My mom found him early on the morning of July 15th, stretched out between the refrigerator and the breakfast table like he'd been reaching for something. His skin was blue-white, ice crystals still clinging to his eyelashes when Mom screamed from the doorway. The thermometer on the kitchen wall read eighty two degrees.

I'm Theo. Seventeen, normal kid from normal Midwestern stock. I learned to drive in snow before I could parallel park. I play JV basketball badly and work the closing shift at a sandwich shop three nights a week, biking home past empty storefronts and gas stations that close at ten.

Nothing about my life prepared me for finding my grandfather's body that morning, or for understanding what had happened.

My Grandpa, Isaac, had lived with us for four years, ever since Grandma died and Dad decided the old man shouldn't be rattling around their farmhouse alone. Grandpa was seventy-four, with arthritis in his hands and a habit of falling asleep in his recliner with the TV remote balanced on his chest. He'd worked twenty years managing the local IGA before retiring, knew everyone in town, remembered their kids' names and which checkout girls gave the best customer service. He was practical, steady, unremarkable in every way that mattered.

He was also dead in our kitchen, ice cold in eighty-degree weather.

The coroner, Dr. Willits, spent forty-five minutes examining the body. He took photographs, checked the thermostat, questioned Mom and Dad about Grandpa's health, his medications, whether he'd seemed confused or disoriented lately. He measured the room temperature three times with different thermometers, frowning at readings that made no sense.

"Hypothermia," he announced finally, signing papers with the kind of confidence that comes from three decades of determining cause of death. "Severe hypothermia due to unknown environmental factors. Possibly a neurological episode affecting temperature regulation."

Dad asked the obvious question. "How does someone freeze to death when it's eighty degrees outside?"

Dr. Willits adjusted his glasses and delivered the answer that would satisfy the insurance company, the death certificate, and everyone except me. "Sometimes the body's regulatory system fails catastrophically. Medication interactions, undiagnosed conditions, stroke affecting the hypothalamus. The body can literally lose the ability to maintain core temperature."

Mom mentioned the frost she'd seen around the body, but Dr. Willits dismissed it as condensation from the air conditioning. I didn't correct him, even though our AC had been off for three days.

The funeral was on Thursday. Half the town showed up, filing past the casket to pay respects to a man who'd bagged their groceries and remembered their faces for two decades. They spoke about his kindness, his reliability, how he'd given their teenagers first jobs and second chances.

None of them knew about the temperature of his skin when they found him, or the thin layer of frost that had formed around his body like he'd been lying there in January instead of July. None of them had seen what I saw when I came downstairs that morning, when Mom's screaming brought me and Dad running.

I saw my grandfather's final expression, frozen on his face in the moment death took him. He wore no peaceful look like most people would imagine. His eyes were wide, staring at the ceiling, and his mouth was open like he'd been trying to say something important.

He looked terrified.

Strange things started happening two months ago.

May 28th in southern Minnesota means tornado watches and sudden thunderstorms, the kind of weather that keeps you checking the sky every few minutes. It doesn't mean finding patches of kitchen floor so cold they make your feet ache through wool socks. But that's exactly what I found that Tuesday morning after Memorial Day, a circle of tile near the sink that felt like stepping on January pavement.

Mom blamed the air conditioning, even though we hadn't turned it on yet. Dad checked the basement for broken pipes, crawling around with a flashlight and muttering about foundation settling. The cold spot vanished by Thursday, but another one appeared in the hallway upstairs, then another in the living room by the weekend.

"Old houses settle," Dad said when I mentioned it. "Foundation shifts, creates drafts you wouldn't expect."

Our house was built in 1987. It wasn't exactly old by anyone's standard. Dad liked cheap explanations that didn't require expensive repairs.

I pressed my palm against the frigid patch of living room carpet, watching my breath form small clouds in the seventy degree air. When I called Mom over to feel it, her hand passed through the cold like it wasn't there.

"Feels normal to me, honey," she said, giving me that concerned look parents get when they think you're coming down with something.

But I could see the frost forming on the carpet fibers where my breath hit them.

The winter winds started a week later. I'd be watching TV or doing homework and suddenly smell snow in the air, that sharp clean scent that comes before a blizzard. The smell would drift through rooms like invisible smoke, carrying whispers I could almost understand.

Once I followed the scent upstairs to Grandpa's room, where he was sitting on his bed looking at old photo albums, his face pale and distracted.

"You smell that?" I asked him.

He looked up from a picture of him and Grandma at some company picnic. His hands were shaking as he closed the album. "Smell what?"

"Like snow. Like winter."

"It's May, Theo." But his voice cracked when he said it, and I noticed he was wearing a sweater despite the warm afternoon.

The whispers came with the wind that smelled like snow, voices so quiet I couldn't be sure I was actually hearing them. Sometimes they seemed to be calling a name, sometimes just murmuring like people having a conversation in another room. I'd turn my head to catch the words, but they'd fade into nothing, leaving me wondering if I'd imagined them entirely.

But Grandpa heard them too. I'd find him sitting in his chair at midnight, eyes wide open, responding to things the rest of the family couldn't detect.

"I'm sorry," he'd whisper to the empty room.

When I asked him who he was talking to, he'd look at me with the desperate expression of a drowning man.

"You can hear them too, can't you, Theo?" His voice barely above a whisper. "The voices in the wind."

I nodded, and something between relief and terror crossed his face.

"Then you know she's coming."

The shivering started in June. I'd wake up at three in the morning, teeth chattering, pulling my covers tight around me. The room would feel normal to everyone else, maybe even warm, but my body acted like I'd been sleeping outside. When I mentioned it to Mom, she immediately started checking for fever and asking about my appetite.

"Growing boys need more calories," she said, adding extra bacon to my breakfast. "Your metabolism's probably just running high."

She couldn't see the frost forming on my bedroom windows while the thermostat read seventy-five degrees.

Grandpa started acting strange around the same time, but this was different from the whispers. This was paranoia.

He began looking over his shoulder when we watched TV together, checking the locks on doors that nobody ever used. During dinner he'd pause mid-sentence and listen to sounds the rest of us couldn't hear, his fork halfway to his mouth, eyes darting toward the kitchen doorway.

"Nothing there," he'd mutter when I followed his gaze. "Just tired."

But tired people don't spend twenty minutes staring at the same photograph, and they don't whisper apologies to themselves while they think no one's listening. I started finding him with those photo albums more often, usually the ones from his working years at the IGA. He'd flip through pages slowly, his finger tracing faces I didn't recognize, his lips moving in silent conversation.

One afternoon in late June, I found him in the kitchen at two in the morning, still in his pajamas, staring at the spot where his body would be found three weeks later. The linoleum around his bare feet was covered in frost that sparkled under the overhead light.

"Grandpa?"

He turned toward me, but his eyes took a moment to focus, like he was seeing me from across a great distance. When he exhaled, his breath formed a small cloud between us.

"She's coming," he said quietly. "She's been walking through the snow for twenty-seven years, and now she's almost here."

"Who's coming?"

"I should have stopped. I should have helped her." His voice was barely audible. "But she was so awful."

I asked him what he meant, who he was talking about, but he just shook his head and shuffled back to his room, leaving wet footprints on the kitchen floor that steamed in the warm air.

Everything came together the night I saw her.

It was July 4th, just past midnight. Fireworks had been going off all evening, late celebrations from people who'd bought too many bottle rockets and didn't want to waste them. I was lying in bed, listening to the occasional pop and crackle from somewhere across town, when the temperature in my room dropped twenty degrees in the span of a heartbeat.

I sat up, pulling my sheet around me, and saw her floating three feet above the hallway carpet.

She was translucent, like looking through ice, but I could make out her basic shape: a woman in what might have been a winter coat, her hair hanging in frozen strands around her face. Snow clung to her shoulders and sleeves, never melting, never falling. She moved without walking, drifting down the hall toward Grandpa's room with the deliberate purpose of someone who knew exactly where she was going.

