Twisted Fate (Tales of Horror)

by Saul, Jonas

  It’s not my fault.

  Jimmy shouldn’t have touched me like he did.

  It wasn’t my fault he died all those years ago when we were ten.

  We reach the back door and he opens it. Entering the house is tricky because I can’t stand beside him supporting his arm anymore so he takes the lead by feel.

  I wonder why I don’t feel remorse for what I did. Maybe because I’m harmless. He shouldn’t have put a gun in my neck when all I wanted were leaves. Maybe this is a lesson he needs to learn.

  I follow him out of a room where shoes and coats go, past a washer and dryer and into a narrow hallway. There aren’t any lights on, but I don’t think the half-blind stranger really minds.

  I stop at a door where the stranger entered and wait. Why didn’t I put the long gun down? I’m still holding it in the hallway of this stranger’s house. I could’ve put it on the dryer or the washer. I step back into the laundry room and try to lift the long gun up onto the washing machine. It snags on something. I pull hard, but it’s still snagged. I look down and see my umbrella’s wooden handle has gotten caught in the trigger guard.

  What are the odds?

  I twist the gun and give it one last pull, but this time a roar belts out as the gun fires and jerks in my hands. The recoil bites into my unprepared shoulder, tearing at it like a noose yanking on a neck.

  A serious fire shoots through my arm. My eyes widen at how much pain my shoulder is experiencing.

  A hole has formed in the drywall. I can see into the hallway, through the hole.

  The woman I saw in the upper window appears before me. The pain must be intense because I hadn’t noticed her standing there. She has a large rolling pin in her hand.

  Before I can get out of the way, she’s on me. I try to protect my head, but my left arm isn’t working well and my right arm is pinned to my chest. It had been holding my aching shoulder.

  She hit me on the head. I’m not sure what I’m feeling now. There’s a pounding, but I can’t breathe too well. My shoulder still doesn’t feel like it belongs to me. I try to move my head, but it aches. I move it anyway. I’m screaming now.

  The woman is convulsing on top of me. Her weight makes it difficult to breathe. I roll and she falls off. My nose inhales deep, my lungs fill, the pounding in my head drops from a ten to a seven.

  Something moves in the doorway. My stranger is there, his face still red. No doubt called by the roar of the long gun and the shriek of the strange woman.

  “Asthma,” is all he says before he bolts from the doorway.

  He’s back now with an inhaler or puffer or whatever they call it.

  I lean against the wall, the gun beside me. The woman is sitting up. She appears to be breathing better. My stranger can see and talk, although his eyes are very red. He’s explaining to the odd woman what happened and how stupid he must have been. He should never have entered the house with pepper spray on his face and a lingering scent on me. He should’ve known she’d get a reaction to it.

  The woman says the word, police.

  I use the wall to stand. Halfway up, I grab the long gun. Might need something to defend myself if the police are coming.

  The strange man looks at me with a question on his face. I shrug and gasp. Man does my shoulder hurt. Funny how I took for granted a shrugging motion, and now it tosses coal on the flames of a fire I can’t ignore.

  “What are you gonna do, Mister?” the stranger asks.

  I don’t talk much to people. They’re okay, but years ago I decided I wouldn’t talk to people anymore. Only when I really had to. I even pretend at times that I can’t talk. I use a pen and paper to communicate with tellers, waitresses, and cab drivers. I point at my mouth and show them with my hands that I can’t use it.

  All my life people have laughed at me when I talked. It wasn’t always this way. Only after I was nearly killed by those teenagers. I was beat up to within an inch of my life the doctor said. Brain damage. But it never took away my love of leaves, so it’s okay.

  At least I remember why I was beat up. It was because of the death of Jimmy Urdith. No one believed me when I said it wasn’t my fault. They laughed at me then and they laugh at me now.

  So I try really hard not to talk to people.

  I step away from the man and the odd woman on the floor and lock the bolt on the laundry room door. I use the long gun’s barrel to point them up and out of the room. I push and prod them into the living room.

  The redness in the man’s face is diminishing. It looks like everyone’s going to be fine. I’m happy about that.

  Except if the police come. Then I will have to explain things. And I don’t want to talk. I just want to pick leaves and go home. I only want my leaves.

  Why can’t everyone just let me be?

  When I saw the woman in the window on the phone she must have been calling the police. Especially when she saw her man being guided to the house, his face a mask of tears. With me holding the strange man’s gun, it might have made her think I was hostile. Why didn’t I realize this earlier? I shake my head back and forth and smack my temple.

  The living room has a long couch where I get them to sit. I use shoelaces to tie up their feet. I don’t want hostages, I only want them out the way while I do a field press on my new-found leaves. Then I will exit this strange house in a strange land owned by strange people, by way of the back door and disappear.

