In the Land of Blood and Ghouls (First Draft)

I wrote this short piece on a whim, to get a set of experiences off my chest. There isn't much to it and exists in the form it was typed out initially (for now), to feel out using TheProse to write. Let me know what you think?

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There is a temptation in pain, to see things broken before seeing them stay the same. It's no kind of world to watch things wither before they die, and that's what stagnation means. Persons of no particular bent will speed up when headed for a cliff if there's no other road to follow. No one should blame them. Sometimes a cliff is the best kind of exit to hope for, and cliffs were all there were in Ohio. Raimis saw them everywhere he looked.

"My dad used to call these things giants," he said into the wind. Nick looked over at him, away from the corpse of the factory lingering below them. "Said they were asleep."

"I don't know," Nick said. He put his hands on his hips and, standing on top of that big hill looking down on the highway and the industries alongside them, he looked like some kind of explorer. Except there was a landfill under their feet, and all the discoveries to be made, were made. "They're more like dinosaurs."

"What do you think?" Raimis asked him. "Worth anything?"

"A lot of scrap, maybe. To somebody."

Raimis made the notation on his clipboard, the wind throwing the papers up into his face as he tried to work. The work truck growled behind them, idling. His stomach joined in. On queue, they both checked their phones for the time. He and Nick were in perfect sync on everything that didn't matter. Everyone has an idea of how to raise the dead, but few practicable solutions.

"It's got rail access," Raimis said, pointing with his pen down at the indiscriminate shuffle of steel and glass that used to be a pipe plant.

"Is it active?"

"I'll have to check the map." Raimis said and did, unfurling it from behind the stack of papers kept precariously in place by the clipboard. "Not that it matters."

"Doom and gloom, Raimis," Nick said. "We'll be alright."

"You really think that place will ever run again," he asked, pointing with his pen. "Would you ever really want it to?"

"Too hungry to listen to another one of your tirades, Rammy," Nick laughed. "Lunch time, ain't it?"

"Just about," Raimis said. "Just about."

The ghosts of a different time shuffled up against the road, hoping to strangle the life running through the utilities running through the right-of-way, ghosts in and of themselves of life that used to belong to them but now was piped between hubs of the new day. There were old food stands in the middle of empty parking lots, cracks in the asphalt overgrown with weeds like some derelict farm grown from the seeds of unspent dreams. The laborers would pop over from the mills on lunch for a quick bite and some small talk. Maybe their memories conversed still, but that was all. Most of that part of the state was filled up with dead or the waiting to be. Raimis wasn't sure if even vagrants bothered with them, much less vandals, and that was the strangest thing of all. In bigger, livelier beasts, decay was an active hunter. Here, everything fell apart by slow movements.

"Come up with anywhere to eat," Nick asked, the wheels on the county car thumping in and out of the potholes.

Raimis wondered how the bland strip of asphalt would look 100 years from now, when they were all gone, when seas drank the coasts and everyone else was struggling to fill the space left over.

"You got a brain," he told him, watching the concrete barrier alongside the highway crumble slowly.

"Hey, I'm just the looks."

"I don't know whether to take that as an insult or a compliment."

"Something on your mind, dear?"

"Just the same that should be on your mind."

"I don't worry about those sorts of things."

"You'll be fine, is why you don't worry about them."

"This budget fiasco will hurt everybody, Raimis," Nick said, and there was an edge to his voice that Raimis did not expect, did not have a reply for. "I want to do my job, same as you, and I think I'm good at it. But yeah I'll be fine. I'll get moved and put under somebody and things will suck, but I'll be fine. You're on the chopping block. I've heard it and heard it and heard it."

"And you've had it."

Raimis turned away, watched the exit ramp glide by outside the window as they got off in town. The franchise signs loomed in welcome to them. Shell, Burger King, McDonald's, and the rest. Like tombstones, memorials and reminders. The future is here, and here is where the past is buried. He could trace the leylines of all his wounds up and down Main Street. That corridor saw every part of his adult life, every step he took on his own, even if most of the time he was driving straight through to get to the university the next county over. Raimis made a point to never trace those threads back. He didn't know anymore what they would lead to.

"How about pancakes," Nick asked him, and somehow that made more sense than anything else he could have said.

The plates clattered onto the tabletop, heaps of buttermilk wobbling, the waitress pushing their coffee cups aside with them. They grabbed them, as if just remembering them, and drained them. Raimis saw the crow's feet around the lady's eyes twinge. He wondered if her knees bothered her, if she didn't want to walk back again to fetch the carafe. He wondered if it was her back and it was all those years at the car plant that did it. Everyone had a legacy in the bones of the earth, processed in the name better mechanical amusements. Nick worked his way through college at the mill. Raimis's daddy worked at the car plant to put him and his brother through college. Both of them often asked where that train would let off. Nick mostly just asked himself.

