by Ezra Blake
Ash takes a step forward. Jake reels back.
He’s going to do it.
The axe flies from his grip and bounces off the tree behind him. It crashes to the ground in two pieces: wooden handle and gleaming head. They gawk at it for a moment.
“I just split thirty logs with that thing,” Jake says.
“The fire’s huge anyway.” Ash crosses his arms and sits in the dirt. “Jake,” he says, “how many people—”
Then a minivan rumbles into the clearing, and that’s it. No conversation. Jake waves manically and initiates an elaborate handshake with Scott and then with the driver, the green-haired guy from the videos. After pleasantries, they launch into an impassioned debate—something about leftover drugs. Scott wants to take them home, and Jake insists there’s no such thing. The only drugs that survive a party are the ones you keep secret.
“Caruso.” Lucas slams the door to his fucking Tesla, beady little eyes locked on the booze. “Scott said there’d be party favors.”
Jake herds his guests into the cabin and presents his cornucopia of snacks and intoxicants to Lucas, who nods approvingly. Then he stands, whips the lid off the trashcan punch, and says, “Here here! Glad you all could make it.”
Though there are only six people here and none of them are clapping, the resulting roar of applause could cause an avalanche. We’re so proud of you, little messiah!
“Thank you,” Jake says. “This is a very special—Mocha.”
“Huh?” She’s nodding out on the couch.
“Stay with us. This is a very special event in honor of my new friend Ash, so please do your best to show him a good time!”
Everyone drinks, even Ash. There’s so little of him that half a solo cup of punch will get him good and loaded, and he must be, because he’s talking to people.
About you, they say, and Jake says Fuck off. Dusk falls.
Ash is roasting a marshmallow. Nobody brought the rest of the ingredients for s’mores, so he and Scott eat them straight from the stick, burning their mouths and picking sticky sugar strings off their fingers.
“I didn’t know they went to school for that,” Scott says. “I thought they just…I dunno, walk into church and say hey, I’ve got a reference from the big man upstairs.”
“I wish. Nah, most of them got a Master’s in divinity at least. I ain’t smart enough for that.” Ash laughs. When he next inhales, the air tastes like helium.
“I thought I wasn’t smart enough for school either, and now I’m gonna be serving wings and selling pills for the rest of my life. You’ll regret not trying.”
He picks marshmallow residue from under his nails. “I didn’t know you sold drugs.”
“Dude, everybody here sells for Jake. Why do you think we hang around?”
“I thought you were best friends.”
“Yeah. I mean, we are.”
They gaze into the crackling fire for a moment, and then Ash jabs his stick into the dirt and says, “I think I need some water.” He passes Jake on the way to the cabin and gives him a little wave. Jake smiles, says something about music, and continues cobbling together extension cords.
He drags the radio toward the fire and fucks with it for twenty minutes, trying to find a station that hasn’t been commandeered by government agents. It will get easier once they have some goddamn music going. Nobody’s talking about him—they’re talking about things they’ve consumed and things they plan to consume, television and drugs and video games—but he can’t shake the feeling. It’d be better if he couldn’t hear at all.
Static curdles into speech: This is happening right now, folks! Premeditated murder just east of New Albany. Our reporters are observing the scene by helicopter—
Click.
But there's a bad man in everyone, no matter who we are, There's a rapist and a nazi living in our tiny hearts—
Click.
Little messiah is saving the Earth! Deliver the package, begin the rebirth!
He yanks the plug out of the power strip and kicks the radio away, cracking the plastic. Lucas glances at him, frowns, and returns to his conversation with Crust.
“Hey,” Jake says, shouldering his way between them. “What are you talking about?”
“Oh…just school,” Lucas says.
“C’mon. Lay it on me.”
“Uh, I was just saying that I’m thinking of changing my major. Accounting is full of boring assholes like you.”
“Accounting is practical,” Jake spits.
“What?” Lucas frowns. “Acoustics, Jake. I’m in acoustics.”
Delirious laughter tickles his eardrums.
“Fuck, uh. Whatever. What’re you changing it to?”
“Dunno. I was thinking maybe economics.” He sips his punch. “I love acoustics but nobody in my course is going anywhere, you know?”
