The clearing reeks of sweat and bad intentions but these three seem not to care. Sitting equidistant from each other, they huff and eye prod one another like feral cats. This night in august lies damp and dark, only a cheap battery operated lantern casts a paltry amount of unflattering light on the situation.
Gnawing his lip red and sitting with his knees buried in his chest is Hezekiah. His parents are not religious. They lost God when they lost his brother and they haven’t stopped resenting Hezekiah, or his name. He’s all wet, his skin and his eyes, and he’s drooling. He lays his palms to the dirt, picking up pebbles and dust like a gecko, and rubs them to his face. An attempt, it seems, to camouflage him, hoping the other two bodies in this clearing don’t see how much he’s weeping or how flushed his pale face is.
To the right of Hezekiah slumps Buck. Propping his heaving body up by his elbows which are being rubbed raw by the gravel on the ground and the toll gravity takes on his heavy form. Grinding his jaw, his eyes from underneath his sickly blond and wiry mop stay fixed on Hezekiah’s pathetic, small body. Out from Buck’s throat comes the sound of a frustrated sow as he conjures up rage-filled mucus and spits at Hezekiah’s feet. Buck laughs at Hez flinching much too late to avoid the glob of snot and throat stuff coating the side of his shoe. Hez grinds his shoe into the dirt which only mixes up Buck’s spit with some debris into a paste that binds further to the ratty suede. Buck starts to feel sick as his fire sways from anger to something like pity and he rolls over, lying prostrate on the soil and turning his face to the cool woods that abound to the south. He awkwardly maneuvers his cigarettes and lighter out of his front left pocket and lazily smokes, his cough makes him look like a fat fish plopped on the deck of a fishing boat.
To the left of Hezekiah is Ruth, who hasn’t looked at anyone in particular for the better part of 13 years. Her eyes seek refuge in the beds of her nails or just above people’s eye lines. Those who converse with her grow self conscious, worrying they missed something in the expanse of their foreheads in the mirror this morning. Hez is presently feeling this anxiety. Ruth’s blackish eyes flit to his hands, witnessing him do his gecko camouflage routine for maybe the third time now. She takes her locs out of a disheveled ponytail and snaps the stretched out hair tie at Hezekiah. Buck, still staring off into the unending green pines, laughs at Hez’s yelp. Ruth’s jaw is slack, as it often is, and she untangles her limbs to sit with her feet outstretched. In the space where her legs used to be she seems to be taking up an impromptu art project as she feverishly starts manipulating the earth all around. There’s probably a method to it, that’s what Hez is thinking, she always has a reason.
It takes the sound of a gunshot for all three of them to snap out of their respective trances. Buck’s head jerks to the left and his eyes, wide like a small child’s, snap to the north where a fourth is walking up behind Hezekiah. Hez is shaking now and crying like a toddler. Ruth looks up, but her hand has not stopped drawing. Hezekiah’s loud sobs are hardly choked back and he wipes more dirt on his face.
The fourth groans at Hez’s unrelenting gecko mannerisms and winds up high and comes down fast with a slap hard and flat on the back of his bony neck. He hisses, Buck laughs and Ruth winces through a smirk. The fourth rubs the spot where she wounded him, and flips her hand over, cooling off the ruddy mark of abuse. She kneels at Hez’s side and kisses him dispassionately and awkwardly in the space between his eyebrows, hardly putting him at ease. She stands back up, she’s tall and lumbering over the three idiots.
The fourth speaks up, the words slip out with an afterbirth of I-told-you-so, “What the fuck are you guys gonna do now?”
Buck lets out a long sigh, pulling his corpse up from the ground, the front of him covered in a mixture of indeterminate bodily fluids and the mud his sweat’s generated. “Shut up,” he moans in a crescendo, ending his insight and wisdom with another loogie at Hez’s feet—eliciting another cry and gasp from the poor sucker’s sore throat. “You fucking too,” Buck kicks up some shit in Hezekiah’s direction.
Through sobs, Hez shakily strangles out, “I don’t have anything—nothing…nothing to do with this.” The other three whip their heads at him, being shot at with dirty looks from three people he used to consider his friends is enough send him reeling, crying, praying and getting into a child’s pose. Over his crying Buck reiterates his point from earlier, the demand is unanswered but Hezekiah tries to quell his crying, shoving his face further into the topsoil. He interlocks his hands over the back of his neck in anticipatory defense.
