The heat of the Kentucky noon boiled the ichor off the bayou in a redolent haze. But darkness came early in September, the sun slipping behind the Ridge, and soon the haze coalesced into a sticky, clammy sweat.

Tonight was rain, the clouds rolling in dark low battleline, swallowing the dusk. Already starting to push out drops slow and thick like molasses, pelting the cruiser's steel in an uneven and jarring syncope.

A night for hiding. For loneliness and forgetting. A night to smell the rust in an overdue rain. The taste of blood and a memory from a time when things mattered.

But we were detectives. Keepers of the truths no one should know. We put on brave faces and we lied. To protect the fallacy of innocence. To save what little hope was left for those who really needed it.

A night for detectives.

"Turn on the high beams Matty."

He obeyed without a word, and the rain jumped center stage in white relief, finding the holes in the black canopy of overgrown hemlock, smearing against the windshield in an oily slick. The sign for Blue Ridge was hidden in the morass, but Matty knew the way. With graceful ease, earned dodging IEDs in Iraq, he slung the 6000 lbs of Detroit steel around the Cinnamark gully and up the winding road to Joe Wilson's.

The asphalt under the tires trickled and faded away, where some Depression Era road crew had burned through the last of their tar, and just never came back, probably after facing the business end of Winchester double barrel. Probably toted by Joe Wilson's Great Great Grandpa. If dirt was good enough for God, it was certainly good enough for Blue Ridge.

The one exception was the single frayed and fragile overhead power line, snaking up the Ridge between a succession of old logs and railroad trestles, repurposed and pounded vertical, no two the same. Snaking towards the Wilson place. A gift from Terradyne surveyors trying to finagle mining rights from Joe after a tungsten vein had been discovered creeping up the side of old Blue.

They needed it for drill bits. For bullets and bombs. Because Tungsten was hard. Unyielding. Like Joe Wilson. Modern words dropped casually - investment returns, stock options, compounding dividends - didn't even make a dent. Not even a scratch. The metal was going to stay in the dirt. Like Joe Wilson.

But Joe had a new daughter, and Mary was able to talk him into accepting the gift of power.

For Amanda.

Then he slotted a shell of huge double aught buck with a sinister slow ratchet, and told them to get the fuck off his land.

Terradyne found other veins. Made other offers. But never again for Blue Ridge...

A land of sweat and blood and time, turning to mud before our eyes. Cut through with twin parallel trenches carved by the treads of Joe's old Ford, going up and down. Now they were filled with dancing rainwater, silver snakes caught in the headlights, chasing each other back and forth in formation. Pointing the way, curling around the Crown Vic's tires. Like a ride on rails. Only one way forward.

Actually, there was a second way. If you counted launching off the side of the Ridge as forward.

But not tonight. Not with Matty at the wheel. He didn't fight it. Didn't overthink it. Friction and inertia know their own way, ease into their natural groove. Leading us toward the destination. Here, tonight, it was the top of Blue Ridge. It was two detectives in the dark, looking for answers.

*****

Joe's old Ford was exactly where it always was. Parked on a patch of squarely laid straw so a random mudslick wouldn't carry it away. The F was old Detroit yellow, the only letter still with enough paint to exist. The rest - O, R, and D - long gone.

But not everywhere. Because there were other trucks here too. Newer trucks. Parked in the mud. Trucks with all their letters.

Trucks that didn't belong.

Matty killed the Vic's engine and she settled into the sludge. The top of Blue Ridge.

"What the hell is this boss? Some kind of family reunion?"

Maybe.

A reunion minus one.

"Let's go find out."

The slamming of car doors. Detectives in the rain and mud. Their natural element. Guided through the dark, to the porch of Joe Wilson's, with a haze of ghostly blue. The cold, underwater blue of an old fashioned thorium lantern. Not light, but not dark either. The kind used to guide pitmen through the deadly deep trench mines of Kentucky coal country. This one had miraculously found it's way back above ground - a second chance - only to find itself haphazardly hung from a makeshift hook. A last minute, temporary job to lead temporary guests to the door. To keep them from walking blindly into the pig trough, or falling down the well.

Matty was waiting back over my left shoulder. Cover position. Cool and steady. A monolith in the rain. Head cocked slightly down to keep the water out of his eyes, hiding them in the black shadows falling from his ridges. Discreetly, he had already unbuttoned his coat; now his gun hand was softly gripping his belt buckle. This was the land of moonshine whiskey and the second amendment, after all, where trouble hid around dark corners and almost never knocked.

But we were detectives. We always knocked.

The other side of the door went quiet. The end of some sound that was only recognizable once it was gone.

A man's voice? Whispering...Praying?

This time I pounded.

"Mr. Wilson! It's Detective Mitchell! I need to talk to you!"

There was a shuffle of feet inside. Then short, unintelligible words, thrown back and forth.

Men's voices.

I shot a glance back at Matty. He gave the slightest perceptible nod, hand easing up off his buckle like he was patting himself on his stomach. Ready to draw.

The slide of a deadbolt and the door swung open.

Joe Wilson was standing there. Wearing black.

Wearing a suit.

The men of the Wilson clan standing behind him. Wearing black.

Wearing suits.

Reverend Smith was there too. Wearing black. Holding the hand of the impossibly frail Mary Wilson. Wearing black.

An audience. A congregation. Arrayed in a semi-circle around a space of reverence. A space for white candles. a wreath, and a photo....A little girl.

Amanda Wilson.

"What the hell is this Joe!?"

"A funeral."

"No, it's not. Because she's not dead."

Joe looked down at his shoes for a moment. His one nice pair. The silence was total, the kind that hurt for interruption. The reverend offered a whispered prayer, something about God, but the silence only pressed worse. Finally Joe lifted his head - the weight of three lifetimes - and excused himself before stepping out onto the porch with us, under the blue, and closing the door behind him.

"Tell me why I'm standing outside Amanda's funeral Joe."

"She's dead Robert."

"Bullshit. You don't know that. What'd I tell you about those girls they just rescued in Ohio, or that Smart girl over in Utah. You gotta be patie--"

"--I gotta message Rob."

"A message?!? From who???"

"From God."

"FROM GOD!? God told you she's dead...?"

Joe looked down at his shoes again.

"You're telling me God sent you a message - spoke to you directly - and told you that Amanda is dead?"

Joe just kept staring at his shoes. His only nice pair.

"Look me in the eyes and tell me that Joe."

Joe slowly lifted his head and raised his eyes to mine. Distant and faraway, The story of two veterans considering their tragic fates across a scarred battlefield. Things that could never again be saved. Only remembered and mourned.

But Joe didn't say anything. He just reached into his pocket and fished out an old leather wallet, bulging with notes and receipts rather than cash. Hidden carefully behind it all was a business card. Crisp and new and shiny under the thorium blue.

Joe handed it to me.

"Please leave us be Robert."

He went back inside. The dead bolt slide closed behind him.

The card was embossed cerulean blue, sparkling under the light. An eye of Osiris. Almost winking.

On the back was a name:

Psychic

******

The rain was heavy now, fighting against the wipers on full blink. Swiping away, pushing waves of water from side to side. Every now and then, a second to see through the torrent, to see the road leading down and away. Before nature said enough, before the rain said no more, and Matty drove on muscle memory alone, high beams just a reflected sheet of white, falling up and down and everywhere.

Between the curves he looked over. At the card in my hand. Glistening now and then in refracted headlight. Lilly. Psychic. The answer to our questions. The end of the line of inquiry. Something on that card was the key. But Matty didn't ask. He was a marine. He knew how to wait. How to do his job, and how to anticipate, finger on the trigger.

Until the C.O. said fire.

The tires hit level ground again, and Matty had us back on the main. Back to headquarters. Back to every friday night, when we called it a week and prepared to drink the unsolved and unrequited into oblivion. He pulled the cruiser into our spot, under the hazy orange metal halide. Under the rain. He turned the key. Killed the engine. And our world went silent. Just rain and things unspoken.

I held up the card so he could see. Lilly Panoply. Psychic.

"A psychic?"

"A psychic."

Matty shook his head. "That's not right....That's the devil's work."

"I think we're dealing with the Devil's work here, Matty."

"The devil didn't take Amanda...."

"But he knows who did."

For the first Friday in years, we didn't get a drink. Without a word, we decided to search for oblivion on our own. To separate, drive away, put a period on the fate that had cursed us together, and disappear into the black.

The last Friday of hurt. Of hope. Of finding Amanda alive.

Matty drove away in his Bronco and the chapter was complete. Except for the addendum. Except for the card in my hand. Psychics stayed up late, didn't they? The light of day wasn't conducive to their business. The devil worked in the dark.

*****

Psychics didn't put up a sign in Blue Ridge. No fates were told here. No tarot cards laid on a table. No neon lights: "Fortunes Told." Not if they didn't want it burned down. Not in Christian old Kentucky.

But a call to Kentucky State Police reversed the name, threw up an address on the cruiser's laptop. The back lot of Mayfair mobile home park. Number 66. An old econoline turned to rust under years of Kentucky sun and rain. The temporary turning to permanent.

I opened the screen and knocked on the door. Then I pounded, loud even in the rain. An old graybeard from 65 stuck his head out. But he saw the cruiser and vanished, back to his liquor or his meth lab or his oxycontin. I didn't care. Let the rain swallow him. I pounded again.

In preternatural slow motion, the door to 66 opened. A beautiful young woman, her frame bracketed by long black hair. Her lips, red and sensual, pouting with the pain and potential of existence. On her chest, above the low cut V of her top: a star, upside down, tattooed in blood red. A pentagram.

Lilly Panoply.

"Hello Detective," she whispered, between the hypnotic red of her lips.

"Hello," I said, lost in her gaze. "I'm detecti...err, I'm Rob."

"I know," she said. "I've been waiting."

Sometimes,

The light of the world goes out

And the beginning seems like the end...

She led me to a table. Two chairs, and a circle. No crystal ball. No props, no strings. Just her and me. She laid out her hands, soft and lithe, and I took them.

Sometimes,

We live only to exist

And pain is the only thing real...

"Joe had a funeral," I said. "Because of you."

"She called to me, detective," said Lilly. "It wasn't my plan."

"You told him she was dead."

"She called to me. From a better place."

"A better place?! What place is better, for a six year old girl!? A muddy drainage ditch behind a Walmart!?"

"Not a ditch, not a Walmart. A grace of the eternal, a dance among the stars."

Sometimes,

Faith is all we have

A last gasp when hope is gone...

"Close your eyes," she said. "Listen to the rain."