I couldn't move. Couldn't breathe. Couldn't do anything but watch as she passed my doorway, leaving a trail of frost on the walls where she'd been. The air around her shimmered with cold, and I could hear the sound winter makes: that particular silence that comes with heavy snow, broken only by the soft whisper of ice crystals forming.

She turned her head toward me as she passed, and for just a moment I saw her face clearly. Her eyes were the color of winter sky, pale and empty. Her mouth was open in an expression that might have been speaking, but no sound came out. Just that patient, terrible silence.

When she reached Grandpa's door, she didn't open it. She simply passed through the wood like it was made of mist.

I stayed in bed until morning, wrapped in every blanket I owned, listening to the one-sided conversation that drifted through the walls. Grandpa's voice, apologizing over and over to someone who answered only with the sound of wind through bare trees.

By the time the sun came up, the temperature had returned to normal, but I found a single perfect snowflake on my windowsill, refusing to melt despite the July heat.

I knew then that my grandfather was going to die, and that I was the only one who would understand why.

My grandfather told me the worst thing he'd ever done.

It was July 13th, two days before we found him dead on the kitchen floor. He'd spent the morning pacing between his bedroom and the kitchen, muttering under his breath and checking door locks that were already secure. The house felt like a meat locker despite the air conditioning being off, but only Grandpa and I seemed to notice.

By afternoon, he looked like a man who hadn't slept in weeks.

"Theo," he said, finding me in the garage where I was fixing a flat tire on my bike. "I need to tell you something. About Mary."

I'd never heard him mention anyone named Mary before, but something in his voice made me set down my wrench and pay attention. He looked older than his seventy-four years, his shoulders bent forward like he was carrying something impossibly heavy. When he breathed, small puffs of vapor escaped his lips despite the stifling heat.

"I worked at the IGA for twenty years," he began, settling onto Dad's workbench with careful movements. "Made some good friends there. Knew everybody's kids by name, mostly." 

He paused, his hands working against each other in his lap.

"And then there was Mary."

The temperature in the garage dropped ten degrees when he said her name.

"She worked in the office. Bookkeeping, scheduling, handling complaints. Been there longer than anyone, maybe fifteen years when I started. Everyone called her Mean Mary behind her back, though never where she could hear it."

His voice got quieter, more distant, like he was seeing something I couldn't.

"Mary had a talent for cruelty, for finding people's weaknesses and pressing on them until they broke. New employees, part-timers who couldn't afford to quit, anyone she thought was beneath her. She seemed to enjoy it. But what she did to Tommy was beyond cruel. It was evil."

"The Tuesday she destroyed Tommy was like watching a predator hunt. Tommy worked maintenance, had some kind of mental problem that made him talk slowly and repeat himself sometimes. A sweet kid, maybe twenty-five, lived with his mother and needed that job more than anything. A customer complained about water on the floor near produce, standard stuff, happens every day."

Frost crawled up the garage walls now.

"Mary saw her chance. Called Tommy up to customer service where everybody could see him. Employees, shoppers, some kid waiting on his mother by the register. Started berating him, loud enough to carry across the whole front end."

I watched him work up to the next part. He wasn't looking at me anymore.

"Then she mocked his voice. Slow, the way he talked when he got nervous. 'Tommy sorry. Tommy try harder.' Kept it up until people started drifting over to see what the noise was."

"Tommy just stood there with the mop, crying. He didn't understand why anybody was laughing. Mary told the customer, right in front of him, that the store kept Tommy on out of charity. Said maybe they ought to find somebody who wasn't useless."

Grandpa stopped talking for a second. When he started again his voice wasn't steady.

"The customer tried to wave it off, said it was just a wet floor, no harm done. Mary wasn't having it. Called him a burden on decent society. Said his mother ought to be ashamed, sending him out like that. Tommy went down on the floor right there, crying so hard he couldn't get a breath in."

"I Found out later his mother had to take him to the emergency room that night because he wouldn't stop shaking. The doctor said it was a panic attack, but I knew better. Mary had broken something inside him. He never came back."

"That was the kind of person Mary was," Grandpa whispered. "Someone who could destroy an innocent man for entertainment and sleep soundly at night."

"Grandpa," I asked, "what does Mary have to do with the cold spots and whispers that follow us through the house?"

His hands stopped moving. When he looked at me, his eyes were wet and desperate.

"Because I'm the reason she's dead."

The story came out slowly, like he was pulling each word from somewhere deep and painful. February 14th, 1998, ten years before I was born. A blizzard had moved in faster than predicted, dropping nineteen inches of snow in six hours and creating whiteout conditions across three counties.

"Store management made the call to close early. Two in the afternoon instead of nine at night. Everyone was anxious to get home before the roads became completely impassable."

Mary had left first, as she always did. She lived alone in a rented house on the other side of town and drove an old Buick that wasn't reliable in the best conditions, let alone in a blizzard.

Grandpa stayed another hour, helping to secure the store and making sure all the coolers and freezers were properly sealed in case they lost power. By the time he left, the snow was falling so hard he could barely see his truck in the parking lot.

"I took County Road 47," he said. "It was faster, and your grandmother was waiting with dinner. I've driven that road a thousand times."

His voice got quieter, forcing me to lean closer to hear.

"I saw her headlights first. Flashing on and off, on and off, like someone signaling for help. The Buick was nose-first in a snowbank, maybe fifteen yards off the road."

"As I got closer, I could see Mary standing beside her car, waving her arms frantically. Even through the snow and wind, I could tell she was in trouble."

"I pulled over," he said. "Sat there with my engine running, looking at her through my windshield. She was walking toward me, stumbling through knee-deep snow."

"I thought about Tommy crying while everyone laughed. About the way she'd called him useless. I thought about the kind of person who could destroy a poor kid like Tommy for fun."

His hands were shaking now. From the cold or emotions, I couldn't tell.

"She reached my truck. Started pounding on the passenger window with her fists, screaming something I couldn't hear over the wind. Her face was pressed against the glass, and I could see the terror in her eyes. She knew she was going to die out there if no one helped her."

He paused, his breath coming in short, sharp puffs that crystallized in the air.

"I put the truck in drive and kept going."

Neither of us said anything for a while.

"She ran after me for maybe twenty yards, waving and screaming. I watched her in my rear view mirror until the snow swallowed her up. Then I drove home and told your grandmother I'd taken the main route because it was safer."

"They didn't find Mary's body until March, when the snow finally melted enough for a farmer to spot something that didn't belong in his field. She'd made it almost a mile from her car before the cold took her, found frozen in a drainage ditch with her arms wrapped around herself, still wearing the same winter coat I see floating through the hallway."

"I killed her," Grandpa whispered. "And I've been living with that for twenty-seven years."

By the time he finished, ice covered every surface, and the metal tools rang like bells when the expanding frost shifted them. 

"Why are you telling me this now, after keeping it secret for so long?"

He looked toward the house, where shadows were beginning to gather in the windows as evening approached.

"Because she's here, Theo. She's been in my room every night for a week, standing at the foot of my bed, dripping snow melt on the carpet. She doesn't say anything, just watches me with those frozen eyes."

His voice dropped to almost nothing.

"And I think you're the only one who can see her too."

The air conditioner stayed off for the last two days of my grandfather's life.

After his confession in the garage, he became obsessed with heat. Every time someone turned on the AC to combat the mid-eighties weather, he'd shut it off within minutes, his hands shaking as he adjusted the thermostat.

"Can't stand the cold air," he'd mutter, pulling on another sweater despite the sweltering house. When Dad complained about the temperature, Grandpa begged.

"Just keep it off," he pleaded. "Please."

The whispers were constant now. Where before I'd barely been able to make out voices in the wind, now I could hear words clearly: "Left me." "So cold." They drifted through the house like smoke, always in Mary's voice, though I'd never heard her speak when she was alive.

Mom and Dad noticed Grandpa's behavior but attributed it to grief or maybe early dementia. They scheduled a doctor's appointment for the following week and talked in hushed voices about assisted living facilities and medication adjustments.

