by PW Cooper
“Just walk away, Jeffrey, just put it down and leave here and it'll be like it never happened.”
“I can't do that.” The grip was slippery in his hand, slick with perspiration.
Robert cocked his head. The little dog did the same, as though it were Robert's canine offspring and learning by imitation of the father. “Why not?” he asked
“Because of what you did to Alice.”
“What did I do to Alice?”
“You...” Jeffrey had to wipe the sweat from his stinging eyes, “You beat her. You beat my sister.”
Robert sighed, and sat down on the edge of the bed. His wide hands brushed at the lacy coverlet. “She made me do that, Jeffrey.”
“Shut your fucking mouth, you son of a bitch.”
Robert looked at him, and his eyes were damp, but hard. “She asked me to, Jeffrey. She asked me. The way she acted, she might as well have. She wanted it.”
“She didn't want that.” Jeffrey sneered. He couldn't tell if Robert was being serious or not.
Robert shrugged. “She told me she did. I don't know. I guess she got off on it. How do you feel about masochism, Jeffrey? Personally... I've never been tempted.” He bared all his teeth.
Jeffrey struck him across the face with the pistol. Robert flinched, putting his hand to his lip; it came away bloody and a dark trickle ran down his face from the corner of one eye. Jeffrey was shaking and when he spoke, his voice seethed: “Don't talk,” he bit off the words one by one.
Robert touched his bleeding eye again and looked at the tips of his finger. His smile had faded. “You can't do this,” he whispered. “You're my brother, you can't do this.” He stood up, the expression on his face more perplexed than afraid. “Don't you love me at all?”
The gun went off. It roared in Jeffrey's hand, lit with furious heat.
Jeffrey stared at his brother-in-law. Robert sat cross-eyed back down to the bed, a dumbstruck expression on his face. Part of his skull was open; something wet and pink and dribbling seemed to breathe and pulsate inside the bone-shard nest of smoke and blood. Robert reached up and touched it; he pressed his fingers into his brain and his eyes rolled. He slipped off the edge of the mattress and thumped to the floor, the breath wet and ragged in his mouth. Jeffrey dropped the gun.
The dog hopped up on the bed and lowered its belly to the bedspread. It moaned, and stretched out to lick the blood from the jagged white shards of its master's exposed skull. It bit playfully in, tugging wet pink brain tissue out with its little white teeth, like it was pulling cotton fluff out of a stuffed animal.
There were shouts coming from the hall, feet pounding on the hardwood floor. Jeffrey climbed out out the window into the bone-cold night. He staggered across the lawn and fell to his knees by the little pool beneath the waterfall. He threw up and knelt with his head between his legs.
There were cars starting out in the darkness. Headlights swept across the yard and the woods beyond as the more skittish celebrants fled half-nude into the shrouded depths of that Acheronian forest.
He squeezed his eyes shut. All he could see was the quivering pulp of Robert's shattered cranium. He opened his eyes and he saw it still, reflected in the dashed moonshine upon that trembling pool. The air around him was as cold as fire. How had the gun gone off? He hadn't meant to shoot, had he?
Alice approached silently across the grass. She knelt beside him and put her hand on his back. She was crying.
“He said he didn't kill Michael.” Jeffrey groaned, his voice ragged. “He said that you wanted it. That you wanted him to hurt you.”
Alice choked the words out: “I was only a child, Jeff. I didn't know what was going to happen to me, I was only a little girl!”
Jeffrey looked at his sister. Her eyes were blue as ice and her hair like molten gold spilling forever down her back. “Did you want him to hurt you?” he asked.
She buried her face in her hands, her smooth white hands laced with scars and darkened by angry bruises, fingers crooked with old breaks half-mended. “I thought he wouldn't love me anymore if I didn't tell him... He wanted me to say things, Jeff! Terrible things... I never...”
He held her. There was blood on his hands, though he could not account for its presence. She wrapped her arms about his neck and he pushed his hands down under the surface of the crystalline water and it was icy cold and seemed almost to sap the life from him. He was so frightened: everybody would forget him when he was dead.
Alice cried on his shoulder and he buried his face in her long hair. His hands turned numb. The tears fell into the pool. Red and the blue lights flared through the far forest. A gentle snow began to fall from the vast gray sky. It melted easily enough on their skin, white crystals turning to points of colorless water. The distant sirens wailed as though lamenting the ending of the earth, and the siblings clung to one another, mouths slack and drooling like the mouths of fearful idiots. And when they spoke it was as though their words had come from another time, from another being's mind, come spilling from their lips like rain from a strange sky:
“Don't leave me. Don't ever leave me again.”
“I won't go. I promise I won't.”
“I love you.”
“I love you too.”
September Eleventh
Kimberly stared across the park. Yellowed leaves whirled in the air, falling one after the other into the wind, making dismayed pirouettes to the earth. She took a sip of water from the glass in her hand and set it down on the step beside her.
The trailer park hummed with sound. Insects buzzing in the warm dusky air, sneakers and bicycle tires crunching in the gravel, the voices of children.
