by Chris Page
“Thank you,” she offered, which he decided not to acknowledge.
They were mostly apart now. Only thin, bloody sinews, wrenched from the memory of their missing son, connected them, and even these frayed from the tug of war each sought to win against their respective guilt. That futile effort was ceding ground to failure, and for the both of them a silent recognition had pricked the back of their thoughts; but with everything realigned to humor the effort, nothing remained to address the inevitable.
26
_________
He stalked back across the diameter of his clearing, a remote circle in the center of the forest no one visited. Not for over thirty years, an absence broken some ten months ago when he returned. Then, he’d come to pay homage. However, in the course of a long, dark night, he found the thing, which had disrupted his own youth, aggravated by the incomplete effort to appease it. He set out to correct this as the thing took up residence in his own head.
His offerings had pleased the thing in his head, which had become a voice and a force compelling him to complete the sequence. A series of boys had corrected the sacrificial line, cleansing it of feminine impurities. He took pride in that, pleasing the thing, the voice, angry with his predecessor’s penchant for luring little girls as well as boys.
But there was a problem. Like before, there was a break in the sequence. An escaped child. A broken ritual. It had to be made right. He couldn’t proceed the way his predecessor had, he knew that would displease the voice, the thing, the dark presence inhabiting his thoughts. He would have to reckon with the escaped and recaptured boy before moving on.
He reached the edge of the clearing and exhaled, watching a plume of breath push out towards the trees. Then he turned and marched towards the opposite edge, quickening his steps in the center as he passed the shed.
The boy was too old, he knew that now. It was his critical mistake. He’d just been so innocent, so child-minded that his sacrifice seemed uniquely valuable.
The man reached the other edge and snarled. The escaped boy had been recaptured, secured in a makeshift prison to await his offering. But the boy had broken the ritual. The sacrilege required greater measures to atone. The man knew he would have to be more heinous, more vicious with the older boy to make up for the transgression. But the solution had not yet occurred to him. The voice had not instructed, instead appearing to insist that the man uncover the new ritual on his own. It was a weight he could barely shoulder, biding his time by feeding the boy a little each day to keep him alive, keep the offering from perishing. The man was running out of time, however. The boy would die on his own soon, stealing the man’s opportunity to correct the course of things.
The man encircled the space, watching his shoes, three hundred dollar dress shoes presently wrapped in bags, trace the edge of the clearing. His feet swung past one another in a deliberate march. When they were smaller, perhaps half as large, they’d been less particular in their placement. They nearly spelled his undoing when they became unstable in the mud of the same clearing, collapsing him. He recalled that moment vividly when he gave chase after the older boy who escaped. Again on his back, in the mud, back injured. As an adult, it proved a greater impediment. As a child, he was able to rise and escape. Now in his forties, it required a great deal of effort to rise and chase after the teenage boy. Unlike him, the teenage boy fell back into his captor’s hands. The older boy’s panting had given his hiding spot away when the man came looking. The man found the boy in a hollowed out trunk. At the base of the tree, a malformed, bulbous growth had bent its otherwise straight, cylindrical form into an oval. The man recalled learning, sometime after he was forced into the forest as a child, that these were called galls. As a sapling, the tree played host to insects, nestling into its bark to lay their eggs. It was a small hole, one seemingly insignificant to the baby tree. Though, as the small tree grew large, so too did the hole the insect had burrowed, eventually ballooning into a hideous open wound. The boy hid within one of these. He was petrified within the tree when the man discovered him, forcing him out by knife point. He led the boy back to the shed where he was once kept, decades prior. He hoped not to need the shed, but knew, upon recapturing the boy, that he would require its service.
The man passed through a strand of spider webbing as it floated invisible before him. It caught his lips and draped over his ear, catching his hair. He stopped his march to bat it away from his face, finding more wrapped around his fingers, wrists, face. He became angry and flung his arms manically, trying to rid himself of the webbing.
He came to a stop, breathing heavily and feeling the soft, sticky sensation all over his face. He turned towards the shed, clutching his fists at his sides. He stormed up to the door, undid the lock, and flung the door open.