They couldn't see the frost forming on windows despite the eighty-degree indoor temperature. Mom pressed her hand flat against the kitchen wall once, at my insistence, and felt nothing. 

On July 14th, the day before he died, Grandpa stopped sleeping entirely.

I found him in the living room at two in the morning, fully dressed, staring at the front door. The house was stifling without air conditioning, but his breath formed steady clouds when he spoke.

"She's getting closer," he said without looking at me.

"Where is she?"

"Right there." He pointed toward the empty hallway. "Can't you see her? She's standing by the stairs, just watching."

I looked where he was pointing and saw nothing but shadows. But the temperature in that spot had to be below freezing, because frost was forming on the wall in the shape of a woman.

"What is she doing?"

"Nothing. Just looking at me. But I can feel the cold coming off her, like standing next to an open freezer. And her eyes," He shuddered. "her eyes are like looking into a January sky."

We sat together until dawn. I held his frail, cold hand, listening to him whisper apologies to the empty air.

That evening, our house felt like an oven. The air conditioner sat silent while the July heat pushed the indoor temperature well into the nineties. Every fan in the house ran at full speed, but they couldn't compete with the supernatural winter that followed my grandfather from room to room.

The whispers started earlier than usual, just after sunset. This time they weren't random phrases but something more focused, more demanding. I couldn't make out all the words, but Grandpa could.

He sat in his chair, no longer pretending he couldn't hear her.

"I know," he said to the empty room, his voice steady for the first time in days. "I remember leaving you there."

A pause, as if he were listening to something I couldn't quite catch.

"Yes, you called my name. You begged me to help."

Frost crept over the walls around his chair.

"I'm sorry." His voice cracked. "I'm so sorry, Mary. But you were so cruel."

"No," Grandpa said, shaking his head. "Sorry isn't enough. I know that now."

The conversation continued for hours, Grandpa responding to accusations I could only partially hear, accepting blame for a decision that had haunted him for twenty-seven years. Sometimes I caught fragments of her voice in the wind: "...left me to die..." "...so cold..."

Near midnight, his voice changed. He sounded resigned.

"Yes, you were alone. You died alone because of me, and that was cruel. Maybe as cruel as anything you ever did."

"I deserve this. But please, leave my family alone. They don't know what I did," he said with a tired, dejected voice.

By one in the morning, the house felt like a walk-in freezer. Ice covered every surface I could see. The whispers had stopped, replaced by something worse: the sound of someone breathing slowly in the darkness, each exhalation bringing more cold.

"Theo," he said, with all the warmth and affection he could muster, "Go to bed. You can't help me, I'm ready. I'm tired, and this is nothing you, or anyone should ever have to see."

I went to bed knowing I'd never see my grandfather alive again, but unable to do anything except watch it happen.

Mary had finally gotten her revenge, and she'd made sure my grandfather experienced every moment of the cold that killed her. The only difference was that she'd died alone in a field, while he died surrounded by the warmth of a family who loved him.

Three weeks later, I sent my college applications exclusively to schools in Florida and Arizona. Some things are too cold to forget, and I never want to feel winter again.

The frost disappeared from our house the day we buried Grandpa, but sometimes, on the colder nights, I still hear whispers in the wind. They're fainter now, more distant, like someone calling from very far away.

The lake on my brothers property has no bottom. 2 Days Later.

So, anyway, there I was, busted up ankle, brother due back tomorrow, and Earl gone, dead, dragged into the deep of Gaspar's lake by something that shouldn't exist. It's been a couple of days since I made my last post and I want to give you a recap of everything that's happened since then.

First, the sheriff came by and the whole experience was weird.

"Hey Henderson." I said, as he got out of his cruiser.

"How's the ankle?"

"Hurts like hell." 

"I bet." He paused a beat, "Jake. I need to talk to you about something."

"Okay, Henderson. What's up?" I replied. Even though I knew what's up.

"Earl's sister reported him missing. You and I both know he's probably sleeping off a mean drunk in someone's shed, but the last place his truck's GPS pinged was here on your property."

Earl was what they call a "high-risk" borrower, the only way they would give him the loan was with a tracker on the truck so they could repo it if he didn't make his payments.

"You know he's out here all the time, Henderson. I'm not surprised. We were, uh, fishing in the lake." I pointed in the general direction. "Didn't catch anything though."

"Ha!" The sheriff laughed. "Y'all ain't gonna catch nothing there. Lakes been dead for years."

"Yeah, Yeah, we figured that out." I replied.

The radio on the sheriff's shoulder crackled to life.

"Sheriff, you copy?"

He lifted the mike. "Go ahead Nadine."

"Deputy Miller just located Earl's truck."

I sucked in a breath. 

The sheriff straightened. "Where at?"

"Off the road at the intersection of County eight and Sage."

That was about two miles away. Sage road bordered the property on the east.

"Anybody with it?"

"Negative, Just the truck."

"Copy that, Nadine. En route."

He nodded at my leg. "Ride along? I know you and Earl were close."

"Yeah, I think I will."

It took only a couple of minutes to head up the road to the intersection where Deputy Miller and two other deputies I didn't know had their cruisers parked on the side of the road. Deputy Miller waved. We knew each other from high school.

"Sheriff, This is the damnedest thing I've ever seen. I don't think this was a wreck."

"What do you mean, Miller? Earl was always getting drunk. Had two DUIs under his belt already. This was inevitable."

"Look where the truck is. Right in the bushes. But no skid marks on the road. No damage trail to the vehicle. The truck's been crushed, not wrecked."

Sheriff Henderson rubbed his stubble and mumbled to himself.

"Sheriff, It's like it fell out of an airplane. Weird as fuck."

The sheriff sighed. "I hate weird."

Then the sheriff seemed to notice something. He pointed at the winch and boom that were still bolted to what was left of the bed of Earl's truck. 

"What the hell were you boys trying to catch in Gaspar's Lake?"

"Big fish?" I replied 

The sheriff walked away muttering something under his breath that sounded like "fuckin' drunks."

We spent about ten minutes at the wreck before he drove me back to the house.

As he pulled into the driveway he turned to me and with a serious look said "Look, I know Earl was a drunk, but I also know he was your friend. Anything you know about what may have happened, anything at all, I need you to come clean and tell me."

I sat there and thought about telling him the truth. But what proof did I have? The tape didn't show what actually happened to him. And I might be found responsible anyway. I thought about spending the next five or ten years in jail for something I didn't do and decided to keep my mouth shut. I'm not nearly as dumb as people think I look.

I watched the sheriff pull away, my ankle throbbing inside the walking boot the clinic had given me. Time to ice it down and pop a couple more pain pills and rest a little. I sat down on the steps and thought for a while. How had Earl's truck ended up so far away? Did that thing throw it? I was in way over my head with this shit.

The state inspector came out that afternoon. Carmichael. I'd never met him, but Earl talked about him sometimes, said he was one of the few state guys who wasn't a total prick about paperwork.

He got out of his truck, looked at the house, looked at the lake off past the gazebo, and didn't say anything for a second.

"Did Earl call you?" I asked.

"Earl doesn't call me unless he wants something. I called him a hundred times since Tuesday." He shut the truck door. "You want to tell me where my ROV is, or you want to tell me where Earl is first?"

I didn't have a good answer for either.

"It's hard to explain," I said.

"Try."

"I mean it's hard to explain. Not hard like it's complicated. Hard like you're not going to believe it."

He rubbed his temple. Looked tired in a way that didn't have anything to do with the drive out. Anyone who'd dealt with Earl had that look sometimes. It was their "Tired of Earl's drunk bullshit look."

"I've got a Notice of Loss form sitting on my desk with your property listed as the last known location of state equipment, and a missing person report with the same address on it. I don't need you to explain the ocean to me, Jake. I need something I can write down."

I thought about the sheriff, not four hours earlier, asking me the same thing in a different tone.

"I've got a tape," I said. "From the sub. I can show you what happened. But you're not going to like it, and I need you to not go telling people, not right off."