There was an American flag hanging inside the window of Mr. Smith's trailer; it was worn and faded, threadbare. The pained half-light of the approaching evening caught in the glass like fire, like the flag was burning. She took another drink of water. Her bare toes curled around the edges of the old wooden steps leading up into her home. She sat and watched the little bugs creeping between her toes. She felt... peaceful.
“Kim?”
She looked up. “Oh. Hi there.”
Gena Riley's arms were folded over her stomach. She wore a fuzzy down jacket, but she just had sandals on her feet and her toes were bare. She stepped closer, hesitantly. “Hello, Miss Burke.”
“How are you doing these days?”
Gena nodded. “I'm fine.”
“You going somewhere?” Kimberly asked.
“Just... enjoying the evening,” Gena mumbled, shrugging uncertainly.
Kim breathed in deeply through her nose. “I love this time of day. Just between the day and the night.”
“Twilight.”
“The kids really miss you, you know. Sally asked about you the other day. They'd love it if you came to visit sometime.”
“Aww, that's sweet. I'll stop by.”
Kim brushed the hair from her face. “Is that job alright then? The library, I mean?”
Gena nodded. “It's okay.”
“And how's your mom doing?”
Gena shrugged. “Fine, I guess. She's watching TV right now. That's why I came out here. They're talking about it on, like, every channel.”
“Can you believe it's been a year?” Kim exhaled noisily, “Feels like it was just yesterday sometimes.” That wasn't completely true, though. Sometimes Kim felt like it had been a very long time. Like years had passed, whole lifetimes. She made room on the porch for Gena to sit down beside her.
“It's like a bad dream,” she said.
Kim nodded. “I remember hearing about it on the radio on the way to work, but it didn't, you know... didn't really register. And then I got to the restaurant and all the waitresses were crying. The cook was just sitting there smoking in the kitchen. His hands were shaking. The manager didn't say anything all day, didn't hardly move. He just stared at us with this expression on his face... like he didn't know what was going on really. We all watched it on the television together. We all thought it wa
s an accident until the second tower got hit, and after that, no one really knew what to think.” Kim reached into her pocket for a cigarette. She took out a single cigarette and held it between her lips. She let it sit there for a long while before she tore out a match. “You don't mind?” she asked, and Gena shook her head. Kim struck the match and lit the cigarette. She still couldn't quite believe it, that so much had changed that day. That so few people could have done so much. Just a few madmen, a few fanatics. That was all it took to change the world, just one clear voice: Hitler or Jesus or John Brown or Bin Laden. And the rest of them were so terribly... irrelevant. She took a long drag.
“I was at school when it happened,” Gena said. “In class, actually. Uh... English, I think. We were reading Lord of the Flies, and we had just gotten to the part where the boy finds the pig's head on the stick. The teacher asked us what we thought about it, and one of the boys in the class made a joke. I don't remember what it was, something about pigs, I guess. He made the most horrible sound, like a pig being killed, I guess. I remember feeling like I was going to throw up. Then they announced it on the loudspeaker.”
Kim blew smoke into the cooling air. Gena sat on her hands to keep warm.
“The principle kept making more announcements, like he was repeating everything that he was hearing on the TV. At first, you know, at first we all sort of thought it must be a joke or something. Like, some kid was pulling a prank. The teacher's face was so white, it was horrible. And I sort of figured it must be real. They sent us home early. Everyone was so quiet getting back on the buses, that was the scariest part. How quiet everyone was. It was like we were going to a funeral. I remember... I saw this boy looking out the window, just crying and crying. Not making any noise, but just, his face just covered in tears. And nobody said anything. There were some of us with relatives who lived in the City, second-cousins or whatever. No one wanted to say anything. It felt like the end of the world. All of us wondering if something was going to fall out of the sky and just... wipe everything out. Kill everyone.”
Kim tapped the ashes off her cigarette and ground them out in the dirt with the tip of her sandal. She sat there, leaning forward with her elbows on her knees, and she didn't say anything for a few minutes. What difference did it make if she told Gena? She didn't believe in God, but she didn't want to die without having first confessed her sins. Maybe that was just her upbringing. She wondered if she should go see her father's grave sometime, if only just to make sure that he was really dead. “I saw Mike that night,” she said. “He came to my house... I don't know when exactly, some time after dark.”
“How come?”
Kim turned her head thoughtfully. “I'm not exactly sure. I knew him, but we weren't close or anything. He just came inside and sat down on the couch beside me. We watched the news together. Of course, it wasn't really news, just footage of what was going on in the City. I remember thinking that it looked like a movie. You know, one of those big disaster movies. And I remember thinking how sick that was, to think like that. That I was so... I don't know... numb. It felt so fictional, I wanted to cry, and there was Mike, his eyes all red and his cheeks wet; he'd been sobbing. And I was just sitting there, taking it all in like I was watching a movie.”
Kim took a long drag on her cigarette. She felt her lips curving into a kind of half smile. It felt good to finally say it. She'd been carrying it around for so long.
“I remember, later in the afternoon, after it had died down a little, they were mostly just showing the same clips over and over. Those streets just filled with dust and smoke and paper. There was so much paper! Do you remember that? I remember feeling disappointed that it had gotten so... boring. There was a part of me that wanted something else to happen, something more. I wanted everything to burn. And I sat there, feeling this growing inside me, and just hating myself more and more for it. Then Mike turned off the TV and he looked at me, and he told me that he was going to kill himself.”
