Four Crows

by Lily White

  On the day I was deployed to go fight in the Middle East, my boy had been holding this rabbit tightly in his arms while I held the boy tightly in mine. My body shook as the memories came rushing back and I screamed again when that memory of the last moment I’d held him rebounded in my head. I remembered thinking there was a chance I’d never see him again, but I’d been selfish at the time because I believed it would be me that ended up dead.

  I was the person who’d been heading into a battlefield, and yet it was my young son who’d paid with his life.

  Collapsing down, I hugged the stuffed rabbit to my body, cradling it as if it were Michael himself. Memories flooded me, painful because they were too happy, too optimistic to bear. Everything I’d spent years blocking from my mind was suddenly standing in front of me, mocking me with the horrible truth that I would never touch my son again. I would never hear his voice or smell his skin. I’d failed him because I left him alone.

  I’d failed him.

  And I’d failed my wife.

  There was no telling how much time passed as I laid on the ground helpless to the agonizing assault of memories that plagued me. I was crazed and crippled as the agony ran its brutal course. It leaked out of me with each tear I shed, with every scream and whimper that burst from my throat. As the pain ebbed slowly, the fury returned to take its place, the heat scorching me from the inside, the rage pulling me apart and stitching me back together again until the pain threatened to annihilate me.

  Unable to contain the surge of that which destroyed me - the nameless, faceless reality that tore me apart inside - I pushed up to my feet, stripping everything from the walls, kicking over everything that lay littered on the ground. I punched walls until my knuckles bled. I destroyed whatever object lay motionless in my path. I beat my hands against the cage that sat rusting, but nothing lessened the fury – nothing would bring my son back.

  Wanting nothing more than to destroy the place where my son had taken his last breath, I pushed up from the floor with the dirty, rotting rabbit still tucked under my arm, and I grabbed for the gas cans and matches I’d seen on my way inside.

  I should have taken the photographs from the wall and given them to the police. There were other parents out there like me who were still seeking the answers of what happened to their children. But I wasn’t thinking logically at the moment. All I wanted was vengeance, all I knew was that I needed the godforsaken place destroyed.

  Throwing gasoline over wooden floors and splashing it on the walls, I doused the place until the smell was unbearable. Barely able to breathe oxygen through the fumes, I reached for a match, and stepped towards the door as I struck it and tossed it inside.

  Years of decay burst into flames, and I watched with morbid satisfaction as it all came tumbling down in a brilliant display of chaos and fire.

  Not even watching it burn eased the feeling of utter failure that tore me apart. I breathed in the smoke of its destruction, I allowed the flames to lick at my body. I stood there reveling in the pain of standing so close to its inferno because I deserved that torment. I deserved to burn because, by failing my son, I’d just been another monster, one who’d told him pretty lies before leaving him behind.

  He was helpless.

  I was his hero – his strong, protective soldier.

  And I’d allowed him to die.

  The human body is a wonderful and terrible thing. Wonderful because its design is a marvel of nature and science. Sheltering our vitality in an effort to keep us alive, the body acts without conscious thought. Cells regenerate, injuries are cushioned by the rush of water and fluids, the blood distributes oxygen, nutrients, and energy to the parts of us that work constantly to breathe, to cleanse poisons, to create children, to fuel us through our everyday lives.

  The body allows us to feel emotions, chemicals designed that lead us to laugh, to cry, to love, and to hope. The brain stores our memories. It allows us to dream. And it allows us to think beyond the ordinary to invent and develop, to become part of something bigger than ourselves.

  But there are the terrible parts as well, the seemingly innocuous consequences to our very souls that are part of what it means to be human. I don’t care what religion you subscribe to, because there is one belief that is common amongst them all: we continue to exist once our bodies die, that there is a light inside of us without scientific explanation that carries us into the afterlife. It can’t be touched or seen. It can’t be weighed or measured. But it does exist and it is trapped by the physical body.

  That’s how I felt while sitting in the truck outside the pig farm as Elliot walked from building to building: trapped.

  My soul had been injured by the injustices of my life. Shredded and torn apart, my soul was begging to fly free. The need to escape was the frantic pulse that beat within my veins. The desire to forget was the headache that pounded within my fragile skull. I was tired and weary, disillusioned and forced to stare at the ugly truth that my life until now had been one, big, horrific lie.

  No matter how desperately I wanted to flee this world and all the horror it encompassed, I was trapped within a network of organs, my soul tied down my tendons and veins, my very essence left with gaping holes and sharp edges because my body was too stubborn to die.

  It was a lesson in counterparts, the desire to leave this world in search of something better as opposed to the instinctual and biological drive to survive.

  I was selfish for feeling this way, greedy and weak for wanting to simply fly away.

  I’d been complicit in my family’s crimes. I’d turned a blind eye beneath stars on those long, lonely nights. My mind had shielded me from believing I was responsible. Hidden beneath the comforting blanket of a lie that I was too young to understand, I broke under the weight of truth that now stared me in the face. I hadn’t been too young my entire life. There were plenty of opportunities where I could have tried to do what was right.