The long, stringy body of the teenage boy hunched in the corner opposite his bucket for excrement, and the man watched the boy’s head twist back and forth, his hair in clumped locks shivering with each movement. The man stepped into the darkness of the room and let the door shut behind him. He squinted to perceive the purpose of the boy’s action, his eyes slowly adjusting. The white flesh stretched taut over the boy’s ribs appeared first, then the shallow valleys between them, filled with shadow. His white briefs, despite recent replacement, already featured stains along the back, warranting a fresh pair. The man stood by the door a moment, watching his prisoner. The boy’s fingers wiggled above the dirt floor, their tips grazing the dark soot. The man could see the filth collected beneath the boy’s nails and noted to himself it was time to bring another set of clippers back to trim them.
Then he saw the boy’s body lurch forward, his arms shoot in front of him, and his fingers nab something. Quickly, they returned the thing to his lips, where the man saw a spider thrash about, its long legs pressing feebly against the boy’s cheeks as he passed its spherical body into his mouth, gnashing it between his teeth. Some legs fell back to the ground, others remained on the boy’s chapped lips, matting into the dead skin.
The boy lifted his gaze to the man, who stared back with an expression of shame. The boy had soured, the sacrifice lost value daily. Still, the boy had escaped. Just as the man had. Which meant a greater punishment. The boy was not like the man. He would not be like the man. He would weep, and in his weeping, he would become ready. The man need only await that time, the moment of the boy’s exasperation. That would be enough. Enough to sacrifice.
The man turned and opened the door, stepped out back into the clearing. The door bounced in its frame and the latch clanked against the metal loop. The man fished the lock from his pocket and held it out before him, in the space between his eyes and the loop it hooked through. He listened for sounds from within, of the boy rustling, perhaps charging the door, or maybe digging a tunnel. There were none. The boy remained in the corner, emaciated body crouched and curled inward, spider remnants resting between his teeth. What did the boy think? What did he think of the man? He wondered if the boy understood, if he knew how everything was bullshit, but everything was necessary. The man knew. Somewhere nestled deep in his thoughts, he recognized the true face of the presence in his mind, the nefarious thing. It was an amalgam, a collection of features from men that had visited upon one another at different stages in life the harms that produced their successor in a lineage binding them together. The man lived with that face, and now, perhaps, the boy had seen it. Maybe the boy, being of a more advanced age, could see the grafting of his own features upon that face, and the horror of it reduced him to the animal that now hunched itself over the dirt of the shed, hunting tinier creatures for sustenance, or sport. Vengeance, perhaps. Insatiable, unknowable vengeance. If he left the lock undone, left the door to the shed open, would the boy even leave?
He dismissed the thought and clasped the lock around the hook before depositing the key into his pocket and removing his latex gloves, stashing those into a trash bag he pulled from his coat and opened while leaving the clearing. A half hour’s journey through
difficult forest made easy by repetition returned the man to his luxury sedan parked at an abandoned trailhead hidden behind a pair of fallen branches. There he removed the bags from his shoes and placed those in the trash bag, then placed the trash bag in the trunk before peering through the branches down either direction of the county road.
It was clear. He returned to his car and placed himself behind the wheel, taking a deep breath before pressing the ignition. The car whirred to life and his face in the mirror dissolved, or perhaps reformed, into another person. He pulled out of the gravel onto the road, quickly ran out to replace the branches, then drove back towards Willow Brook while reviewing work voicemails.
END
OF THE
PATH
27
_________
So imaginative. Jake smiled down at his son while Benny played with his toys on the carpet in the living room. Jake had joined twice before, attempting to keep up with the fiction Benny had concocted. From what Jake surmised, there was a coalition of diverse individuals—perhaps out of necessity, since his collection of toys were a hodgepodge of pieces from varied sets amassed as donations from their extended family. In any event, each character was as different in background as appearance, Benny’s imagination crafting for them such involved histories that Jake could hardly believe Benny hadn’t lifted them from somewhere else.
