“Do you like strawberry shortcake?” Jessica asks, laying out a plate for me and pulling out a chair.
A silly feeling, I think, reminding myself of the years since I left home, the countless nights hunkering through the darkness and moving from one backseat to another, filling my life with the most basic things needed to survive. I try to remember the cold, brick walls of my alley, but it is hard surrounded by these walls.
“Sure,” I say, sitting down.
We eat sugary goodness in silence and it makes my mind and body feel light.
“If you couldn’t tell by the stew,” Bill says, “Jessica has always been the cook. First thing I ever loved about her.” Their hands touch and their eyes meet and a form of passion passes between them that’s foreign to me.
After we are done, Bill and I are alone again. We sit at the table while Jessica cleans off the remaining dishes. Curiosity and questions crawl their way back into my mind.
“How long have you two been together?” I ask.
“Forty-two years,” Bill says. Jessica makes her way back to his side with a steaming cup of coffee.
“Coffee, Max?”
“No, thanks,” I say, my stomach more bloated than it’s ever been. We sit in silence awhile. Uneasiness tickles my skin.
After a few more minutes, my better instincts kick in and I say I should be going. I get up from the table.
“Don’t go,” Bill says. He exchanges a nervous look with Jessica and then turns back to me with pleading eyes.
“There’s something we should talk about first,” Jessica says, her light touch pulling me back to my seat.
“Did you like dinner?” Bill asks, sounding more awkward and robotic than before.
“Yes.”
“You liked everything, didn’t you?” says Jessica.
“Everything?” I ask. She looks around the room and then back to me.
“The food. The house. People —”
“Family,” Bill finishes for her, his hand cradling hers again.
“I’ve seen you before,” Jessica says, her eyes falling to the table, “before The News, I mean … I’d seen you around that grocery store and walking downtown.”
I can hear my heart racing and feel my palms dampen. Jessica opens her mouth to speak again, but she stops. She buries her face in coffee. Bill clears his throat and takes the reigns.
“Jessica and I … we’ve led a good life, Max. We’ve loved each other and helped each other. We’ve been good people, good parents, good workers, good neighbors. I know someone like yourself … you’ve probably been deprived of a lot of that love and that goodness. Jessica and I, we —”
“We want you to live here,” she nearly shouts, turning to me, a sharpness in her eyes I haven’t seen until now.
“We want you to live with us and we want to share this goodness and this love with you,” Bill says.
“We just want one thing from you in return,” Jessica adds, her spidery hand swimming to my knee, her wedding ring twinkling beneath one of the overhead kitchen lights.
“We have needs like anyone else,” Bill says. “We want to have you here. We like you. We think you deserve to be here. Tonight was perfect proof of that. But, Jessica and I, we have things we’ve come to realize recently that we have never experienced, things we want, things that life has deprived us of that we want now with a hunger you can’t imagine.” Bill’s eyes change and look like his wife’s now. My insides claw against my chest. I close my eyes, Jessica’s hand on my leg growing tighter and moving upward. I close my eyes and try to remember the fleeting moment after everything changed. How freeing it was.
I open my eyes when memories of the feeling fail to appear and see the two staring at me with the “hunger” Bill had described. I look around and the place is as cold and lonely as my alley.
Without another look to Jessica or Bill, I get up and walk toward the front door. If they try to stop me, I don’t notice. I’m back outside in the cold and lighting a fresh cigarette before they can say another word. The heat of the cigarette massages my full stomach.
I begin walking down the street, smoking to keep warm, realizing as I move my feet, one in front of the other, that my dream has finally come true. I have no fucking idea where I am.
200 days left
“I am so happy we can share this together.” I look to my son, soaked in red. He is someone I don’t recognize, someone I am proud of. “I love you,” I say, feeling the resistance from the dried blood on my lips.
I stand next to my son, blissfully taking in our work which paints the room from the walls to the dripping ceiling to the now pooled over hardwood floors, a job I’d watched the husband finish only a week ago. I move my tongue across my lips, giving everything one last taste. I turn to my son, his attention fully consumed by the aftermath before him. My heart is more open than ever before. The News was the best thing that ever happened to me.
A few more moments pass and I tell my son it is time to go. We wash what is most noticeable from our bodies and put our clothes back on. I take one more look before we leave and smile, knowing it’s my best work yet.
I start the car, the engine immediately turning over, as smooth as ever. I pull out of the driveway into the fog of the early morning and drive down the dirt road. I shoot occasional, curious glances to my silent son, trying not to be obvious.
His attention focused on the passenger window and passing foliage, I tell my son that I love him again.
“I love you too,” he says without looking at me. I leave him be. Perhaps he needs to let it all soak in on his own for a bit. I watch my knuckles while I drive, a thin layer of blood caked onto them. It makes me smile and feel tall and good. It’s why I never clean myself completely after it’s all done. A light scrubbing still leaves you with the trophies of what happened.
A few moments of quiet driving while you soak in your conquers and the stenches of every vile thing you did. I feel it. I enjoy feeling it. I love the way it makes my skin tingle and my mind float. I hope my son feels it too.
