u/muffinartillery

Content warning: references to deceased animals, hate crimes, murder

Just Now, You Are Coming Home 

When you come home after many years, you find that home is an undersized sweatshirt with cheap, cracked letters. You consider calling your old friends; you will need to learn what’s acceptable behavior around them now, whether they drink or work a steady job or stay out past 9 pm. The number of Starbucks kiosks and dispensaries seems to have doubled since you last left, but the regular storefronts are filled only with reflections of passing traffic.

It is quieter than the city, at least. You will take the dogs for a walk where there are roads instead of streets, and remember to nod at the cars that muddy their tires to leave you some extra room. You watch the robins pull worms from rank ditches and listen to the morning condensation sizzling on the overhead lines. The feathers you step in are from a mourning dove that exploded the day before; the carbonized body was stolen by the foxes that very night. There’s only a tiny foot left, pointed like a ballerina’s toes. 

When you first see the truck, listed to the side of the road in front of the neighbor’s fence, you think little of it. The rotting hulls of cars, buses, and boats make for common lawn ornaments in this district. Three properties down, the remains of a refrigerated boxcar sit hulking in a thicket of salal and huckleberries. But you will get closer and, with an instinct you cannot explain, grip the dogs’ leashes more tightly as the vehicle looms into view.

The truck is the color of an old molar and sits expectantly, one window rolled down as if to let in an unfelt breeze. As you approach, you know that you should check for a sleeping form or a still body, or maybe a couple of ambitious teenagers. But the cab is empty, and that somehow turns your breakfast to a lump in your stomach. There’s a single shoe in the back, and a plastic disco ball rotating slowly in the rearview mirror. 

The corner of a memory refuses to lie down, raised like the edge of a dirty stamp. You lift it gingerly in your mind, holding it to the light while the dogs whine and snuffle at your feet. 

***

You were at a party in someone’s garage. Someone had challenged the room to name the scariest shit they’d ever seen. A friend of a friend begins to tell a story about the time they lit a bonfire on the north spit. It was on a February night, the kind of night where everyone was wearing everyone else’s jackets. The smell of beer in an overheated can. The hulking silhouettes of the mills lining the jetty. 

Suddenly, the sound of an engine coughs to life just beyond the dunes. A white truck glides onto the sand, headlights beaming directly at the group. They get up and run for it without thinking, charging down a dark stretch of beach until they’d ended up in foaming waves. 

The storyteller pauses to take a drink. This truck, he said, or the drivers in it. We didn’t even stop to ask about why it was driving after us, we just ran. At some point, his girlfriend had stepped on a bottle shard hidden in the sand. In the shock of the ocean, she stood bleeding into the water. One of them took out his phone to call 911, only to drop it into the ocean. The tide was up, and for a minute they clasped hands in the surgical glare of the lights before the truck turned, drove off as fast as it had charged. The storyteller looked down. He’d had to carry his girlfriend all the way back to the main road while his friends kept a lookout.

“What kind of truck was it? Was it someone you knew?” People ask simple questions when they don’t know what else to say. This truck was kind of weird, he said, not like a surf pickup or a grow dozer. As it bucked and slid on the way out, they could see a tree scratched into the paint on the side. It was a crude etching, not like a company truck. And the tree had had a face.

The storyteller finished talking then. You remember how their date took out a piercing and dropped it into the ashtray with a sudden ping. You heard someone in the back murmur: “Was the tree some kind of lynching thing? Is there even lynching in California?” 

Nobody bothered to ask whether the police ever followed up. The local sheriff was known for elevating conspiracy theories to an art form. He had once marshalled a hand-picked task force to track the rumor of an Antifa caravan into a cul-de-sac of unreason. For about a week, the county had become a punchline in the national media. It was under the sheriff’s blind watch that a whistleblower uncovered the graves of a hundred dogs behind a mom-and-pop rescue. This place, you all agreed, was a locus of terrible contradictions. The cold and lonely beaches. A place of vibrant decay, a forager’s paradise. To think: the tallest trees in the world, but a town built on an economy of demise.

In that moment, you recall a childhood rumor that June Chancey, a pixie-haired theatre kid, had been beaten with a pipe for kissing another girl. Even if the rumor wasn’t true, the spirit of the lie had felt completely right. 

***

Standing in the road, you almost know what you will see before you approach the passenger side. You have already pictured the tree with the face, the way that the rust would have turned it into a nest of scabs. That the corrosion would leave the eyes looking like pennies at the bottom of a purse. Your feet are turning numb as if they have been plunged into February water. You stare at the side. Then you turn and escort the dogs back to the house.

When you call the sheriff's office to report an abandoned vehicle, they don’t seem to take much interest. When you tell them that it had a tree on the side with a face, you think you hear the dispatcher laugh to the side, even when you add that it looks like some sort of cult thing. You are certain she’s picturing some company logo slop, and not the unholy pictogram you saw bleeding through the fresh paint. 

It has been years since you’ve been home, so long that you’d almost forgotten why you’d left. You think that it’s good to return sometimes, to make sure that you saw the things you really saw. To make sure there the roots are still attached to something.

But getting back into the car is an automatic action, just as you pull into the ditch to make room for a neighbor strolling along the shoulder. They raise a hand in greeting without looking up. The radio is on and as you pass the city limits sign, you hear on the news that a young mother has been mowed down at a protest on the East Coast. You can already picture the justification of self-defense. To prompt a uniformed officer to hit the gas, to pull her from her child’s hand, she must have been a sight. A crazed woman, out of her mind with radical terror. In your mind, she is holding a bottle that glints in the moonlight. You see her, one in a line of women, standing knee-deep in the froth of night-time water. Impervious to their hurt, to the creatures in the ocean. 

You are now well past the city limits, the speed limit. 

You are never going to be fast enough.