Poison Tongue

by Nash Summers

  “Maybe one was.”

  “Well that’s a nasty thing to say.” Sheriff Dawson paused for a beat. “You mean that Poirier kid?”

  I almost smiled. Something about cops calling everyone kid even when he and Monroe were likely close in age. “No, it ain’t his fault. He didn’t start it.”

  “Well, he sure as hell finished it. Billy’s gonna be eating out of a straw for the next month. That’s not to say he probably doesn’t deserve it.”

  Sheriff Dawson gave me an awkward, lopsided smile. His slate gray eyes crinkled at the corners, and you’d have to be a blind man or a straight man not to notice. I was neither.

  But, because my heart was treacherous and beat only for things deep, dark, and mean, my thoughts focused on Monroe. “Is he all right?” I asked. “Monroe?”

  “Yeah, he’s all right. Barely a scratch on him. It’s a miracle he’s walking out of that bar in one piece, let alone lookin’ like he just took a nice little stroll through a park.” Sheriff Dawson flicked the brim of his hat as he turned to look toward Monroe. Monroe’s arms were pulled behind his back, his legs spread wide, his chest flat against the hood of the sheriff’s car. He looked natural there, as if he’d been in that exact position a million times before. He probably had.

  Two uniformed officers stood right behind him, one with their eye on Monroe’s back, the other turned toward the owner of the hardware store, jotting down notes on a pad of paper. Billy and one of the other men Monroe had been in the fight with leaned against the brick side of the bar, near the front door.

  “So, what set ’em off?” the sheriff asked. “The mob of wild animals, I mean. Besides all the liquor in their systems.”

  I shrugged. “You know, Sheriff. Rumors. Prejudice.”

  He sighed. “The amount of folks I’ve had down at the station complaining about Poirier is unjust. I don’t want him in Malcome any more than the next man, simply because of the amount of paperwork I’ve had to do filing complaints about him.”

  I laughed and he smiled.

  “Your bark is worse than your bite, I see,” he said.

  My gaze flickered back over to Monroe. He was looking at us now, Sheriff Dawson and me. The black snake was wrapped around his throat, its long tail trailing down his back inside his shirt.

  “Is that it?” I stood.

  His eyes focused on the small cuts along my arms. “You need to go see the doctor?”

  I dropped my arms down to my sides. “No. It ain’t that bad.”

  “Then you can go. We’re finishing up here, just getting a few statements. Most folks say Poirier wasn’t the one to start the fight. A few others say you tried to break it up.”

  “He wasn’t doing anything wrong.”

  “Yeah, well, some of the folks think otherwise. When people think you’re the devil, they think you’re doing something wrong just by breathing.”

  “Do you think he’s the devil?”

  “To tell you the truth, I ain’t really sure what he is. All I know is that he must’ve lost his mind on Billy. I’ve never seen one man take down three grown men in a fight. And I sure as hell have never seen a person snap the way folks say he did. They said it was like a light switch.”

  “There was a lot of blood,” I said quietly, absently.

  “Wonder what would make a man snap like that.”

  “Don’t think he’s had an easy life, Sheriff.” For some reason I found myself defending Monroe’s actions. “Especially not since moving back to Malcome. Most folks would’ve done the same thing in his place. He’s just lucky he could hold his own.”

  “His own and then some, I’d say.”

  Sheriff Dawson stared at the hood of the car Monroe was plastered against. He had a soul that was different from others I’d seen. It was calm, fresh, stable. It reminded me of the mountains, their tops covered in snow. Frosty, but tolerant. Immoveable. I wondered what it would take to make a man like the sheriff snap—if that was even possible.

  “Do you need a statement from me?”

  The sheriff shook his head. “Nah. If we do, I’ll stop by tomorrow. We’re gonna take these boys down to the station and get their statements and then send ’em on their way. I don’t think anyone is going to be pressing charges, though.”

  One of the officers opened the back door of the police cruiser and shoved Monroe inside, slamming it behind him. He climbed into the front seat and started the engine.

