As far as I can tell, I’m the only person in the hallway. Where a gaudy fixture normally showers with light the banister and the last few steps of stairs there is only a trapezoid of greenish glow folded across the floor and up the wall. I ring the bell again. The spring under the button feels unreliable but I can hear the chime singing a jagged song just the other side of the entrance. Street sounds climb through the open skylight above me. The painful pulse in my head returns and I have to lean against the wall and close my eyes. When the door opens, she finds me on one knee near a water stain on the thin carpet. Jesus, Kathy! she says and latches my arm with hers and she leads me into the stuffy warmth of her efficiency. Once in the light of the room she reclines from me, still locked with me at the elbow, and instantly finds what must be a nasty lump darkening my forehead. I realize I may be bleeding. Kathy, she whispers and eases me onto a cushioned chair surrounded by a random disaster of magazines, their pages butchered into splinters and shards and gorgeous faces and tanned midriffs. I have to call the police, Kathy. No, Zoe, please. I’m taking you to the ER. No, Zoe, I have to meet my parents in a half an hour. I don’t care. Please, just help me. I’m trying to help you, Kathy. I’m starting to cry. Just help me. Kathy, who had been gathering her purse and coat and keys, now stands frozen in the center of the rug, her eyes sagging in sympathy, each item in her arms sounding off as they drop one by one to the floor. Just help me fix my hair or something so they can’t see. And we’ll cover it with some make-up, she says. We’ll cover it with make-up and bring your bangs down so they’ll never know. Thank you, Zoe. But godammit this is the last time, baby doll. Thank you, Zoe.
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Feathery whips of seeding grass bent in the breeze, delicately dragging her cheeks. Her hand draped the stone colored reach of long dead mesquite now shading her legs still stretched across the ground into a green dusty unknown. She heard the insects sizzle as if they were the sound of the sun threatening to devour everything. She thought of the animal and bent her neck across the dead tree in the direction it had bolted. She wondered if it had found water. She wondered if there was water to find. For hours, her eyes had scanned the height of the dancing grass for a landmark but the grass was too tall and now she only cared to ponder the scarred cactus figs standing at attention along the blades of the prickly pear. Nearly as red as her blood, they stoically awaited their fate, setting an example she was just now beginning to accept.
If what he suspected were true, his respect for her was about to be run over like any dumb varmint on a freeway. He hated her youth for what it kept hidden from her. There are so many ways to be young, he thought, so many parcels of naïveté. But she's not as young anymore, is she? She should know better. She's been burned. How can she possibly not see where she's headed? He watched her move past him. She hadn't noticed him. Even though it might betray his tailing her here, he wished she might catch a glimpse and stop, maybe give him that squeeze of eyebrows and skin she made when curiosity found her. What would he say? She'd ask him what brought him so far to this side of the city. He would want to ask her the same question but he wouldn't. He would lie to her. And that sudden revelation landed firmly on his head with the weight of an anvil and he had to brace himself against the table, the ice rattling in his drink. Lie to her? he thought. And what is your respect worth now?
I left Masterson’s chambers with his angry voice accompanying Jim in quick step behind me. The door closed. Jim and I had managed to escape, leaving Masterson’s voice banging it’s head into the solid confines of the office. I stopped before a tall grid of glass panes, icy flakes crusted in their exterior corners, a frigid resonance touching my face. Michael, you’re making things very difficult for me. He was standing behind me, nearly whispering. You remember Pop reading Mark Twain to us, Jim? I don’t read Twain anymore. I knew why he didn’t read Twain anymore. Twain said, I told him, ‘Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.’ In other words, take account of the facts, consider the possibility you’re being fooled. People can be swallowed by the mob. He stepped next to me and we watched the snow sifting from some silent place above the shimmering streets, each flake growing heavier as it fell, deforming into a beautifully crafted thing feathering with gravity to its demise in the steam and muck of the gutters. You’re not losing anything by voting yes on this one, Michael. From my point of view, I lose everything. I spent a lot of time and money and bent a lot of rules to bring you here, Michael. Then you shouldn’t have. But I have, brother, so how does that help us now? He was frightened. The red light at the peak of the monument far out in the darkness blinked slowly. I thought of the yin-shaped storm of birds I’d seen here in the spring. All that sunlight behind them. The air so heavy and moist. All I can tell you, Jim, is I’ll stand with you if you’ll stand with me, either way, I will be standing, right here. I turned to him and there, deep in his dark eyes I found that same yin-shaped mess and I wanted grab his tie and throw him through that window. You have no idea what you’ve done to us, Michael. Maybe but I’m a quick study.