She squeezed my hands, and the world became quiet with answers.

Pain is part of The Plan,

Hard answers live in the shadows

Under the eve of the noonday sun...

Peace is the price of mortality,

Under the spire under the sun

A shadow of something almost forgotten.

Under the shadow under the spire

The life of a six year old girl.

"She needs you to find her detective," said Lilly. "She's calling for you."

"How!?"

"Under the spire...A cross of shade. An answer to your prayers."

Save me!

Robert Mitchell

Help me!

I can't breathe...

Lilly had drawn me a picture, a black scrawl on the back of a napkin. A shadow from a spire. Marking a spot on the ground. A little girl waiting to be found.

*****

Saturday was Matty's day off. He would be sleeping right now. Next to his pregnant wife. The one day Matty override his boot camp habits and let morning come late. Let his wife sleep, with his arms around her.

Safe.

But veterans were light sleepers by nature and natural selection; sounds of potential flicked them awake and alert--a car's tires biting into the gravel outside. Someone getting out--a man.

Footsteps.

Matty opened the door before I could knock. Wearing his briefs. Holding his .45.

"Do you know what time it is?" he asked.

"Yeah," I said.

"You're wearing the same clothes."

"I was up late...I have a lead."

"What lead?" asked Matty.

I showed him the napkin. A spire, in black and white. A shadow of a cross. An X on the spot.

"What is this?"

"It's where we are going to find Amanda."

Matty shook his head, looking down. Sad. Or disappointed. Or both.

"Did you draw this?" asked Matty.

"No."

"The psychic?"

"Can I come in?"

"Yeah," he said.

I followed Matty into the kitchen. "Do you recognize it?"

"No," he said. But he wasn't looking. He was scooping heaps of Folgers, pouring water. Anything but looking.

I put the napkin on the counter next to the Mr. Coffee.

"Matty please."

He sighed and resigned himself, placing an arm on the counter and lowering his eyes closer to the sketch.

"The psychic drew this?"

"Yeah," I said. "Do you recognize it?"

Matt squinted his eyes, then shook his head slowly. About to say no. But he suddenly froze.

"Wait... I do recognize this. The cross inside the circle, the was just like that church that burned down a few years ago. Remember? Off Old Ironsides. Insurance Fraud."

"Holy Names."

"That's right."

"But it burned down."

"The spire's still there."

*****

Holy Names was built on a balloon loan. Short term cash on long term interest. The good Reverend Douglass Cotton has taken every penny the bank would give, which was a lot, knowing the back end would be enough to pay the CEO's pension. Cotton wasn't worried. He was building a monument to God. Build it and they will come. He spared no expense.

And they did come. Holy Names was towering and gothic and filled with stained glass. At once immaculate and intimidating like every church should be, a $100,000 dollar mural of the suffering Christ rising up to the top of the steeple. Blood and thorns and pain, in the brushstrokes of a master artist. And they came from far away to witness. To be blessed. To have sins forgiven.

But Reverend Cotton had sins of his own, including an unhealthy carnal desire with the female members of his congregation. And a reoccurring inability to distinguish himself from the man on the cross. A Jesus identity crisis.

There wasn't much congregation left, when the fire broke out. The pews were saturated in gasoline, and the building went fast. Reverend Cotton was never found. Some say he died in the fire. His church certainly did.

Yet the spire remained. A concrete and steel tower standing lonely in a mud courtyard, skeleton of iron rebar sticking out from the sides where the church once stood. The cross on top still charred where the flames caressed it, perfect circle encompassing the crossbar.

Just like the napkin.

A chain link fence had gone around the lot since the last time Matty and I had been here, and he stopped the cruiser at the gate.

"Property of Terradyne Industries. No Trespassing."

But we were detectives. We carried bolt cutters. And we enjoyed using them.

*****

At six in the morning, shadows were long and stretched: the shadow from the cross so oblique it landed two lots over, plastered on the side of some Terradyne warehouse.

"So where should we look?" asked Matty.

The mud lot was filled with miscellaneous industrial crap. Stacks of rusty chain link, disintegrating tires, crumbling concrete culverts and pipes. Terradyne had probably bought it cents on the dollar. A place to stow their trash.

I held up the napkin. Lilly had drawn the shadow coming down at a 45 degree angle, a vivid x marking the spot on the ground. But the sun was too low in the sky for 45 degrees. We were too early.

"We need to wait for the sun to rise," I said. "Then the shadow will point the way."

"So what time?" asked Matty.

"I don't know."

"What if it rains?"

"I don't know."

Matty just nodded once and wandered off, threading west through the garbage, unwilling to wait for shadows, or the advice of psychics. Preferring to rely on his gut. On the good old fashioned mark one eyeball.

But I waited. Waited for a sign. Waited for the sun to catch the cross and show me. Feet in the mud, waiting for the voice of Amanda Wilson to call to me again.

"Hey Boss! Over here!"

Matty was kneeling down next to some oil drums, unconcerned that his pants were covered in mud. The shadow of the cross was on the fence behind him, slowing coming our way.

"What is it?"

Matty pounded his fist on four drums in succesion. Each clanging with a deep low resonance, the oil or sludge inside echoing with a deep underwater sound. But number four was different. A sharp metallic report, higher and hollow pitched.

The shadow of the cross crept closer.

"Open it!"

Matty nodded and sprung into action, trying to open the lid sealing bolts with his pocketknife until his blade snapped. He stood up and swung his head side to side, looking for a more appropriate tool. Something caught his eye and he dashed off.

I kneeled beside the drum and knocked softly. Not filled with liquid, like the others, the sound too sharp and high. But not empty either. Something inside pressing against the drum and muffling the vibrations.

Matty returned with a piece of rebar in his hands, and I moved back to give him room to swing, his massive frame crushing metal against metal with a spray of sparks. His target was the lid bracket, roiling away under every swing, until it hung broken under a single bent screw.

"Help me get it open!"

Two men, struggling in the mud, under the shadow of a cross. Pulling for their lives, for Amanda's life. Pulling at the seal between us and everything black.

And the lid came away, fell by the wayside. And the light of day shone, inside the drum for the first time.

A little girl, peaceful and light, like she was sleeping. Like she would be getting up for school any moment.

Hair brushed, clothes neat....Skin cold.

Amanda Wilson.

Matty lifted her small frame out like it was weightless, laying her down in a bed of mud and seeping oil. CPR was second nature for him, learned beside bullets and dying friends in a distant land. But never on a child. Never on a little girl.

Frantic, tender. Not wanting to crush her tiny chest.

Fifteen compressions.

Desperate, gentle. Touching her still red lips.

One breath.

15-1. 15-1. 15-1.

Next to a shadow of a cross.

"She's gone."

Like a tolling bell, my phone rang. Like an answer before the question.

A digital chirp and a little girl dead.

Matty's phone rang next. He answered.

"Hello sir....At the Holy Names Church, sir.....We found her sir....Amanda Wilson....yessir...yessir...."

Matty's face went white, like his phone was a live grenade.

"Oh my god."

Matty hung up. His hand was shaking. Not like him.

"What is it?"

"A possible kidnapping."

"What!?"

"Sabrina Meyer. White female. Six years old. Waiting for the school bus."

"Oh my god."

*****

The scene was the same. Same as a year ago. Cops and cruisers everywhere. Flashing lights, men in blue.

Standing around. Doing what they could. Which was nothing.

The ambulance was here too. Probably for the mother. Xanax, so she could answer questions. Or take her to the psyche ward, for something stronger.

But Theresa Meyer had no answers. No leads, no suspicious persons. Just a knock from the bus driver, asking where was Sabrina? A mother's soul going cold in realization, in panic. Remembering the little girl from the year before. Crossing the threshold from life into living hell.

The Sheriff told us to canvas. Just like he had last year. Even though it had been useless.

The only clue here was the pattern.

The morbid connection between two six year old girls. One gone, one found. One year apart.

"Get in the car Matty."

"Aren't we supposed to canvas?"

"Fuck that."

I held up the scrawled address of the Mayfair Mobile Home Park.

"What's there?" he asked. But the answer dawned on him a second later, and he looked down at his feet, some internal struggle going on in his brain. He finally looked up, sad. Then he nodded once and we got in the car and drove.

*****

The park looked different in the day. The hopelessness and decay painfully evident in the bright light. Red spray paint graffiti calling someone a whore. Disintegrating garbage bags taped over long broken windows. Skeletal meth heads smoking cigarettes and fidgeting with their stringy half bleached hair.

I wondered where their kids were. Maybe they were all in drums, just no one noticed.

"Her place is in the back," I said. "Lot #66."

Matty drove slow, and the suspicious residents trickled back into their trailers, to cover up whatever illegal thing they were doing today. When we got to 66, it was a ghost town.

"So you think she knows where this missing girl is?" asked Matty.

"She knew about Amanda," I said.

"So you think she's psychic?"

"How else could she know?"

Matty just shrugged his shoulders. Then until he saw Lilly, standing in her open doorway, and she had every bit of his attention. Beautiful as ever, black hair and red lipstick perfectly in place. Dark and seductive. This time she had on a tight black top, cut high to hide the pentagram tattoo underneath.

"Come in, detectives."

She led us inside, to the same table, this time three chairs neatly arranged.

Sometimes,

Truth is hidden by faith

A circle of repeating expectation

Sometimes,

Backwards is forwards,

And up is down and what's left is right....

Lilly reached out her delicate hands and we joined them around the circle.

"You found her," she said.

"Yes," I said. "Exactly where you said."

"She wasn't breathing."

"No."

"I'm sorry."

"We're here for someone else," interjected Matty. "Another girl is missing."

"I know," she said.

"Sabrina Meyer. 6 years old," he said.

"I know."

"Well do you know where she is!?"

"Close your eyes," she said.

I did, and she squeezed my hand, the world becoming quiet with answers.

Pain is part of The Plan,

Hard answers live in the shadows

Under the eve of the noonday sun...

Peace is the price of mortality,

Under the reckoning under the sun

A shadow of something soon forgotten.

Under the shadow under the circle

The life of a six year old girl.

I felt Matty's hand suddenly jerk from mine, but I kept my eyes closed, still searching, still lost in Lilly's touch.

Save me!

Policemen

Help me!

I can't breathe...

Matty lurched up from his chair and it crashed on the floor. He was shaking, sweating, eyes wide and black like a terrified animal.

He pulled his .45 and pointed it at Lilly's face.

"GET THE FUCK BACK!"

Lilly didn't move, didn't let go of my hand. Just smiled her red lips into something unforgettable.

"GET BACK NOW!!!"