  Dawson sighed. “It’s gonna be a long night. You should go home and get some sleep.”

  I hesitated for a moment, my gaze locked on the police car housing Monroe.

  “Really,” Dawson pressed. “Nothin’ else you can do tonight. He’ll be home by the morning.”

  “Thanks, Sheriff.”

  “Take care of yourself, Levi.”

  I walked home slowly, my head and heart lost in thought. The darkness I’d seen in Monroe was growing, expanding quickly, consuming him. He had snapped. He’d snapped completely and totally, turning into the beast people claimed him to be.

  I closed my eyes that night wondering if Monroe Poirier even had a soul worth saving.

  Chapter 7

  A WEEK later I dreamed of flames.

  I stood in the middle of a dark space. I could see nothing around me but the flames crawling up the wooden walls, their yellow and orange and red hues flickering and dancing. They lit the small space. The smell of bristle and old, wet wood burning pressed against my senses. A taste on my tongue of fire and cedar. And the air was smoky, like the soot from a fireplace had been tossed up into the air and left to settle there.

  The flames crawled closer and closer, reaching for me. It hadn’t struck me that I should be afraid of them—that they could burn me and drown me in their hot depths.

  I reached toward the flame as they danced and twirled in front of my eyes. Just as my fingers were about to touch the heat, something thick and black and freezing cold wrapped around my neck. Two black eyes stared at me as the black mass slithered and crept closer. Its scales cut my soft flesh beneath them. Its body was so cold, it hurt to touch.

  “You don’t belong here,” I said to the snake calmly, mindlessly.

  It hissed.

  The black snake had no place in my dream of warm fires and consuming flames. I wanted to keep them separate from one another, far apart so that the two should never meet. And yet here it was, invading my dream, my most private moments, staring at me like there was something I should know.

  Intending to pull it off my arm, I wrapped my other hand around its body. Useless. It acted as though I hadn’t even touched it, as though my hand was made of clouds and dust.

  The flames on the floorboards pulled themselves closer. The heat beat against my lightly clothed legs. The light from the fire only seemed to make the snake impossibly darker, casting shadows on it that couldn’t be real.

  Suddenly there was a burst of light. The flames spread wildly, covering everything, the darkness, illuminating all around me. The heat tickled first, and then began to sear.

  I screamed.

  Huge hands grabbed my arms. I was being pulled up, out of the flames, as though I’d been seated in a deep pit filled with gasoline.

  “Levi!”

  Ward stood in front of me, his hands on my arms, his grip painfully tight.

  “Levi,” Ward’s voice was raw. “Are you all right? You were screaming about a fire.”

  I could still feel the heat lingering on my skin.

  I looked around, disoriented. My room was deeply shadowed, moonlight pouring in from the window next to my bed.

  “There’s a fire,” I croaked. I began coughing. My throat was raw, as though I’d breathed in real smoke.

  “Where?” Ward stood up and looked around the room. “I do not see a fire.”

  “I don’t know.” I rubbed my eyes. “But I dreamed that there was a fire. It was so real. And that dark creature from the swamp was there, coiling around me.”

  “What happened?” my m
other asked. We both turned to look at her standing in the doorway. She wore a long, white nightgown, with a shorter blue dressing gown on top. Her eyes focused up on the ceiling.

  “Mama.” I stood. I went to her, took her hands in my own. “I’m sorry, Mama. Just a nightmare.”

  The frown on her face deepened. “Nightmares are as real to you as the earth, Levi. What did you see?”

  “A fire. It was consuming me. I felt it. It was so hot, I could feel it as it began to burn my skin.”

  Mama covered her mouth and I immediately felt terrible for telling her. She wasn’t a delicate woman by any means, but she’d become more fragile and more worried since her… accident. And maybe it wasn’t only her that had changed. Maybe I’d changed too. I kept some things from her I never would have before, and constantly worried that I’d say or do something to upset her.

  “There is no fire in here, Levi,” Ward said.

  A moment of silence passed between us.

  But that moment was shattered quickly by the unmistakable sound of a dog barking. The hound barked and howled wildly, its cries seeming to echo through my tiny room.

