The Bones of the Earth- The Complete Collection

by Scott Hale

  Asher pushed himself out of the chair and came to his feet—the magazine stuck to his ass. “I’m going to say something to Ms. Lucy.”

  “Stop.” Ramona rose and stood in front of him. “Come on. Don’t overthink it. It was a stain, dude. See?”

  Ms. Lucy had noticed the splotch, too, and holding her nose, she started going at it with a healthy dab of spit and the end of her own shirt.

  “Honey, you better get a camel if you’re going to try to spit-shine that out,” Asher said, as if he were speaking to Ms. Lucy directly. Then, to Ramona: “Okay, I didn’t just come to apologize.”

  “That’s what she said,” Ramona snapped back.

  Dead-eyed, Asher continued. “Lux… was weird today.”

  “I mean, she’s right to get fired up—” Ramona noticed her boss emerging from the back office, his attention fixed on her. “You know? This could be the start of a bunch of hate murders or something. We have to get on this.”

  “Yeah, I know.” Asher noticed Ramona’s boss and started to drift away from her. “But the way she handled the server. I know she doesn’t like the guy, but damn. Dude likes to get pegged by his girlfriend while watching cartoons. He’s got enough on his plate.”

  Ramona drew a sharp breath, and then, quickly backing away, “Ash, shut up! What’s wrong with you?” She saluted her boss, to show she was going back to work. “For real, though, are you serious?”

  “Not about the cartoon thing. I don’t know.” Asher chewed on his lip. “He seems decent. Kind of reminds me of Salinger, and we shit… pooped… all over him. We’re supposed to be more accepting.” He scratched the back of his head and turned away from her, to leave. “I don’t know.”

  Ramona heard someone clear their throat behind her. Thinking it was Asher trying to scare her again, despite the fact that he was right in front of her, she stayed her heart and glanced over her shoulder.

  There was someone behind her, but the smell of them preceded the shape of them. It was a rank odor; a cloying musk, like that which would lift off the charred remains of a fetid offering. It smelled of ripe fruit, and sulfur—an alluring feast from the sickening larders of hell itself. It made Ramona retch.

  “Am I already vegan?” Asher carried on, not seeing what she was smelling, because his back was to her. “I can’t remember… Good golly, miss Molly, what the hell is that—” he spun around, “—smell.”

  Ramona and Asher both saw him at the same time. Ansel, the server from the coffee shop. The one Lux had insulted, and had insulted before, time and time again. In his hand, he was gripping his cell phone, and there was blood coming out of his hand, and the cell phone. The smell was strongest at the device—the technological origin of that very organic stench.

  “I…” Ramona started.

  But the server shoved past her, his slick arms sliding over her skin like sea-polished stone. And as he hurried towards the exit of the library, Ramona caught a glimpse of something on his cell phone’s screen. An image. A symbol. A diamond of light wreathed in tentacles. The very same Lux used as a header for all her blog posts.

  The server’s name was Ansel, and sure, yeah, when he was in the right mood and with the right person, he’d let a woman fuck him in the ass. Sometimes, he and whoever was strapping in for the night would even laugh about it and say he was taking one for the team. It wasn’t something he did often, nor was it something he was all that embarrassed about. That was the great thing about Bitter Springs. Over the last few years, it had become so open in regards to sexuality and “gender roles” and the usual bullshit people debated about on the behalf of those who could just as easily, if only asked, speak for themselves on the matter. No, Ansel could handle someone knowing his sex life as well as he could the toys he used to enhance it. What he couldn’t handle, what had him sweating profusely and hallucinating shapes and whispers, was that someone had attacked him and his lifestyle on the Internet, and stated with the utmost certainty that it was result of latent pedophilic tendencies.