Matt was wild, scary, his gun trembling with the weight of death.

Lilly shook her beautiful features calmly back and forth.

No.

Matty pulled the trigger, and ruined her features forever, painting them across the wall.

I let go of her and she fell to the floor. Already dead.

In a fury Matty flipped over the table, launching it across the room and crashing it into the wall. Then he was down on his hands and knees, clawing at the floor like an animal.

Losing his mind.

When he found something....A ridge, a section where the grain didn't quite match.

A trapdoor.

He smashed away with his fists until he could get his hands around the end and lift it open.

The light of day, shining down for the first time, on a secret basement.

A little girl, still breathing.

"Save me!"

Challenge

Challenge of the Month IV: February

The Villain. Some villains may be innately evil. Others may be the product of unfortunate circumstance. Still others may simply be misunderstood - heroes willing to do the unsavory, but ultimately necessary deed. Tell the tale of a villain. Fiction or non-fiction, poetry or Prose. $100 purse to our favorite entry. Outstanding entries will be shared with our publishing partners.

EliCates

37 reads

Nightcap

Wednesday nights at the Watchman used to be busy. Patrol Cops, coming off the long end of the Monday morning double, drinking Pabst and swapping loud stories of tube topped blonds in low Corvettes. Or the grizzled Detectives, taking advantage of their free time, before the ramp in homicides that always came with the weekend. Drinking whiskey, huddled over the bar, having already had plenty enough of other humans. Sometimes even the Captain, still wearing a chest full of brass, there just to buy a round for his boys, to soak up and spread the recent adulation of some job well done: some runaway returned home to his bible thumping mother, or some rapist turned eunuch, on the receiving end of Bakersfield’s country justice.

But this Wednesday night was quiet. Like every Wednesday in recent memory. Like every Thursday, Friday, Saturday. Everyday. The new cops, they didn’t think of Bakersfield as country. They dressed hip and smart, driving their fuel efficient muscle cars to be seen bars like The Left End or the Crowbar. Damn those names sounded gay. Probably were. I mean Crowbar, seriously? Why not call it Ass-less Chaps? Cut out the ambiguity. But I guess all chaps were technically ass-less.

“Another double?”

I nodded. At least Mickey knew how to name a place. He was gray now, and stooped, but his trembling hands found their steadiness as soon as soon as he tipped the bottle, and the whiskey poured out smooth and neat. Just like it always had. Just like it went down. Living proof that in some places, old fashioned was a still a complement. That some things still got better with age. That there was a proper order to things, and those who didn’t appreciate it could just move along, and leave us to our dimly lit bars, and our whiskey.

“You shouldn’t think too much Robbie...it’s not good for the brain.” Mickey slid the old TV remote across the bar. It only had five buttons, but it was big, almost as big as the TV itself, Mickey’s one concession to modern technology. Actually, modern wasn’t really the right word, since Mickey had grabbed it off the side of the road somewhere, a “Free” sign taped to the screen. Still worked though. “I think there might be Blaze game on,” he said.

The Blaze were Bakersfield’s minor league team. Perennially in the basement but but we never abandoned hope. Underdogs, the way we liked them. Maybe this season. If not, there’s always next year. Unlike the big cities, we didn’t abandon things just to jump on the newest fad. We respected tradition here. Where men still worked their own earth with their own hands. Broke their backs over their own dirt and green. Patient, deliberate, old-fashioned. Just like baseball. Win or lose, there were no ties. At the end of the day, there was always a resolution. A reckoning on exactly were you stood.

I clicked the TV to channel 44. Home of the Blaze. The denim-clad old timer down the bar briefly looked up from his drink. Last week, when the Blaze were playing the Mudcats, he had offered up some rambling drunken story about a nephew or cousin or something who had once played catcher up in Toledo. He looked like he might tell it again, but there was no game tonight, and he lowered his head back down to stare into his drink. Maybe the Blaze were headed up to Toledo. Maybe they would play tomorrow.

Maybe a double header.

Tonight it was just some fake bullshit Hollywood cop show. Some perfectly primped detective with a name like Max Stone shooting his gun like a cowboy every five seconds. Winking innuendo with his red headed partner slash model, breasts falling out of her shirt. Punching out suspects with perfectly coifed hair. All tattoos and goatees and six pack abs.

Fucking fake.

I switched the channel. Another cop show.

“Jesus Fucking Christ!”

Mickey examined the shirtless and chiseled fake TV cop with a stern frown. “Everyone is Hollywood is a homosexual these days,” he said. “I read about it. They’re trying to turn everyone gay.”

I wasn’t sure that was true, nothing wasn’t gonna turn me that way, but I turned off the TV anyway. Because fuck Hollywood, and their fake cop shows. The bar went silent, just the rhythmic clack of the overhead fan, fighting against the hot dog day night that was seeping in through the cracks. And losing. Measuring out the silence, as we waited for someone to say something. The rest in the first beat of a measure, the lull before everything changes.

Ending with the jingle of the bells at the front door.

A woman.

The white knuckles of her hand gripping the cast iron door handle, long wavy hair cascading down in front of her face. Dark trails of eyeliner drawn down her cheeks, then the wobbly first step of her high heel on the green velvet carpet.

She was in the wrong bar, in the wrong town. She was too beautiful for Bakersfield. Too beautiful for words. In the midst of her tragedy, we were beholden. Anything she needed, she just had to ask.

Which I’m sure she knew.

Carefully, with her delicate fingers, she eased the door closed, silencing the bells and their obnoxious jingle. Her hands graced over her cheeks, and she turned back towards us, suddenly composed, smeared eyeliner vanished. Glowing in her full beauty, all eyes on her, a star on her stage. A place she had been since she was a teen. A place she was comfortable.

But not Mickey and me. When she stole glances at us, our eyes darted away, desperately searching for something else interesting. To prove our innocence. For Mickey, an imaginary spot on the bar that suddenly needed wiping. For me, a full glass of whiskey, that suddenly needed drinking..

Two boys caught red handed.

Six long, lithe steps in her heels, and she was at the bar, her hands coming up to gently grasp the brass rail, like she was about to order a drink. But instead her sultry voice whisper to Mickey, “Can I use your phone?” An old fashioned request. Even in Bakersfield, everyone had a cell phone.

Except her apparently. And except Mickey, who wordlessly fished around under the bar for a moment before proudly producing an old Ma Bell telephone. He fished out slack in the old gray line, tugging gently to make sure it was still attached to something. Satisfied, he placed the phone down in front of her, the old fashioned bell inside jingling as it hit the bar.

“Thank you,” she whispered, before picking up the handset and placing it to her ear. Then she frowned. Something was wrong. With her other hand, she pressed down the buttons set into the cradle. Two, three, four times. Like they did in old movies, trying to get a connection. She squinted at the receiver, fighting tears of frustration that were starting to form, fighting for composure that was threatening to slip away. She took a deep breath and blew it out her mouth, setting the phone back on the receiver.

With an embarrassed smile, she told Mickey: “There’s no dial tone.”

Mickey turned the phone back around and placed the handset to his own ear, a look of stern concentration on his face as he listened to the sound of nothing. Then he repeated her technique, repeatedly clicking down the receiver. Did that ever work? You either had a dial tone or you didn’t. Finally Mickey shook his head solemnly, like a doctor about to pronounce time of death.

“You can use my phone,” I said, fumbling it out of my pocket and offering it to her. Suddenly, her composure returned and she smiled. I smiled back. I know it was a goofy grin. But I couldn’t help it.

“Thank you so much,” she said. She tried to use the phone but the screen was still locked.

“Oh! Let me get that for you.” She handed the phone back, and I punched in the unlock code. 4362. The last four digits of my badge number. Then I handed it back.

“Are you okay?”

“Not really,” she said.

“What’s wrong?”

“Someone mugged me,” she said, embarrassed, her hand instinctively coming up to hide her face. A common reaction. Victims often felt guilty. Felt responsible somehow.

“I need to call the police,” she said.

“I am the police.”

She hesitated, my phone in her hand, unsure if I was joking, while I frantically fished out my badge and flipped it open. The stainless and bronze detective’s shield. Bakersfield PD stamped in gloss navy blue.

“I’m a detective,” I said.

A look of relief crossed her face. “Thank god,” she said. “I need your help.”

“Have a seat.” I threw a look at Mickey and he nodded, placing a tumbler in front of her and pouring three fingers of whiskey, the cure for everything. She smiled in thanks and threw it back, coughing twice as a warm glow graced her cheeks. Marty poured another for me.

“Sergeant Robert Ryan,” I said, “and this is Mickey.”

“Ashley.”

I pulled out my notepad and flipped a couple pages till I found an empty one.

“Tell me what happened,” I said. The whiskey in me almost added, “Just the facts, ma’am,” in my Joe Friday voice. Like she would get that. Like she had ever seen anything in black and white.

“I just moved into town last week,” she said.

“I’m sorry.”

It was a joke. She didn’t smile. Instead, she looked at me, straight into my eyes. Serious and intense.

“I needed a fresh start,” she said, her voice heavy with gravity and unspoken meaning. Slowly, she tucked her hair behind her ear. Her right eye was bruised and swollen. A classic shiner.

“Oh my god,” I said. “Did he do that to you?”

She nodded.

“Mickey, get her some ice!”

Mickey’s face was tight and red with rage, like Popeye about to explode. In his Bakersfield, a man never laid a finger on a woman. Not if he expected to see the sunrise. He grabbed a clean towel and buried a hand full of ice cubes in the center, offering it to Ashley.

She tried to politely decline: “Really, I’m fine. It doesn’t hurt anymore. I’m sure it looks worse than it is.”

“We’ll get the son of a bitch,” said Mickey.

“We’ll get him,” I confirmed, and Mickey’s face finally relaxed. “Take the ice,” I said. “It’ll make the swelling go down. You’ll be glad you did when you look in the mirror tomorrow.”

Ashley relented, taking the ice filled towel and gingerly pressing it against her eye.

“Thanks,” she said.

“So where did this happen?”

“I was checking my mail,” she said. “At the Post Office, just around the block...It’s on Williams, I think.”

“Yeah, we know it.”

“They leave the doors to the P.O. Boxes open at night. I thought it would be safe.” Her eyes looked up at the ceiling, like she might cry again. “I’m so stupid.”

“No, no you’re not,” I said. “It’s not your fault.”

“I didn’t have any mail anyways.” She wiped away a single stray tear and managed a semi-smile at the irony.

“Did you get a look at him?”

She nodded.

“It was my husband,” she said.