Here's some encouragement, judge, I've never won anything, never come out on top in any competition, the proverbial loser; so you have that going for you and you already have the advantage of the machine so in a sense, you've already won. That's what I'm trying to tell you, Billy. But in another sense, judge, we're both of us at the mercy of the law of averages; the more times something doesn't happen, the more probable it will happen; all of my failures have lead me here and all of your triumphs have brought you. Billy, I'm afraid you've lost perspective. Perspective? there's a legal term I'm not familiar with, your honor; I've made my 'perspective' pretty clear, the perspective of my struggle, same as you; the difference is that struggle and I have a very special relationship; we enjoy one another's company; so gather the machine, your majesty; push the buttons or don't and save yourself the humiliation... good talk but I gotta bounce. Billy, the law has to be enforced and it's up to you how painful this is gonna be; why not just turn yourself in and we can end this thing peacefully? Why? because, as you well know, your eminence, I don't really have anything else going on; I'm bored, need a project; sayonara, your grace.
The rain stopped and the clouds separated into bands, a great ribcage reaching over the foothills. She could hear the freight train moaning like her mother used to late at night when she thought all her children asleep. There's only one way down the mountain now, he told her, shaking her shoulder. They're coming? Yes, he made a motion against the outlying bulwark of trees, the blue serrated distance carving the horizon behind them. I want you to take the boy and the pack and get going. She corkscrewed her neck through the folds of the damp blanket on her back. The boy sat crying on a log fifty feet from her, his leg tied to a tent stake loosely dipped into the wet soil. Why run? she grabbed his collar. We don't have to do it like this. He slapped her fingertips and she retracted them, hissing at the cold slice of pain. Godammit! he barked. Take the pack and the boy and get moving or I will leave you here. The knife appeared silver and liquid, mercurial death escaping the shadow of his coat and she held her breath as the blade kissed the skin just below her jaw. I understand, she whispered. I know you do. He shoved her from the lichen covered rock to her knees and set to limping across the meadow toward the trees. When she finally stopped crying and opened her eyes, the boy and the tent stake were gone.
For him, a man who cherished the movement of life—the course of days—this waiting was killing him, or so he thought, amazed how the act of waiting required an exhausting amount of strength and focus. Those around him worried depression had discovered him and he took note of their attention. At times, it seemed as if they had almost willed this corporeal disturbance in his chest. However, he could easily admit to himself the grind of his focus was ultimately guilty of creating this germinating depression. He found himself randomly staring it directly in the eyes in restroom mirrors or the reflections in an elevator door, sensing its taste for his destruction. It fed on lackadaisical moments between waking in the morning and the appearance of coffee, during those normally forgettable minutes in line at the convenience store, or staring into the vibratory red of a traffic signal. It developed an odor. He failed to pinpoint the familiarity of the smell but he recognized it. A texture bubbled across its surface with an annoying grace, a subtlety beaded ribbon of cognizance wrapping around his chest, slithering the tunnels of muscle and gristle leading to his throat where it would constrict and writhe. That which initially he suspected as a parasite soon revealed itself the engineer of a cocoon. He had been transformed to chrysalis, no longer the selfish thing in command of a mind or body—a mind and body he could barely remember—but a thing built by the creature.
We stood among the pines on the eastern slope, hearing the wind yawn as it plowed across the mountain and we waited for it to touch the needles above us as the rising sun painted the dark pillars with swimming red light. The spires waxed velvet, the radical color dissolving the shadows, burning the darkness. She told me when she was a child she feared the snow and I saw her fixation on the patches of steaming ice stroked down the talus below us. I asked what she could possibly have to fear from the snow. Everything was more danger’z back then, she explained, specially Mother Nature. She recounted the deaths of her cousin and another boy in a blizzard when she was five years old. They had gone into the weather to bring the cow in from the field and one fell in the creek and the other went in to save him and their blue-black bodies were found a week later on the muddy red shores of a playa. She told me how she wouldn’t leave the house, gladly taking whippings from her father for refusing to go to church or school or even fetch the eggs until every drop of snow had melted. Hell, she laughed, looking back on it, there was probly more chance of that roof fallin on my head than dyin in the snow. I could see the tears glassing her eyes, too cold to escape. I never thought I’d be this old, she said. I don’t rightly know if I endorse livin this long. I feel like the last of somethin. And it’s lonely. It must be, I said. She stretched her arm into the light, her hand shivering not from the cold but the very weight of her fingers as if her arm were a long pole growing heavier the higher she lifted it. Thing about lonely, she smiled and closed her eyes with the sun revving waves of heat across her open unsteady palm, is the same as anything else like it. It never gets worse than the first time. And that makes it easier? I asked, her smile infecting my face. Well, of course.
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Archives
April 2024
Chrysalis, a growing collection of very short fiction.
That Night Filled Mountain
episodes post daily. Paperback editions are available. My newest novel River of Blood is available on Amazon or Apple Books. Unless noted, all pics credited to Skitz O'Fuel.
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