  That someone was Lux. And although the post didn’t talk about him directly, it was obvious, and it would be obvious to anyone else, as Bitter Springs was a small town. She had written the damnation on her blog two hours ago. It had hundreds of comments, and thousands of ‘likes,’ and both metrics were increasing steadily by the minute. The overall sentiment of her readers was not good. Lux had never laid a hand on him, and yet she had fucked him in the worst way possible.

  Ansel’s phone had blood all over it, but he wasn’t thinking about that right now. Instead, for the umpteenth time, he read Lux’s profile of him, or rather, people ‘like him,’ and felt his stomach turn, do a belly flop inside his belly—its best dead, beached whale impersonation.

  The blog began as all self-important blogs began. With a call to arms attached to a body of hyperbole. It read thusly:

  When the gates are unlocked, anything can come through. Something has found its way into Bitter Springs, and I need your help rooting it out, or everything we will have fought for, everything we will have modeled and promised to this country, will have been for nothing.

  As you may well know, there has been a death in Bitter Springs, but what is even more insidious than death itself are those things that cause it, for if they have happened once, then it stands to reason that they may happen again. Salinger Stevens was found brutally murdered with the word ‘faggot’ slashed into his chest. As an involved member of the LGBQTIA community, and someone who knew Salinger Stevens both in passing and personally, I can say with absolute certainty that he was not a gay male, but a heterosexual cisgender male posing as a gay male. He was killed not for what he was, but for what he pretended to be. I will be called a bitch for saying it, but it is the truth, and I don’t care: We are fortunate that Salinger Stevens died, because he died in place of one of our own. That does not make him a martyr, but it does buy us some time, as not only do we need to find out who the culprit behind the hate crime is, but how many more imposters there are in Bitter Springs, as they threaten our very way of life.

  Make no mistake, I am not saying that people are not free to do as they choose, but cultural and sexual appropriation as a means by which one disguises their personal issues and inadequacies is deplorable. This is the majority passing themselves off as the minority in attempt to reap the benefits of systematic discrimination. By posing as, for example, asexual, bisexual, demisexual, gay, lesbian, metrosexual, pansexual, skoliosexual, transgender, transsexual, or even as another race or ethnicity, they are effectively minimizing who we are, diluting our community, and stripping us of the few supports and resources available to us. Some may claim that they are merely questioning their identities, but do not be misled. They mean to infiltrate us and see us eradicated. And it is not an eradication through typical means, but a slow decay of our values until we are normalized into nothingness.

  Now that I am aware of them, I have begun to see many imposters in our midst. It is not my intention to start a warlock hunt (I can’t even get into the misconceptions of witches right now), but it is my duty to warn others of the liars that walk amongst us.

  With so many places to begin, let us start with the safe spaces in Bitter Springs, as they mean very much to me, as well as everyone else who uses them as a way to escape from the negativity and the triggers this world seems so desperate to ram down our throats.

  I am so angry right now that I literally cannot see straight, so I will begin with Bitter Springs’ coffee shop, the Grindout.

  There are several imposters at the Grindout, mostly among the staff there, who I now believe have been planted deliberately in those positions to keep tabs on our community. Among them is a cisgender, white male who reportedly has women perform anal sex upon him. Initially, I, too, attributed this behavior to nothing more than a kink, but in interacting with this individual, it became obvious that he was a straight male trying to give the impression that he was gay, or at least, so I thought.

  Self-diagnosis is a valuable tool
in these days where psychologists, psychiatrists, and social workers are paid to apply labels to groups the general public find undesirable. I consider myself extremely proficient at self-diagnosis, as well as the diagnosis of others. And what I discovered was that this imposter at the Grindout was not only pretending to be gay, but that he was using it as a cover—a cover for latent pedophilic tendencies. Many brave women who have been forced against their will to perform anal sex on the imposter have stated he made them pretend to be children—little boys, actually, age nine to ten. Displacement at its finest.

  Can you not see the importance of this issue? Can you not see the weight that it carries? True criminals and delinquents are invading our community and wearing it as a costume, to keep tabs on us and to carry out their twisted fantasies. These repulsive individuals may even find themselves modeling their behavior as acceptable for those of you in the community who do not possess a keen eye such as myself, and you will be led astray because of it.