Feeling sweat dripping down her back, Ruth rolls her eyes and grabs at the hair tie she snapped at Hez to wind her locs back. She grabs her shirt and wipes the sweat from her face. Breathing in the musky and metallic smell that clings to her, she shakes herself like a dog and drops her shirt back down, a streak of drug store foundation leaves another patchwork stain of cool brown on the hem of this soon-to-be burned pj shirt.
The fourth one, in long strides, stands between Ruth’s legs and looks at her picture. It looks like shit, so she walks around to Ruth’s back to see it how it’s supposed to be seen. Right side up, it still looks like shit.
“Gimme your gun, yer gonna kill someone you fuckin’ idiot,” Buck’s left hand waves all grabby in the fourth one’s direction while his other one sits on his hip. Ruth notes his diva stance doesn’t suit his ugly fashion sense and eternal farmer’s tan.
“You call me an idiot? Christ, when I shoot you it won’t be an accident. Your IQ’s rotting in your place in hell. Mine’s in heaven, with Einstein and Marilyn Monroe and shit. You’re not getting my gun, and you’re the fuckin’ idiot,” the fourth one says, flamboyant and waving around her revolver, at the end with her final words she mocks his podunk Washington state drawl and stupid pose. The pose fits her well, Ruth thinks.
“Josie, are you of any purpose in this life or are you here to act holier than thee and jerk off and leave?” Buck knows she doesn’t like her name so he smirks, proud of himself.
The fourth one, who these days only accepts the name Jo, licks her teeth and walk off back towards the north, facing a lake that hides behind the thick swath of trees she emerged from, “You guys are so fucked—sort it out yourselves.” She shakes her head and throws her revolver back into the clearing, it clunks against the plastic lantern which flickers—it dims. “It’s holier than thou you dipshit,” she mutters, and in a couple of sweeping paces, she’s gone.
Hezekiah looks up, his face caked with snot and mud. His tears keep coming and it’s a wonder this motherfucker isn’t dehydrated by now.
Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
The revolver glints in the lantern light and a moment of heavy breathing passes as the reality of the situation falls upon them in this clearing. The assignment is clear. That the capacity for intelligent life in this spot of earth has quickly cinched from three to one.
Buck sits, letting gravity pull his dense habit down. He’s wishing the reaper hadn’t just walked out on her job, and though he wanted the gun, he never had the intention of pulling the trigger tonight.
A laughter takes over the silence as Hez unwraps his hands from his neck and slaps his palms to the ground. Convulsing and twitching, his core spasms after being tensed up for so long. With the potential energy of a rubber band stretched from here to Sri Lanka, Hezekiah springs up from the ground. His arms still stiff and his core still vibrating he tilts his head back, snot lurching down his throat, choking him. He coughs and hiccups between cackles. His features are disguised by the mud and dirt, Ruth stares at his brow, and Buck tries to make out any semblance of an expression—he’s met only with flared nostrils, wild eyes, and a foaming mouth full of yellow crooked teeth. Spitting and sputtering Hezekiah erupts in tongues, the seven years of religious fundamentalism he endured in childhood roars to life in his spirit and his bones. His blood fills with devotion to his lord and savior, though it seems just last week Hezekiah took note in his diary he was an atheist asking for a book on Wicca for Christmas. Hezekiah may have thought that then but now he sees God staring at him. God is all he sees, all he feels, he feels infinite. God, through His almighty and hulking form somewhere in the stars, is peering through Hezekiah and Hez feels his brain spilling out of his ears and his hands tingling and his tongues start making sense to him. As God orders, he follows, and he lunges toward the gun, cocks it, and wraps his mouth around the barrel. After letting out one more pathetic yelp, he blows the brains out of the back of his head and falls back onto the ground like a bag of wet cement.
Ruth, jaw almost unhinged, is surprised he didn’t shatter into a million pieces, he always seemed so frail. She crawls—careful not to mess up her art project—to his body, still gurgling and making noises not too dissimilar from the noises he made his whole life. Hezekiah’s face, or what used to be a face is hard to look at with all the mud and blood—for the first time Ruth finds it easier to look into his eyes, though they’re red and wide. She presses a kiss to the space between his eyebrows. She almost starts to cry, but Buck interrupts, swiping the gun out of Hezekiah’s limp hand.
“Stand up, get off of him—get the fuck up,” Buck’s flustered and yelling, swiping his shock blond hair behind his ears and fussing with his shirt that was a bit too short on him, Ruth judges.