Once, when Jake had taken up one of the figurines, a soldier with a bent rifle glued in its grasp, he began to speak through it to the others, requesting orders, seeking a general. Benny quickly corrected him, politely but sternly explaining to his father that the soldier was, in fact, a salesman of bent objects and the uniform was merely part of his pitch to sell the rifle. Benny further elucidated the business of selling bent objects. The salesman acquired them cheaply because their previous owners believed they were broken. In fact, they failed to uncover the new applications for their bent items. A bent rifle could fire around corners without exposing the person wielding it, you see. And with theatrical flair, Benny played out the salesman’s pitch to the other toys, who were eager to acquire the bent rifle for their latest mission. What’s more, they recruited the salesman into their elite team to add his skillset to their wide-ranging abilities. The rag-tag misfits proceeded into their next mission, the newly acquired member featured prominently in their scheme.
Jake withdrew from the make believe, content to watch and admire Benny’s penchant for fantasy. He crossed his arms and smiled from the corner of the couch, leaned back for a bird’s eye view of the mission.
Carrie entered from the kitchen, crossing reverently around the outside of the figurines’ domain to place herself alongside Jake. “What have we here?” she inquired.
“Top secret,” Jake informed.
Carrie turned into him and smiled. He drew her closer with his right arm hooked around her shoulders, planting a kiss against her forehead. She nestled her head up underneath his and he perched his chin gingerly atop it. Carrie folded his arm at the elbow, collecting her forearms atop his under her breasts. With her thumb, she casually pet the hairs beside the crook of his elbow. She sighed and he felt her body ease into repose, his own acting in kind, the two of them drifting blithely into a state of blissful inertia. It made Jake’s voice lazy when he spoke. “You know, I had a thought the other day.”
Carrie took a breath and sighed, further flattening herself against him. She watched Benny at play while she replied, “Oh? What were you thinking?”
“I’ve got a bit of an imagination like Benny here,” he said. “It’s been hungry for use lately.”
“Benny isn’t keen on sharing his toys, shall we find a new set for you?”
Jake chuckled, the vibrations from his chest gently shook Carrie. “I was thinking of doing some writing. Try my hand at fiction.”
“Huh,” was Carrie’s response.
“What’s that?”
“Oh, not that I don’t think you couldn’t, honey. Just that I didn’t know you had any interest.”
“Guess I never talked about it,” Jake said. “But I think it’s something I really want to try. I was thinking of making myself a space for it. In the shed.”
“With the tools?”
“Well, I’d take those out. Enough to fit a desk in there.”
“And put them where?”
“I’ll clean up the garage, make some space.”
Benny suddenly reared his head back, a snarl twisting his features, one eye squinted, the corner of his upper lip lifted towards it, teeth bared. He growled as best a boy could, in mimicry of his pirate figurine held up towards his parents. “Benny,” Carried exclaimed, “what’s happened to your face?”
“I’m a pirate, yar!”
“I won’t have any pirates in this house,” Carrie teased. “Filthy, thieving men.”
Benny settled back onto his heels, curled up beneath him. “It’s just pretend,” he said in a soft voice.
“Oh, well then,” said Carrie, “I suppose we can host a pirate if he’s just pretend.”
Benny went back into his world and the one his parents inhabited fell off the edge of his own. “What do you think?” Jake asked.
“About what?”
“A writing office, Carrie.”
“Oh. Sure, it’s a nice idea. Taking up a hobby.”
Jake exhaled through his nostrils, the resulting breeze casting brown hairs about atop Carrie’s head. It didn’t matter what she said, ultimately. He would pursue it, take the time for himself and scratch the itch. His mind had recently filled with ideas, pressing against the boundaries of his daily life, producing strain. With an office, he could ease that tension, hang up his life like a coat at the door before plunging into the scenarios of his fancy. Whether Carrie supported him or not, she would benefit, his newfound resilience in the face of the mundane fostered from the time spent in his shed.
And in the cold of a December afternoon years later, when dark clouds gathered but refused snowfall, Jake sat in the center of his shed staring down at the product of his obsessive mission, a slew of papers with illegible writings forging a case founded on little more than perceived grievance, a fabricated wrong made right in the most perverse way, and Benny as far from his heart and thoughts as one’s own child could be.
28
_________
Carrie reached through the cupboard, her slender arms extended into the shadowed rear, fingers grasping for a pot. Instead, they met with the wooden back. She swiped them left until they met with the wall, drew down until they struck the bottom, then traced the line from one back corner to the other. Her arm swept through empty space. There were no more clean pots. She growled, the sound was quiet, impeded by the rawness of her throat.
