Endings always come too soon. Near the end, Granny was impatient. I couldn't understand the change; the stony old woman was the epitome of patience. Those last days, when we still owned the farm, were the epitome of how things end.
I felt cold in the early morning of the first of the last days. I had to go out to cut firewood, not because it was required of me, rather I was intent on building muscle. I wanted to continue to grow in stature and to look like Dad and Uncle Bear. I took on any work that strengthened me.
The chill bore into my arms and pressed against my chest. I could see my breath in the glow from the house as I crossed the muddy backyard. I heard a soft swirl of water in Jake's Dip, the nearby pond of Sudden Swamp.
A slight fear made me tremble. I had always feared the enormous alligators of Sudden Swamp. I had watched them take prey and while I respected them, my respect was merely a routine fear of them.
"If you chop now, before dawn, you'll wake up Granny." Cousin Boon sat with his father's pipe, loaded with a sour smelling herb that made his eyes red and his jokes funny only to him. I had tried it once and all it did was make me think the alligators were watching me for hours until it wore off. Just the smell of it made me worry about the return of such insistent paranoia.
"There's a cold snap coming in." I told Cousin Boon. He smiled weirdly at me and said:
"I know. Let it freeze. It will put hair on you." He was grinning stupidly again, thinking he was hilarious. I shrugged and asked:
"What about Granny? We need to keep the house warm for her." I feared for the shivering octogenarian. The chill of fear was nearly indistinguishable from the blue air.
The sound of the swampys swishing gently in the predawn sublight hushed us both. I freed the ax from the stump and looked in the direction of Jake's Dip.
"You going to go look at the swampys? See if they can see you. They can, you know." Cousin Boon chuckled. It wasn't even a joke. I shrugged.
"There's something happening down there. You ever hear them this early? How often do they make any noise at all?" I looked at him over my shoulder. The porchlight was in my eyes as I exhaled visibly. I knew my eyes were glittering in the dark, just like when the swampys watched from the still water.
I heard my father's voice from the direction of the outhouse. He had walked up on us, silently. There was a stillness, a morbid grave stepping, of the descendants of Granny on her farm. My father said:
"Gonna freeze over. Swampys know already. They always know what is going to happen."
"How's that, Uncle Wolf?" Cousin Boon asked.
"Ask Wade. He's got the know' of them. Reads all them old books." Dad told his nephew, Cousin Boon.
"Okay, I'll bite. How's a swampy know what's gonna happen?" Cousin Boon asked me. I sighed and gently chopped the air with the ax to send my impatience on ahead to where I wanted to tread. I turned after taking a breath and explained:
"They are the oldest and wisest of creatures, unchanged while mountains and continents shifted. They are a fallen people, reverted to their atavistic modern metamorphosis from bipedal boverisuchus sapiens to swampys. While Man has merely walked for tens of thousands of years, their dynasties lasted for millions of years. Their science - indistinguishable from magic to us - altered their descendants for all time. While they languish in devolvement, a proud heritage is still theirs. An ancestor remains watching over them, immortal, godlike, childe Sobek."
"Those old books get you pretty high." Cousin Boon told me and then fell over laughing like a loon. His mirth ended with painful coughing and he swore at me as I walked into the darkness, toward the swampys.
I had considered that what I had read wasn't true, but it meant that the unbelieving world around me was real and I wasn't ready to accept that yet. I needed the stories to be real. Granny was dying and we could lose the farm. The family would be scattered and I would have nothing. There were answers in those old stories that always said that things had a magic to them. Magic in endings that said that everything would be alright.
I felt an angry tear burn my cheek in the cold air.
I stood at the edge of Jake's Dip and leaned on the 'No Swimming' sign with an alligator skull adorning it on top. The sun was rising through the trees of Sudden Swamp and trying to shine on Settler Farm.
Granny Settler had refused to sell, refused to pay the difference of increased property taxes and had refused to honor the foreclosure. Our family was in debt and when she was gone there would be nothing stopping Sheriff Goodwin from forcing us off our inherited land.
He was the dog of Banker Mann and his leash was his elected position, his collar the law.
I had many fears to contend with. I was afraid of the pain that would form in the empty place in my heart when Granny was gone. I was afraid of the destruction of my family and home. I was afraid of something that was beginning to happen that I had no control over and of the edge of the ax. Not the ax in my hand, the one in my mind. I knew something far more sinister and horrible was coming. I felt like my life was unravelling into some kind of nightmare fable.