She gets up slowly and takes her shirt off to drape it over Hezekiah’s god-fearing visage. Damp and heavy with sweat, the shirt plops down on his face with an amusing sound that reminds Ruth of those things of putty you shove your fingers into to make fart noises. She taps at his body with her centuries old untied high tops maybe trying to get him to laugh at the sound. He doesn’t because he’s dead, which she realizes. She frowns, and turns to Buck, who starts to feel self conscious, and wipes at his forehead in case he has an unsightly blemish.
“Are you thinking about shooting me?” Ruth hasn’t spoken in a couple days now, so her pitch sounds more uncanny than usual. She doesn’t wait for an answer, she doesn’t really need one, she walks away and snaps up the lantern. It dims a bit the second she touches it—cheap thing—she feels sick at Buck’s insistence on sourcing his supplies from bargain bins and thrift stores.
The judgment is written plainly on her face, apparently, and Buck starts, “I’m not thinkin’ about it, I’m gonna, jackass. You have never once looked me in my eye, and all you fuckin’ do is judge and sit there and think yer better than the people around you.”
“I don’t think I’m better than you, hick.”
Buck laughs, all insecure, he’s not a hick.
“Come here, before you shoot me, hayseed I got something to show you.” Ruth sways the lantern, it dims a bit, and she squats by her drawing, hiking up the leg of her brother’s gym shorts and pats her knee, inviting Buck over.
He tightens his grip on the gun and walks over, his rustic gate betrays his opinion and favors Ruth that he is, in fact, a hick. He squats down, the heft of his body so near to her feels like a bonfire.
The lantern sits on her knee and she points with her right hand, at her seemingly indecipherable scratches in the dirt and lowers her voice to a whisper, “This is you, and me, and Hez,” she moves her hand around clockwise in a triangle showing three figures equidistant in this spot of earth.
Buck leans his head closer, grabbing the lantern with his right hand—it dims—and in what was once a load of shit and scribbles he sees something close to what he imagines Hezekiah saw. His neck is jutting so far forward. Ruth grabs at his scruff and Buck’s left hand goes slack, the gun slaps the dirt and he jerks the lantern—it dims. With her right hand, she brings Buck’s face to meet hers. For the first time in 13 years, Ruth meets the eyes of a living person, and for the first time in his life, Buck meets the eyes of God and feels the infinite as Ruth inches further into him. He falls back, swaying the lantern—it dies.
Ruth swipes the dirt at the last seen location of the gun in the light. Her hand brushes the cold metal and her hand grips her scythe. Buck’s fat and muscle writhe beneath Ruth as she bangs the lantern hard against the earth by his ear—it struggles to life for a flash—the strobe shocks Ruth’s expression into an afterimage against the clear sky, Buck begins to see her in the constellations. Ruth, through dark and light, has not moved her eyes from his. With her left hand she fiddles through his pockets for his lighter. Holding it close to him she flicks it on, disappointed to see Buck’s tears pool against his eyes. To make sure his vision isn’t blurred, Ruth uses the barrel of the revolver and jerks the redneck’s head to either side, spilling his tears down his temples. She curls over him, cocking the gun and placing it to his forehead. Buck’s eyes cross before they snap back to Ruth’s.
Buck tries to lift his hand and so tenderly, he begs, “Am I gonna go to hell for this?”
“I don’t care,” she lilts, and in the next instance his blood is pouring into the soil from a newfound hole in the back of his skull, the contents of which connect to the pools of his own tears. She kisses him in the space between his eyebrows and stares him down for a moment longer.
She stands up slowly and tosses the gun somewhere between Buck and Hezekiah. She takes a wide step to avoid Buck’s corpse. Gracefully, she swipes her shirt from what used to be Hezekiah. The middle of the shirt sags with blood, but the edges have dried out enough that the lighter’s flame laps happily at the polyester pj shirt. In the light of her shirt’s flame she scans over the bodies before her. She paces in a circle around them. Killing time for her shirt to burn out, she starts to outline their bodies where they lay, without flinching she glides her finger over the bodily fluids and bits of matter that are fulfilling their role in the circle of life. She thinks that’s about the only time these boys have ever fulfilled anything. She frowns, picking up what used to be her shirt.
She stands at the edge of this clearing. Sniffing in the smell of metal and sweat and fulfilled existence. She turns north and walks through thick firs, slinking into the blackness of this lake under this new moon. Letting her shirt disintegrate in the water, she floats on her back, to admire herself in the infinity above her. She feels her precognition manifested staring at all these stars and, in seeing their deaths now, she has never known more peace.