“I’d rather be happy than be going somewhere, you know?”
Crust cracks a smile, catches Lucas’s glare, and immediately schools his expression. The fire pops and crackles. Jake runs a hand through his hair and takes a step backward. “Uh, I’m gonna grab some more hotdogs,” he says. “You guys want anything?”
“Do you have Pepto in there?” Lucas asks.
“Yeah, I’ll look—fuck!” He falls on his ass in the mud. There’s Mocha the human, vomiting right in front of the door. He squeegees grime off the seat of his jeans, puts on his sweetest voice, and says, “Hey, Mocha, think you could do that somewhere else?”
She looks up at him with gigantic eyes. “Have you seen Rose anywhere?”
“Nope. Sorry.” Jake ducks around the corner and wipes his hands on his thighs. The smears look like oil slicks, glimmering with undertones of emerald green and royal blue. He looks up at the forest and stops cold.
The world is moving.
Distances shrink until the skyline mountains soak into his socks. It’s a sound stage more real than reality and it’s all happening now: he is twelve years old, building tiny rock villages for the fairies living under the front porch, and he is twenty-four, killing his first deer. He’s twenty-six and he blinks, and there’s Scott pissing in nature’s majesty, briefly connected to the forest by a golden umbilical cord.
Fuck, he’s coming up hard.
Then he’s inside, and only now exists. There’s Ash, kneeling on the bearskin rug with his head bowed, surrounded by antlers and turkey plumage, a monument to wanton destruction.
“Jake!” He scrambles to his feet and tucks his necklace back into his shirt.
“Hey, Are you okay?”
“Are you okay? You look kinda pale.”
“Yeah, I’m. I’m good. Just wondering where you were. I couldn’t get the music working but the party’s picking up out there.” His jaw is stiff as fiberglass, clicking with every word. “You need anything?”
Ash fidgets with the necklace through his thin shirt. “Could you stay for a minute? I’m feeling kinda weird. Ain’t never drank nothin’ but communion wine.”
The sofa is patterned with subtle thorns which drag them in and wrap them together. Ash clutches a pillow to his chest and gnaws on the neck of his t-shirt as they listen to the wind on the tin roof and the faint, drunken shouting.
He looks up from his saturated shirt collar. “Jake, I got something to tell you.”
A wall of sound slams into the cabin and they both jump. His friends shout incoherently until someone turns it down. Too Young to Fall in Love by Mötley Crüe—must be Scott and his tricked-out mom van.
“Sorry, do you want me to ask him—”
“S’okay,” Ash says. He’s nearly inaudible over the music and Jake’s chattering shadows. They hate hair metal, even though Jake kind of likes Mötley Crüe.
“What were you saying?” He shouts.
The song changes and the voices quiet down. Something from Crust’s drone EP. It’s eerie, but the recording quality is garbage so they can only turn it up so loud. Ash’s black eyes are fixed on some point in the distance, and Jake glanc
es over his shoulder to make sure nobody’s walked in. It’s just the two of them.
“Dude,” he says. “What did you want to tell me?”
Ash’s face warps and bulges like a bad photoshop filter. “I feel really weird.”
“It’s okay, man, you’re just drunk.”
Ash nods, chin bouncing off his jagged collarbones. Then his heat-seeking missile eyes lock on Jake and he says, “Has anybody ever told you that you look like—”
“Homeless Jared Leto? Yeah, all the time.” He laughs and tucks his halo behind his ears, dulling its golden light. Ash blinks.
“Jesus,” he breathes.
“Yeah, not a good look.”
Ash wobbles to his feet, which are billions of miles away from his head. “No, I mean—” he swallows the thurible-sized lump in his throat. “I can’t—oh, Christ. I can’t find no penance in me. I keep looking but it ain’t there.”
Christ looks out from inside his stained glass cage, through paradise peacocks and grazing lambs lined in dull lead.
“Do I—do I gotta say it?”
“What are you trying to say?”
The couch roses snake up his arms and wind their thorns around him. Ash says, “God, I thought I’d know how to do this.”
“You should sit down, dude.”