Driving through the morning fog, I let my mind wander. I let the memories of the morning wash over me like a warm shower. I feel my heart jump and I crave the same yearning that came from the hunt, from the blood, from seeing my son connect himself to me more than ever before. There is nothing closer to the true nature of love than taking life together.
I look to my son again. He’s going over his hands with his eyes. They are rougher now. It’s clear even beneath the blood. I wonder for a moment whose blood it is. The mother’s. The child’s. It doesn’t matter. That’s what’s so beautiful about war paint.
The blood nestling itself into my skin through my pores makes me think of their eyes, watching them be carried off. It’s strange having seen so many make the small leap from life to death and to still know nothing of what they feel, like a bartender deprived of the very poison he serves. A piece of me feels excited for the end, feels ready to make that leap, to understand that small flicker of loss that occurs before we all leave forever.
We drive for another few minutes, me lost in thought, my son no doubt the same, until we reach the abandoned gas station.
It looks no different than before. Deserted. Hollow. The nozzles on the pump are rusted and the building is covered in fading and undecipherable graffiti. Without speaking, we both exit the car and head toward the restroom.
The stench is as harsh and thick as before. I grab the cleaning supplies I left in one of the stalls and we both undress and begin scrubbing. I’m sad to lose the blood and I’m sadder to watch my son lose it.
Washing blood is perhaps the most difficult task one can do. It stains you, gets in your pores, latches to your soul. People can scrub and scrub for hours until they finally give in with a pinkish stain still painted on their skin.
With years behind me, I know the tricks to fighting it off with relative ease. Silently, I help my son scrub and wash himself of the evidence of the morning. I show him the small tricks i
n movement it takes to wipe away the staining red.
My son makes the mistake of scrubbing in short strokes and with unnecessary force. I smile, seeing a portal into my own past. I show him to take the cloth and give big strokes with just enough force behind them. Wiping my son down, our eyes meet for the first time since he cut the youngest boy’s throat.
When we are done, washed of our prey, we change into the fresh clothes I stored in a trash bag above one of the ceiling tiles. As my son changes, his eyes begin making me nervous. They are too quiet, too distant.
“How do you feel, Jason?” I ask.
“I’m fine,” he says, washing the sink of remaining blood. I grab him by the shoulder and turn him to me. His eyes dart around the room, avoiding mine.
“Jason,” I say, “is there a part of you that feels good, free, like something you’ve never felt before?”
“Yes,” he says. I hold his face with both of my hands and force his eyes into mine.
“Then embrace it. The rest is all lies. That part is me … in your blood.” My hand falls to his heart. Our eyes hold each other for a long time. I smile at him as best I can, and he wraps his arms around me, something he hasn’t done since he could barely talk.
My son lets go of me and I watch as he finishes cleaning the sink and then throws our dirty clothes in the trash bag and leaves the room. He is a now man and I watch him with pride.
I leave the bathroom, the sun beginning to rise and greet the world, the open-air welcoming to my senses after the assaulting claustrophobia from the thick odors of the bathroom.
I go to my trunk and grab the waiting lighter fluid and matches. I walk to the back of the store where I see Jason exactly where he needs to be. The bag of clothes is at his feet and he stands in front of the large barrel we’d found when scoping the gas station before.
“Throw the clothes in,” I say, which he immediately complies with. I open the cap to the lighter fluid and spray a thin layer on top of the bag. I hand the matches to my son. Jason lights one, the spark reflecting off his pupils. He takes in the fast burning flame for a moment before dropping it and we watch as the last remnants of the morning erupt into flames and burn themselves to ashes. We stand and watch awhile, my arm around my son, the warmth of the fire embracing us both.
The next morning, I wake with a headache. It’s happened every day since The News. I hate it and don’t understand it. The scratching in my skull has become how each day greets me. I wonder if it is how the world lets everybody know they are still alive now.
I get up, careful not to wake my wife who has taken to sleeping until noon these days, something my body and mind will never allow me to do. I move down the hallway quietly and slowly, the house still and undisturbed. I love this house when it is like this. It’s the only time it truly feels like a home.
I peek into my son’s room to see him sound asleep, recharging from the first day of the rest of his life. I head downstairs to make my coffee in solitude.
After the coffee grinds and brews, I pour it into my #1 DAD coffee mug and sit in my same morning spot at the kitchen table facing the sliding glass doors leading to our backyard. These moments are peaceful, valuable, especially on a day like today. I find it gives my mind a few moments to be unburdened, to be free to roam wherever it chooses.
I think about my son, of course, because there is still so much to think about when it comes to him. I wonder what is storming in his mind. I think about the stone look on his face as he held the knife, as he watched them scream and then gargle on their insides.
I shouldn’t worry so much. He is like me. He has always been like me. I knew even before The News that he was like me. From the moment I found the snuff films on his laptop two years ago from some corner of the internet, I knew. It wasn’t until the day everything changed that I had any idea of what to do with that knowledge.