“Oh.” I saw Mickey raise his eyebrows. I was thinking the same thing.

“We’re in the process of getting a divorce,” she explained. “Hence the fresh start.”

“Has he ever hit you before?”

She nodded again, slowly, filled with the weight of history and tragedy. Black eyes, broken ribs, split lips.

Excuses, lies, last chances.

“That’s why I moved to Bakersfield,” she said.

Mickey’s face was red again, like he was holding in a mouthful of molten iron. “Don’t worry,” I said to both of them. “We’ll get him.”

“He has my purse,” said Ashley, worried. “My keys were in there. And my new address...”

“Where is it?”

“An old farmhouse down on Old Line,” she said. “A couple miles past the Feed Stop.”

“Pat Cooper’s old place,” said Mickey.

“He was my uncle,” said Ashley.

“He was a good man,” said Mickey, his highest compliment. “They don’t make em like that anymore.”

“No, they don’t,” she agreed.

“Let me give you a ride home,” I said. “If your husband is there, he’s definitely gonna regret the day he came to Bakersfield.”

Ashley nodded, looking stronger. Ready for some country justice. Mickey was ready too, for this punk interloper to get what was coming to him.

Ashley handed the towel with ice back to Mickey. “Thank you for the whiskey. I owe you.”

“No ma’am, you don’t.”

The night was hot sticky. Like every summer night in Bakersfield. Old timers called it “the clench” -- because it never let go. The city sat in the trench of the San Joaquin Valley, which funneled countless tons of dustoff fertilizer and cow farts into a heavy blanket, stuck in place until the autumn rains of the Sierra Nevada moved in and brought some relief.

But boy, did it make the stars twinkle. Especially tonight. It’s how the stars must look in heaven.

I walked Ashley towards my Crown Vic, unmarked, but obviously a police car. Technically, a detective’s cruiser. So old, the Captain never cared that I drove it home.

“Where’s your car?” I asked her.

She pointed down the block, at a shiny late model import. Stylish and black, or maybe dark blue. Hard to tell in the dark.

“Nice,” I said.

She shrugged. “The payments, not so much.”

“Do you have a spare key?”

“No,” she said, with the regret of hindsight.

“Don’t worry, I know a locksmith. I’ll call him tomorrow morning. It’ll take two minutes.”

“That would be awesome,” she said. I opened the passenger door so she could get in. “I get to sit in the front?”

“Only criminals sit in the back...you’re not a criminal, are you?”

She laughed politely and I closed the door. As I moved around to the driver’s side, I saw Mickey standing outside his bar, watching us. Wanting to trade places, no doubt. But I was the cop, and he was the bartender. We exchanged a quick wave, before I closed the door on him, and the Watchman.

He was still standing there, tiny in the rear view, when I turned on Williams and the bar vanished out of sight.

“Let me turn on the AC for you,” I said, rolling up my window.

“Actually...I’m good.” She rolled down her own window. “I like the fresh air.”

“You don’t mind the smell?”

“No way,” she said. “I grew up in London.”

“They have cows in London?”

She laughed. “London, Ohio. Population 500. Well, 499 now. But the cow population is like a million. There’s so much methane in the air, it’s illegal to smoke outside during the summer.”

“Wow,” I said, thinking Bakersfield had it bad. “Really?”

“No.” She smiled. “Else they would have thrown me in jail.”

I took out my pack and offered her one.

“Oh my god, thank you,” she said. “I’ve been dying. Mine were in my purse.”

I fished out my lighter and she lit hers, cupping her hand around the flame. She handed me the cigarette then lit another for herself. Then she took a deep puff and sighed, relaxing into her seat.

“Lucky Strikes, huh?”

“I’m old school,” I said.

She examined the Lucky Strike emblem on the pack, inhaling deep. The ember glowed bright red, before it was obscured by a cloud of blue smoke.

“I like it.”

Silence then, as the moonlit fields passed by the wayside. Alfalfa probably, and almods, barely caught in the light of a pair of headlights. A lonely road, two people enjoying the simple, timeless pleasure of company alone, on a quiet country night. Her hair blowing in the breeze, a contented smile on her face.

She held her hand out, feeling the air rush past. “I wish we could just drive forever,” she said.

Me too.

But the headlights caught a glimpse of the Feed Station, its huge sign designed to look like a giant ear of corn. Unmistakable. That meant we would be at her place soon.

Too soon.

I think she knew it too, because the smile on her face was evaporating, remembering the reason for this trip in the first place. To keep her from getting another black eye. Or worse.

I turned on her driveway, and the smooth hum of paved road gave way to the noisy crackle of dirt and gravel. She was rolling up her window, sitting rigid in her seat...on edge. Her smile gone.

Her house appeared in my high-beams: a simple old, single story white farmhouse, probably renovated a hundred times, to accommodate things like running water and electricity. But still sturdy. I pulled to a stop.

“Don’t worry,” I said.

I clicked on the car’s spotlight, and swept it across the yard. A small barn, probably red at some point. Besides that, just long dead, long baked weeds and abandoned fields.

“Wait here,” I said. “Just honk the horn if you see anything.”

She nodded quickly and tightly, like scared people do.

“It’s okay, I’ll be right back.” I said, trying to be reassuring. She looked at me and tried to fake a reassured smile. I was maybe two steps from the car when I heard the locks clicked closed. She was scared, but still thinking. That was good.

I headed towards the barn, cutting through the spotlight, steadying myself against the whiskey, as I watched my shadow crawling up the barn door. My gun suddenly felt conspicuous in my shoulder holster, like I should pull it. But I didn’t want to scare Ashley anymore. I’d wait until she couldn’t see.

The barn door was old redwood, the paint baked under years of sun, and flaking off in splinters. Flecks of white trims still caught the light, and reflected it, barely, in a sad pastiche that said old and neglected, in a way only an abandoned barn could. Why they always found their way into prize winning black and white photographs of rural life. A symbol of a bygone bera. When horses did more than prance and run around in circles.

And men too.

But at the end of the barn door, a long black line, swallowing the light. Someone had left it open a crack. Someone had been inside. I pulled my gun, keeping it low in front of my body so Ashley wouldn’t see. A heave and the door swung open, squealing against rusty hinges. The spotlight poured in. If it found a person, I would have blasted him. He should have expected it.

This was Bakersfield.

But there was just a stack of hay bales, dried blonde and shiny. And an old ladder leading up to a hay loft, laying a long shadow of lines across the far wall.

“Hello?”

Just crickets, and the rustle of a timber mouse probably, minding their own business. I left them to it.

The house was next. Humble, but well cared for. Two large square windows on either side of the front door, to let in the sunrise as it came up over the Rockies. A farmer’s alarm clock. I peaked my flashlight through, around the old drapes that hung in the corners. A small touch of class, like the side curtains that framed the stage of old fashioned vaudeville theaters. The light picked out the ghostly silhouettes of hand made furniture: A kitchen table, a couch, a four post bed. But no sign of people.

The front door was unlocked. Still common in Bakersfield, but becoming less so. I flicked on the lights, and suddenly the place went from sinister to cozy, even quaint. A lovingly hand knit blanket draped over the couch, blue and yellow. The colors of summer. An oak and glass tea cupboard, the china inside painted with delicate images of windmills and horse-drawn plows. Old black and white photos on the wall, featuring bare chested, overalled men holding up bushels of alfalfa and barley: the pride of the harvest. Everything as it should be. I slipped my gun back into its holster and snapped it closed.

Ashley unlocked the doors as I approached the car. She seemed better. Less edgy.

“You didn’t find anything?” she asked.

“Nope. No one’s here. Just you and me.”

“So what now?”

“Well, I need some more information for the official report. And a picture of your husband if you have it. Then we can round him up and throw his ass in jail.”

“Good,” said Ashley. “You want to come inside?”

“Sure.”

I turned off the cruiser’s lights and the stars came out to greet us, suddenly beautiful and everywhere, twinkling like they only do in Bakersfield.

“It’s beautiful out here at night, isn’t it?” she said.

The same night that had seen her get mugged and assaulted. Amazing she could still appreciate it.

He was gonna pay.

“Yes, it is.”

This time, she locked the front door, and we took a seat at the kitchen table.

“I don’t really have any food, or anything,” she said, apologetically. “I haven’t really had time to shop. But I have some bourbon.”

“I think that counts.”

She found two thick glasses, probably as old as the house, and filled them. Then she disappeared into the bedroom. “I’ll be right back.” She reappeared a moment later with a small picture in her hand, and put it on the table in front of me.

A wiry blond haired man in combat fatigues, smiling an okie grin. Behind was a large transport truck, painted sandy beige, parked on a dilapidated desert road in what I figured was the middle of some third world shit hole.

“This is your husband?”

“Yeah.”

“He’s in the army?”

“He was,” she said. “They booted him for smuggling drugs in the caskets of dead soldiers.”

“Sounds like a winner.”

“You have no idea...I was young and stupid.”

“Can you tell me his full name?”

“Chad Aaron Mitchell.”

I spelled it out on my notepad. We ran over the other relevant details, and soon the page was filled up. “I think that should do it,” I said.

“You’re leaving?” A loaded question. A dam straining to hold back panic.

“I have to get this report in.”

“What if he comes back?”

It was a good question. How many cops had intervened in domestic disputes, only to return hours later to a murder scene? I happened all the time. No one was more dangerous to a woman than her estranged spouse. Especially one who had been thrown out of the army. An army that had taught him to kill.

“Do you have any place you can go?”

She shook her head sadly. “I don’t know anyone around here.”

I looked over at her couch. It looked comfortable. She saw me looking. Her eyes were hoping.

“Actually,” I said, “That couch looks comfortable.”

She smiled, and that was all it took, the arrangement was sealed. She looked young again. The way she was meant to look.

“Thank you so much.”

“No problem, but first I have to call this in.” I raised the notepad.

“Yeah, yeah, of course.” She was relieved, almost happy. Black eye and all. That made me happy.

When I got back from the car, the couch was all made up. Ashley had changed, out of her dress, into shorts and a t-shirt. She looked more beautiful than ever.

But this was work.

“Can I get you anything else?” she asked.

“No, no. I’m good.” I took off my holster and put it on the coffee table, the gun thumping down with a reassuring weight.

“The bathroom’s right there.” She pointed to an open door down the hall.

“Okay.”

“Thank you so much Rob. If there is anything I can do...”

“Absolutely not,” I said. “My job is to protect and serve. I can’t let anything happen to Bakersfield’s newest resident.”

She smiled. Bright and enchanting. Like a princess.