"Telling people what?"

"Please, just watch it first."

He looked at me for a long moment, then went back to his truck and came out with a little fold-out player.

"Show me what you have."

He hooked the player up on the tailgate and I climbed up next to him, ankle boot and all. The little screen lit up gray, then the rocky wall of the sinkhole came into view, lit up sharp by the sub's lights.

"This is the descent," I said. "Nothing happens for a while."

"How long's a while?"

"Just watch."

The rock scrolled by. Carmichael didn't say anything, just watched with his arms crossed, the kind of stillness that meant he was actually paying attention and not humoring me. Around four hundred feet the walls went smooth. He leaned in a little.

"Huh." Just that.

I didn't say anything back. I'd already seen it once. Watching it the second time, I found myself watching him more than the screen.

The counter ticked past eight hundred and the walls dropped away into open water. Carmichael's arms came uncrossed.

"That's not right," he said. He said it the way a mechanic says something's not right just before he tells you it's four figures plus labor to fix it.

Then the shapes came into the light and started to move.

He didn't say anything for a long time. I watched the side of his face instead of the screen, because I already knew what was on it. His jaw worked once. He didn't blink much.

When the eye opened, his hand came up off his knee and just hung there in the air, like he'd meant to point at something and forgot why.

The picture went dark. It was still recording though. I noticed the number on the screen was still going up. It reached fifteen hundred feet before the signal cut off completely.

Carmichael reached over and stopped the tape. Didn't rewind it. Just sat there a second with his hand still on the player. He took a moment and then rewound the tape and watched it again.

I watched him instead of the screen the second time too. He didn't flinch at the eye this time. He was ready for it. While he was watching I gave him the rundown of what had happened. Our experiment with the ropes, the thing that had risen up and taken Earl.

He ejected the tape when it finished and held it in his palm like it was radioactive.

"Earl's truck went in? With Earl in it?" 

"Yeah."

He nodded slowly, like that answered something he hadn't asked yet, and got in his truck. He didn't say goodbye. Just backed down the driveway and pulled out onto the road, and I stood there in the boot with my ankle throbbing, watching the dust settle. Good thing I made copies. He had taken the tape.

I had the other copies sealed in in envelopes. One to the Governor, One to the newspaper, one to the FBI and one to the news station. Just to be safe.

That evening I was hobbling around the house trying to get things squared away. Carl was due in on the four AM red-eye and I wanted the place looking decent, or as decent as it gets around here. Even on the bum ankle I figured I could manage a garbage run. I had a bag of empty tallboys in one hand and the crutch tucked under the other arm when the ground started shaking.

I'd never been in an earthquake, but I knew that's what this was, or thought I did. The dirt under my feet moved, side to side like a wave. Out past the gazebo the lake went choppy, little waves slapping against the bank with no wind to cause them.

Then the ground opened up.

The dirt gave way under my good foot, and I went down before I even understood what was happening. Ten feet, maybe. The sides were packed hard, old soil, the kind that doesn't crumble easily, except it was crumbling now, coming down on my face and shoulders in clumps.

I clawed upward. Got a mouthful of dirt for my trouble and spat it out, eyes shut, hands scraping at the wall trying to find something solid to grab. The dirt started filling my mouth again. Panic started ringing in my ears, and I felt like I couldn't get a breath. Being buried alive is about the worst thing I can imagine. My bad ankle screamed at me every time I put weight on it.

I stopped caring about my ankle pretty quick when the noises started. It was loud and wet, coming from the direction of the lake. Like something big stomping around. I held still. The dust kept sifting down around me even though the shaking had stopped.

I could feel something heavy moving around in long pulls, dirt sliding off the walls of the crack in little rivers every time it hit again. I pressed myself flat against the dirt and stopped digging altogether. Getting out felt like a worse idea than staying put.

I don't know how long I stayed like that. Long enough that my arms started shaking on their own. The dragging sound kept going, followed by a loud splash. Then the noises stopped.

I waited another minute before I moved. I finally got a hand up over the lip of the crack and pulled myself high enough to see over it, the ankle boot working against me the whole way.

The gazebo was gone. Not knocked over, gone, flattened into splinters and shingles across a patch of ground that looked like someone had dragged a bulldozer blade through it sideways. Gouges cut into the dirt in long parallel lines, wider than any tire tread, deep enough that I could've laid down in one and not touched the sides.

The place was an absolute mess. The house still looked fine. That was something.

Carl was probably going to kill me anyway.

Well, things have gone from bad to worse. I've got Carl a ride squared away from the airport tomorrow. That's a conversation I really, really, don't want to have. Glad I made copies of the tape, thanks for the suggestions. I'll keep y'all posted on whatever happens next. 

The lake on my brother's property has no bottom.

Me and my brother live on twenty-five acres out in the middle of nowhere. He inherited it when our dad passed. Our mom and stepdad had already died a few years back, so it's just the two of us.

When I say out in the middle of nowhere I really mean out in the middle of nowhere, a thirty-mile drive to the nearest grocery store, forty to the nearest big city. But we like it. It's nice and quiet.

My brother Carl is an artist. Not an artsy artist, he does design work for big companies out on the east and west coast. Does all his work on a computer, he can work from pretty much anywhere that's connected to the internet. Now it costs quite a bit to get internet in the middle of nowhere, but it's possible, and he can more than afford it.

Me? I'm Jake. I'm a shiftless, no-good lazy layabout. At least that's what my stepdad always said. My bio dad, when he wasn't being an abusive drunk, would say pretty much the same damn thing. That's fine. I've made my peace with it. I keep busy by taking care of the place. Doing the lawn care, the maintenance, painting. All the crap work that needs to be done.

We have a pretty simple life.

The strangest thing about this place is the lake. Well it's actually just a glorified pond. It's about eighty feet across, and almost a perfect circle. Sinkhole, I'd guess. It's way out on the edge of the property past the gazebo. Officially it's known on the maps as Lake 224, but everyone calls it Gaspar's Lake, after some fella that lived here like a hundred years ago.

The water is unbelievably clear, way more clear than I would have ever expected. And deep. The thing is, I have no idea how deep it is. I heard rumors in town that it's bottomless when we first moved out here but I paid it no mind, but you can't see the bottom at all.

One summer, I had a fella from the state fish and game department come out and stock the lake with fish. I thought I'd do some fishing that fall, but it just didn't take. Don't know how, or why, but come fall there wasn't a fish to be found. Didn't make any sense. If they'd died, I'd have seen them floating, right?

Another thing is the light. Sometimes at night I could swear I see a glow come up out of the water. I got a nice little setup. I'd sit at the gazebo until late in the evening grilling bratwurst and sipping cold beer from the cooler. But on the way back, that glow. A color that's just not right, you know? Not bright or anything, you can just barely notice it, but it's there.

Anyway, my brother doesn't care about any of that shit. He's got no sense of adventure, no curiosity. He's all about deadlines, meetings, and products. Sometimes he'll fly out from the local airport on a puddle jumper to go see a client and leave me out here for a week or two. You'd never get me on one of those tiny single-engine planes. I kind of get the feeling he's embarrassed of me, but whatever.

He flew out to North Carolina or maybe it was Virginia one week and I had the place to myself. So I called up Earl - he's my drinking buddy - I called up Earl and said to him we're gonna find out how deep Gaspar's Lake really is.

He brought over his jon boat and I'd say about three hundred feet of half-inch nylon rope. We were going to be real scientific about this. I tied a cinder-block to one end and we marked off the rope in ten-foot sections.

He backed his truck up to the water and we got the boat in, and headed out to the center of the lake, and dropped the cinder block over.

I figured it'd bottom out at fifty feet or so, but shit no, that rope just kept flying right on out.

Fifty feet, hundred feet, hundred and fifty, just kept going.

"Maybe we should tie it off?" I asked.

"Yeah, that, uh that's probably a good idea." He replied.

We got the free end of the rope tied off round the cleat and watched the rope keep spilling out.