The surface of the water was slick and weird, starlit and reflective. I stared, knowing that the swampys were looking at me. I could feel their eyes on me, and the old sensation of terror made my teeth chatter and my nerves cry out - to take at least one step back from the edge of the liquid darkness.
I refused to obey fear. It felt the same as when I was forcing myself to get into the freezing cold bathwater once a week to stay clean. While my body screamed and agonized at the brutal will of my demanding mind, the cold penetration almost caused a mutiny.
As I often felt like I would leap out of the icy suds: I felt like I would step backwards to preserve myself. Fear tensed my muscles and I fought it, making myself stand still, commanding the calves of my legs to stop spasms and be still. The effort was distracting; thus I forgot the torment of my heavy fears.
I was lost in the light as it found its way through the lingering night of Sudden Swamp. It was sunlight, despite the misty coolness of it and its shifting form. As I stared, I could forget everything the world knew and just remember what I knew.
The hour of magic.
"Childe Sobek, tell me how the ax comes. I am the axman." I prayed to a pagan god, the only god I was sure cared about anything. I doubted it cared about me or the Settler Farm. Did it at least care about Sudden Swamp?
I daydreamed of a rock untread by human foot. The rock was within the swamp. Childe Sobek lived there still, in memory, hidden in a cave that was all that was left of an Antediluvian temple. If it was real, I would find it, the answer to my prayers and my questions. I worried it was just my imagination, that maybe I was starting to crack.
"Wade?" Dad had come to find me. The tenderness in his voice could only mean one thing.
I held my hand up to him, gesturing clearly enough that I understood without another word. I listened as he walked away. The silence of Settler Farm was finally gone.
As I wept, I knew the swampys were watching me. I felt like the financial vultures were somehow to blame. I wanted revenge on them and I told myself that the swampys agreed with me. An evil fog blurred my vision and my tears scalded my cheeks, leaving stains on my face where they froze and cut my skin.
I dropped the ax and picked it back up. I whispered darkly, angry and bereaved, afraid of the change: "I am the axman."
Then I went back up to the farmhouse to say 'goodbye'. As I strode past the chopping stump, I thunked the blade without effort and it stuck deep. The handle trembled and said: "I am the ax."
Inside the farmhouse time had moved inexorably without me. The magic had kept me away while things developed. I interrupted the moment, a talent I shared with Uncle Bear.
"Get off my property." Dad was telling Banker Mann and his suit wearing thugs with their briefcases. It was good that I had left the ax asleep. I saw weapons in their hands, as deadly as an ax in the hands of a berserk young man that spent as much time building a body as he did reading. I had read Grandfather's entire collection of books and knew the words by heart. My heart was beating with rage and my heart was broken.
Dad had sounded angry and impotent as he addressed the financial vultures. When he saw my tear-burned face, sweater stretched over log tossing bulk, the look of careless and violated fury in my eyes, he said in a way that was so genuine that they actually did what he said:
"Y'all had better go. Come back later. That's my son, Wade. He needs to be alone to say goodbye. Her body hasn't even gotten cold yet. Just go."
"We'll come back tomorrow." Banker Mann looked at me and despite his arrogance and senselessness, he knew I would bite, literally. I watched them go, restraining my feet from letting me near them. I wanted to tear their arms off and bludgeon them all to death with their briefcases. Instead, I let them escape.
"I am the axman." I could hear myself saying. Somehow the thought of chopping wood calmed me down a little bit.
"You can't do that Wade. It will make things worse." I heard Dad saying. He had said more but I wasn't listening.
"Do what?" I hesitated. Had I said I was going to kill them?
"Intimidate them. Don't intimidate them. It's bad enough as it is. They can make things really bad for us."
"How could they make it any worse? We're being evicted from our home, Dad. Granny is dead. I don't even know if the cave is real or how to find it." I was talking out-loud and saying things he didn't understand when I mentioned the cave.
"Just go say goodnight to her." Dad lowered his voice, realizing he was scolding me.
"You mean goodbye." I lifted my hand the way I did when I wanted to end a conversation. Dad slapped my had back down and said:
"Now isn't the time. We need to stick together." Dad's eyes were welling up with tears. I didn't know he could cry, it hurt a lot to see him about to. I apologized, something I had never done before. I wasn't good at it:
"Freaking sorry, Dad. Jesus." I almost stuttered.