“You’re the best,” she said. “I think I’m gonna like it here.”

That made me smile. “Get some sleep,” I said. “Tomorrow morning, I’ll call the locksmith and we can go pick up your car.”

“That sounds perfect.”

“Good night.”

The sun came up early, and hot. Heat that made you want shade. To find a shadow somewhere, anywhere. But the couch was narrow, the windows large; there was no place to squirm out of the way. It was today. No way to avoid it. The hangover starting. A promise of seasickness and sticky, fermented sweat. Rancid breath and regret.

I was used to it.

Just needed an eye opener and I would be fine. Well, maybe fine wasn’t the right word.

Functional.

There was an empty glass on the table. It smelled like bourbon. I found the bottle in a cupboard and poured myself two fingers. Then another two. The bottle was close to empty to I just poured the rest. It burned going down. I took a few deep breaths and the nausea started to pass. The things that hurt started to go numb. A good start to the day. My hands were steady again.

I strapped on my holster and waited for Ashley to get up.

But 8am rolled around and there was still no stirring from the bedroom. So I knocked. And waited. And listened. Nothing. I knocked again, louder. Still nothing. My mind was spinning red. Worried.

What the fuck?

I kicked. The door splintered with the crack of old wood. Bakersfield PD would pay for it. I just needed to find her.

But the bedroom was empty. The old four post bed, still made. An old faded sunflower quilt, perfectly in place. Perfectly square. The room smelled dusty, and mothballed.

Empty.

I rushed outside. Just acres of dry dusty fields. A carcass of an old scarecrow, pointing to weeds. I checked the barn. Just stacks of bleached, brittle hay. And the smell of rust.

Ashley was gone.

The only thing left, heading out towards the highway: foot prints in the dust.

One pair, or two?

Chad Aaron Mitchell.

That fucker was going to pay.

I ground the shit out of the ignition, but it finally turned over, and I gunned it wide open, down Old Line, just rubber and dust.

The Feed Stop.

The sign was a twenty foot fake piece of corn...

So fucking stupid.

Jesus, does anyone know how to drive?

Was that a cruiser in the parking lot?

Maybe someone robbed the Feed Stop.

Hah.

Maybe someone stole some hay,

Bakersfield, 1 mile...

I slammed the cruiser around Main, then down on Mason.

There was the Post Office, where Ashley was attacked. Around the corner should be her car...

But it was gone.

Down the street was the Watchman.

And noise and lights.

Flashing blue.

Police and police cars.

Must be every cop in Bakersfield.

Except me.

I flashed my badge to one of them: Schmidt, from his badge. I told him to tell me what the fuck is going on. He looked nervous.

Fucking rookies.

There was Detective Anderson, slow talking but honest.

“Robbie, are you okay?”

“I’m fine goddamnit! Tell me what is going on!”

Anderson waved his hands, like he was telling an orchestra to go slower.

“Robbie... something happened at the bar last night.”

“No shit!”

He tried to grab me but I shrugged off my jacket and flung myself inside.

There was the green velvet carpet, crushed and faded but still green. The mahogany bar, polished a million times. And the old TV, just static.

And two bodies.

Swarming with CSI techs. They looked up in a panic. Looking at me.

It was Mickey. Ghost white and dead. A hole through the forehead. Stamped in a puddle of red.

Gone. Long gone.

The other body. Half zipped in a bodybag.

Please don’t be Ashley.

My gut knew it was her.

But it wasn’t her. It was a man. A wiry, blonde man, in his late 20s.

I pulled the picture from my pocket. A wiry, blonde man, in his 20s, standing in fatigues in the middle of some middle eastern shithole.

Chad Aaron Mitchell.

“Robbie!”

It was someone shouting behind me.

The oversize Captain Arroyo, and his baritone voice.

And his toady escort. Two bootlicking privates.

They grabbed me by the shoulders.

“What the fuck!”

Arroyo just stood there, fat and pompous, while he put on nylon gloves.

Then he grabbed my Colt 1911 out of my holster.

The gun that had won the west.

With a flick, Arroyo dropped the magazine from the hilt, catching it in his left hand.

On the magazine, there was a line cut straight down, to reveal how many bullets were remaining.

Six brass .45s.

The clip held nine.

Three were missing.

“Sergeant Ryan, you are under arrest.”

Challenge

Challenge of the Month III: January

New beginnings, a fresh start. A new chapter in an old story, or a new story altogether. Write about the start of something new. Fiction or non-fiction, poetry or Prose. $100 purse to our favorite entry. Outstanding entries will be shared with our publishing partners.

EliCates

84 reads

11:11

Evie sat up in bed. She slid off the Coach eye compress which she wore every night, and gently pressed under her eyelids with her fingertips. Still puffy.

Piece of crap.

This was going to add another fifteen minutes to her makeup regime. (The application time for the the Mac Miracle Eye Wonder Gel.)

Worth every penny.

She began tallying minutes in her head, expert in the nuance of application times, even accounting for the high altitude. Blow dry, foundation, straighten, liner...then she saw at the clock.

7:11

“SHIT!”

Matt was still sleeping next to her, his face soft and innocent, his lips dribbling a small puddle of saliva on the pillow. She smacked him straight in the jaw, square, so the crack echoed off the walls. He was shocked awake, gasping for air, his face turning red around the white outlines of her handprint.

Matt spun his head left and right in a panic. “WHAT’S WRONG!?”

“Get up!”

Matt sat up in bed, eyes wide, looking for the fire. The only thing burning was his cheek.

“What’s going on!?”

“You were supposed to wake me up 45 minutes ago!”

“I’m sorry,” pleaded Matt. “But I was driving all night...”

Evie got out of bed in a huff and collected the various accoutrements she needed to get ready.

“Goddamnit Matt! This was the one fucking day I needed you to be responsible.”

“I’m sorry.”

Evie slammed the bathroom door behind her. Matt heard the shower turn on. Then he switched the alarm from 7:15 to 8:15 and put his head back down on the pillow, not caring that it was wet.

An hour later, Matt got up and shut off the alarm. He threw some clothes on and tied his shoes. Evie was still in the bathroom, probably painting on her Fire Engine lipstick, or Mystique eye shadow. Or Luscious rouge, or Linea lashes, or whatever the fuck. He didn’t really care, even though his Visa had paid for most of it.

Fifteen minutes later, the bathroom door opened, and Evie presented herself. Revealing yoga pants. Low cut, tight fitting tank top. Fashionable Adidas sneakers. Matt thought she looked beautiful, as always, but her expression said pissed. Almost a scowl. For all the trouble she went through with her makeup and outfits, he thought, it never seemed to improve her mood much.

“You look beautiful,” he said.

“I look like shit. Thanks to you. I had to rush.”

Evie held out her cell phone and Matt silently accepted it. He knew the routine. She moved around the room, looking for the best spot to have her picture taken.

“The view from the window is beautiful...” he suggested.

“Too much glare.” She finally settled on a pose in bathroom, where the mirror could highlight her rear assets. Matt clicked off pictures until she was satisfied, then handed the phone back, reclaiming his seat on the bed while she uploaded them to Facebook.

Matt watched her thumbs whirring, like a miniature game of smack the gopher. She typed in: “About to claim 1000! Wish me luck!!!” Then added #1000 and smiled to herself. Post.

Finally, a smile.

But it didn’t last long.

“THAT FUCKING BITCH!”

Before Matt could ask, Evie thrust the phone in front of him. It was Myra Millers’s Facebook page. There was a picture of Myra, packing her parachute. The caption read:

‘El Capitan - Here I come!’

“I hope she fucking dies!”

“Come on E, you don’t mean that.”

“That bitch is trying to steal my number from me.”

“The climb to the top of El Capitan takes at least three hours. You have plenty of time. Don’t worry about it.”

“All my shit better be packed and ready.”

“It is,” said Matt. “I double checked it last night.”

“Then let’s go already!”

Matt rolled his eyes, thankful she didn’t see. But she was already out the door.

-----------------------

Colorado Springs was a half bowl, set into the rising steppes of the Rockies, which cut like granite teeth into the sky beyond. The Cree people called them ‘As-sin-wati.’ ‘Where the gods walk.’ A magical place where the division between human and nature was at its thinnest.

But Evie had her phone up, a shield against any kind of spiritual epiphany. Her thumb was on refresh, and she scowled at the screen, watching the pictures of the hated Myra, as she began her ascent up El Capitan. Under the photos, hordes of Facebook admirers offered generic encouragement: “You go girl!” “Such an inspiration!” “Girl power!”

“Blah blah blah.”

Fuck them.

Matt opened up the back door of the SUV. “Do you wanna check the chute?” he asked, hesitant. He knew the look. The one he didn’t want scowling at him.

“You checked it last night, right?”

“I triple checked it, but it was late...”

“Jesus, we don’t have time....” Evie trailed off, distracted suddenly, looking at the passenger side of the SUV. Deep scratches ran along the entire length, exposing the chrome underneath. Evie ran her fingers along the gashes, her face turning red with frustration.

“WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS?!”

Matt grimaced. The damage looked much worse in the light of day. “You don’t remember?”

“Obviously not! What the FUCK?!”

“You must have been sleeping.”

“What the hell happened?!”

Matt used his hands to explain: one held up, straight and steady; their SUV. Then the other hand came into the picture, swerving back and forth. “On the highway down from Denver, this random truck came straight into our lane.” His hands jerked together, pointing in opposite directions. “I had to swerve out of the way, and our car hit the guard rail.”

“It looks like shit,” said Evie.

“That guard rail saved our lives. We could be two corpses at the bottom of some thousand foot ravine right now.”

“It still looks like shit.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s too late to fix it now. We have to go.”

Matt opened the door for her and Evie got in. “The cameras are totally gonna see it,” she said.

“It looks kind of extreme.”

“No, it’s looks ghetto.”

Matt got in the driver’s seat and started the car. She’s just nervous about the jump, he reminded himself. They drove off in silence. Soon, Colorado Springs had vanished in the rearview, and the newly ghetto SUV climbed the serpentine highway 6 into the mouth of the Rockies.

Where the gods walk.

The Royal Gorge Bridge was the highest suspension bridge in the world, rising nearly one thousand feet above the Arkansas River. In BASE jumping terms, that was five seconds. But that was without a parachute, straight down. Ideally, the jumper pulled the chute before the five seconds were up.

The acronym BASE stood for Building, Antennae, Span (bridge), and Earth (cliff). The BASE jumping Hall of Fame permanently enshrined the names of individuals who successfully completed jumps from each of the four categories, bestowing upon them a number indicating order of enshrinement. The late legend Stu Magnus was 1, and famed daredevil Robert Raffi was two. Currently, only 999 people in the history of the world had jumped from every category of BASE.

