Another fiction Monday. Today I bring you something that I am actually quite pleased with, though in that way that happens when a story comes to you, demands that it be written, and will not leave you until its done. PLEASE BE ADVISED that this story is significantly more violent than anything I have offered you previously and does imply, at one point, possible sexual violence. I have been faithful in not being vile or expressly inappropriate, but the content is indeed there. Please take that into consideration as I, as always, commend these words to you. (Also, this story has a ton–I mean a ton!–of Scripture throughout it. This explains some of the odd sentences.)
And the Earth was Full of Violence
Jack had always thought of their lives like a movie, but Tommy never could remember his lines. Out in a whispering pasture under the maternal gaze of a sea of stars, they sat on the tailgate of Jack’s truck, a cigarette dangling from Jack’s mouth and beers in both their right hands. The moon crept low across the sky, a thin and quiet crescent, a sharp-lined ghost of light. Jack flicked the ash off his cigarette and studied the brief glow of the ember in the darkness. He remembered something from his youth, something he had heard once from the pulpit, about the surety of man’s troublesome nature being itself as sure as sparks flying up. It made him smile, the only way Jack could smile—a paralytic half smirk, mouth slanted slightly to the right. When he was truly happy, which was rare, a bit of his teeth would show.
“What will happen to Mary-Ella when she dies?” Tommy had his eyes fixed on the beer that he had placed between his hands, thumbs tracing up the neck of the bottle and feeling its sweat.
“She dying soon?” Jack pitched the stub of his cigarette forward. It struck something on the ground and hissed, then was silent.
“No.” Tommy chewed on his bottom lip. It was blistered from the heat and dry air, torn open by the boy’s inability to keep from worrying it. He could taste blood in his mouth, could feel a sharp pain shoot across his lips when his tongue ran against the freshly opened skin. He liked the pain. He pressed harder with his tongue, the nerves in his face tingling as his eyes grew damp with the erotic agony.
“Tommy?”
Tommy withdrew his tongue from the wound and blinked several times. The darkness of the pasture before him and the slow rustle of death stirred by a warm, gentle wind brushed against his face. “Sorry, I was just thinking.” He was a bad liar, even for a twenty year old. “What I meant to ask was what will happen to Mary-Ella after she is dead, after all of us are dead, when we fly up to Heaven. Will she still be a retard?”
“Who said we were going to fly there?” Jack took a swig of his beer, letting it roll around in his mouth. It was lukewarm and he was tempted to spit it out, but the edge that licked at his soul made him swallow. His eyes flicked closed, the darkness ran a hand over the side of his cheek as the wind rolled once more across the pasture.
“The song says it, right? They sang it in the church yesterday. We’ll fly away, or something like that. You’re the one who went to college. Don’t you know?” He slipped his tongue out over the wounds on his lip again, pressing into it deep and tasting blood once more.
Jack let out a soft sigh into the night and shook his head. “Bad religion in so many of those songs. Preacher men in their Sunday suits singling glory, glory and they don’t know to who.” He laughed bitterly, took a swig of his beer, felt the lukewarm kiss and spat it out of his mouth.
“Come on, Jack,” Tommy rebuked him, setting his beer down between them and looking out into the darkness, down to their feet where a form tented the veil of night. The form was motionless, but glistened gently where the damp had settled upon it.
“It don’t mind,” Jack replied quietly. “Not now anyway.” He too looked down into the darkness and considered the form before them. “Bible doesn’t say anything about flying away to Heaven, Tommy. Says that the people rise up and meet Him in the air, then all of them come back down to earth.”
Like the sparks that always flew up.
Tommy dangled his legs over the side, feeling the nothingness beneath his feet. “How come you know so much about it, Jack?”
Jack tilted his head to one side, feeling the tension in his neck revolt as the muscles stretched. “I read a lot. I read the men the preachers are supposed to read but never do. I read and I remember. It makes me dangerous.” He studied the sharp line of the moon rising over the pasture, a scythe poised to harvest, and he felt the anxiety of his soul quicken.
“So what about Mary-Ella?” Tommy persisted. He hadn’t understood what Jack had said about raising but not flying, but the question that pressed his mind the way his tongue pressed his wound was what that dopey-eyed girl who never could talk right was going to be like when they were all perfect, when they were all finally at peace.