I left him to go hide his pain and I went to go shed mine. I walked through the house, the open doors and windows making it as cold as the winter morning. There was a feeling of desolation and fear. I was afraid of the death in me that would happen when I met her dead. I was about to die inside.
I went into her room and found her stiff carcass under a thick blanket. Her face was contorted and cruel, her eyes staring horribly. There was a stench already and I kinda appreciated it. It made it easier to see that I was just looking at her dried-up old corpse. She was gone and all I was looking at was a spent shedding. Granny was in a higher and more dignified place. Her bones weren't her, just the coil of her life.
Death had done good work, making sure there was nothing worth worrying about, looking at her wasted remnant.
A strange thought occurred to me: "The best thing to do would be to chop her up with the ax and put her pieces in the wheelbarrow and take them to Jake's Dip."
They would never be able to pry her from her land, not without contending with the swampys. By the time they caught them all she would be digested and part of them, part of the swamp. Then they would have to deal with childe Sobek. I smiled, imagining the god's wrath on the financial vultures.
"What is so funny?" Cousin Boon asked me. I hadn't even noticed he was sitting in the corner in the rocking chair, in uncharacteristic reverence. He sounded desperate to break free from the pall that had its grip on him, choking the humor from him.
"I was thinking that I should bury her in Sudden Swamp." I admitted, hoping he would find it amusing.
"You should. Why would it even matter? What are they gonna do about it? None of this matters. Nobody cares about anything that happens here. Nothing matters, not anymore." Cousin Boon sounded queerly maudlin. I looked at him and realized he was also in great pain. Granny's death had killed his happiness.
He had died inside. I had died inside. Dad was dying in some dark and lonely place. We were all dead inside, not the way Granny was dead, but in a way that somehow felt the same.
The entry of Santa Claus interrupted the moment. "Uncle Bear." I stepped aside.
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Watching a Santa kneeling beside her bed was jarring and disturbing. Uncle Bear was still wearing the entire impersonation, bringing some joy to the mall owned by Banker Mann. Everything in the county was owned by Banker Mann, except Settler Farm. He started crying loudly, letting his anguish out.
Cousin Boon and I couldn't stand to watch his suffering and so we left him to die inside, alone.
"A record-breaking blizzard is coming in..." Said the weatherman on the news. Dad was watching television. I had forgotten that we even owned one. It was an antique, with antennae on it and a compatibility box attached.
"The swampys knew it before the scientists." Dad told us as we sat with him.
"Look." I pointed at the four-day forecast. "It will freeze tonight."
"Maybe that will slow down Banker Mann." Cousin Boon said. Dad and I ignored him and kept talking about the weather until there weren't anything else to say.
A disheveled and distraught Santa came out of Granny's room. He looked insane with the costume and the mourning. I looked away as Uncle Bear dragged himself around, the huge man looking pathetic and interrupting the moment.
"Why don't we have anything to drink?" He asked.
"This was a dry house. Granny's rules." Dad reminded him.
"Jesus wept. We can't drink our tears." Uncle Bear sniffed.
"Take that stuff off, Dad, you're creeping me out." Cousin Boon requested. Uncle Bear ignored him: request denied.
The television went to static and we all just sat there and stared at it. Outside we could see that it had started snowing. It began to get very cold in the house and I got up and got my coat.
When I came back all three of the men were asleep. I threw blankets over all of them and went back to reconsider my plan to hack apart Granny's dead body with an ax and toss the parts to the swampys.
It made me feel better to think that way. Her gaping mouth and wide eyes looked like something out of a horror movie. I lay down next to her, ignoring the nauseating stink.
I opened my eyes, awakened by the sound of vehicles arriving. Glancing outside I saw Sheriff Goodwin, Deputy Frank, Banker Mann and the assorted business suit thugs with briefcases. With a shotgun scepter Sheriff Goodwin led them through the falling snow to the last stand of Settler Farm.
They hadn't brought enough guns. Things were going to get ugly, I decided. There was no way I was going to leave quietly. I doubted my kin felt any different.
"Come on out here, Settler boys, no need for things to get uncivilized. Time's up." Sheriff Goodwin said the last thing he would ever say in his confident and boastful sounding drawl.
There was a kind of calmness, a sort of calm before the storm. A literal storm was blowing in. My head was full of visions of carnage and terror. "This is it. There's no more running from it." I told myself.
Hell howled as a white wind, bringing the flurry and frost. The record-breaking blizzard arrived and hit Settler Farm with all of its winter wrath. It wasn't going to stop until it was all over.