Every bit of the rope played out and the boat resonated with a loud "thunk".

I pulled the rope a bit up out of the water and could feel the weight of the cinderblock on it.

"Earl." I paused, "Earl there's not any fucking way this lake is three hundred feet deep." I said.

"No fucking way." He nodded. "What the actual shit."

"We got to get more rope." I said.

"My uncle's got a full industrial spool of half-inch nylon rope. A thousand feet. There's no lake anywhere around here that's a thousand feet deep." Earl replied.

I grabbed the rope and started to pull it up, it was going to take a minute or two to pull it all back on the boat. Earl started winding it up as it came in. I got about fifty feet of it onboard when it just stopped. Like just dead stop.

I leaned back and pulled harder.

Nothing.

It felt like the cinder block had gotten caught under a ledge.

I wrapped the rope around my forearm and gave it one good heave.

"Hung up on something?" Earl asked.

"I guess so." I started to say, when the rope tugged back. Hard. Threw both me and Earl off balance enough the boat flipped over.

The water went over my head and I sputtered, righted myself and broke the surface. Earl came up right beside me and let out a loud "God damn it." We struggled to get the boat set right but we got it.

That's when I noticed the cleat had snapped right off. Rope and all had gone down into the lake.

So, three days later, me and Earl were back again. We spent all afternoon setting it up. Got an electric motor to pull the rope back up and a pulley system at the end of a boom winch. It almost looked professional, bolted there in the back of his truck. Almost.

Earl grinned and smacked our Jerry-rigged setup on the side. "I always knew those machine shop classes I took would come in handy."

He backed up the truck, and swung the winch over the water. It extended about ten feet out. I tied off another cinder block, no shortage of those around here, and tossed it in. We watched the rope run and run, the spool spinning freely. We had it set up so it would spin in one direction, but not the other, so we could winch it back up.

The rope spooled out faster and faster.

Two hundred feet.

Three hundred.

"It's still going." Earl said, incredulity in his voice.

Four hundred.

"No, fucking, way." I said.

Earl stopped grinning around six hundred.

By eight hundred neither of us was talking anymore.

The spool kept spinning all the way to the end.

Four minutes after I tossed the brick in, it ran out with another loud thunk. Hard enough the truck rocked backwards a bit.

"Jesus, Jake, what in the actual fuck is going on here. That's a thousand feet of rope."

"I have no earthly clue, buddy. There's no way it's a thousand feet deep."

"I ain't got no more rope. Like I guess I could order some." Earl said, but was interrupted by a loud groaning coming from the winch.

Something was pulling on the rope. I could hear the strain in the fibers. The truck was practically vibrating.

Then the front end of the truck started to rise up a hair.

"Oh shit Jake! It's gonna take my truck!" Earl yelled as he ran over and hopped in. He started the engine and began to pull away when all of a sudden all the tension let out of the line.

I went over to the winch and turned it on and the rope began to wind onto the spool. It took a lot longer to pull it all up than I thought it would, but then I saw, and smelled, the cinder-block.

It was covered with a dark, glistening slime. Something the color of rotting leaves mixed with oil, and it stank like, God, I don't know a squished bug mixed with kerosene.

I cut the line and let the brick drop back into the water. No way in hell I was touching whatever that was.

Earl pulled his truck up away from the edge, got out and came over to where I was staring at the water.

"A camera." He said.

"What, like an underwater one?" I asked.

"Yeah, I know a guy. He's got an underwater rig, a little robot submarine. He uses it to inspect bridge pilings, dams, and culverts for the state. It's rated down to fifteen hundred feet, but it usually doesn't get used that deep. Got lights and a camera, you can drive it around." He said.

"Sounds like a plan." I said. "But Earl," I paused. "Isn't this more than a little bit weird? Like even for around here. Maybe we should call somebody, I don't know, like an official?"

"Jake, this is the most interesting thing that I've been mixed up in since farmer Brindle's two-headed goat got loose in the dollar store. Look around, nothing happens around here."

I nodded. This place wasn't known for its excitement.

"I'm gonna call him, get it out here." He said.

"I've got an old VCR we can hook it up to, record what we find." I replied.

Earl nodded. "Good idea."

The next couple of days passed without incident. I spent the time power-washing the garage. I know, high excitement, but it's got to get done.

Earl pulled up in his truck the next afternoon. It really was a pretty cool setup. The sub was about four feet long and had lights and a camera on the front that could be panned around remotely. We tied it off to the winch with the nylon rope. It had its own coil of cable for the camera that we sat on the tailgate.

"I made sure it had a full charge." Earl said, manhandling it out of the truck. "It'll give us at least a couple of hours."

Getting it in the water took longer than it should have. The thing was heavier than it looked and we kept second guessing which end was supposed to go in first.

"I think the camera end goes in last." I said.

"That don't make any sense, how's it gonna see anything pointed at the mud?"

"I didn't say pointed at the mud, I said last. As in, we lower it in tail first."

Earl looked at me. "That's the same thing."

We went back and forth on it for a while before we figured out it didn't matter, the thing would right itself once it hit the water. We felt pretty stupid about that.

"Alright, easy now." Earl said, as we walked it to the edge. It was awkward, no good place to grip it. "For God's sake Jake don't drop it, that thing probably cost more than my truck."

We got it in without dropping it. Barely.

Earl picked up the controller and we watched it bob there for a second, listing a little to one side, and then it straightened out and sat there humming quietly.

"Okay." Earl said. "Down we go."

Three hundred feet down it was dark enough that we snapped on the lights fully bright. All it showed was the rough stone on the side of the sinkhole. The water was still crystal clear.

Around four hundred feet the walls changed. I almost missed it.

"Earl, hold up. Can you back it up a little?"

He reversed the sub and we both leaned in toward the monitor. The rough pitted limestone we'd been watching for the last ten minutes had stopped. What replaced it was dark and smooth. Almost glassy.

I looked at Earl. He looked at me. We both looked at the monitor.

"That ain't natural." I said.

"No." He said. Just that.

We stayed there a minute, both of us staring at the screen. The sub's lights caught the dark surface and threw back a dull reflection. Whatever it was, it went down as far as we could see.

Earl's hand was still on the controller. "You want me to keep going?" he asked.

I should have said no. "Yeah." I said. "Keep going."

At eight hundred feet the walls just disappeared.

The sub drifted out into open water and I realized I'd been holding my breath. The sinkhole had been feeding into something else the whole time: a cavern. The sub's lights didn't reach the far walls, didn't reach the bottom. Just open black water in every direction, and the hole we'd come through sitting in the ceiling like a drain in reverse.

"Earl." I said.

"Yeah." He said.

Neither of us said anything for a minute. The sub just hung there in the dark, lights cutting maybe thirty feet in any direction and then nothing.

"God," Earl said quietly. "I wish I'd brought some beer."

I laughed. Couldn't help it. Then stopped.

"Keep going down?" I asked.

He already was.

"Can you point the lights down?" I asked.

Earl adjusted the controller and the sub nosed down slowly. The lights swept across what I thought was the bottom of the cavern and I squinted at the monitor. Something was down there. A tangle of shapes, thick and dark and piled on each other like cable left in a heap. "What the hell am I looking at?" Earl said, mostly to himself.

The sub drifted lower. The shapes resolved a little. Thick as tree trunks, some of them. Thicker. Coiled loosely over and around each other, tapering at the ends, widening in the middle. Some of them were moving. Drifting, kind of like seaweed.

"Earl."

"I see it."

One of the big ones began to uncoil. It peeled away from the mass and as it moved it revealed a surface beneath it. Dark and rounded and covered in a texture I couldn't make sense of at first. It was dark and bumpy like an old avocado. I was still trying to figure out what I was looking at when it split open down the middle.

It was an eye. Had to be twenty feet across. The iris was the color of old bronze and the pupil was shaped like a triangle, and it was looking up at the sub.

My stomach dropped straight out of me.