"You ever thought about getting out," Raimis asked him.

"You ever thought about eating your pancakes?" Nick shoveled half of his own stack into his mouth, syrup collecting in the threads of his beard. He used to be a wrestler, but that was catching up to him. Fork tips scratched against ceramic, chipping bits of paint away beneath mounds of dough. "Everybody thinks about getting out."

"You never did."

"I was out, and I came back." Nick said through his coffee. Raimis shook his head. "You don't understand that."

"I've tried to."

"You don't belong here. I get that." He stared out the window at the cars whizzing by out in the street, most of them junkers. The steam from his mug made a cloud in the sun under his beard, like rain falling upwards into a forest. "There's really no other place for me. I don't know. Maybe this budget thing will be a blessing for you."

"It's only a blessing if there's a ship to leave on," Raimis said, setting down in his mug hard enough that the plates clattered and a bit of the sludge lapped over the rim. "One has yet to come into harbor."

"Don't need a ship, old buddy. Just swim on out," Nick said and Raimis scoffed. "What do you have to lose? What's tying you here? Family you don't talk to, friends you don't see. And don't give me any of that loyalty garbage."

"You don't think we owe a certain amount of loyalty."

"Fuck no, we don't. Where do you think we are? Hell, where have you been? Loyalty doesn't have any currency around here, certainly not anymore. We're crabs pulling each other back down into the bucket, at best."

"Dismal view for he who came back."

Nick shrugged.

"I thought I could help the crabs out," he said. "I already said I'm not the brain here."

"You boys be wanting that check about soon," the waitress asked, appearing out of the dull gloom of the diner's interior, snatching and stacking plates as if she meant to carry away the whole table and them with it.

"Yes, ma'am," Nick said, glimmering at her in the sunlight. Smooth things couldn't even touch him. Raimis dug his wallet out and thought about leaving the whole thing. He'd float away if he couldn't get things to wash off him.

The ride back was quiet. Raimis couldn't even hear the rasping of the tires. The thumps into and out of the potholes were felt, but produced no noise for him. There was the rush of wind, but not the kind that comes with plowing through molecules at 55 miles per hour. The grease on his forehead made a stain against the window when he pulled it away. Nick went on driving, watching the world outside the windshield, blissfully unaware of the quality of the country that was pouring out of the radio. Blissfully unaware of everything, or aware of it all and incapable of seeing it as something that could be changed but just watched and let die. Decay works on the soul, too.

"I think today might be my last day," Raimis said when they parked.

Nick twisted the keys out of the ignition and for a while said nothing, but sat staring at the steering wheel. Then, almost imperceptibly, Raimis saw his shoulder slump and knew it was the closest thing next to a sigh that he would find in the man. Their hands went to the handles of the doors, the locks thumped when they pulled them. Nick held the door for Raimis as he entered the building, the porter to a prisoner that would presently be released. They went up the stairs to their offices on the second floor in silence.

Raimis stepped through the series of mausoleums that were the other offices, recently emptied, between his and Nick's along the system of corridors. The journey always reminded of rats locked in a maze, but without any cheese to guide the way. The cheese was gone, eaten a long time ago. There were crumbs, sure, but were often enough destroyed by all the rats fighting over them. Then they fought just to fight. Missy, the secretary, had her head down when he rounded the last corner and he hoped she kept it that way while he sneaked past.

"Bill wants to see you," she said, not looking up from the receipts she was examining, spread all across her desk like how notice boards used to look in the old days.

Raimis sighed as quiet as he might.

"The audit," he asked as he passed her desk, glancing over the litany of transactions and withdrawals and deposits.

"You guessed it," she tried to laugh. "As if there wasn't enough going on. The new line is they want to transfer me to another department to cut down on costs."

"And you know what that means."

"I've got two kids in college, Rammy." Missy looked down at her receipts as if she could get back the bill. "I've been here 35 years, you know that?"

"If they cared," he said. "You wouldn't even have to say that."

"You'd barely talk with half the things you wouldn't have to say," a voice boomed out of the office behind Missy's desk, the door half ajar but the space beyond utterly dark all the same. "Get your ass in here, Rammy."

"We'll talk later," Raimis told Missy, exchanged a smile, and walked on.

"Shut the door," Bill said, poring over a whole other set of paper madness spread across his desk, his floor, his lap, everywhere that paper could be set and stick. "Have a seat."

"You wanted to see me," Raimis said, letting the door cough shut, and then plopped down into the big armchair on the far side of the room. The dark roosting between the office's only two lamps took him in solidly.