After a pause, during which Jack trained his eyes on the thing below, on the form tenting the darkness, he parted his lips and tasted stale smoke on the wind as he spoke. “Aquinas says the blessed—” Jack closed his eyes for a moment and considered who Tommy was, remembering that he was a person and a certain sort of person, and accordingly corrected himself. “Aquinas says that the Christians will have four parts to their new bodies: brightness, no sadness, speed, and a fully spiritualized flesh.” He shrugged gently in the dark, raising it with his shoulders before it fell down like velum when he lowered them. “I suppose that means Mary-Ella will won’t be retarded anymore.”
Tommy nodded slowly. The first part of what Jack had said was lost on him, but knowing that Mary-Ella wouldn’t be retarded was comforting. He had watched her the day before in the church, slowly picking her way through a hymn. She didn’t know the words but knew the tune and tried to sing along by making a strange, languid moaning noise in the key she believed the rest of them to be singing in. Tommy hated whatever it was that had made Mary-Ella that way, hated the ache in his chest that made him feel that he was, somehow, responsible for her retardation.
The wind came over the pasture once more, bringing with it the stink of death. Tommy covered his mouth and coughed while Jack only tilted his head back and looked to the highest point of the thin moon and trained his eyes on the point. Should it prick the firmament, he wondered, the world would be lost in a deluge of darkness and milky stars. His heart began to pound, slowly and dully, a mite in an offering jug, clanging with a reverberating twang as each beat struck the inside of his chest.
“Does it get easier, Jack?”
Jack spat into the night, the spittle landing on the form that tented the darkness. “No.” His breath felt heavy in his chest and his soul drew a claw along the inside of his flesh. “It never gets easier Tommy, not your first time or the seventh. Each time it just comes out of you, hungry and needing to be fed.” He shook his head, casting his eyes back up toward the sky. “There’s an anger that lives inside of a man that festers and rots.” Jack felt a tremble in his arms and hands, the clang of his heart against his sternum felt in the tips of his fingers. “It’s a damned cosmos, Tommy! A whole damned mess!” Jack made a fist with his left hand, raised it, and threw it against the side of the truck. The metal groaned into the dark pasture and complained to the watchful stars.
Tommy didn’t know what to do. Tommy never seemed to know what to do. In the darkness he could hear Jack’s breath—a wheezing, labored moaning—and he could feel the tremble in the metal from the other man’s shaking. After a moment, he reached his left hand out and placed it on Jack’s shoulder, a gesture of comfort he had received from their father when their mother had died of pneumonia the winter previous. His fingers had just grazed Jack’s shoulder when Tommy was knocked to his back. Jack’s knees dug into Tommy’s chest as the latter saw the darkness flinch as Jack brought back his right arm before leveling a blow to the side of his face.
Tommy’s lip broke open down the line where the wound had first been made and he tasted blood in his mouth again. He tried to raise his hands in defense, but Jack was wild and the glow in his eyes from the stars a maddening sight. Tommy’s nose was next, his cheek, then three more blows. He lay there and took it, tears formed in his eyes as he gave up the need to fight back. He thought of Mary-Ella and her slanted eyes, her voice raised in the midst of a hymn. When the words were, “Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it, prone to leave the God I love,” and all she offered was her frail, wordless tones. Tommy watched his own face with the slanted mouth in the darkness before he slowly looked above Jack’s head to the highest point of the rising moon, wondering if his gaze would catch on the tip and he’d be left blind forever.
Jack didn’t stop until he felt the crack. Bone gave way under his fist and Tommy’s right cheek cratered in. The darkness around them settled into the divot. Several minutes passed in which Jack’s breath came heavy and thick, his chest pricked by the splinters in his soul, until his right hand loosened, slowly forming out of its fist. He could smell blood, carried against his back as the wind came soft along the pasture once more. It was only when his breath had slowed, when his chest barely rose with each inhale, that Jack realized his was the only breath in the pasture and Tommy’s body was limp beneath his knees.
The sickle moon drew high in the night sky and the maternal stars glimmered and pulsed as shifting skirts of clouds slowly draped over them. Jack stared down at the form beneath his knees, his own form, which tented the darkness in its own way, the way his own form did. He rose, sliding off Tommy and feeling a tremble take his hands. The stench of blood clung to his fists as he pushed the other off the truck bed, the beer bottle knocking over and spilling out onto the ground, landing with a thud and splash. Jack kept pushing until Tommy’s body slipped off the tailgate and crumpled atop the form that had been there before. The wind rolled over the pasture, death close on its heels, and Jack felt a kind of fire in his fingertips as he stood erect on the tailgate, surveying the moon’s slow climb across the endless sea of ghostly stars. He stood there for a moment, a wave of nausea rippling over his flesh, before he jumped down off the tailgate and closed it with a heavy shove.