Then the rest of them started moving. All of it, the whole mass, coming apart into individual shapes. Eyes on every surface, opening. Mouths too, rows of teeth catching the light, opening and closing on nothing. The cables, the arms, whatever they were, filled the cavern below us.

The monitor went dark.

"Shit Earl we have got to get the fuck out of here." I screamed, but Earl seemed frozen.

I grabbed Earl's arm. He was still staring at the monitor. "Earl. Earl we have to go. Right now."

The surface of the pond began to swell and boil. Whirlpools and waves churning around.

He blinked. Came back. We ran for the truck.

We dove in and Earl started it up, but we didn't make it twenty feet before the back end lifted. It had come up fast. Nothing that big should be that fast.

The tires left the ground and Earl screamed something I couldn't make out over the sound of the frame starting to give.

I had opened the door and jumped out without even thinking about it. The ground came up quick and I landed with a wet crack as my ankle snapped.

From the ground I could see the truck maybe thirty feet up, wrapped in something that looked like a giant black and glistening worm, being pulled toward the water. Earl was still in there. I know because I could hear him screaming. Then the roof caved in to the sound of shattering glass and metal forced beyond its limit, and then I couldn't hear him anymore, as the truck sank beneath the water.

The VCR had landed a few feet away. I don't even remember Earl throwing it.

I told the paramedics I fell off a ladder.

Anyway, now I don't know what to do. My brother's due back in two days and the sheriff keeps coming around asking about Earl. The state inspection fella wants his submarine back and I don't know what to tell him. All I got is this busted leg and the video we took, and I'm not sure who I need to show it to. I think I'm going to call the governor. Maybe the press? Should I call the FBI? What should I do?

This is a followup to the snippet I posted here

It's been slightly expanded and the world and narrative filled in a little bit better.

Would appreciate feedback on the world-building.

Working title: I live in a Post-Collapse Dystopia and All I Got Was This Stupid T-Shirt.

Chapter One

Shopping is a surreal experience for someone from my generation. Protein is either cricket powder or farm raised catfish. The cricket powder has the FDA purple star. "This product is price controlled and subsidized by the US Government." The catfish, bred in giant underground lakes under layers of insulating concrete, is fifteen dollars a pound. I grab the cricket powder.

When I was a child, even though we were poor, I never had to wonder where my next meal was coming from. When I opened my restaurant, I spared no expense on my meals. I splurge with a small bottle of sunflower oil.

That's what most meals are for me, anymore. Rice, cricket powder and a vitamin multipack. I look over at the specialty goods. A bag of wheat flour, a bottle of real olive oil, a small chuck eye steak. All locked up in a metal cage that requires two keys. All over eighty dollars each.

When I say dollars, I mean the new adjusted dollars. Greenbacks have been rare for years. I have three twenty-dollar bills pressed into an old book of Audubon's prints. I take them out and look at them sometimes, a reminder of a different world. Adjusted dollars look like euros, plastic-feeling with holograms and little clear windows. Colors based on denomination. I never get used to the cricket powder.

I scan my ration card for the rice, and pay cash for the sunflower oil and cricket powder. 

"Hey Ellen, where's Rudy?" I ask.

Ellen has the same bored teenager look that every teenage cashier has ever had. It hits me for a second that most of her generation has never tasted steak. 

"Hey Mr. Becker," she pauses to tap her ear piece, "Rudy's in trouble again. Got caught jail-breaking people's shower timers." 

She slides her middle finger down the bridge of her nose, something kids do when they think something is dumb. I nod my head, Rudy is absolutely being dumb.

"When he gets out of community service again, tell him I'd like to talk to him." I say.

"You going to scare him with the jail story?" She asks, a smile almost breaking her bored expression.

"I might, I might. See you around."

I take the underwalk from the grocery store to the transfer station, and catch the 7 PM green line bus. It stops about ten minutes walk away from my apartment building. It's long past the heat of the day but it's still in the nineties and brutally humid. I'm soaked with sweat by the time I make it to the lobby and swipe my access card. I check the mail, mainly out of habit. Only the government sends letters anymore. Or family. Not that I have much left. 

There's a letter. From my cousin Lacey. I haven't heard from her in fifteen years. Not since… I don't know what to feel. My brain short-circuits for a second, then I tuck the letter into my shirt pocket and head up.

No elevators anymore. It's three flights up, and hard on the knees. I badge myself into the room. I used to have a closet bigger than this place. The air conditioning sputters anemically. It's tolerable. Not comfortable, but tolerable. I toss the letter on the kitchen table. Food first, then I'll deal with this.

I add the rice, a teaspoon of oil and a scoop of the powder to the rice cooker. It dings tiredly a short time later. I add a few dribbles of hot sauce, imported from Thailand, or what's left of Thailand. My only luxury. It cost most of a week's worth of wages. There are some small things I refuse to give up.

I have a single window in my apartment. A small six inch square of reinforced, insulated glass. People younger than me don't believe it when I say my first nice apartment in downtown Louisville had floor to ceiling windows on two sides. "How did you keep it cool? How did you keep it warm? That seems so wasteful." They weren't alive when the sun wasn't as angry, when winters weren't so brutal.

We're on the cusp between monsoon, or what we used to call spring, and summer. Moving from torrential rain and the smell of mold into wet bulb days and timing errands around the heat alerts. Most kids have never seen snow.

Today the sunset is a bruised purple and red that hurts the eyes. The fires in Kentucky burn unabated. Fields that at first grew tobacco, then soybeans, now lie fallow, choked with weeds and scrub that catch fire every year. It's an orange air quality day. Not the worst, not the best. White, yellow, orange, red, black. I've only seen code black twice.  The sky looked apocalyptic, and tasted like ash.

The T.V. goes on, for background noise. It's a documentary about the ChemStar lynching. Bad business, really ugly. A lot of people my age talk about the food riots in Nashville and Louisville as the turning point, but I really feel the ChemStar lynchings in New Hope were the first domino in a long series of awful things. I remember watching the situation live on the news.

I sit on the floor and slowly eat my meal, savoring every bite. The spice from the hot sauce barely covers the grit of the protein powder. I know what real hunger feels like. Everyone does now. 

A single beam of reddish light walks across the floor from my tiny window as the sun goes down. God, I feel like I'm back in jail. I did eighteen months for felony assault over thirty years ago. Stupid kid doing stupid kid stuff. 

Dishes go in the sink. I'll worry about them later. I pick up the envelope and sit at the table. I stare at it for a while, like it's some kind of alien artifact, before opening it up.

Lacey sent me a letter. An actual hand written letter. I read it slowly, holding the yellowing paper that's practically an antique. She needs my help, John's in jail. Got caught taking refugees across the mountains in West Virginia. 

"God dammnit," I rub the bridge of my nose.

When I was young, West Virginia was a long drive with a couple of stops for coffee and questionable gas station burritos. Now it's travel permits, shredded roads, and hillsides that decide to become valleys when the rain's bad enough.

Only Lacey would write a letter. She's weird like that, real artsy, you know. But she's family. The only family I have left now. There's a folded flag in a box, and a picture of a young man in uniform, sitting on the shelf. I can't talk about him. I don't know if I'll ever be able to.

Is what I have here worth giving up? This tiny apartment, the part time job I have at the cooling center I got to supplement my UBI? Even the furniture belongs to the building. I could fit everything I own in two suitcases. 

But it feels safe. It's safe and quiet, even if it also feels confining. I guess I got accustomed to living small. I used to be somebody. A big shot chef. People came from hundreds of miles away to eat at my restaurant. I got that second Michelin star and thought I was hot shit. I had a Porsche and did coke and ate steak with rappers and country singers when they played at the bucket. 

I guess that's what I miss the most. The real food. Not the money, or the attention, though it was nice. The real food. I have the steak dream every damn week. I'm back at the Crystal Halcyon (I know, pretentious as hell, but the Kitchen Manager said we needed to be pretentious to pull in the big names.) and I'm searing sixteen ounces of aged wagyu strip. The aroma is fucking intoxicating.