The BASE hall of fame also kept a less prestigious list: fatalities. According to the math, one jump in sixty resulted in a death. That meant anyone attempting all four categories had a one in fifteen chance of dying.

But the only math Evie cared about was the number that came after 999. Social media had chronicled the push by various jumpers to claim the mythical 1000. (The pics of Lars Svengard’s brain matter and shattered skull were up on Facebook for three days before they took them down.)

Many had failed. Today, she would not. She would claim 1000, and stick it to wannabes like Myra Miller. No one would ever forget her name.

Matt paid the $10 toll at the booth, and the wheels of the SUV did a double thump over the raised metal strip, marking the entrance proper of Royal Gorge Bridge. The iron lattice of the South tower rose into the sky above, pulling one end of the suspension cables, while it’s twin, at the opposite end, pulled back. Two steel sentinels, silently and perpetually pulling, 150 years and counting.

The RG Bridge had felt the hard soles of pioneers, the hoof prints of draft horses, even the tracks of armored vehicles sent to put down the miners’ strike of ’35. But thirty years ago, she was purchased by the Morgan Theme Park company, and turned it into a tourist attraction, complete with large paved parking lots on either end and a wide thoroughfare for pedestrians.

“Where should I stop?” asked Matt.

“Right in the middle. That’s where everyone is,” said Evie.

The pedestrians tried to look nonchalant, but their turning heads and expectant glances gave them away. Jumping off the bridge was illegal, parachute or not, but that’s why everyone was here. If the Colorado State Police caught them, the event would be shut down.

Evie stepped out of the car, and a spontaneous cheer went up, contagious and spreading. The crowd became a single entity, an organic half circle caught in the gravity of their darling. Their BASE jumping princess. At that moment, Evie felt like 1000. It was hers. She was jumping. No police could stop her. The adoring crowd wouldn’t let them.

Waiting for her at the jump point was Vince McCreary, number 666, bedecked in his famous devil themed gear. Next to him, his ubiquitous cameraman Tory was already filming. Vince had spun his notoriety into a successful YouTube channel, with more than 100,000 subscribers. When he saw the stunning Eve and her beaming smile, he knew this would be his biggest video yet.

Matt was at the back of the SUV, carefully unpacking the parachute and the jump rig. One small tear was the difference between life and death, but no one besides him seemed to appreciate this. They were all busy fawning over Evie, who was fawning over Vince McCreary, and his camera.

“First, let me say what everyone is thinking,” said Vince into his mic. “Why is someone as beautiful as you about to jump off a bridge?”

“Ahh Vince, come on,” said Evie, blushing seductively, perfectly coy for the camera.

“I’m serious. Don’t women like you end up becoming models, actresses, or weather-ladies?”

“You know what,” said Evie, suddenly serious. “That’s exactly why I’m here. Every life has it’s own challenges. We all have obstacles and fears to overcome. I’m here today to prove that it doesn’t matter what you look like. Being pretty doesn’t mean I’m delicate. It doesn’t mean I’m not as brave as any man.”

A feminine cheer went up from the crowd. As it died down, another sound emerged...

Police sirens.

The camera turned, along with the sea of heads, towards the end of the bridge. Colorado State Police cruisers, making their way through the tollbooths.

The camera turned back to Vince and Evie. “Looks like the po-po is here to crash your party.”

“Not my party,” said Evie. “Not today!” She raised a fist in defiance. The crowd went wild.

“Keep them back!” shouted Vince, over the din. The crowd merged into a human wall, five people deep.

“Let’s go Matt!” shouted Evie. He was standing by, holding the jump rig, looking worried.

“You’re not going to check it?” he asked, concerned.

“I thought you already did!”

“Yeah, but--”

″--Then hurry up!”

Matt slipped the rig over Evie’s shoulders, like a backpack, then began buckling the myriad harnesses and straps. Evie wrapped her fingers around the ripcord, one by one, making sure her grip was firm. She gave it the slightest tug, to check it was taught.

Behind them, cop car doors were slamming closed. Cops were shouting. Her fans were shouting louder.

“E-VIE!” “E-VIE!” “E-VIE!” “E-VIE!”

“It’s now or never,” she said, before gracefully grabbing the railing and swinging her legs over, so the only thing between her and gravity was a two inch ledge of concrete. She glanced at her watch:

11:11

Myra can suck it.

Evie gave the camera a thumbs up, and jumped.

The crowd went dead silent, for exactly four seconds. At five seconds, they cried out in horror. Even louder was the sledgehammer crunch as Evie’s body cratered into the granite bank of the Arkansas River.

----------------------

Evie sat up in bed, her body drenched in cold sweat. She slowly slid off her Coach eye compress, blinking back tears, knowing they would leave her eye bloodshot. Through the sheen, the digits of the clock sparkled and waved:

7:11

Deep breathes.

Next to her, Matt was still sleeping peacefully, dripping saliva pooling on his pillow like he always did. Evie put her hand on his shoulder and gently shook him awake. When he opened his eyes and saw the clock, he bolted upright, immediately aware he was busted.

“Damn! I’m sorry Evie. I know I was suppossed to wake you up at 6:30--”

″--It’s okay.”

Matt saw tears starting to fall from her eyes, before she quickly wiped them away.

“What’s wrong E?”

“I had a bad dream,” she said, wiping away more tears in frustration.

Matt put his arm on her shoulder, feeling his heart swell for his uncharacteristically vulnerable fiance. “That’s totally normal,” he said, his voice gentle and kind. “This is a big day for you. Most people would be puking their guts out...Actually, most people wouldn’t have even made it here.”

Evie cracked the hint of a smile. “You’re right.” She wiped away the last remnants of her tears. “My eyes are going to be so bloodshot!”

“You look beautiful. You always look beautiful. It’s not fair to everyone else.”

“Thanks Matt.” She collected her gear, then disappeared into the bathroom to get ready, offering a wink and a wave, the kind only beautiful women can do, before she closed the door.

An hour later she emerged. Revealing yoga pants. Low cut, tight fitting tank top. Fashionable Adidas sneakers. As radiant as ever.

“You look amazing,” said Matt.

“Thanks.” She smiled, but it was obligatory, not happy.

She must be nervous about the jump, he reminded himself.

“Do you want me to take a picture?” he asked, used to the routine.

“Let’s take one together,” said Evie. They moved together to the balcony, the Rockies filling the sky behind them. “Cheese.” Two smiles, one picture. Post.

“Ready?”

“Ready.”

In the parking lot, Matt opened up the back door of the SUV. “Do you wanna check the chute?” he asked.

“You checked it last night, right?”

“I triple checked it, but it was late...”

Before Evie could check, she was distracted by the gouges dug deep into the passenger side doors. “What happened?”

“You don’t remember?”

“Wait...I do remember,” said Evie, in a far off voice. “You hit a guard rail. A truck swerved into our lane....We could be two corpses at the bottom of some thousand foot ravine right now.”

“Exactly,” said Matt. She took the words right out of his mouth. He opened the passenger door, and she got in without another word, her gaze lost in the depths of the Rockies.

The serpentine drive up highway 6 was quiet. Just the hum of weathered concrete under the treads, and thin mountain air passing by the windows. Every mile, Matt turned his head to check on Evie, but she was lost in her own world, lost in a thousand yard stare, visions of futures and pasts passing by her wayside.

The higher they climbed into the Rockies, the more the silence began to press down, taking on a life of its own, a third companion in the lonely car ride. Matt wanted to say something, but he didn’t know what. Hair, makeup, pictures, Facebook. Things she liked to talk about. They all seemed suddenly trivial.

Jumping off bridges. That wasn’t trivial. But like condemned prisoners on death row, superstition ruled, and only the man (or woman) facing his own (or her own) execution had the right to bring it up. And Evie wasn’t talking.

Not until Matt paid the $10 toll and the wheels did a double bump over the bridge marker. Then she turned to him, fear in her eyes, and broke the silence:

“I don’t think I can do this,” she said. Her hands were trembling. She crossed them over her chest to hide them from his worried glance.

“Yes you can baby,” Matt said, with a reassuring smile. He had never seen her this nervous. “I know you can.”

“I just have a bad feeling.” She could see the legions of pedestrians, her fans, suddenly looking to their car expectantly as Matt pulled to a stop. “I have a really bad feeling.”

“That’s normal honey. Remember how you felt at the top of Al Basri Towers?” She nodded reluctantly. “But you totally nailed it! You even stuck a ten pointer on the landing! They are still talking about that...”

Evie smiled half-heartedly, coming around. Fans near the SUV recognized it was her, their BASE jumping princess, and spontaneous cheering went up. Arms pumping, American flags waving, posterboards plastered with #1000.

“They’re all here for you,” said Matt. “You inspire them.” He offered a fist bump.

Evie clenched her fist and bumped him back. “Let’s do this.” Then she stepped out into the roar of her adoring fans. She knew nine out of ten of them had never jumped off anything higher than a jungle gym. But that’s why they were shouting her name.

She saw Vince McCreary waiting at the ledge. And there was Tory, with his ever present camera. Evie pumped her fist, and the roar turned to a frenzy. The crowd parted in front of her as she took her position. Vince kissed her on the cheek, and Tory waved for quiet so Vince could start his interview.

“First, let me say what everyone is thinking,” said Vince into his mic. “Why is someone as beautiful as you about to jump off a bridge?”

“Ahh Vince, come on,” said Evie, blushing.

“I’m serious. Don’t women like you end up becoming models, actresses, or weather-ladies?”

A feminine cheer went up from the crowd. As it died down, another sound emerged...

Police sirens.

The camera turned, along with the sea of heads, towards the end of the bridge. Colorado State Police cruisers, making their way through the tollbooths.

The camera turned back to Vince and Evie. “Looks like the po-po is here to crash your party.”

Evie suddenly felt sick. All the way to her bones. A nightmare deja-vu. Terror, panic, horror. All of them and more. She clutched Matt’s shoulder to keep from collapsing on the pavement.

“What’s wrong?”

“I....I can’t do this.”

Matt didn’t know what to say. He saw Tory filming, knowing this would all be on YouTube soon. Knowing Evie, the ignominy of failure might be worse than death. But before he could think of any words of encouragement, Evie grabbed the car keys from his hand. A second later, the SUV was peeling out down the bridge, Matt standing there alone, holding the parachute.