  I strode to the window next to my bed. Below, running frantically back and forth, stirred Monroe’s dog, Coin. He whined as he paced back and forth, looking right up into my bedroom window.

  “The dog?” Ward asked.

  “Something’s wrong.” My hands gripping the curtains tightly. “I need to go to the Poirier house.”

  I hadn’t seen Monroe since the night of the brawl at Whiskey’s, but he’d still been the leading role in most of my thoughts throughout the week. The day after the fight, I’d called into the police station to make sure Monroe had got out safely. Sheriff Dawson told me Monroe had left the police station early that morning with little more than a few scratches on him.

  “I will come with you.” Ward had already turned and was making his way to the door.

  My mama stood in the doorway. It was evident by her hesitation to move out of the doorway that she didn’t want me to leave. Gently I took her hand in mine and squeezed. This was one of the times when I truly wished my mama could see my face. Then she’d know that I had to leave, that this wasn’t a want, but a need.

  “Mama,” I pleaded. “I have to go.”

  After a brief pause, she nodded, then moved aside as Ward passed her. “Be careful, Levi. I can tell something ain’t right.”

  “I always am, Mama. And I’ll have Ward with me.”

  She nodded, looking uncertain, but turned and left.

  I pulled off my pajama bottoms, yanked on a pair of jeans, and darted out of my room. Ward waited for me at the bottom of the staircase.

  The metal frame of the front door clanked and rattled as I shoved it open. The night air was warm and thick. A big yellow moon sat in the sky, watching. Chirping birds were barely heard over the sound of small feet pattering toward us.

  Coin stopped, eyeing Ward uneasily. But, seemingly deciding he was the lesser of two evils, Coin barked once, spun, and darted off into the distance. I didn’t have to watch him run to know he was headed back home to the Poirier house.

  The Poirier house rose as a dark beacon in the night, the center of a pool of quicksand, the sun in the sky that kept all the planets dancing around it. It stood like a tall tower that could be seen over the tops of trees and hills and mountains.

  I took off behind Coin, Ward dashing close beside me. We traveled along the dirt around the edge of the town. My sneakers dug into the hard dirt and gravel. Tall weeds brushed against my ankles. There were no houses around this side of the town, just fields and dirt and plants that wished there was enough rain to grow.

  In the distance the light caught my eye. I paused my jogging for a moment to stare.

  Against a dark navy backdrop, bright orange flames reached for the sky. My dreams were creeping into my reality, sending an uneasy feeling directly to my gut. But when I closed my eyes, breathed deeply, and looked out into the distance again, the flames remained.

  It wasn’t a dream. There was a wild fire burning red and incessant against a night sky. It was wicked and wrong against the simple, clean backdrop of the darkness of night. It drew all attention to it as it grew higher and higher.

  My feet sprinted back into action before my brain did. Ward’s heavy footsteps followed close behind me. Coin’s fur glimmered more and more the closer we drew to the brightness of the flames.

  My heart sped. My lungs heaved. The Poirier house was on fire. And Coin wouldn’t have come to us unless Monroe was inside.

  Some selfish, dark part of myself screamed, Yes! Let the wicked house and its demon burn.

  The coldness of that thought would’ve stopped me dead in my tracks if I hadn’t already known there was a dark part of me—like there was in everyone. I recognized my desire for what it was: a quick fix to a problem I couldn’t explain. I couldn’t understand my immediate loathing of the Poirier house or Monroe, as much as I couldn’t understand my desire to fill my lungs with swamp water.

  But in my heart—and my soul—I knew that the world wouldn’t be a better place without Monroe Poirier in it. Without Monroe, a few of the darkest shadows I’d seen wouldn’t allow the light to look so luminescent. And without Monroe in the world, I might never get to see what the flicker of gold in his soul truly looked like.