  They will never see me again.

  I figure the cops will take at least fifteen minutes to get to this remote setting. I had spent ten here already. I need to hurry.

  I am happy with all my clear thinking. This is becoming fun in a way. I haven't been in control of a crisis for a long time. Neat how it all comes back to you, dealing with issues that are unpleasant.

  I run to the kitchen. I set the long gun on the counter, locate the wax paper and rip a strip off. I flatten it out on the kitchen table and place my satchel down. I carefully take the leaves out of the magazine pages and set them gently on the wax paper. I make sure they are flat and ready.

  Now I need newspaper. After a frantic minute of running around the house I can’t find any. I walk into the garage and locate a recycle bin. There’s enough in it for my purpose.

  When I get back to the kitchen something’s different. I place the newspaper on top of my leaves and look around. For some reason I can’t figure out what’s different about the kitchen.

  It’s time to leave. But first I want to check on the strangers in the living room. I go to the counter to pick up the gun, but it’s gone.

  That’s what was different. The gun’s missing.

  My stomach rolls. My shoulder still throbs. My head feels like it’s an egg that got cracked. But I need to do what I don’t want to do. I need to check on the strangers in the living room.

  When I get there, the living room is empty.

  Why are they doing this? I just want my leaves. I just want to go home. I wish everyone would leave me alone. I didn’t ask for this.

  It’s the same when Jimmy followed me into the woods that day. We walked and walked, looking at all the trees and their wonderful leaves. We marveled at the colors, shapes and sizes. After about three hours on our own, Jimmy wanted to head back to the teacher and the rest of the students. I didn’t.

  We argued. I remember walking away from him. He grabbed my arm and spun me around. I was shocked. He yelled at me. He said we had to return to the group. We had to go back to school. We were supposed to go home.

  He had touched me, yelled at me. Those two actions made me run. I always run when people touch me too much or when people yell at me.

  Jimmy was found dead a week later. He got lost on his way back to the school bus.

  It wasn’t my fault.

  I ran from my dad. He always yelled. He died from yelling when I was twelve. Yelled and yelled and yelled. Then his heart blew up.

  I come back to the room in my head. The strangers are not where I put them. Maybe they left the
house. I’ll get my leaves and go.

  I turn and discover the strange man has the long gun. It’s pointed at my midsection.

  “Get down,” he says.

  Now what do I do? I don’t want to get shot. For my leaves, for my Honey Locust leaves, I get to my knees.

  “All the way. To your stomach.”

  I refuse to talk so I shake my head back and forth.

  The strange man raises the gun to his eye and points it at my face. We’re in a long hallway, the living room opening to my right and I think he might shoot me.

  “I said all the way down.”

  I shake my head again.

  There are footsteps behind me. For fear of being shot, I don’t move. I want to turn around, but I don’t want a bullet for it.

  “I thought I told you to get outside and stay outside,” he says to the owner of the footsteps behind me.

  “I know, but I can’t leave you alone.” It’s the woman’s voice. “What if you needed my help?”

  “I don’t need no help. I was just getting him to the ground so as to tie him up until the police get here.”

  “He don’t look like he’s on the ground. He’s only on his knees.”

  “I was working on it. Now let me do this.”

  The long gun takes up its position, aimed at me again. I push off the wall on my left and dive for the dirty rug on the floor of the living room.

  A loud boom echoes throughout the house. My hearing disappears. I race my hands over my body. No blood. No wounds.

  I scramble to my feet as my hearing ebbs back. But all I hear is screaming. A woman screaming.

  She was directly behind me in the hallway. The gun went off. I wasn’t there to get hit. She got hit.

  The strange man is a blur as he runs by the living room alcove. I peek around the corner. He’s on the floor, holding the woman’s foot. It looks like an ankle wound. She’ll live.

  I bolt for the kitchen. My field press is waiting. I carefully wrap a string around the newspaper like a present and pick it up. When I peek into the hallway, the man has set the gun down. He’s got a cloth of some kind. I can see he’s applying pressure to the woman’s wound.

  I hate her screams. I have to leave. In three steps I’m in the laundry room. I unlock the deadbolt and move out into the early evening air.

  A voice comes at me from all sides.

  “We heard a gunshot. Is everyone okay in there?”

  It sounds like one of those handheld metal things cops use to make their voices louder.

  “We’ve got the place surrounded.”

  I look left and right. I don’t see anybody. I drop my shoulders and start for the trees. Maybe they won’t see me.

  I’ve done nothing wrong. I helped a man back to his house. This is all a bad case of mistakes.

  I’m running hard. I’m thirty yards from the trees. I’m going to make it. I feel great.

  “Hey! You there! Freeze!”