  My hatred of this farm sickened me because it was part of the sin I’d committed by complacency. A beacon of remembrance left decaying where it stood, the farm had always been a place in my nightmares – a place I’d chosen to forget while others had died. How many times had my hand been near a phone? Saving people would have taken one call, one written letter, one word spoken to a stranger who strolled by.

  When I looked out over the expanse of rotting buildings and neglected land, I watched the ghosts of my family’s victims staring back at me, their spirits glimmering in the bright sunlight, their expressions twisted with anger for the way I’d turned my head. I couldn’t look at them where they stood restless, I couldn’t apologize to them because it meant I’d have to accept my part in their deaths.

  And while the weight of their lives crawled along my shoulders, I mourned the man who’d stolen them away.

  How fucked up did that make me?

  Several times, my hand moved to unlock the doors. My body prepared to jump down from the truck and run away while Elliot was hidden within the buildings. We were two people on opposite sides of a line that had no way of intermingling. Victim versus monster. Good versus evil. A man desperate to reveal truth versus a woman who knew that truth but had chosen to remain silent.

  But yet, I sat there watching him walk the grounds while remembering every horrible thing I’d done to him. He cared for me despite the lies. He protected me despite the pain I’d caused him. He respected me because he was an honorable man who knew he’d been seduced by evil, but refused to believe there wasn’t something good inside.

  He saw parts of me I never believed existed. His faith in me was true. And for the life of me, I couldn’t see the same person staring back in the mirror that he swore he saw when he looked into my eyes.

  I wept for the man who murdered Elliot’s family, and yet Elliot was strong enough to feel sympathy for my tears.

  He wasn’t just a decent man, he was the bravest man I knew.

  Watching him walk into the network of sheds that sat off to the side of the house t
hat was falling down on top of itself, I waited in anxious anticipation. Never having been inside those sheds when I was a child, I remembered the disgusted feeling I had when I walked past them. The banging sounds of animals caged, the smell of sweat, blood and decay. Having been young, I’d assumed those scents were just an unfortunate consequence of a farm, but I knew better now, knew that hidden behind those walls were atrocities like I’d never known.

  Minutes ticked past with furtive beats, time grinding to a halt as the sun stopped its slow path across the never ending sky. Every breath was a struggle as my eyes remained locked to that single, decaying door that led into what I imagined was nothing less than Hell.

  The silence surrounding me was deafening, every small sound that escaped its grasp shouting at me to look away.

  Trapped in what felt like a pressure cooker, I fidgeted where I sat, my hand finally breaking free of the demands of my mind, my fingers gripping down on the handle as I set myself free.

  I hadn’t made it halfway across the yard before the screaming met my ears, and I tripped over my stumbling feet as smoke climbed its way up from the buildings. The breath of a dragon, it danced in dark plumes, reaching up with wicked hands to darken the bright sky.

  Running over uneven land, I tripped and fell to my knees. My mouth opened to scream Elliot’s name, but the sound wouldn’t come, the one word had failed me, and I was helpless to watch and wonder if the bravest man I’d known would emerge from the rubble to live another day.

  Sinking down into the sand, my palms pressed flat over sandspurs and weeds, I ignored the pain while my eyes sought any motion within the flames. Every heartbeat was agonizing, every tear I shed burning, every hope I’d had dying, as I watched the buildings crumble into embers and ash.

  “Elliot,” I finally whispered, my voice trapped in the belief that he was dead. But then to the side of the destruction and rubble, I saw a man creep along the ground, a stuffed rabbit held beneath his arm, his face twisted in agony for whatever he’d discovered on the inside.

  In that moment, I realized that bravery didn’t always mean to walk blindly into danger without fear or concern about your life. Bravery was the ability to forgive, the willingness to see the truth, the promise to survive despite the horror that stared you in the face.

  It was my turn to be brave, to push past the weight that held me, to shove all my own pain aside so that I could pull Elliot from the chaos that threatened to swallow him whole.

  Pushing up to my feet, I found the strength to move forward, to rush to his side and fall down on knees beside him. Never before had I seen a man gripped by the power of pure agony, crushed into dust by the beam of light that revealed what existed in all the dark shadows.

  Tears streaked down his face to mix with the soot and dust of the fire. His body collapsed forward, his mouth opened on a silent scream.

  When I’d been left crippled and broken beneath the death of my father, this was the man who’d picked me up and carried me away. It was finally my turn to return to him the favor.

  “Come on, Elliot,” I pled. “We have to leave. If we stay here, we’ll die.”

  The fire was spreading with the wind that blew the flames. Dead grass and debris caught and sparked, the inferno crawling across the ground with a vengeance to consume whatever was trapped in its path. Smoke replaced oxygen, burning ash rained down on our heads. If we didn’t move fast enough, we’d become one with the evil that still lingered on this swatch of land.

  “Dammit, Elliot!” I screamed, “We need to move!”

  I recognized the emptiness in his eyes, the inability to move forward because he was trapped in the past. But I wouldn’t leave him here to become part of it. I flat out refused.

  Gripping his arms with my hands, adrenaline and tenacious will flowed through my body. Pushing up to my feet, I found the strength to pull him with me, to force him towards the truck despite his feet fighting not to move.