The SUV blew through the toll booth, the engine racing hard. Evie had the steering wheel in one hand, wiping away tears with the other. She didn’t know where she was going. She didn’t care. As long as the Rockies were in the rearview.

Cutting through the fugue, the clock in the dash board, cool electric blue, clicking over, all straight lines.

11:11

It was the last thing she saw. The oncoming semi swerved into her lane and closed the gap so fast she didn’t even have time to break. Her body lost it’s beautiful form, smeared across 100 yards of lonely Colorado highway.

------------------

7:11

The sound of sobbing woke Matt up. He blinked his eyes, making sure this was real. He reached out and touched Evie gently on the shoulder. “Are you okay?”

“No, I’m not.” She could barely get it out through the sobs.

“What’s wrong?”

But Evie just looked at him, devastation written on her face, before crumpling in his arms. They stayed like that, holding each other, while Matt watched the minutes on the clock tick by. Eventually, Evie calmed down, but he noticed her eyes had been open the whole time, staring into the creases of his t-shirt.

“What happened E?”

“I had a bad dream.”

“About the jump?”

She silently nodded her head, still buried in his chest.

Matt compassionately stroked her hair. “That’s totally normal. Jumping off a bridge is stressful.”

Evie bolted upright. “NO. This wasn’t normal.... We are not going anywhere near that fucking bridge.”

“Hey, hey. It’s just a dream.”

“I don’t care! I’m not jumping.”

“But all your fans are expecting you! They’ve traveled from all over the world, just to see their BASE jumping princess claim number 1000.”

“FUCK THEM!”

Matt knew there was no point arguing, so he decided to take a shower. He took his time, hope Evie’s mood would pass. But when he got out of the bathroom, she was still in bed, now holding the alarm clock on her lap, staring at the red LED numbers.

“Should I call Vince, and tell him you’re backing out?” asked Matt.

“Yes.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

Matt escaped to the balcony, to make the call, but he talked loud enough so Evie could hear, their conversation betraying obvious disappointment. But Evie didn’t seem to care. When he went back inside, she was still staring at the clock.

“Are you hungry?” asked Matt. “Do you wanna get some breakfast.”

“No.”

“You just wanna sit here and stare at the clock like a weirdo?”

“Yes.”

Matt sighed and sat back down in the bed next to her. He looked at the clock, trying to determine if there was something imperceptible he was missing. But it was just a clock.

“How long are you gonna stare at that thing?”

“Until it turns 11:12.”

Something in her voice. Matt knew this was not up for debate. He decided he could wait until then before assuming his fiance had lost her mind. They had been together two years, he could spare two hours.

So together, in silence, they watched the clock. 9:30...10:00... Matt dozing off.

The fire alarm woke him up. A shrill insistent wail, and flashing halogen bulb on the wall, strobing the room in bright white light. But Evie was still frozen in place, staring at the clock, silent tears rolling down her face.

“OH MY GOD!! EVIE!! WE HAVE TO GET OUT OF HERE!!!”

Matt launched himself out of bed, grabbing her by the arm. But she shrugged him off.

“It’s no use.”

Smoke was filling the room. The walls were scorching black. The roar of the fire, the

wailing of pandemonium right outside their door....

11:11.

Challenge

Challenge of the Month II

The Gift. Write the story of a gift, passed from one hand to another. Perhaps it is a heart-warming gesture of kindness and goodwill. Or perhaps it is something more foreboding, more sinister. Perhaps it is a simple, material object. Or perhaps it is something more amorphous, more esoteric. Whatever it is, it must be a gift. Fiction or non-fiction, poetry or Prose.

EliCates

49 reads

Book of Leaves

A small town hugs a stretch of rural highway somewhere. Started really only so drivers didn’t run out of gas between LA and Bakersfield. Given a euphemistic name like King City, so the sad reality could be ignored by those just passing through: people lived here. Some never left.

Hidden away from the highway and the gas stations and fast food was a worse euphemism: “The Elysium Center for Mental Wellness.” Identified by only a small sign on the front door, lest the sturm und drang penitentiary for the non-sane offend the sensibilities of the rest of us. Or worse, infect them.

Lily was in the right place.

She signed some papers and a waiver at the front desk. Dark looks from the staff made it clear visitors weren’t usual or welcomed, lest they become permanents. A towering R.N. stared a final warning ahead of the grand tour--many with sterner stuff than this ingenue had left permanently unwell. But Lily had come all this way, and like all misguided youth, thought she could always go home again.

Nurse Ronove led her down hallways of linoleum and sick fluorescents, through the chemical warfare haze of formalin disinfectant and the thick debased taste of human waste. Merely severely disabled “patients” encircled a muted TV, laughing maniacally at nothing, faces contorting into epileptic spasms of momentary exorcism, stuck in a circle of repetition.

A medieval steel gate was the threshold before the bowels of the asylum proper. A last defense against some apocalyptic contingency best not considered. Lily watched the nurse unlock it with a rusted key and retract it. A lightswitch should have been next, but illumination was anathema here. An artificial version of full moon pandemonium. Some things best stay in the dark.

Each double locked door held some vision of human torment behind it. Worse to imagine it, until the maniacal and ludicrous realized they had company, their caterwauling chorus of insanity contagious and spreading. Reality was worse than imagining. Crawling under doors, squeezing through cracks in the walls: tortured atavistic grunts and howls stillborn from human life unrecognizable, but for nothing else on earth could convey torture so extreme. Aborted wails clawing at the boundary between us and them begging the sane to come over and join. Some piece always did.

For the lucky it was only temporary.

“Don’t make eye contact...It excites them.”

The nurse stopped at door 616 and began to unlock it, oblivious to the rabid beat of limbs and heads smashed against safety glass from adjoining cells in tribal rhythm. Hungry for fresh blood, intact brains; desperate to escape and convert the visitors to their primeval religion.

“Here’s your friend.”

“What’s left of her.”

It was Kali. Same ice blond hair. Skin white enough to glow. But this was the horrible facsimile. A toddler’s doll, after she’d given it a haircut with plastic scissors and left it out in the rain for a few seasons. A prop corpse in an old haunted house. Except for the Level 4 restraints pinning her to the bed.

“Is she always tied down?”

“Only when she has a visitor.”

“Does anyone ever visit?”

The nurse chuckled at that one.

Lily whispered her friend’s name softly...Kali. Through the narcotics, tranqs, blitzed neuronal connections, rotting white matter, something stirred. Her head began to jerk. Twitching in sinus rhythm. Still for an instant, then more violent. Shaking off some cursed thought had found purchase, and the horror acknowledged that it was permanent. Kali’s eyelids shot open. Lily’s knees buckled and the nurse caught her.

“Self-denucleation.”

A strange word that defined itself deep in the lizard part of Lizzy’s brain. She saw the white of the skull deep in the empty eye sockets and had a fleeting panic that she needed restraints herself. Before she clawed that image out of and into her own head...Leave.

“I think I….”

“You had enough?”

The pumping blood, the bile about to come up. The madness becoming contagious, it had electrified Kali with purpose, an invitation to the party. Body bucking and writhing against the restraints, finding impossible strength. Her thumb snapped backwards and her wrist shattered into an acute angle, flopping like a piece of overfolded origami, Kali ripping from the wrist cuffs. Loud as a gunshot in the sepulchre. Dangling fingers and meat groped Lily by the hair, pulling her closer.

“Leave! Leave! Leave! Leave!”

The nurse smashed the alarm and hit Kali with an emergency mainline of Haldol.

The visit was over. First and last. Enough to be forever.

-----------------------------------

Lilly’s first memory was carrying her little Barbie suitcase through the palatial American Revival double doors of the Webster mansion on the shores of Malibu. She was Malibu Barbie now, her mom had joked. She was six.

Her psychiatrist’s office was an airy loft attached the Eternal Beauty Plastic Surgery Clinic; posters of svetle de-aged celebrities greeted her every visit, the siren song of trophy wives through the revolving door. Nightmares of lost youth had also brought Lily here, but her Doctor worked on the interior. All the degrees on the wall said so. It didn’t take him long to find his buzzword du jour: memory repression.

Mom never told Lily much about those years. Her early life was hard, many zip codes and lifetimes away from Malibu. A place where women aged much faster, and showed it. Deer Creek. An addendum on a map in the foothills of the Sierra. A mining camp more than anything proper. A fire at the shale pool had killed her father, leaving a single mother that never came home much. “To make ends meet,” Mom said. How mom did that was never really covered, but the cause of her repressed memories came to light when the doctor started asking questions.

“It’s not what your perverted mind is thinking.”

Kali was only a kid herself, but old enough to babysit in Deer Creek for mac and cheese and a quiet place to avoid her own relations. Lily wondered if her dark makeup and black hair made her a witch, like Halloween twenty four seven. Mom said she was just lonely and dealing with “family things.” Which seemed like a yes.

All Soul’s Day, November 1st, the girls had wandered the camps and mobile home park, asking for leftover treats. Which had gone pretty well, but Kali was still distant, looking for some dark satisfaction to her angst which Halloween had promised but never fulfilled. It was the high witch’s sabbath after all. A day of power for people like Kali and her ilk. The goths said so. But it had came and went with just more smashed pumpkins and beers and rowdy miners shouting at scantily clad teens from the backs of their pickups.

The girls found the mushrooms growing in an alder patch at the base of the rotting trestle. It was dark but the moon was out, and the mushrooms were white and ghostly like they had some internal iridescence. Kali had heard about magic mushrooms from Simon, the high school boy she spent Fridays with doing things which parents don’t approve. He dressed in black and listened to noise described by him as real music. He scared Lily, but Kali said he had a car and was going to take her to the big city.

Kali’s parents were out somewhere, so the girls took the mushrooms to her basement floor. They had lost their glow but not their awe. Kali said spells needed to be spun; life was not going to be forever turning tricks on skid row like her mom did. Lily didn’t take much convincing. Kali was a witch and the only authority figure Lily had ever trusted. They chewed down the caps and stems and chased it with Capri Suns.

“Hail Satan!”

That’s how Mom tells it. The mushrooms were magic yes. Death magic. Amanita bisporigera--The Destroying Angel. A name earned and appropriate, if you ask the bystanders.

Lily spent a year in the asylum, scratching out impressions of hell on paper they gave her to express herself, not thrusting her to talk lest she choke on her tongue again.

On day 366, Mom made the deal to get Lily released. She showed up with a Barbie suitcase.

“Time to go!”

She thought she was the lucky one. But Doctor Nielsen was suspicious by profession. He knew lying is human nature. More than a few mothers are incarnate sins of omission.