I felt the fear of the ax edge in my mind. "I am the axman." I whispered, unable to hear the words. I went through the dark house, leaving the dead body of the old woman where I had slept beside her.
Deputy Frank was counting loudly down from some number and nearing 'blastoff'. I heard Uncle Bear's double barrel click shut audibly in some blackened corridor of the creaking old house. I had no idea where Dad was until I heard the sputter of a chainsaw. I almost laughed, hoping he had put on his ski mask with the eight tiny reindeer pulling the sleigh stitched to it lovingly by Mom.
I wondered if her and Granny were reunited in whatever happens after death.
Out back I found the ax still buried in the stump. I ran my hand across its handle and remembered what it had told me earlier. "You are the ax."
The front door was broken open and Sheriff Goodwin and Deputy Frank intruded in our home without our permission. We didn't care about their warrants or eviction notices or any of their self-appointed authority. Granny was gone and we were untethered. We wouldn't be unhomed by godless men.
They found Cousin Boon and he came at them with his Bouy knife. Sheriff Goodwin managed to take him down with the butt of his shotgun and they wrestled him down and put handcuffs on him. They had to leave him under the static of the television as he growled and raged like a madman. He was the calm one of the Settler boys.
There were screams from out front as Dad chased the suit wearing thugs around with a running chainsaw. When they fell their screams of terror became bloodcurdling as Dad gave them hellish wounds where they lay.
I could visualize the men in black with their hands, fingers, wrists and arms up in the air defensively as they lay on their back. The spinning chain-blade could tear through a fallen log with minimal effort and would make short work of the limbs of fallen men. I really hoped he was wearing the Christmas ski mask.
After freeing the ax I went back into the house. The sheriff and his deputy would have to go back out to protect the bureaucrats. I found Cousin Boon where they had left him and saw he was pulling his legs up through the handcuffs. A neat trick that got his cuffed hand out in front of him.
I felt horrific fear as I heard gunshots out front. I wanted to run out to help Dad. I made myself stand there and not run out there. I would get shot doing that. It was not the time to panic, even though I felt enough fear to lose control. I forced my feet to obey me and stand my ground.
"Get up." I told Cousin Boon. I felt some relief as I heard the chainsaw still running and a variety of screams from out front.
"You shot me! Goddamn hick sheriff!" One of the thugs in suits was yelling. He couldn't be shot that bad, if he was complaining about it like a baby.
"Get in the car! It's a warzone!" Banker Mann seemed to be addressing his wounded assistant.
The wind was howling louder and a treebranch came down and broke a window. Cousin Boon put his chain atop the coffee table in the living room and I used the ax on it. It took me two swings to break both the chain and the table.
"You okay?" I asked Cousin Boon. He got up and got his knife.
"I'm going to gut that sheriff." He snarled.
"No. They see you free and they will just shoot you. Come with me." I collected my mind.
We left the farmhouse behind and went down to Jake's Dip. The water was frozen solid. I walked out onto it, heading to Sudden Swamp. The blizzard raged around me.
"That can't be safe to walk on." Cousin Boon called behind me. I was terrified and knew he was right, but it was our best move. Seeing my determination to go into the swamp, he followed me out onto the creaking ice.
All around us the snouts of the swampys were sticking out of the ice. The alligators were sleepy and breathing from under the water, their massive bodies under the ice. Sudden Swamp's alligators are the largest in the whole world, total freaks of nature.
"What are they doing?" Cousin Boon asked, creeped out by the alligator snouts sticking out of the ice all around us.
"Brumation." I told him. "It is like they are hibernating. One of their survival strategies. They are classic survivors." I told him, my voice shaking from the fear and cold.
"What are we doing?" Cousin Boon asked me.
"There's a cave in the swamp. I have to find it. The answers are there." I told him.
"This is crazy. I am going back. Dad and Uncle Wolf need our help. You're not going to let them fight those trespassers alone, are you?" Cousin Boon chastised.
I kept walking and left him behind. He turned back, thinking that violence was the answer. I didn't know what the answer was, but I doubted that it was to be found in the horror of battle.
I heard more gunshots from the farm. The blizzard and the distance muffled their unmistakable thunder. The boom of the double barrel sounded. I knew Uncle Bear had popped out from somewhere in the house, still dressed as Santa, and fired both barrels into someone's face.