  If I had to drag him, I swore to myself I would find a way to move mountains if for nothing else but to keep him with me, to take him to safety, and to repair the parts of him that were dying before my eyes.

  Don’t ask me how I managed to get him in the truck. All action without thought, I didn’t pay attention that the odds were stacked against me. But I managed to move him, to buckle him in and to run around to take control of the wheel. And as an explosion rocked the property behind us, I slammed my foot on the pedal and left the scorched horrors of the past behind.

  Elliot didn’t say a word as we drove for several hours. Keeping his eyes trained to the terrain that flew past us, he clutched the stuffed rabbit to his body. Every so often his jaw would tick with some unspoken thought. Pained groans rattled from his throat and his body would tense only to relax slowly again.

  I was a fish out of water struggling to breathe as I continued on the path towards the only other place where I knew we could find my brothers.

  Exhaustion eventually overtook me, my eyelids drooping down, the truck swerving over the road as I struggled to remain conscious. And even when I finally pulled over, Elliot refused to glance in my direction.

  He hadn’t told me what he found in those abandoned sheds, but it didn’t take a genius to figure it out. What did take a genius was discovering a way to free him of the past that imprisoned him to bring him back to the present day.

  “I can’t drive anymore, Elliot. Would you like to take over?”

  Silence was his only response. Reaching out to prod him to look at me, I snatched my hand away when he flinched at the feel of my fingertips on his skin. I realized quickly that every part of him hurt, as if his body had been burned in that fire. From what little I could see of his skin, he didn’t have a mark on him, except for the dried blood on his knuckles.

  “Elliot, I need you to help me here. We can’t sleep on the side of the road.”

  Still nothing. Not a blink of his eyes, not a twitch of his lips, not a scathing expression that screamed at me to stay away.

  He was practically frozen, and I was determined to be the ice pick that cracked the surface and pulled him free.

  Reaching forward again, I wrapped my fingers around his bicep, my fingernails digging into his skin as I shook him to gain his attention. “Damn it, Elliot. Talk to me. Scream at me, if you need to, but stop sitting there on your ass doing nothing! You got me into this mess, and –“

  The words died in my mouth in an instant as my body was pressed up against the driver’s side door. Elliot’s hand wrapped over my neck threatening to squeeze the life out of me. With wide eyes I stared back at him, happy that he’d finally moved, but scared shitless that I wouldn’t be moving much longer.

  “Elliot,” I rasped while staring into violent, grey eyes. “You’re hurting me.”

  “Oh yeah,” he growled out. “How does it feel, Maggie? Knowing that death is staring you in the face. Because it sure as hell stared in mine today. Because of your family. Because of that sick fuck who owned that farm. Because of –“

  “Me?” I finished the sentence for him. “Is it because of me, Elliot?”

  I wasn’t sure how he’d managed to understand me with my words as broken up as they were, but his fingers relaxed over my throat, his eyes blinking twice until something human had returned to them, and he abruptly pulled away.

  His head turned so he wasn’t looking at me, but I didn’t dare move a muscle until I knew that he was under control. We sat there for several minutes before his breath evened out again and the ticking of his jaw quit its furious, bloodthirsty beat.

  Speaking softly because I was frightened, I chanced casting out a line that kept him connected to the present moment while it appeared he was slipping farther away.

  “If you need to blame me, I’m right here and ready to take it. But sitting there saying nothing isn’t helping you, Elliot. I’m sorry I don’t have the strength to pick you up and toss you in a shower like you did me, but I’m trying to pull you back from whatever edge you’re currently
standing on.”

  Shaking his head, he breathed out heavily, his shoulders shaking with the vicious emotions trapped inside.

  Pushing away from the door, I leaned against the steering wheel. “Please, Elliot. Talk to me.”

  “I don’t blame you,” he spat, heartache and turmoil dripping from those four words. A finely honed blade couldn’t have sliced me deeper than the pain implicit in his voice.

  “So, who do you blame?”

  His head spun on his shoulders and his eyes locked to mine. “I blame myself, okay? I blame me.”

  His words hit me like a ton of bricks. “What happened to your family wasn’t your fault, Elliot. There was nothing you could have done. If anybody is to blame, it’s me.”

  “You?” he scoffed. “You were four fucking years old. You had no idea what your family was doing. I was nineteen. I could have done something. I could have stayed home instead of running off to fight in a stupid war.”

  “It wasn’t your fault,” I repeated, making sure to add enough strength to my voice to make what I was saying believable. “It wasn’t.”

  “Yeah, so who’s fault was it?”

  “My family’s. My father. My brothers. That damn farmer. They’re the ones you should be blaming.”

  His nostrils flared at the mention of my family.

  “I hate your family,” he snarled.

  Slowly, I nodded my head in understanding. “Yeah, I know. And whether we like it or not, I’m part of that family. So, if you need me to get out of this truck right now and walk away so that you can heal, I will.”

  “No,” he answered. “I just need…fuck…”

  He was breaking down before my eyes, crumbling to pieces right there in front of me. But I was determined to pick up every single scrap of him and stitch it back together.

  “What do you need? Tell me and I’ll give it to you.”