Luckily for Lily, hypnosis was his specialty. Something about traumatic recall, if was normal if things were hazy. But the truth was always a little different. Only fools implicitly trust the narrator. The lighthouse that shines in your eyes makes it impossible to see anything clearly.

That was Lily’s last session with Dr. Nielsen. His offered was shuttered the following visit, boxes being carried out by large men in functional suits. Lily never saw him again. Mom said he was just going to pump her full of drugs anyway.

“You wanna end up like your friend?”

-----------------------------------

Japan was nuked into prostration by B-29 Bockscar in the Fall of ’45. One hundred thousand people turned to ashes in less than a second. Pretty impressive. She had to surrender. A citizenry entirely of cremains would not be appropriate subjects to worship Emperor Hirohito.

That meant San Diego suddenly found itself filled with newly landlocked sailors out of work. American Mining Co. found deep lignite deposits out near Death Valley the same year, without men to mine it. Like ships in the night, a roster of ex-Navy men eventually found themselves there. They were suited for it. Taking orders, working in filth and grime, looking at the horizon and seeing the same thing in every direction. Submariners were especially sought after. Working deep under the surface, in coffin size, coffin dark tunnels of ore was like home to them.

Even the sailors called them crazy.

Lignite was dirty, dirt cheap coal. It smelled like brimstone when it burned, and eventually killed everything it touched. Even by coal mining standards, the men died young. And because the mining slurry leached into the groundwater, sometimes the kids died younger. From diseases too long to pronounce. Two generations, one disaster, and a partial settlement later, American Mining closed shop and moved on. But many of the families didn’t, Death Valley too entrenched in their makeup.

Deer Creek would die with them. The clock was ticking.

Getting there was a brutal drive up rural 13. So far out there Lily was convinced she missed it. And the middle of nowhere didn’t like visitors. Old men watched her from their collapsing porches, propped up with 2 x 4s, shotguns within easy reach. Twenty-somethings in goth makeup were not supposed to be here. But Lily came prepared.

Her dad had a makeshift tombstone in the Potter’s field at the edge of town. Two perpendicular wood planks nailed through the center, tipped over into an X. RIP BILL WINTERS. Lily turned it 45 degrees and stuck it back into the ground. Then she got out a Solo cup and some whiskey and made a show appropriate for a memorial.

“Friend or Family?”

The old-timers didn’t say much, but they got to the point. This was a ritual they had seen many times before. They were willing to forgive Lily’s appearance. That’s what happens to kids from Deer Creek in the big city. She told them about her Dad, and just like that, they were family. Now for the reason she came here. Somethings old-timers know better than the Internet.

Lily passed around Solo Cups and whiskey. She talked about gossip, memories, the good ol’ days; standard banter of those closer to the end than the beginning. Soon they all had something to say. But when she pulled out her single Polaroid picture, Kali and Lily, miming witches for Halloween, the mood turned rancid. Looking at things on the ground was now more interesting. Fumbling hands found cigarettes and pockets and more reasons for whiskey. Lily asked about Kali’s parents and the men suddenly remembered they were standing in the middle of a cemetary. They evaporated like the smoke from their cigarettes.

But the dead man’s party had attracted an interloper:

“You know what Jesus does with painted whores like you?”

Some bitter old woman, shriveled like the town itself, bathrobe covered in cat hair. She watched Lily from behind a screen door. The only door left in an long time since mobile home. There was no car in the mud gravel patch drive, or anywhere nearby. Lily wondered how she got to church on Sunday. Maybe she did her own ceremony. Matthew did say it was the hypocrites that love to stand and pray, that they may bask in the adulation of others.

But despite the widow’s holiness, it was the bottle of whiskey that captivated the old wren’s gaze. The Lord might be her shepard, but it was the liquor for which she wanted. Lily offered it, a tithe, and the screen door opened. The Solo cup was redundant. The old arthritic knuckles were perfectly shaped to twist off a bottle cap post haste. The rest was history.

“It’s been so long since I tasted any of the good shit.”

Lily wasn’t sure Canadian Mist qualified. A time and a place for everything apparently. Diabetes made a drunk, the widow said. Lily led her to the couch, shoving cats out of their usual beds, and watched Mrs. Thoth collapse like a stained Afghan. There was awkward and bloody fumbling with an insulin injection, which Lily took as her cue to exit. But before she got to the threshold, Mrs.T licked the blood running down her forearm and asked if she could see the Polaroid.

“I recognize her. Shoulda guessed she was the reason you dress like that. Is she dead?”

-----------------------------------

The Samael homestead was a neatly manicured oasis of Kentucky bluegrass up the Nadeu trail down into Panamint Valley. Rusted bulletholed signs and abadoned exacavators lined the way, past the scrub and gravel to a neatly squared section of silt poisoned ground patched over with expensive sod from across the country, the stage for a classic east coast Colonial. Neatly symmetric balconies and eaved windows; separate outhouses and guest quarters aligned just so. The centerpiece was a towering white cross, shadow creeping across the grounds to cover every inch when the time was appropriate. About to disappear with the sun behind the foothills of the Sierra Nevada.

Mrs. Samael was out to greet her before the car had even stopped. Lily immediately knew it was her.

“We don’t get many visitors anymore.”

She was friendly and invited Lily inside. It might have been Malibu high school or it might have been MeToo but Lily prefered the old-timers’ wary ambivalence to Stepford wife sandwiches and tea service. Lily tasted carefully for any sinister additives, decided to leave it alone anyways.

The Polaroid pulled back the veil. Clearly we’re all friends here was relative. Mrs. S scowled like someone had stained the bride’s wedding dress before the nuptials. She traced the photo with her finger, her manicured nail subconsciously scratching away at the face of her daughter. Then she slid the Polaroid back across the table and reapplied her composure as enthusiastically as an Avon Lady paying off a Buick Regal Grand National.

“Kali’s dad will be home soon. We should wait…..More tea?”

There was suddenly a newfound imperative to re-clean the immaculate kitchen, Mrs. S scrubbing obsessively at a square of tiles, lest they reveal something horribly ignominious. Lily excused herself to use the restroom. Mrs. S gave her directions without looking up, pointing emphatically with her finger.

But Lily didn’t need them. She missed the gesture. Her feet were bigger but these were steps she had taken two decades ago, tattooed somewhere deep inside the part of her brain that was supposed to be missing.

Kali’s bedroom only needed a cat and some hot cocoa to be a postcard picture out of homesteading quarterly. A Drill Sergeant could have bounced a roll of nickels off the bucolic bedspread. Covered in moons and stars. Go figure. But a bible was placed neatly squared on the nightstand; red velvet bookmark sticking out prominently from somewhere near the end. Revelations probably.

The perfect cover.

Secrets, spells and tarot cards; Nine Inch Nails and all black everything. That was what she was made of--that’s what Lily remembered. This bedroom was just another mirage for appearances. Lily shoved a row of modest calf length dresses to the side of the closet, next to the kid themed crucifix. The back panel had the grain of coffinwood, and a secret latch for nimble fingers.

A passageway to something Lily was remembering for the first time. Ropes and a table. A photo album. Of Polaroids. Filled with kids Lily’s age holding Kali’s hand. One each. And a blank page where the picture in Lily’s pocket belonged, before the pages of symbols and a hand drawn idol of Baphomet, rusted brown with dried blood.

The Book of Leaves.

All the knowledge of Hell, contained in a single prayer. Once prayed, always permanent, The madness of a existence, in this life and the next, stuck in a mind broken over the wheel of the Libro Folio. The madman’s prayer repeating over and over. To infinity. A single thought forever. Over and over.

In aeternum.

It was dark when the fire broke out. The light carried a long way and the firefighters were notified in time to save most of the property. They found Mr. S hanging by a noose from the stairwell balcony, grotesque and distended. The knot was roughshod and haphazard, miscalculated so his death was long and agonizing.

Mrs. S screams from the basement got noticed only when the commotion from the stairwell finally subsided. The firemen found her kneeling at the bottom step, using it to smash in her forehead, chanting something to herself.

“Leave! Leave! Leave! Leave!”

Lily missed the Samael finale. She was on her way back to Malibu. Drinking what was left of the whiskey. After all it was all the way from Canada.

-----------------------------------

Mom’s career had done its own about face after Deer Creek. How she met Prince was another detail lost to history, but he was a B-Movie director with titles like “Vampire Maniac” and “Sins of the Devil.” Mom’s newly enhanced breasts soon became his favorite signature, especially when she was running from the month’s current flavor of psycho killer.Those breasts occupied the prurient thoughts of plenty young boys before the Internet put R rated nudity on the bottom shelf.

Mom and Prince retired to Malibu and had another kid, this one willing to buy into the proverbial “Lifestyle.” But the matching Range Rover for her deserving daughter wasn’t quite enough. Girls night at hip be seen sushi juke joints, despite the plunging cleavage, were getting less thumbs up on Internet. More surgical enhancement was the answer. Prince called in a few favors and Mom reinvented herself again.

Star of cable TV’s hit reality show “Malibu MILFs.”

That’s when Lily left.

Like only happens in Hollywood, a five minute call with the Malibu MILFs Producer got Lily back in good graces. They even talked money. Mother reuniting with her estranged daughter--Lily would agreed to a makeover--it was the perfect story arc for the new season. And hopefully a halt to the slide in ratings.

Lily only had one condition: the end of this familial separation had to be live: The Sunday Night “Talking Malibu” after show when the most viewers would be tuned in.

“Great idea. Consider it done. This is going to be so money.”

7 Days later Lilly was waiting in the soundstage green room. Still dressed in black. The Producer said the Goth look would make more of an impression. Troubled, depressed, even tragic. The audience would eat it up.

He asked what was in the book under her arm and Lily told him it was an old photo album. Something that was really going to move her Mom.

“That will really jerks at the feels. You’re a natural.”

Two hours later, the Production Assistant pushed Lily out the door to standard cue sign applause. But it turned to gasps and schadenfreude when they saw her appearance. Glad she wasn’t their daughter.

The reunification was stiff and awkward, like pushing two magnets with the same poles together. But good TV, until the dead air. The Producer needed to smash through this ice field. He frantically pointed at the photo album. The decision would go down in history. She was born for this moment.

Lily opened the Book of Leaves calmly, the Latin coming back to her like a memory of reincarnation:

“Non enim videbit me homo et vivet.”

It starts with a wave of head jerks across the audience.. Jerked, and frozen.

And jerked again.

The audience begins to dance. The blood and gore is their own making.

Live across America, millions of faces reflected on the TV screens jerk along with them.

#Horror #ShortStory