by Sam Richard
Staring into his eye, I wondered if this had always been the plan. I thought, again, of myself: the stick returning to the maple. I thought, again, of Molly. And mom. And even dad. I waited for some kind of cosmic revelation or divine illumination, but nothing came. Breathing in Fiannarna’s scent, one of acrid decay, I tried to tell him that I was back so the great undoing could occur, but I couldn’t. Didn’t
With indifference, he looked at me, showing no emotion, or divinity, or knowledge. Whatever he had, whatever he knew was either lost on me or lost on him.
His head shook slightly and his antlers clacked together again, the sound of thunder moving through my body like a wave. My heart skipped. My knees went weak. I could feel warmth dripping out from my ears.
Still locking eyes, he did it again. I felt frozen in place. This time I could feel my wet warmth dripping down my cheeks, finally splattering on the floor as the subtle scent of iron filled my nose. My brain turned over inside my head and my skin was burning hot. My grip on the antler started to slip under sweat and tearing moss, but I squeezed it against my chest, trying my best to maintain some connection to the physical world.
Moving his head slightly, Fiannarna tried to clack his antlers together again and panic set in. My muscles felt like they were encased in marble, but I broke through the shell, plunging the antler into hiss amber eye, sending him falling backwards onto the altar. His long, spindly legs fighting to keep him upright as he cried out in multi-tonal shrieks.
If I had been able, I would have ran and ran and ran; through the barn and out of the compound, beyond the crimson stars, the pulsing planets, and the moonless sky. Beyond the thunder. But I couldn’t. I didn’t.
Brown blood splattered on the ground below Fiannarna as his cries stopped and he shook the mossy antler from his eye. It hit the floor covered in thick, opaque white fluid as he rose up upon his hind legs and let out a roar. The pressure in the room became more concentrated and my hearing stopped working as I fought for breath, as I fought to stay conscious. My lungs collapsed inside my chest.
I thought about Molly. Her voice rang in my head, saying those same eight words, “Branches into the maple will bring the undoing,” on a loop as my vision went black.
The mourning wails of the congregation shook through me as I felt myself lifted off the ground. Reaching my hands to my eyes, I felt the sticky warmth of blood. I was lifted higher and higher in a prone position as jagged edges slowly slid through my back, neck and thighs. I reached below and behind me to push myself away from the pain and felt antlers coated in soft, velvety moss.
As I began my ascent pierced onto Fiannarna’s antlers, the stars burnt out; I had finally returned to the maple.
WE FEED THIS MUDDY CREEK
I hate to go all cliché right off the bat, but Danielle wasn’t like anyone I’ve ever met. I don’t think she was like anyone at all. Period. We met at a bar off Highway 15 between Perryton and Farnsworth, a dump called Ragtags. It smelled of stale beer, old cigarettes, and cat piss. I always fucking loved that place.
I’d saddled up with a couple of friends, drinking to celebrate Tim’s release from the clink. He’d served 3 years upstate on a manslaughter charge—3 years of a 7-year sentence. A sentence that should have been 25-to-life had the courts known the truth. Tim rode the razor’s edge but only got nicked this time; I doubt he would be spared a second.
He started fires. No one knew why, and he sure as fuck couldn’t tell ya. Just as I couldn’t tell you why I‘m drawn to the creek. He claimed that the flame was his god, even. This time was different, though. The victim was his ex-boyfriend, cooked through to a pile of ash and bones. Tim and Connor had always had a rocky relationship, and we were all relieved when Connor broke things off for good. You could tell there was love between them, but it was always obscured by something else; the debris of everyday life, past trauma, jealousy? Whatever it was, we all knew it wouldn’t last.
When Connor broke it off, Tim was lethargic. I’d never seen him like that. He stayed on my couch, staring off into space, crying himself to sleep, and when its warm embrace wrapped around him, he would still whimper like a sick dog. I tried to console him, but each person must go through the dark night of soul alone. I could only do so much.