Ash doesn’t. He takes a few breaths of consummate glory. “I ain’t been respecting my mother and father, first off.” His hands are shaking and shaking and shaking and he can’t stop them; he can’t remember how many fingers he’s supposed to have. “I hated them so much when they sent me to that school, and I was scared. I know they just wanted to save me.”
“Wait, what?”
“But after, in the shelter—I shoulda never asked. If he was gonna do it, he woulda did it himself without me asking, and I shoulda never kissed—” his stomach heaves. He looks up, alarmed, to find the stained glass exploding into a slow-motion prism, twisting through dimensions he didn’t know existed. “Oh God,” he mutters. “They didn’t say nothing about this.” The glass shatters. The room is shrinking around him like plastic wrap in an oven, clinging to his skin, suffocating him. “Jake,” he moans. “Where are you? Jake?”
“Hey, hey. Calm down.” The origami prism folds and folds into nothing, and there’s a hand on his wrist, solid. Warm. “It’s okay. I’m right here. Ash? I’m right here.”
“Help me,” he blurts. “God I know I ask you this all the time but please don’t let me die ‘til I’m forgiven, please show me how to be sorry, please keep me alive until then—”
“Ash.” The hand, veins and bones and cellophane skin, touches his cheek. “Take some deep breaths, okay? You haven’t done anything wrong.”
“I did!” He wails. “I’m still—still—I—”
“So what if you did? Everybody does stupid shit.” He shrugs. His hair is drifting seaweed around his shoulders. “I forgive you,” he says. “If that matters.”
All the air is punched from his lungs. The writhing walls flatten.
“You do?”
“Sure,” he says. He wraps his arms around Ash’s shoulders and presses his face close, into the golden fleece of his hoodie. “Of course, dude. Whatever you did. It’s fine.”
He pulls away. Stumbles toward the kitchen. He finds something sharp and holds it close to his chest, and when he turns around, Jake is leaning on the wall, running a jerky hand through his hair, shimmering.
“Is that…it?” Ash asks.
“Uh. Usually it lasts a couple of hours.”
He wobbles to the couch and throws his arms around Jake’s bony shoulders, buries his face in Jake’s greasy hair. Jake is tense, which doesn’t make sense until he pulls away to find himself still holding the knife. He thrusts it into Jake’s hand. The soft sound of his closing palm echoes through the mountains.
“Now?” Jake asks.
“You said it only lasts a few hours. I wanna do it while it’s fresh.”
“Shit, Ash. You sure? I kinda wanted to—” he glances toward the screen door. “Show people. I wanted to wait ‘til it kicked in for everybody.”
Ash places one hand on his waist and the other on the knife. He leans closer until his breath warms Jake’s face and the tip of the blade is pressed into his belly. “Why do you care about them?” He asks. “They don’t care about you.”
Jake’s soul crumples like a printer jam.
“No, listen. I care about you. That’s why it should just be us.”
“But you’ll be gone.”
“You’ll see me again. You’re going to heaven for this.”
Jake opens his mouth to say something about dogma, but then he’s full of brilliant, strobing pictures: clouds like cotton, golden fractal branching oaks. “Are you sure?” He asks. “Like really, really—”
“I’m sure,” Ash says. “Please. Please do it.”
He places a hand on the small of Ash’s back.
The door bursts open. Lucas falls inside, trailed by his own ghost, and covers his mouth with his hand. He chokes back vomit. Then he looks up. His eyes bulge.
“What the fuck is going on?”
Lucas is here and he is still at the door. Lucas is dripping black ink and the knife is flying through the air like a blow dart. It bounces off the refrigerator and clatters to the ground.
“Crazy bastard!” THUD. “What did you give us?”
Swollen cheek, split lip. Fuck. Pain is red and blue and ultraviolet, pouring from his nose and down his shirt. The radio switches back to Mötley Crüe and everyone inside him starts screaming.
“Jake, what did you do?”
That’s Ash, apple knocking knees, smooth face made of eyelashes. Fuck, fuck, holy Fuck, nothing! He says. Does he? I didn’t do anything!
SHOUT! SHOUT!