Carrie retracted her arms and used them to lift herself off the floor, hooking her elbows and pressing them against the edge of the countertop overhead. Slowly, she found herself upright, the kitchen sink at the bottom of her vision. In both wash basins, a collection of filthied dishes, cups, pans, silverware piled over the rim, a plate with some encrusted remnants squeezed out onto the counter. She had planned to wash them the previous day, but her walk had exhausted her, and she returned home without the predicted morsel of vigor intended to see the chore done. Today, she withdrew the trash bag from the kitchen bin, lugged it through the front yard to deposit it at the curb. She hadn’t the energy for another task.
A packet of ramen awaited preparation alongside the sink. It was plenty for the evening, enough to fill her and make her drowsy, inspiring sleep. She need only find a pot to boil some water. She rolled her head around to view all the opened cabinets. Empty wooden shelves offered no solution. She peered down, crossing her vision along the cupboards. Similarly, open and empty. Except one. Her eyes focused on the cupboard at the far right end of the kitchen, its little wooden door shut. Why hadn’t she inspected it? The lack of food made thinking difficult, and she dismissed the inquiry in favor of exploring the last remaining cupboard.
Carrie e
ased down to herself to her knees, then crawled three feet over and wrapped her hand around the metal knob. She plucked the door open and instead of kitchen utensils found folders collected together. A momentary frustration gave way to a second reaction, of curiosity. She reached forth with a shaky hand and her fingers walked over the tabs. They read dates, some years old, others more recent. At the very end, she found one from the beginning of the year. Just before.
She pinched the folder between her thumb and forefinger to lift it from its place. As she brought it forward, its contents spilled across the kitchen floor, pages of writing fanning out before her eyes. None looked familiar to her, and it took some examination before she recognized the handwriting. It was scraggly, each letter formed by an indelicate hand. It belonged to her son. For that fact alone, it entranced her, otherwise a useless distraction. Instead, it was a relic unearthed. She gathered the pages carefully and evened them. She placed her back against the second to last cupboard and held the manuscript in her lap.
In faded pencil across the title page read, “The Grasshopper and the Ant, a story by Benjamin Holloway.” As if an ancient text, she turned the page over cautiously, laying it gingerly beside her leg. Her eyes, slow to focus, eventually found the words legible with a bit of effort. She read through the first page, an introduction to the small scale stage of a backyard expanded into a fully imagined world. While she read, a part of her brain ached, aggravated by the lack of nutrition. Localized there, a voice commented on the fiction that it seemed a bit trite for a child to romanticize their own backyard, but she pressed on reading, relegating that voice to a space now filled with concerned others, which cropped up over the previous months.
Upon the second page, a bit of mess alongside the text drew her attention away from the story. She lifted the page nearer to her eyes for inspection. At first it appeared like some marginal writing crossed out, but she squinted and discovered notes written over erased illustration. Once, there were drawn characters occupying the spaces beside the main body of text. She placed a finger against the page and traced the erased lines as best she could, viewing them like a puzzle to be assembled. Her finger looped and zagged, in her mind casting ink along the page. When it finished, she imagined the original artwork, an ant crossing over a branch, a large piece of leaf mounted on its back. The note that laid over its half erased remnant read, “Lacks motivation.” It was written by a different hand, the letters all capitalized and neat. It was Jake’s, she realized. She glared down at the note, despised it. Jake had believed his own commentary of greater importance than Benny’s visualization, a belittling remark, pretentious in the context of a children’s story. Yet he had read the story. Carrie never had, couldn’t recall one of her son’s she did. She thought then of the shed, the birthplace of Benny’s fiction, the realm of her husband, a patch of grass between that structure and the house as effective as an ocean separating Carrie from their creative play. At times, she supposed she could have crossed it, but only to arrive an interloper in their established club. Benny had been an imaginative boy, but in the hands of her husband, his propensity for invention was culled, the undesirable pieces stripped away, the evidence clear on the page before her. In the shed, where Jake stole Benny away, their family fractured. In the house, where Carrie had manicured their lives into something beautiful and perfect, silence pervaded. Their absence maligned her efforts, rebuked its design in favor of a singular and selfish interest. Despite Jake’s efforts, though, Benny had been a good boy, had shown his mother love while in her presence.