I finished crossing Jake's Dip, walking on the water, past the swampys as they slept. I reached Sudden Swamp and went in, carrying my ax and wearing a warm coat. There were more swampys all around, the whole place was infested with alligators.
I didn't know where I was going. I was afraid of what I would find. I used my fear as a compass, telling my feet to walk upon the weak ice in whatever direction terrified me the most.
How easy it would be to go back to the farm and fight with my kinsmen against the invaders. I knew that knowing the answers would be far worse than getting shot by Sheriff Goodwin and watching the Settler Boys die, red upon the snow. Nothing could be worse than the answers.
And yet some fear, far deeper and colder, insisted that I was somehow even more afraid to die without knowing the truth. Was the cave real? Was anything?
The blackened tearstreaks on my face were a comforting pain, telling me I was immediately alive. Existential dread was much harder to gauge, as it shifted from one footstep to the next. "I seek your temple, childe Sobek."
My prayer held whatever magic was left in the world. The blizzard quieted where I arrived. I was in the heart of Sudden Swamp and there was a twisted and rocky island, covered in dead vines and the grasping branches of sinister looking trees.
I stared, an empty feeling of morbid fascination holding me on the ice I stood on. I walked off of the ice and onto a block of solid rock. I stood there in the calm of the storm, snow drifting around me. I held the ax like it could defend me from the terrors within.
There was a cave, used exclusively by alligators and full of bones and rotting meat. I crawled in there, into that darkness. My mind raced with a sensation of forcing myself into the cold water, forcing myself past the fear, making myself move despite feeling petrified and wanting to jump out. There was no going back: the cave was real.
Inside the cave I found a structure, the walls glowing unnaturally so that I could finally see. The swampys didn't come so far inside and there were no more fresh bones. I looked around and saw that where I stood was the heart of the temple and all that was left of it after millions of years. The air was dry and barley breathable, as though to oxygen were too old for my mortal lungs. The temperature was stable and unchanging, although cool, it felt warm compared to the swamp.
I looked around and realized there was no light. I was seeing from memory, a strange sensation of being able to see without seeing. Like I just knew what I was looking at, even though the artificial light had no illumination. All of it was crafted, the stone, the light and even the air I was breathing. It was the ancient magic of the crocodile gods.
"I have come for answers, childe Sobek." I spoke.
As I said the words I was understood, as though my human language were so simple it could easily be deciphered. What heard me I didn't understand. Perhaps it was the structure or perhaps it was the god of the swampys. It knew all about me and had let me come, allowed my entry and then it gave me the answers.
Like hieroglyphics the images swam in my head. At first I was terrified, to have thoughts that were not mine moving around inside my mind. When I fought the urge to reject them and paid attention I began to understand the moving images. The brain waves in my head shifted to what are known as 'alpha waves' and it felt like I was watching a cartoon. A very long and scary cartoon.
I was sweating despite the chill. Time seemed to be holding still, and yet I was vaguely aware that as centuries and millennia of crocodile history flashed behind my eyes that it was only hours in the cave. I shook and trembled as I could not contain even one more day of their world in my overflowing mind. It was a terrifying experience, nothing about their world was good or peaceful.
Their atrocities and wickedness made my problems seem like child's play. I knew the greater fear of knowledge that I had feared I would know. A kind of madness eased me along as I meekly thanked childe Sobek for the answers.
I left the cave and found that evening was approaching. The thin ice was already melting and some of the swampys were starting to thaw back out. I saw their snouts opening and closing as they woke up hungry.
I could hear their thoughts, images of what they saw and heard and sensed and dreamed. I had become a part of their world. When I left Settler Farm I would take them all with me. Ghosts, reptilian haunts, nightmares for answers. When the swamp was all gone it would still be a part of me.
I feared the state I was in, knowing I was forever changed. I knew the answers, I knew the truth. The truth was eternal dread.
When I reached the farmhouse, I saw it burning down. I wandered around with the ax in my hand, my face looking like I had running mascara from the frostbite from my tears. I found where Uncle Bear had fallen.
Dressed as Santa and wielding a double barrel shotgun, he had battled the intruders to the death. A burning Santa had come running out of the farmhouse and died face down in the snow with bullet holes in his back.
I found Cousin Boon next. He had died atop Deputy Frank, whom he had stabbed repeatedly with his enormous razor-sharp hunting knife. Somebody shot him and he fell dead atop the cop.