  The imposter begins this way at birth. They are raised this way, and I have seen many children—a supposedly “non-binary” kindergartener, in particular—parading about Bitter Springs, creating confusion and chaos for those other children who are trying to better understand themselves. It makes me sick to see the lengths that the mainstream will go to to see us undone.

  There is a murderer in Bitter Springs, and though they may be doing us a favor, they will have to be stopped, before those that truly matter fall beneath their blade. Stay vigilant against this malevolent virulence that sickens the straight man’s soul. False faces must be unmasked.

  Ansel’s hand was shaking again, and there was blood seeping between his fingers from the cell phone. The tendons in his neck tented. His eyes went out of focus. His teeth clamped down on the side of his tongue, and his canines carved a place for themselves in it. He tried to steady his breathing, but his breaths were so short, it was as if he wasn’t breathing at all; his body was simply going through the motions. Now, it was a vessel, a place to hold an eventual vigil, as anger and fear ripped him apart, inside and out, and made him stupid, and slobbering.

  Holding the phone like a beaker bubbling over with a bad chemical reaction, Ansel left his kitchen and went and stood in the middle of the living room. He swiped the screen, to bring himself to the comments section of the post. It made his finger hurt, going down the page like that, as if he could feel the literal pitchforks poking out of the glass.

  The comments were curated by Lux, and so almost all of them agreed with and contributed to her narrative. They read thusly:

  I think I know who you are talking about at the Grindout, and I am going to report him to the manager. I threw up in my mouth reading this blog. Thank you, Lux, for, as always, being our light of reason.

  It’s no surprise to me but that the mainstream wants to impersonate us. Whites have been doing it since the dawn of the time. What they cannot understand, they take over.

  I know who you are talking about. I’m going to key his car. Let the police try to stop me. Do the Bitter Springs police support pedophiles now?

  I want this server out of our town, and away from our children. Gay men have fought so hard to remove the stigma of them being unfit to be around children. This monster is going to bring it back.

  Pedophiles and imposters should be killed. The murderer is doing us a favor. For once, it’s a hate crime I don’t hate.

  Your hair looked so good Lux at the get-together.

  I say that we organize a meeting to begin tracking down these imposters. Their values are ruining our tradition.

  You’re so brave, Lux, for posting this. You speak the truth when no one else will. I can’t believe you’re the only one writing about these things. When I don’t know what to think, I find it’s best to listen to you, lol.

  There were more comments than those, calling for Ansel’s arrest, or death, as well as the arrest or death of the supposed imposters living in Bitter Springs. The only comment Lux had bothered to respond to was in regards to whether a woman should shave her body, not because a man asked her to, but because she wanted to. Lux told the poster she had a responsibility as a woman to ignore what she wanted for the good of womankind. To the other posters, she had nothing to say. They were all in agreement with her.

  Ansel took the blood-soaked phone and slipped it into his pocket. Standing there, in the middle of the living room, he could feel the gaze of the people outside his windows, passing by on the sidewalk or in their cars. He felt like a wild animal that had been captured and caged and put on display for a depraved audience to see. Everyone was looking at him, judging him; to Ansel, everyone had read Lux’s post, and everyone had believed it.

  There were the voices in his head, thudding back and forth, like thick, electrified chords flailing in the dark belly of the sea. The voices came from those who’d commented on the blog, except they weren’t him simply recalling what he’d read—they were actual voices, with their own gender, tone, inflection, and accent, and each of them was yelling at him, harassing him, calling for his blood. It was as if Ansel were an antenna that had picked up, for the first time in his life, a signal, a small blip, of the Internet’s unrelenting, uncompromising ire.