Tim had been doing pretty damn well before the breakup. He hadn’t fixated on fire for a while, as though being with Connor, despite its bumpy path, became the fire he had once needed to produce externally. Their love had become that god he chased. They had only been separated a few days when Tim called me from jail. He’d burned down Connor’s house, with Connor inside. He said he could finally release himself from the pain. Tim was a selfish, fucked up asshole, but he was also a friend.
There was no trial. Tim pleaded guilty—claimed it was an accident, which he fell asleep with a lit cigarette and the place went up like an ethanol-soaked rag. No one questioned if they were still together, or even if they were lovers; this was a different era. He hammed it up about how guilty he felt, how he’d never get over it, and the judge gave him 7 years for manslaughter, with the possibility of parole at the halfway point. Tim further reduced it by 6 months for good behavior. So we were celebrating. Celebrating the release of our good friend from prison for killing his ex-boyfriend. I liked Connor. I liked Tim. I guess I’d recently done seventeen times worse, so I really couldn’t judge too harshly.
About our fifth round of Old Overholt, neat obviously, and ice cold Lone Stars, she walked into the bar. It wasn’t one of those everyone-stops-and-stares situations, just me. Frozen. I’ve never believed in love at first sight, or any of those other garbage television versions of love, but I tell you right now that I knew in the depths of my soul that my life was about to be changed to its core, from the moment I set eyes on that woman.
She looked miserable, like she’d just gotten done with a bad day at work or if maybe there was a man in her life prompting her sour demeanor. She walked with fire to the bartender and ordered a shot of something brown, gulping it down in one swift move and motioning for another, and a bottled beer. Transfixed on her vibe, I noted the sour look had passed. She sat on the other side of the dimly lit bar and nursed her drinks, patiently sucking down the smoke from a long, black cigarette. Alone.
I excused myself from the table with my drinks and headed straight for her. Having no witty lines or come-ons in my back pocket, because what kind of monster uses those, I approached, asking if I could join her for a smoke. The walls were dark brown wood with deep red, faux-velvet square inlays staggered throughout. The red velvet glowed in the dank lighting, as her cigarette embers illuminated our corner. She didn’t say no.
Partially in the bag, I’ve never been able to remember what it was we first talked about—or what we talked about at all that night. All I know is that from then on, we were together. The following weeks were spent getting to know each other, excavating our personal histories and mining the best parts for each other’s amusement. She lived on the edge of town in a small rambler with very little furniture, but lots of art on the walls. She slept on the couch in the living room, opting to use the small bedroom as an art studio. Oil paint covered the mangled wooden floorboards and smeared almost every other surface of the house. A red fingerprint here, a blue streak there. Even her toilet wasn’t safe, with a perfect stamp of two burnt orange fingers on the flush handle.
I did my best to open up to her, to show her who I was. It was difficult, trying to separate one part of myself from other. The guys insisted that this was some long con, but Jeremy backed off when he saw how I looked at her. Why I introduced her to that group of depraved criminals, I’ll never know. Things were just so good, and I wanted to be as honest as I could with her, despite leaving my dwindling fixation on purification through water in the dark.
She got along with everyone just fine, as was her way. The general vibe of the group was full of long-past shared histories, inside jokes, and terrible senses of humor. Though she needed a leg up on the more esoteric parts o
f the conversation, she took it all in stride and was warmly embraced by the whole. The guys seemed to realize that this was no fleeting interest on my part, and I wasn’t pulling any con or had any ulterior motives. I think they could all tell that I already loved her.
After five months, we were already talking about getting engaged. We were at a Halloween party thrown by her old college friends, Kim and Nick, who lived in Manhattan, Kansas. I was the devil and she was a carnival sideshow performer who was half man, half woman. We made out in the kitchen while Hank Williams Sr. blasted up from the basement. Her half-beard intertwined with mine. She looked me squarely in the eye. “We should get married someday soon…” At first, I was taken aback. My life had already so drastically changed. I no longer felt the daily pull to intimately embrace the shallow waters of death. I didn’t know what to say. But then my heart did the talking for me. “Holy shit, we totally should.” That was the first time I told her I loved her, despite having known it since the beginning. We slept in her car that night, clutching each other, like we were afraid any moment the other would be ripped away.
