking a deep swig he lights one up, idly remembering a fight they had eight months back where she’d told him smoking could hurt their baby.
Robert.
Not been a baby in any discernible way back then but a mass of cells; her Tinybeans app had said, in its unsettling appetite for food-based analogisms, she was the size of a kernel of sweetcorn. Nevertheless he had quit his vices that day, all tossed aside as easy as a pair of worn out tennis shoes. Funny, he thinks, the things a fella does when he’s invested. Funnier still how the day of the still being born—the very same day—he had barely been able to move or speak, yet somehow managed to drive himself down to the gas station and buy a pack of Camels. Easy, it was, like fixating back on an old flame.
He looks down at the plot again. That pegged square of uncut earth.
Robert.
As the alcohol began its first warm splotches across his brain, so did other thoughts.
Robert. Your son Robert.
He shivered suddenly, the name spoken in his head as the hissing of steam. It was not a baby named Robert. It was the absence of a baby named Robert and, in its absence, a perversion, a monster, a beast. Some cruel creature that had taken its place with its shriveled skin and blackened mouth and slowly decomposing body, now free riding in the funeral home with people—real people—who had been born and lived.
He takes another sip.
A sickening feeling descends. He could never be cruel enough to talk about how it sickens him. Just thoughts, but evil thoughts that resonated with a truth that was not there at any other time. A truth when he thought of that polished headstone they had ordered, engraved with a name that was “Robert James Galloway” where it should have been “God Is Laughing” and some cockamamie epitaph pulled from the Bible or a Beatles ballad or whatever it was she pulled out of her tearstained ass. Words of love instead of words of anger and heartbreak and disgust. They were cursed now. Unfairly cursed. Doomed to pretend for the rest of their lives they were the parents of a child and not buriers of the botched. He figures maybe when all was said and done they would have living children someday, though it seems unlikely, especially since she was already old—it makes no difference. They are damaged. Irrevocably damaged by the idea of a child named Robert James Galloway and the reality of a creature in a casket.
Yawning, he tosses the spent butt down.
Crushes it with his foot into the plot.
The pathway leads down a gentle hill lined with more birches, around to where the Trinity Episcopal Church sits in the darkening sky. A handsome structure in what he imagines must be a priceless location not far from Carnaby. He always liked the building. Less so the vast and chaotic layout of its Colonial-era churchyard, hundreds of headstones going back to the middle 1700s. She loves that, the history, but he finds it disorganized. Unkempt to the point of unseemly, the graves scattered about pathways like scattered blots, some isolated and some in haphazard rows, but all concealed from plain view between the errant patches of stubborn trees and brush and winding dirt pathways in an untidy maze presumably fashioned by some drunk Pilgrim Father.
“Because of them roots,” a voice behind him mutters.
He jolts, hands snapping loose from the pockets of his parka.
Shit, shit...
It is his automatic reaction, born of time spent working in the city, dodging the panhandlers and junkies on Eighth Ave. Behind, a pair of eyes watches, dense and piercing in the blue swarm of early twilight. Below the eyes, a sharp little chin sporting a scraggly beard and paired with a large hooked nose to resemble a lobster’s opened claw.
“O’r here.”
It is the face of a very old man. Dirty and wild looking.
He stares back, like a sheep in the road. “Can I help you?”
The strange man does not reply at first. His face holds a thin gape of a smile. Inside he sees a flash of the man’s teeth. Small and sharp teeth, the color of radioactive mustard. “I was thinking I might help you,” the old man says.
A quaint accent, Richard thinks. Extinct but for certain nowhere places inland. Shit holes where the tourists and yuppies don’t go. He wears a sickly smile as he steps from behind the trees.
“Help me?”
The man extends his hand, the arm rising slowly like an old Scottish drawbridge. “The name’s Culferi,” he says, “Trent Culferi, I’m the groundskeeper.”
He feels a wave of strange relief and takes the hand reluctantly. The fingers are slender but the grip is firm. Culferi does not shake the hand but holds it for what seems a long time. “Richard... Dick Lautner.”
“Richard Lautner,” the old man replies, pleasantly. Now close, he can see a little more clearly. He is dressed all in black, his head round, bald but for a scrape of what must be hair but resembles instead the dry burr of an old scab. His baglike eyes unblinking in his face. An ugly face it is, even for an old guy. Ugly, cavernous, ridged with wrinkles, his dark eyes slightly oversized so that their inky roundness set in a receding forehead resembles the close-up of an insect. An insect with a toothy smile. “I am very pleased to meet you.”
“Uh, yeah, likewise. Now, if you’ll excuse me…”
“You’re shaking,” the man says, studying him with his strange eyes.
“I…”
“Have another drink, Richard. A big one this time.”
He feels the grip weaken and takes his hand away. Immediately he winces. There is a residual sliminess. One that is too cold to be sweat and too greasy to be water. He takes out the flask and drinks, this time barely tasting it.
“Feel better now?” Culferi asks, smiling.
“Uh-huh." He shakes his head. "Now listen, okay… I don’t mean to be rude.” He pulls his parka closer, “My wife... she’s waiting for me in the chapel office.”
“An appointment?”
“With the Reverend.”
“Oh yes. About little Robert?”
“Huh? How did you know?”
Culferi grins. He rubs his arm across his nose, a sickly honking sound of shifting congestion. His hand is gray, the flesh protruding from his sleeve thinly. More than thin, he thinks, his stomach making an involuntary churn as it always has at the sight of deformity in a body. The fingers are withered, curled like wicker from an unraveled basket. He glances down and sees the other hand is the same, both appendages equal in deformity.
Poor bastard, he thinks.
“There is something I wanted to speak with you about, Richard,” he says, his voice lowering. “Would you listen?”
“Huh?”
“It concerns your wife, your son too.”
He stares, believing he had misheard. He is still thinking about those terrible hands. “What are you talking about?”
Culferi smiles, bearing those mean little teeth again. “You’re a good man, Richard. May I call you Dick?” He grins widely, and does not wait for an answer. “Good enough that I know you will do anything, but consider what I must tell you. For your sake and for your son’s.”
“I don’t have a son.”
“Robert.”
“No.” He feels his insides clench, pressure building. “He was stillborn.”
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