  We stopped a few yards from the house. A knot in my stomach released itself. The house wasn’t on fire. It had been difficult to see from a distance, since the night shadowed the house in a cloak of twilight. But now I saw the fire was secluded, at least temporarily. The garage, a few feet from the Poirier house, lit up the sky, flames engulfing the wooden exterior, smoke pouring and spouting from its open windows. The fire crackled and clawed its way through the small garage, bringing down planks of wood as it did.

  The flames were hypnotizing, much like the ones in my dreams had been. I stood there, slack-jawed, staring at them, watching them consume, wondering if the impossibly black snake from my dreams would slither out from their pits and make its way to me.

  Coin howled. I snapped my gaze toward where he stood on the front porch, pawing at the door.

  The garage was fully lit up in flames, and while the house seemed to be okay at the moment, I knew the fire could—and would—spread to it.

  I ran up the porch stairs and began pounding against the front door. “Monroe!” Coin barked along with me.

  I called his name over and over, but still the door remained closed, locked tightly. There were no lights on in any of the windows, and if I hadn’t known better, I’d have guessed that the house was empty. But the way Coin was howling and scratching at the door reassured me that Monroe was inside.

  “Step aside,” Ward said.

  I moved to the side, adrenaline forcing me to shake. Ward first tried the handle, stepping into the door, putting his weight into it. Nothing. It didn’t budge even an inch. He took a step back, aimed his shoulder toward the door, and threw his massive frame toward it.

  The door crashed open. The lock on the door broke straight through the frame, splinters of wood fraying and falling to the ground. It slammed against the back of the wall as Ward barged inside. But the moment he stepped into the house, as if a huge gust of wind shoved him, he stepped backward until he was back outside.

  “I cannot go inside that house,” Ward stared into the dark hallway, unblinking, as though something was about to barrel down the hall at him.

  Coin shot in through the door first and I chased after him.

  The inside was almost impossibly dark, as though the house itself had begun to suck all the light out from the universe. Unlike the previous times I’d been there, the air was freezing cold. Cloud puffs of my frozen breath swirled in front of my eyes. I reached my hand out and placed my palm flat against a wall. A thick layer of ice coated the wood, small crystals melting under my warm hand.

  From the next room over, Coin began barking. I rushed down the hallway and into the living room. Coin sat n
ext to the sofa, his muzzle pressing up against Monroe’s hand that hung over the edge. Monroe lay on his back across the couch, unmoving. This time I wasn’t surprised by the dark snake coiled around his jeans-covered leg, or the way the serpent’s yellow eyes seemed to find me in the darkness.

  “Monroe!” I rushed toward him. I put my hands on his shoulders and shook him, trying to wake him. “Wake up!”

  His eyelids flicked. His chest heaved heavily. But he did not wake.

  “Monroe!” My voice cracked. I shoved his chest, hard.

  Monroe’s eye shot open. They were stark white and clear, the color of ice.

  The next thing I knew, I was on my back, on the floor, the air knocked out of my lungs. Monroe sat on top of me, his thick thighs pressed against the outside of my hips. His clear eyes were open, unfocused, not seeing me right beneath him.

  I tried to say his name, but it was only then I realized his hands were around my throat, squeezing. The pain momentarily blinded me. White flashed behind my eyelids. I reached up to stop him, but my hands were useless against his arms. They were vise grips around my neck, his arms as hard as cement.

  I thrashed my arms, my legs, anything I could move. It was pointless. I was a ragdoll beneath him.

  My eyes began to close. His hands felt like the deep, cold waters of the swamp. They were the liquid filling my lungs, stealing my air, forcing me under, deeper and deeper….

  I loved them. I loved his hands and those black waters and the feeling of drowning as fiercely and easily as young lovers loved. Everything was simple. Everything was clear. I would drown in these waters and live forever here in the darkness. And we could love each other, this darkness and I, because it was what we were fated to do.

  “Fuck!”

  The voice sounded familiar, but it was from the other side of the solar system.

  But as easily as it had wrapped itself around me, the darkness pulled away. My eyes shot open. The gentle light stung my eyes, making tears stream from the covers. I began coughing. The pain in my throat was excruciating. I shut my eyes once again, warding off the light, but water continued to pour from the corners, down my cheeks.