She packed up the contents of her small rambler and moved into my slightly larger, yet also quite small house on the other edge of town. I had an unfinished attic space collecting cobwebs and dust, with a handful of decaying storage boxes littering the place. I thought she could make it into her studio, leaving the bedroom a bedroom and the living room, well, not a bedroom. The moment she saw the attic, she was in love.
I helped her clean it up and set up her massive quantity of art supplies. She promised to not leave a trail of oil paint all over the house, claiming that she would only stain the bare wood of the attic space. I loved that promise. It didn’t matter to me, but she insisted that she would be careful. And she was right. The floors and walls and bare wooden cross beams all had flecks and splashes of red, gold, green, and black. But they were nowhere else. As soon as she moved in, she began painting up a storm. She’d be up there all night, while I lay in bed, hearing the floorboards creak above me. I’d drift into the silence of sleep with her movement as my lullaby.
One summer day, Danielle got it in her head that we should host a dinner party for our friends—well, my friends. She didn’t have too many people who she was close to. There was a distant uncle in Washington State; “a bit of a prick,” she said. Other than that it was all old friends. Kim and Nick up in Kansas, but they were yoked to kids and the routines of family life. Most of her other close friends lived across the country or across the world, even. And she really only made a few acquaintances in Perryton, no one she wanted to call a friend, I suspected.
In any event, I was open to the idea and brought it up to Tim and Jeremy, who said they’d pass the invite on to Rick when he got back into town. Tim had been seeing a fella since he got out of the clink, Terry, so I told him to bring Terry by, too. Apparently he was a well-mannered, Texas gentleman. I was happy for Tim, being able to move past all the old ugliness and find someone new. I guess I was proud, even. By all accounts, they were pretty happy together.
Jeremy was probably the oddest in the bunch. He was obsessed with how everything worked. Often buying electronics just to take them apart to see how they functioned, only to return them, and claim that he had only tried to ‘fix the broken crap they had sold him.’ I think he did the same with people, only not the returns part. He just wanted to see how they ticked, keeping composition notebook after composition notebook full of notes and diagrams and drawings. It wasn’t like knowledge of the human body was scarce to come by, hell the Grey’s Anatomy book was at the Booker town library, for fuck’s sake! But he was just one of those people who had to see it for himself, I guess.
I’m not gonna say that I’m some saint. It seems impossible to sit here and pretend that I’m not one of them; that I haven’t done similar, worse even. We all have our reasons and demons. I won’t judge them for theirs and they certainly never judged me for mine. Not even when I was starting to crack. There’s a creek a few miles East of Perryton, down 377. It’s where I keep my ghosts, my baptisms. Seventeen of them in total, plucked at their prime. But when I met Danielle, I knew that that chapter of my life had ended and I became a whole person. A new part of me opened up that I didn’t know I had and the rage and darkness fell into a forgotten history.
A couple of weeks later, they all showed up at the house. Danielle and I had prepared a feast consisting of pork shoulder with homemade bbq sauce with loads of stout in it, coleslaw, beans both green and the smoky brown kind with ham in them, and an angel food cake with a spread of fruit to pair with it. We bought some fancy imported beer, hence the stout in the BBQ sauce, and I broke into my secret bottle of Old Grand-Dad Barrel Proof, which I had been saving for a special occasion.
Danielle hadn’t yet met Rick and Belle, as they had been on the road so much when we began dating. Rick was the oldest soul I had ever known, which was strange, given that he was seven years younger than me. He talked like a dustbowl roustabout and was prone to momentary fits of anger. But he was a solid guy to have in your corner in a fight. He and his old lady, Belle, drove a truck all over the country, freelance style. This afforded them the opportunity to explore their own sadistic brand of torture on the road and help them stay unnoticed. Belle was a sweet lady, for someone dripping with sadism. I never heard her speak ill of anyone. But damn did that woman love to be coated in the blood and tears of hitchhikers.