  I hate it when people yell at me. I always run when people yell.

  “STOP! POLICE!”

  I run harder. I didn’t run hard enough when the boys came to put boots to my head all those years ago. The trees are steps away now. Shelter, security, and comfort await me.

  I already hear the trees calling my name.

  Serenity can be found in the strangest of places, the oddest times. I thought of the many journeys I’ve had in forests just like the one I’m entering. How many times I’ve sat and stared at the sky while having lunch. How many times I’ve fallen asleep in a bed of grass and soft leaves.

  Ohhh, the leaves. How I love leaves.

  My arm doesn’t hurt anymore. I feel whole. When I sit up, I’m surprised at how fast I’m standing. It was like I stood with the effort of a thought.

  I see my satchel on the ground. I see the umbrella, too. It’s still attached to the side of a man the police officers are surrounding.

  One of the cops is using both hands to push on my chest. They’ve holstered their weapons. They must have shot me.

  The field press sits by itself a few feet from my body. I’m standing by it now. My fingers try to touch the Honey Locust leaves before they’re blown away in the breeze.

  They tumble from me. My soul aches. My spirit cries. I can feel it.

  I’m a leaf collector.

  I love leaves and they love me. We have an understanding. They whisper my name. They never yell.

  I look around. The trees have won. All I ever wanted was to leave a legacy. All I ever wanted was to be loved, adored.

  I had trespassed one too many times in a forest where the trees didn’t want me taking from their crowns.

  But in the end, I don't blame the trees. I know in their own way they love me because I love them.

  After the light allows me passage to a new home, I have all the lovely trees I can handle. I play with the leaves and set up displays and rummage through forests for hours and hours.

  I love leaves and they love me.

  I’m home now. No one yells here.

  I’m a leaf collector.

  Blood Money

  I can’t believe that I’m actually doing this. People might see me. What if it’s someone I know? My neighbors wouldn’t laugh, but my friends would and isn’t that an injustice?

  I’m not a thief.

  There, I said it. Everyone seems to think so after cops found me sitting in a stolen car. The car was removed from its rightful owner by a friend of mine. At least I thought he was my friend. He picked me up to cruise in his new car. I actually thought he’d just bought it. Guy bailed on me at the first sight of cops.

  The fact that I’m picking up garbage on the side of the highway is because I was ordered to do this community service for ten hours by a judge who didn’t want to listen to reason. I know everyone says it, but in this case, I actually am innocent.

  A car raced by me as I reach for another piece of garbage. I looked too fast. The cut on my forehead made me wince. I touched the bandage with my palm. My supervisor sat on the other side of the road having coffee and chatting with one of the other community service guys.

  Here’s my chance to hide from public view.

  I drop below the edge of the highway and make my way into the ditch. It’s quite wide, opening to a flat area about twenty feet long before another small drop into a line of trees. This is the perfect area to pick up garbage without being seen by anyone driving by.

  It’s not just me I’m protecting here, it’s my brother. He’s second in charge at the police station in our little town of 15,000 people. Everyone talks about everything in this shitty hole of a town and I wouldn’t want him embarrassed more than he already is.

  Thinking of him reminded me about tonight. He’s supposed to be coming over for pizza and beer.

  I notice a small tree bent in half to my right. If it was a storm that caused this deformation, how come none of the other trees around it seem to have any damage? I realize that I’m probably too far from the shoulder of the highway but I have to get a closer look. I drop down a six-foot embankment and step up to the little tree. There’s a large gouge in the earth about three feet behind it.

  Something huge came through here. I part the branches of the small pines and see a car upside down, items from the interior spread out on the grass. Where it sits, this vehicle would never be noticed from the highway. When I was five feet away I couldn’t see it because the tree line was so thick.

  I want to search the car but wonder if I’m going to find dead people. I hope not. The last thing I need is to be in the newspapers for discovering a dead body.

  Much to my relief, there are no humans here, dead or alive. I notice a garbage bag perched on the sill of the broken back window. There’s a rip in the bag.

  I gasp when I see a wad of hundred dollar bills sticking out of the rip.

  I tear the bag open and discover it’s full of bundles of hundreds. It looks like they’re wrapped fifty to a pack, which would be five-thousand-dollar bundles. I ded
uce that I’m looking at half a million dollars or more.

  Questions race through my mind while my heart rate triples. Do I report it? Or do I take the money home and let someone else find the car one day? The court’s already convicted me of a theft that I didn’t do. I might as well just take it. This can’t be called theft because I found it.

  I have to decide and decide now. No one can see me from the highway. If my supervisor happens along, I’m toast. Since it appears no one was hurt here, and whoever was in this car accident left the bag of money behind, then I guess it’s mine.