Kim lit a second cigarette. Gena was staring at her, wide-eyed. Kim went on.
“I should have tried to stop him, I know I should have. Should have done something, said something. I don't know what I could have said. Could have just said that I loved... that there were people who loved him, and that he shouldn't do it. But I just couldn't. I wanted him to die. Not him, really... Everybody.”
Gena cocked her head. “So you think he did it because of what happened that day?”
Kim shook her head. “It wasn't that. It was more like... What had happened made him realize something. He told me that he was afraid of the future. He said... He told me that he believed in reincarnation, and that he hoped he might be able to work off his karmic debt if he died before he got any worse. And then he took out the cross necklace he wore around his neck and told me that he knew Jesus would forgive him. I don't know, maybe he was joking. You know how he was, such a dry sense of humor.”
He had kissed her once on the cheek before he left. God, she could still feel it!
“I never saw him again. I... you know, I hoped that he might have gotten out of here. Gone somewhere and... escaped, I guess. I didn't want to know for sure because it might be bad, and I didn't want it to be. So when people started looking for him, I didn't say anything about what had happened. I just hoped for the best. And then my son found his body.”
Her voice had gotten very soft, almost a whisper. Ash dangled off the edge of the cigarette, white paper burning between her pale lips.
“They said that he'd been down there for at least six months. They said that on the news, from the coroner's report. He must have done it that night. Maybe even right after he left my trailer. Who knows,” Kim shuddered, blowing hot gray breath into the air, “I might have been the last person he ever talked to.”
Gena didn't say anything. There was nothing she could say.
Kim shrugged. “Anyway... I just wanted to tell somebody.”
They sat together, listening to mingling insects about them, to the low chatter and electric animation of their ramshackle little village, hidden away in that gray corner of the world.
“Where's Jeffrey?” Gena asked, “have you seen him? I've been trying to find him.”
Kim just shook her head. “I don't know. Alice told me that he was leaving the country. He never did say good-bye. I just, you know... hope for the best. Hope he's somewhere good. Hope he's happy.” She grinned weakly, and there was a horrible thought in her mind, a gleam of real fear. She'd lost him, just like she'd lost Alice. Would it happen to her other children too? Would they get lost?
Gena nodded. She got up. She walked away, knowing the secret.
After some time, Kim didn't know how long, a plane flew overhead, shooting silently from east to west, rushing towards the burning disk of the falling sun. She heard the roar of it echo over the world. It went like a silver arrow, wings pointed back, long fluffy plume of exhaust spilling out against a dark sky, spreading, dissipating as the stars beyond began to come out, one by one until the sky was scattered with the points of distant light, burning in all the heavens.
High Gorge Park – Winter
The school bus groaned to a stop. The doors swung open, stairs leading down to the snow-dusted ground.
Children slung their backpacks lazily over their shoulders and clambered down off the vehicle, waving to those friends of theirs who had not yet been disgorged. They split off, most returning to their own homes among the scattered trailers. Two of them wandered on past the frozen flag hanging from a frosted metal pole, past the narrow trailers sitting dark and cold in the lot, past the old movie screen standing naked and broken against the creeping forest. They walked out into the wood, leaving footprints trailing behind them imprinted in the soft wet snow.
They talked in low and urgent voices, laughing and snapping little branches off the trees, grabbing hold of larger ones and swinging themselves carelessly round as they spoke brashly of grand ambition and unrestrained hope. They went on.
They reached
the edge of the gorge and they looked down and saw there the wild darkness below. They shouted into it and listened to their voices carry, distorted along the emptiness.
One of them bent low and gathered up a fistful of crusty snow in his bare hands. He squeezed it into a tight sphere; his fingers were red and trembling when he drew his arm back and hurled it across the gorge. It smacked against the hide of a limbless trunk on the other side, the impact marking the black bark with a white circle like a sightless eye. The child who had thrown it laughed and gathered another handful of snow. The other followed suite; they threw snowballs across that silent gulf until the trees beyond were spotted white.
A tattered remnant of crime scene tape fluttered noiselessly behind them, clinging still about the waist of a dying birch tree. The tape had torn in the wind, ragged pieces fallen into the gorge and been carried on by the stream, onward into an endless expanse far beyond.
Over the course of their lives the two children would forget most of what had happened that year. The facts would be hopeless distorted in their minds, the names and faces never more than half-remembered. They would recall only a few faint details about the boy who killed himself. They would remember hearing about another who was arrested, or had perhaps been killed running from the police, they couldn't remember which. They would remember a vague sense of fear, the fear which had consumed that little trailer park in that little town in the years before it vanished, vanished as though it had never been. The remnants of the screen would be torn down, the town would die off, the people would move on, nature would reclaim the garbage heaps and the ruins until only the forest remained, and the ravine.
The two children looked down into that ravine and saw nothing there, nothing but the darkness through which the river was ceaseless moving. And an American twilight turned the gray sky to black.