When Belle entered the dining room, she and Danielle greeted each other like old friends. I think they were both excited by the prospect of having another lady around, to break through the cloud of testosterone in the room. We ate and laughed, drank and shared stories that we’d all heard a million times, but all of which were new to Danielle. So many dumb memories and embarrassing moments were revealed to her that night. She ate it all up, chiming in when she could to rub it in when it was about me. She always gave as good as she got. Everyone used discretion, but it didn’t feel forced or awkward. It was as honest as those people could get, as honest as I could get.
Around the time that we finished the special bottle of Old Grand-Dad, Belle busted out a present she had gotten on their last road trip to Duluth, MN. It was a bottle of Absinthe that had been illegally imported from France. She got the hook up through a dispatcher they had become friends with, who they stayed with one night in St. Paul on their way back home. From the kitchen she appeared with a full glass for everyone.
We didn’t bother with the sugar ritual or any of that other stuff, we clinked our glasses and down the hatch it went. Now I had drank absinthe before in New Orleans. It wasn’t something I drank often, solely due to its availability on the Texas-Oklahoma border, but this absinthe tasted different, bitter. Sure, it had the anise and herbal qualities, but the moment the contents from the bottom of the glass hit my tongue, I knew this was different than any absinthe I had ever tasted before.
The bitter bloomed in my mouth, swelling my tongue and arresting my senses. My eyes watered as air became difficult to attain. The room moved with my body and everything suddenly became impossibly far away, yet immensely close to me. I tried to clear my throat, to gasp for air, to hold onto the table, but I was already slipping away, into the silent darkness. Everything disappeared and I was alone with the nothing. I became nothing.
***
I awoke in a haze to a raging inferno engulfing my dining room. I don’t know if it was the heat that woke me, the massive amount of pain in my side, all the adrenaline, or the horrible screaming, but something snapped me out of my narcotic slumber. The first thing I saw was Jeremy’s lifeless body crumpled into an awkward heap on the wood floor. The second thing I saw was all the smoke. I could feel the heat blazing in the other room as the wallpaper slowly melted off the walls.
Still dazed, not fully comprehending what I was seeing, blood hemorrhage out of me as Tim attempted to push his knife into Rick’s chest. It was slowly being pressed into his flesh, that being the source of all the screaming. A thin
, crimson line grew down his shirt. I recognized the second screamer as Belle, who had raised an old, rusting pipe wrench over her head and struck Tim in the shoulder with it. He winced, elbowing her in the face, but it didn’t stop his knife from plunging in deeper. She staggered back into the other room, where the worst of the heat was coming from and white-hot flames licked the doorframe.
Rick screamed and kicked at the floor as Tim pushed him onto the table. The flames had started pouring in through the door and the old, dusty rug beneath the table went up like an oil-soaked rag, filling the room with noxious smoke and gently floating embers. Rick kicked his last kick as Tim pushed the blade all the way through Rick’s torso, pinning him onto the wood beneath. In the shuffle, Danielle’s unconscious body was pushed from the table and into the flames that had gathered below. I tried to grab her, to help her, but when I moved, my insides felt like they might pour out.
I braced myself through the pain. Tim came at me with a blood soaked fist. I had no time to react, to process; I was consumed with the need to save Danielle. All I could do was kick. I felt a part of my body rip that I hadn’t known existed. I brought a heel down with every single bit of strength I could muster. It connected with his knee and he collapsed in a squeal, his fist just missing my neck.
There was no question. It was Tim. Whatever these bastards had been planning, Tim fucked it all up. Somehow, naively, I assumed that despite the changes I had made, despite the fact that I had stopped listening to the cleansing waters, we could still be together. It took but a moment to see all the chaos, the flames, and the blood, to know that they had a different idea; and that they didn’t agree on what to do about it.
Stumbling over to Danielle, I tried my best to put out the flames that had consumed her. She was covered in burns and charred flesh. Some of the rug had melted to her arm. It was bad. I dragged her to the front door, groaning and cursing as a large trail of blood followed my every move. Every corner of the house seemed alive with flame. I set her arms down and ran back to the table, knowing that there would be duct tape in Rick’s toolbox. Those fucking fucks, those backstabbing bastards. I grabbed it and went back to my love.