  Then, alongside the voices, were his own thoughts. Quick leaps of logic and uncoordinated jumps to baseless conclusions. He was going to school to be a teacher, a grade school teacher, and now that was off the table and buried in the backyard. He was going to be a father one day, or at least he’d hoped he would be, until Lux had socially castrated him. Friends would disown him. Family would disavow him. Ex-girlfriends would take the stand, and prosecutors press them for facts on every sexual encounter, or any time he’d played with one of their children.

  Ansel went to the windows and let loose the curtains. He sprinted out of the living room and made his way around his modest, one-story house, boarding up the place the best that he could in the way a modern man would—with shades and curtains, and the ugliest chairs wedged underneath doorknobs.

  Deep down, in the floor of his gut, where the butterflies had yet to settle, he knew he was overreacting, and yet he couldn’t stop himself. He remembered the first time he had been stung by a bee as a child, and how he had completely lost it; how no one could calm him down, and how nothing else had existed in that moment except for that moment and the mounting pain.

  “Stupid fucking bitch,” Ansel said, the blood in his pocket built up to such a point that it sloshed around like an IV bag. He retreated into his bedroom, but kept the lights off.

  Sitting on the edge of his bed, he then felt it, a literal sting. He drove his hand into his blood-filled pocket to stop the pain. But nothing had bitten him. There was nothing there. Except for his phone. It was vibrating. Someone was calling him.

  Ansel took out his phone. The screen struggled to glow through the gelatinous gore that had congealed on it. His friend, Annette. It was his friend calling him. Or at least, she had been his friend. The voices in his head said that he was a pederast, and that the only friend a pederast deserved was the bullet someone was bound to put in his head.

  Feeling that sting in his leg again, Ansel answered Annette’s call, but didn’t say a word.

  “Ansel?”

  He grunted.

  “What’s wrong?” Then, more seriously than before: “Ansel, what’s going on?”

  “Did you read it?” he asked, whispering in the darkness of his own room, as if he were afraid to wake the beast that might be lying in his bed. “Did you… see it?”

  “Your text?”

  “Lux’s blog.”

  “Yeah, I mean… is that what you’re freaking out about?”

  Ansel sat up straight. Outside his room, somewhere near his kitchen, he heard something wet slap against the linoleum.

  “Hey, why are you freaking out about that?”

  “I…” He strained his ears, but the sound was gone; all that remained were the voices, and their derision. “Did you see what she said about me?�
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  “She didn’t say your—”

  He yelled, “You know who she was talking about!”

  Annette went quiet; he could imagine her retreating away from him, the distance the same from Earth to Space, with all that suffocating silence they shared between them.

  “Sorry,” he said.

  “I’m not the bad guy here.”

  “I know.”

  “No one buys into Lux’s bullshit, except the people she pays to peddle it.”

  Ansel shook his head. “There’re hundreds of comments. Thousands of people have seen it. People want to kill me.”

  “It’s the Internet.” Annette drew a sharp breath and held it until she couldn’t anymore. “They’re all cunts; every last one of them. And you know how I feel about using that word.”

  “It’s bigger than you think,” he said.

  “How? Ansel, she has like two friends in Bitter Springs. The rest she just bullies into submission.”

  “Not on the Internet.”

  “So?”

  “That’s worse.”

  “You’re saying anonymous strangers on the Internet are worse than the flesh and blood losers we have running around our town? Dude.”

  A creak. Wood bending. Ansel lifted off the bed and, still in the dark, went to the doorway. Holding the molding for dear life, he leaned into the light coming in from the living room and looked around his apartment.

  “I’m pretty sure we can report her for this,” Annette carried on.

  Nothing made a person more self-aware than the feeling that something terrible was about to happen to them. He had stacks of poetry books on his living room table, and he could still call to mind almost every inspiring line he’d highlighted inside them. If the voices were right, then the police would turn his house inside out, and what would they find in those poetic verses? Were there secrets in the letters, in the words? Could they forgo interrogation and simply build an Ansel to their liking based off the misinterpretation of his interests?