I went out front and found that nobody had escaped. All around were the fallen thugs in suits, blazed by the chainsaw and in pieces. Dad was breathing his last, leaning on the snow-chained wheel of the sheriff's truck as the red and blue lights flashed in the falling snow.
The blizzard was long gone and the cold air had helped keep Dad alive for me. I went to him and lifted his Christmas ski mask that Mom had made for him. "Did we get them all?"
"Pretty much." I told him. He coughed out some blood and looked up at me.
"You didn't fight."
"I found the cave." I told him. He nodded like it meant something to him although he had no idea what I was talking about.
"Good man. Proud of you. This party was stupid anyway." Dad told me.
Behind me our house was burning down and his brother and nephew were dead. I told him:
"It wasn't a party, Dad."
"That's because there's no booze." Dad chuckled like Cousin Boon when he thought he was being funny. The laugh turned into a cough and then he died.
"I love you, Dad." I told him and let him go.
I heard the cock of a shotgun behind me and the voice of Sheriff Goodwin say:
"Drop the ax, son. Let's end this thing on a peaceful note."
I put my empty hands in the air and he cuffed me.
"You tell me where Banker Mann is and I will make sure you aren't blamed for this whole mess. Sound fair?" He told me from behind with a loaded shotgun pointed at my head while I was in handcuffs.
I felt a kind of horrified realization that I knew where he was. Shivering I said:
"Above me he is. On the ice. I am so hungry." I channeled the thoughts of the swampys, translating them.
"On the ice? He's down at Jake's Dip?" Sheriff Goodwin asked.
"Yes." I knew I was right.
"What is that idiot doing there? Come on, march in front of me. Try anything and I'll blow your head clean off. You get that, son?" Sheriff Goodwin spoke. I said nothing and started leading the way around the burning house towards Jake's Dip.
We stopped at the 'No Swimming' sign with the alligator skull on top of it. We saw Banker Mann out on the ice, trapped. The ice was breaking apart all around him and swampys in various stages of wakefulness were poking their snouts out of the ice.
"Help me you idiots!" He screamed to us. I felt my hands get unlocked.
"Go out there and help him or I will shoot you dead, boy." Sheriff Goodwin pushed me with the barrel of his shotgun in my back.
It was then that my fears reached their highest and most horrified state. Panic made me stand there at the water's edge, seeing the swampys getting ready to take prey. I felt like they were all watching me. I could hear Cousin Boon's ghost saying:
"None of it matters."
I forced my feet to move, one step and then another. I was approaching Banker Mann, forced to come out onto the ice to save him from his own stupidity. The swampys were ready to take him as the ice broke under him with a splash. There was nothing I could do as he plunged into the darkness to be drowned by hungry crocodilians.
"Breakfast-in-bed." I said their thoughts out-loud, translated.
I started back toward the shore and felt the ice snap under me. I went in, the freezing cold water instantly chilled me. I could see through the eyes of the swampys as they closed in on me, my own eyes closed in reflex to the splash.
I was able to push up through the ice near the shore, panic gripping me hysterically. I gasped for air and saw the flash and heard the thunder of Sheriff Goodwin's shotgun. "Hurry, the gators are coming!"
As I blinked and tried to walk to shore in waist deep water, I could see myself from their perspective as they closed in for the kill. I wasn't going to make it. Sheriff Goodwin was shooting at them as they neared me and they ignored the blasts, unharmed.
"You matter." I heard the voice of childe Sobek telling me. The voice was like the hieroglyphs, a wordless thought, an image imbued with meaning. The swampys obeyed their god and let me go. I got out of the water, drenched and shivering.
Sheriff Goodwin just stared at me in amazement. "You've got balls, kid. Holy cow!"
"I'm freezing." I tried to say, my lips turning blue. I stripped from my wet clothing and stood in the frosty air. Sheriff Goodwin put his coat over my shoulders and then put me in handcuffs out front. I was in no shape to give him any trouble, he decided.
"Yeah, come on. Let's get you arrested and in a warm blanket." Sheriff Goodwin took me back up to his vehicle.
He never bothered to arrest me and I was never charged with anything. Instead, I was commended for trying to save Banker Mann. I was released from jail with scars and memories and a gift from my god.
When things end, when they truly end, something continues. Death is just an ending, but it isn't all that there is. I know the answers now, and I live in constant fear of realizing them. Knowing what happens after the end is the most terrifying thing of all.
For me, for now, I'm still answering, with patience, to the end.