“What did you give us? They’re losing it out there!”
SHOUT AT THE DEVIL!
“It’s just acid, it’s clean, I tested it—”
“Jesus, you’re sick!”
“Jake? Jake, what is—Jake? What do I—”
“I’m sick? Me? There’s videos, Lucas, you’re—” half a dozen limp girls on a bare mattress, one after the other “—fucking raping people for, you give them drugs so they—”
“Fuck you!” THUD. “Where the hell do you get off calling me—”
“STOP! STOP, DON’T TOUCH HIM!”
“Are you kidding? This psycho was trying to kill you!”
THUD. Crucifix, pooling tar, tic-tac candy teeth, keep it up, little messiah, you’re doing great!
“STOP!”
He’s the knife in your back, he’s rage.
“Back the FUCK OFF!”
In seasons of wither, we’ll stand and deliver.
Hands. Heat. Sneaker soles oil slick slipping, there’s the door, run, run. Drag him. Go go go go. SHOUT AT THE DEVIL!
“HELP!” Jake screams.
Ash’s wrists crackle in his palms. A crowd, faces, uniform adulation. Flames climbing into the ether. He grips Ash’s shoulders and is bathed in the pure, indiscriminate love of Being. So close. The Answer is in the fire, in Ash’s crackling flesh—
Then he’s yanked backward through the veil and into screaming chaos, pain, smoke. Colors drip and pool like candle wax. A million hands drag him away from enlightenment and throw him in the mud. Ash slips from his grasp and darts for the tree line. The blurred memory of his shape chases after him.
“No!” A million twisted, leering faces. “ASH, NO! Get the fuck off me, Ash, come back!”
Fading voices: It’s acid! He spiked the punch! “No, I just wanted—” What the fuck, Jake? “No listen, LISTEN!” He’s bleeding, we should—I can’t believe you’d—Lucas, leave him the hell alone!
Bushes, brambles, ankle-biting Baphomet. Ash runs until his legs give out and then he stands up and runs some more. The Devil is hot on his tail, hoof prints in front of him and hoof prints behind.
Two ear-splitting bangs echo through the trees.
Elsewhere: BA
CK UP! EVERYBODY BACK UP, I HAVE A GUN!
Chapter 12
Jake picks the pistol off the porch railing and tucks it back into his pants. Every thought, every friendship, and every beautiful song eventually dissipates into nothing.
Camp has real pine trees but smells like stale air freshener. The fire has burnt down to crematory embers. His demons skitter through the tight-lipped tulips bracketing the rotting hammock, and Jake lies on his back, watching irregular bursts of moonlight strobe through the clouds. His breath stretches endlessly into the apathetic sky.
Right now, Scott is piloting a minivan full of dissociating, mud-streaked millennials down the I-476 toward Philadelphia. They left half their shit here, including two cars, and they haven’t answered his texts. They aren’t going to send him mental health resources and they don’t want to know if he’s okay. They’re gone. And nobody knows what happened to Ash.
He’s hanging by the neck, sightless eyes bulging out of his head, swaying in the breeze like an unholy piñata. He’s disemboweled, water balloon organs deflating as his fluids soak into the forest floor.
This is Jake’s responsibility. He sits up.
“ASH!” He yells. “Where are you?”
The forest continues its chaotic symphony. Smells like it might rain.
After a few laps around the perimeter of the clearing, the cold air chaps his face and builds ice sculptures in his ribcage. Screaming hurts. He digs his boots into the mud and trudges toward the car, where he deposits the gun, and then to the cabin, where he’ll sleep and wait for time to start up again. Ash belongs to Gaia now. The birds will peck out his eyes and botflies will lay eggs in the soft curve of his belly, and it will happen whether or not Jake finds him.
As he passes the porch, something smashes into his ankles at full force.
Then he’s on his ass again in the wet soil, and Mocha the terrier is assaulting his face with her tongue and stamping muddy paw prints on his shirt.
“Oh, shit.”
She leaps off his lap and zooms around the fire pit several times. She scurries to Jake’s abandoned jacket, tries to dig a hole in it.
“Shit. You are not supposed to be here.”