He circled around to the driver’s side and got in the truck, starting it after a moment of hesitation, the engine refusing to turnover until the third or fourth try. Jack put it in gear, flicked on the headlights, and illumined the dead pasture. A dusty expanse of withered promise, crops long given over to drought. No morning dew had come to kiss the withered world to life in months and the firmament had let no rain slip through. Jack drove a few yards forward, spun the truck around, and drove back to where he had dumped Tommy, now exposed by the manmade luminaries beneath the watch of nature.
The fields had been turned to dust without water and thick, tawny fog rolled in front of the truck from where the dirt had been kicked up when Jack got out. He left the lights on as he circled to the back, pulling a shovel from the bed that had been wedged against the right wall.
When he came back around toward the front, the dust gently rolled off the two forms that had tented the darkness, now lay bare in the light. There was Jack, bloodied and bruised, the right side of his skull cracked and cratered. Beneath him was a woman, red hair matted and dirty, nearly naked. Her face was turned away, but Jack knew it as well as his own, as well as Tommy’s. It was bludgeoned, bloodied, and showed signs of the days she had spent locked in the barn at the edge of the pasture, where Jack and Tommy used to play as kids, where they would stand above the water troth, stare at their identical reflections, and wonder if there were some place, some other earth, where a Jack and Tommy played normal games, laughed at normal things, and didn’t feel the guttural rumble in their souls.
Jack sneered, the crooked right slant matching the indicting moon that had risen full above his crown. He stepped around their intertwined bodies and began to dig. It was easy to push in the shovel, but the parched earth kept filling itself once more, unable to support its death. Jack swore into the night and against the light of his pickup, but after an hour had managed to dig deep enough to satisfy himself and he tossed the shovel out, using the palms of his hands to steady himself on the brittle earth as he raised himself from the pit and set his feet on counterfeit solid ground.
A ripple of thunder echoed in the earth and Jack cast his eyes to heaven. The stars were gone. He was unsure when it had happened, but the slow moving skirts of dreamy clouds had rushed in with haste, leaving only a dull and faint form of sharpened moon peeking between the veils. Another sound of thunder and Jack cast his eyes down. He took Tommy by the legs first and began to drag him toward the pit. Throwing his legs over, Jack then set the heel of his boot against his own face and pushed Tommy back, his twin falling back into the pit. Then he went for the woman. He took her in the same way, dragging her by her feet toward the pit, dangling her legs over the edge.
When Jack was about to walk to her front, a sudden crack of lightening ripped across the sky and struck the earth beside Jack. Fire crackled slowly then burst into bloom across the dead grass. The flames rose high, nearly to Jack’s face. He stood motionless, captivated by the sudden burst of light. The flames danced and pooled, a liquid offering that he longed to touch, to feel. Jack desired the pain. He was about touch it when the flames shifted in the wind coming off the pasture and in a burst of brightness, Holy Ghost with vengeful furry burst forth from the rippling flames, mouth open to devour Jack and his damned soul. Jack recoiled in fright, stepping backward and tripping over the woman’s body. He fell back into the pit, his boot catching her side so that she rolled in with him, body strewn across his own. He tried to raise himself up but he was mired in the pit, the flame of Holy Ghost crying out in furry for spilled blood quickened and raged across the pasture.
Jack looked up as the flames drew to edge of the pit. He struggled to break free, to even move. Tommy’s face was pressed against the side of his head and when he turned, he found himself staring into his own eyes, dead and lifeless, when a sudden burst of breath entered Tommy’s lungs and he reached a hand forward, placing it about Jack’s neck as his twin screamed in a sudden chill of fear and the flame raged above.
The first few drops of rain splattered against the dusty pasture and the earth moaned in gratitude. Gingerly drops turned into wispy threads, pooling in the divots of the earth and rising gradually until the whole of the pasture seemed as a dirty, rippling lake. Somewhere in the expanse, three bodies slid into the muck and mire, covered by the rain. A pickup’s lights dimmed as the water raised, until they too were no more, only a forgotten glow beneath the grief of the loosed firmament. Above, the great moon rose to its highest point behind the veil of clouds, but carried its way across the sky in disappointment as it set, for there was nothing for the scythe to harvest, nothing left to reap.
© 2011, Preston. All rights reserved.