I laugh to myself thinking about those videos. Short, choppy, so clearly fake. I hope he didn’t pay for them. If there was a God, I would thank him for The News. I finally love my son the way I’ve always yearned to.
I sip more of the hot, soothing liquid and let the images from yesterday’s shared hunt play on the projector in my mind, savoring the memories before filing them away with all the others. The splitting of the boy’s throat after Jason cut it in his sleep. The way he flailed for breath like a fish as he turned the room bright red. The look on the husband’s face, tied and helpless, as I gave his wife the best night of her life, a night that trumped all others, a night that defined her. The way we stabbed the man together, again and again, already dripping with the spoils of the other kills, watching as we turned him inside out. Father and son.
It’s what we were meant to do, I think, enjoying the thought and enjoying my coffee more than I’ve ever enjoyed a cup of anything. And we will do so much more of it, I think.
I take another small sip of coffee and feel my throat reject it and watch it silently splatter on the table. My mind wonders what is happening, but it is too slow. It’s playing catch-up with my body.
I feel a thick and deep sharpness, a pain I don’t recognize in my side, below my rib. I’m warm, warmer than I’ve ever been, like a burst of burning fluid is going off inside of my body. And as quickly as the heat and pain take hold, I then feel cold maneuvering and slicing its way through my insides.
I slump and look to the floor to see my broken mug, only the red #1 left intact, the coffee swimming its way across the tiled floor. I see it mixing with the same red that spewed out of the boy’s open neck, the same red I’d washed off my son only hours before.
Another sharp pain, quicker this time, unleashes in my side again. It’s harder and fiercer now, more painful. I want to scream, but I can’t.
I feel another burst of fluid as the foreign object slides out of me. The coldness is spreading more quickly, taking hold of my throat and choking me. My head swivels to the side using every bit of strength I have and the knife is the first thing I see. Flashes of Jason’s knife dripping from the night before flicker across the projector, still playing reels in my mind.
The knife drips with fresh blood. Muscles in my lower body contract and spasm and I try to stand, but fall to the floor. I don’t feel the impact, which I know is not good. I lay face down, my morning coffee and my warm blood painting my face. I try to force my eyes up to see my assailant, but I already know who is holding the knife. When he steps over me and makes his way into my eyesight, he is even more covered in red than the night before.
It can’t be all my blood. Most must be his mother’s.
I try to breathe out of instinct, but my mind knows it’s over as each breath becomes more and more shallow. I want to flail, to fight as the feeling of drowning begins overtaking my lungs, but I’m a dying man, too deep below the surface to ever swim up for a final breath.
I try to talk, to say something to my son as the world becomes more and more of a shadow, but only fluid leaves my mouth. I don’t know what I would say, anyway. I’ve told him everything I know, taught him everything he needs to know. Feeling colder and more still, I want to feel betrayal, disappointment, all the things I should feel. Instead, I feel right. I feel like I’m looking into the eyes of the mother again, or the father as his pupils darted from Jason to me, back to Jason. I feel like I’m watching my son’s face again as he took his first life. My vision blurs more, the outline of my son disappearing.
Everything feels right as I remember the night before, remember cleaning my son. I close my eyes.
8 days left
How fucking predictable the whole goddamn world turned out to be. The taste is a little off, but the ingredients haven’t changed.
The rodents scurrying around me are what I always thought them to be — vapid and silly creatures looking to eat and fuck and take what they can, when they can. They are animals cursed with a consciousness they have no idea what to do with.
The screaming fury of the engine is good to command and I do my best to focus on it and le
t everything else drown into nothingness.
When the taste of smoke drives its way into my throat and begins stabbing my skin, I try thinking about her and the now lonely ring, but it’s no use. The taste is so damn close, I get parched and unfocused at the faintest hint of a craving.
I push my foot down, the car barely resisting, the slow moan of the engine seductive and thrilling. For a moment, I’m in complete control.
Damn cigarettes. I flicker images through my mind, but it doesn’t help. Everywhere my head turns, there they are. So close. So damn close.
Before I know it, people and buildings begin to disappear. I think about stopping somewhere to find something to eat before I get too far, but I convince myself that the hunger is good. I know I’m not hungry in any normal sense, anyway. I haven’t been hungry for food in a long time. What I really want to do is hurt something. I’m itching for it.
The last name on the list was nearly a week ago and an electricity runs from my heart to my fingertips every time I think about someone else, someone new. I know it won’t be long now, but the want still eats away at my insides.
I tell myself again the hunger is good and the hunger is right as the pedal and my foot slam to the floor.
As the buildings become scattered and the roadway more open, I throw in a tape from the glove compartment and listen to Dwight Yoakam sing about crying himself to sleep and lonely streets he calls home.
His voice is a brief comfort.
“There ain't no glamour in this tinseled land of lost and wasted lives” he lets out as I turn the volume up.
Before too long, Sarah slips her way back into my brain like a bad desire I can’t shake. Leaving her ring did no fucking good. It is no use telling myself she was a fantasy, a peak that simply can’t exist in this reality. She was an escape from it all, and escapes never last long.
Nigh Page 5