I sit there at the tiny kitchen table for a while and hold the letter, turning it over in my hands, re-reading it. The paper and the envelope feel familiar but distant. A memory peaks up from far away. Me and Lacey writing letters to Santa, stuffing them in the same kind of envelope, addressing them to the north pole.

She was my best friend growing up. Her and John. I always knew they would get married. They were the ones who picked me up when I got out of jail. They were the ones who showed up for the funeral.

Nobody's needed me in years, but when family needs help, you help. 

I fold the letter up and put it back in the envelope. The sounds of the city coming alive at night come though muffled. When it's dark, and it starts cooling off, you can almost pretend life is normal again. I look around, and my eyes rest on my boy's flag, the picture of him in his dress blues. 

I made the call. My boss at the cooling center is caught off-guard, but he understands. He can find somebody else to maintain the HVAC units pretty easily. They're simple to babysit and just need a squirt of lubricant in the fans every now and then. 

I sit back and try to finish watching the documentary. The government issued a level 4 heat alert. The bosses at ChemStar mandated a return to work in 110° weather. 60% humidity. A wet bulb event. They threatened to fire anyone who didn't show up, even through the state of emergency. This was one of the last good paying jobs in that small town and things just kept escalating, tempers flaring with the heat. A lot of people died that day. 

Everybody knows the picture. The executives hung from the ChemStar roof in their rolled-up dress shirts, turning slowly in the heat haze. They print it in history books now beside the Kent State girl and Tank Man. 

Originally posted on nosleep.

I went hiking and almost died. I found a forgotten bear trap the hard way.

This happened a year ago when I went hiking alone in a state park. I'm writing it down because I still have nightmares about it, and my therapist says it might help to get it out. I don't know if that's true, but here it is.

The ridge must have washed out sometime in the last couple of weeks. I stood at the edge of the trail where runoff had carved a gully through the packed earth, exposing tree roots twisted through the dirt. Murky water still pooled at the bottom.

I could backtrack. Add an hour, maybe two. Or I could cut through the trees, parallel the trail for a few hundred yards, rejoin it past the damage. Honestly it would be quicker just to go overland and cut out the switchback entirely, it was probably less than a mile.

The forest here was old growth Douglas fir, the canopy thick enough to turn noon into twilight. Sword ferns everywhere, thick clumps of salal between the trees. But it looked passable. I checked my phone out of habit. No signal, hadn't been one since the last fire road. I pushed into the trees.

The ground gave under my boots. Soft with rot and moss. Humid air pressed against my face, carrying the smell of decomposition and wet bark. My breathing was loud. The rustle of my pack against my shoulders. I picked my way between the ferns, trying to maintain a straight line. The washed-out section couldn't be more than a quarter mile. Easy enough.

The trail disappeared behind me after twenty yards.

I didn't see the trap until my boot was already through the leaf litter.

The snap was mechanical. Final.

I didn't understand at first. Pressure clamped around my calf. The world tilted before I understood why, and I hit the ground. My pack twisted, straps digging into my shoulders. My vision went dark at the edges.

It slowly cleared. I was on my back, staring up through the canopy. My chest worked like I'd been sprinting. Short and shallow gasps that didn't seem to bring in enough air. I forced myself to look down.

The trap was old, rust-pitted and half-buried. The jaws had closed just below my knee, metal teeth punched clean through my pants leg. Fabric had torn where it had pressed into flesh. Blood was already soaking through the denim, spreading in a dark stain.

I tried to pull my leg back. The trap didn't move. The pain doubled and a sound came out of me that I didn't recognize.

My hands were shaking when I reached down to touch the metal. The jaws had sunk deep enough that I couldn't get my fingers between the steel and my leg. I pulled at the springs on either side but they were fused with corrosion, immovable.

I lay back. Tried to think.

Something inside my calf kept jumping, spasming under the skin. When I shifted my weight, the bones ground together and my vision whited out for a second.

The blood spread further. Running down into my boot now.

I tilted my head back and screamed.

My pack. I needed my pack.

I twisted, ignoring the spike of pain, and dragged it off my shoulders. My fingers felt thick and clumsy as I unzipped the main compartment. First aid kit. Water. Food. Headlamp. Nothing that would pry open a bear trap.

My phone was in the side pocket. No signal when I pulled it up.

The bleeding hadn't stopped. My sock was soaked through, boot filling. Warmth spread down to my toes. I didn't know how much blood I could lose. Couldn't remember if I'd ever known.

Wait for rescue. Stay put, conserve energy, hope someone noticed I was overdue.

Except no one knew I'd left the trail. And the trail itself saw maybe three hikers a week this time of year. I'd signed the register at the trailhead yesterday morning. If someone found my car in a few days, they'd start a search, but they'd look along the marked route first. It could be a week before anyone pushed into this section of forest.

I had to get out of the trap.

I pulled my hiking pole from the side of my pack. Then the paracord from the bear bag setup. Thirty feet of it. And a carabiner.

I looped the paracord through the carabiner and clipped it to the trap's spring mechanism on the right side. Fed the other end through and around the hiking pole. I'd need to pry both springs at once to release the jaws, but if I could get one side open even partially, create some give, maybe the other would follow.

I braced the pole against a nearby root and pulled.

The cord went taut. The spring didn't move.

I repositioned, planted my good leg for leverage, and pulled harder. My palms burned where the cord dug in. The pole bowed slightly. The spring gave a fraction of an inch, then held.

Not enough.

I unwound the cord and tried a different configuration. More wraps around the pole for mechanical advantage. This time when I pulled, the spring shifted. A quarter inch. Half.

The jaws loosened.

The teeth dragged through muscle as they moved.

Tissue tore. The serrated edge caught on something deep inside my leg and pulled. The pain shot up into my hip, down to my ankle. My stomach lurched.

I kept pulling.

The spring gave another inch. The pressure on my leg decreased slightly. The teeth had punched through skin and fat, into the meat underneath. Dark blood welled up.

I blacked out.

When I came to I was on my side in the leaves. The pole had fallen. The spring had snapped back into place.

My leg was still in the trap.

I lay there for a while. Could have been thirty seconds. Could have been five minutes.

Then I sat up and started again.

This time I didn't stop when the pain spiked. I pulled until my arms shook, until the cord bit deep grooves into my palms. The spring moved. The other side shifted in response, corroded metal shrieking.

The jaws opened.

I dragged my leg out.

Flesh came with it. Strips of tissue caught on the teeth, stretching and tearing as my calf pulled free. I saw bone. White fragments among the red. Part of my pant leg stayed behind, fabric embedded in the mechanism.

The trap snapped shut again, empty.

The wound ran in a complete circle, punctures and lacerations where each tooth had sunk in. The deepest points were on either side, front and back, where the jaws had closed. Dark meat, shredded. Deeper than that, past the subcutaneous fat, the pale gleam of my tibia.

Blood poured out.

I fumbled for the first aid kit. Three tries to get the zipper open. Gauze pads. Medical tape. A single ace bandage that would do exactly nothing.

I packed the gauze against the wounds, wrapping the entire calf. Blood soaked through immediately. I added more, kept wrapping, used the tape to hold it in place. Then the ace bandage over that, pulled tight enough that my foot started to tingle.

Not tight enough. Still bleeding through.

I pulled my belt off and cinched it around my thigh, above the knee. Yanked it until the leather creaked. The bleeding slowed.

My boot was full of blood. It sloshed when I moved my ankle.

I needed a splint. Something to keep the leg immobile. I looked around, found a fallen branch about the right length, and used the remaining paracord to lash it against my calf. The pressure made me gag, but I kept tying knots until it held firm.

Done. Sweating despite the cold, my shirt stuck to my back.

I looked at the surrounding forest. Tried to orient myself. I'd been heading roughly northwest when I'd left the trail, meaning the trail should be northeast. But everything looked the same. Ferns and moss and Douglas fir trunks disappearing into shadow.

No landmarks. No clear sight lines. My mind swam with pain. Which way. Which way.

I picked a direction and started crawling.