"What gave that away?"

The daylight coming through the windows, glimmers of downtown eking in on the backs of the dim rays, framed him at his desk like some old scholar. He squinted like one at the screen of his computer, probably probing the mystery of one email or another.

"Any news," Raimis asked him, smoothing the fabric of the armchair, wanting another cup of coffee if only to have something else to occupy his hands.

"I assume Missy has already relayed her half of the nuclear blast."

"She might have mentioned it. Think it signals anything?"

"Oh, I have every assurance from the Commissioners that we'll be 'just fine'. 'Hang tight', they say. Sooner or later, there's not going to be anything to hang onto. Rats leaving a sinking ship."

"They'll go down with it," Raimis said and dared to let a sigh go. "Their friends will be fine, of course. More blood to suck out of everyone this way."

"You know, my wife gets on me for how bleak I get."

"She gets on you for how much you drink, too."

"And you don't." Bill said and Raimis didn't answer. The rain started to patter against the windows that had been promising to come all day with the thunderheads preponderating in the sky. "All's not lost yet. We got you and Nick. The ship's still afloat and the vacancies were mostly the weak links with too many associations anyway. We can turn this around."

"Who can say."

"You're sharp," Bill said. "You've got so much potential. I see you doing a lot for the people of this county, Rammy. I'll have your back through this shit."

"Bill."

"They'll move you if they can't keep you, but I'll hire you as a damn contractor if they try and can you."

"Bill," Raimis said and cleared his throat, sat a little straighter in his chair.

"Let me finish."

"You're not going to like what I'm about to say," Raimis went on and let everything be read in his face, as much as you can pull from flesh spread over bone.

Bill dropped the papers he was holding. A few sloughed to the floor, joining the disordered stacks surrounding him and his desk.

"Don't do this to me, Rammy."

"It's not about you," he tried to tell him.

"This budget stuff will blow over, we'll be fine. I've seen this before. We'll sue for funding if we have to."

"It's not about the county."

"There's nothing else it can be about, god damn it." Bill smacked his fists against the leathern top of the desk, looked out his wall of windows. "What is it, then? There's no room for more money right now."

"I'm not a vulture," Raimis said and started to stand. "You know that."

"Now wait just a minute. Work with me here, man. You can't just walk out."

"That's all there's left to do, Bill. Can't you see that?"

"I can see you're ready to just drop everything we're trying to accomplish."

"It's sabotaged at every turn. This place is a runaway train. We're all just scraps the rest of the ghouls are just feeding off. I can't wake up another day here. I'm not thirty years old and I feel like I'm dying. Inside, I'm dying."

"You young bastards," Bill said and sniffed. Raimis headed for the door, got his hand around the knob. He could feel his boss of three years speechless behind him, sputtering for words. "Don't know what loyalty is, do you?" He heard the bolt clunk open. "Loyalty's watching those mills closed and having the nerve to stay behind. You don't leave your home behind, Rammy." Bill's voice followed him out the door. "Go on and leave," he went on calling after him as he shut the door, muffling the melancholy rage. "Rat bastard!"

"Bad news," Missy asked, knew, frowning.

"For somebody," Raimis told her. "Listen, I think I'll take the rest of the day off. Have a good one if I don't see you before the weekend."

He started away from her, from a lot of things. There were hooks in the air and anchors that pulled at the ocean floor of his mind that dredged all the things that ever happened to him in that town. He wasn't even in his car yet, incapable of really fleeing to anywhere, but the decision was light-speed and calling up every black hole that ever kept him there. Feeling that force, that downward backward pull, was the best thing he had felt in a long time. Guilt, shame, they'd lost their divisiveness - their claim.

"You won't be back in," she asked him, just as aware of these things as he was.

"We'll see," he said over his shoulder. "Try and enjoy your transfer. You'll get out of here yet, Missy."

There was music coming from Nick's office, his door half-cocked. The light was on and someone was home. That was well. It was like a light, seen from far off, like in the old days when you were struggling in from the field or the hunt or the market. Only it wasn't sitting in his sill anymore. Raimis had no right to it had no right to chance buffeting its slight flame. He passed on and into the labyrinth of corridors that led to the stairwell.

There would be someone else to replace him. He wasn't really all that sharp, or so he comforted himself. Chances were there was some other young back a month or two away from being ready to take the beast to task. Thunder echoed to him through the walls, the ceiling, the floors. Rain fell in dull sheets onto the roof and would soak him by the time he got his hand on the door to his car. That was alright. It'd be the last time he'd grab that handle in that parking lot, to that building, along that street, in that city. The damn thing was done, and he was gone.