I couldn't put weight on the leg. Even the thought of trying made my vision blur. So I moved on my stomach, using my forearms to drag myself forward. My good leg kicked for purchase, boot sliding through the leaf litter.

My injured leg caught on everything. Roots. Exposed rocks. The splint would shift, and the bones inside would grind together, and I'd have to stop, forehead pressed into the dirt.

My pack dragged behind me, still clipped to my chest strap. Dead weight. But it had my water, my headlamp. I couldn't leave it.

The forest floor was a mess of obstacles. Fallen logs I had to navigate around. Dense patches of salal that forced detours. My jacket snagged on thorns. My hands sank into soft rot that released the smell of decay.

I'd gone maybe fifty yards when the rain started.

Just a mist at first. Barely more than heavy air. Then it thickened, drops pattering on the canopy overhead, filtering down through the needles. Minutes later my jacket was soaked. Water ran down my neck, into my collar. The ground went soft under me, then soupy.

I kept moving. Northeast. I was sure it was northeast. There was a slight upward slope, and I followed it, reasoning that the trail followed the ridge line. Uphill meant closer.

Except after another hundred yards the slope plateaued, and I found myself in a small clearing where a tree had come down years ago. The trunk was massive, half-rotted, covered in moss and shelf fungus. Beyond it, the forest continued, identical in every direction.

I stopped. Tried to think through the cold and the pain.

Had I been going uphill or downhill? The slope had felt upward, but now I wasn't sure. And the rain made everything slick, disorienting. Distances stretched.

Somewhere to my left, a branch cracked. I turned my head but saw nothing. Just the vertical lines of tree trunks fading into gray.

Another crack. Closer this time. Then a rustle of undergrowth.

Deer, probably. Or elk. The forest wasn't empty, I'd just been too loud earlier to notice. Now that I'd stopped, now that I was quiet, the sounds filtered back in.

Except they didn't sound like animals moving. I held my breath and listened.

Something that might have been a voice, far off. I almost called back before I caught myself. Nothing out here but trees.

I reached back and checked the tourniquet. Still tight. The gauze underneath was soaked, but the bleeding had slowed to a seep.

I started moving again.

The mud helped in some ways. It was slick enough that my body slid easier, my jacket gliding over the surface. But it also meant less traction for my good leg. I'd push off and my boot would spin out, sending me sliding sideways into a fern or a half-buried stone.

My arms burned. Each pull forward took more effort than the last, shoulders wrenching.

The rain picked up. It pooled in the small of my back, ran down my sides. My hands were numb, fingers barely able to grip.

I focused on small distances. That root five feet ahead. The gap between those two trees. One goal at a time.

Somewhere above, the canopy thinned and I caught a glimpse of sky. Solid gray. No sun to navigate by. The light was diffuse, directionless. I checked my phone. 2:18 PM.

Less than two hours of crawling and I'd covered maybe a quarter mile. At this rate I'd still be in the forest when night came.

The sharp pain in my leg had settled into a deep throb that never let up.

I stopped to drink water. My hands shook so badly I almost dropped the bottle. Half of it spilled down my chin. I forced myself to swallow three long pulls, then capped it and kept going.

The underbrush thickened. Sight lines shortened. I was crawling through sword ferns now, the fronds slapping against my face, and I had to push them aside to see more than a few feet ahead.

A root caught my splint and twisted it sideways.

The bone shifted. I felt it move, felt the broken ends grate against each other, and I screamed into the mud.

Air came back. I'd veered off course, heading downhill now. The ground sloping away. Wrong direction. I angled right, trying to correct, but the slope steepened, and I started to slide.

My fingers clawed at the ground. Found nothing. I picked up speed, jacket slick with mud, and then the ground disappeared, and I was falling.

The drop was only six feet but I hit hard. Shoulder first, then my hip, and finally my injured leg slammed into the rocks at the bottom of the ravine.

Everything went white.

I was curled on my side, both hands clutching my thigh. I couldn't breathe. Couldn't make my lungs work. My mouth opened and closed but nothing came in.

Then my diaphragm released and I sucked in air, huge gasping pulls that burned my throat.

I lay there. The ravine was narrow, maybe ten feet across, choked with fallen branches and standing water. The walls were steep, slick clay embedded with stones. I'd slid down the eastern side. Above me the edge looked impossibly far away.

My leg was screaming. Fresh, bright pain. Something had gotten worse. I didn't want to look but I made myself.

The splint had broken. The branch had snapped in the middle, the two halves held together only by the paracord wrapping. My calf bulged between them, swollen and dark. The gauze was completely soaked through, more red than white.

I closed my eyes.

The rain continued. I could hear it hitting the water pooled around me, a soft patter that would have been pleasant under different circumstances. Cold seeped through my jacket, through my shirt, into my skin.

I thought about staying here. Just for a minute. Long enough to rest.

I could stay here. Let the moss cover me. They'd find bones eventually, maybe the belt buckle.

I opened my eyes.

Through the rain and the gray light, something upstream. A gap in the trees. The ravine curved and widened, and beyond that curve the undergrowth thinned.

I knew that gap. I'd seen it from the trail two days ago. A clearing where loggers had worked decades back, stumps still visible among the new growth.

The trail ran along the western edge of that clearing.

I started crawling again.

The ravine bottom was the worst terrain yet. Standing water hid the depth of the mud beneath. Twice my arm sank to the elbow and I had to wrench it free, the suction pulling at me. Branches jabbed into my stomach, my ribs. My broken leg dragged behind me, the splint catching on every obstacle.

I moved in increments. Six inches. A foot. Rest. Another foot. My breathing had gone shallow. I couldn't seem to get enough air and my heart hammered against my sternum.

The gap in the trees didn't get closer. I crawled for what felt like an hour and it stayed the same distance away, fixed and unreachable.

That wasn't possible. I was moving. I stopped and put my forehead against the ground. The mud was cold. It smelled like iron and rot.

When I looked up again the gap had shifted. Closer now. Maybe fifty yards.

I kept going.

The ravine widened. The walls lowered. I passed a stump, the wood soft and black with decay, and recognized it. I'd seen this stump. I was sure of it.

Then I was in the clearing.

The canopy opened overhead. Rain fell straight down, no longer filtered through needles and branches. The light was gray and flat. The far tree line was maybe two hundred yards across open ground.

And there, barely visible through the rain, a wooden post.

Trail marker.

My arms gave out.

I lay in the mud with my face turned sideways, staring at the post. Weathered wood with a faded white blaze.

I started crawling again.

The clearing was less overgrown than the forest, but the ground was uneven, full of hidden depressions where my weight would suddenly drop, and my leg would twist. Each time it happened, the pain spiked and my vision tunneled.

I was shaking now. Full-body tremors I couldn't control. My teeth chattered.

I was going to die fifty yards from the trail.

The thought made me laugh. A wet, ragged sound that turned into coughing.

I crawled.

The trail marker resolved as I got closer. Four feet tall, the white blaze chipped and weathered but unmistakable. Beyond it was the trail itself, a thin line of packed earth cutting through the undergrowth.

My arms were beyond burning now. They felt distant and mechanical. My good leg had stopped responding properly. When I tried to push off it just twitched.

Something cracked in the tree line to my right. I turned my head. A Douglas fir swayed, branches moving. But there was no wind. The rain fell straight down.

I watched the tree for a long time. Waiting for it to move again. It didn't.

Finally, my hand touched the post. Rough wood under my palm, solid and real. I pulled myself alongside it and onto the trail.

The ground was harder here. Packed dirt instead of mud. I lay on my back and stared up at the sky. The rain hit my face, ran into my eyes.

The light was fading, gray shifting toward dark. In another hour I wouldn't be able to see.

The trailhead was north. Two miles, maybe three. I'd made better time on the way in but I'd been walking then, and whole. I couldn't crawl two miles. I knew that with absolute certainty. My body had nothing left.

But the trail meant people. Not today, probably not tomorrow, but eventually. Someone would come through. They'd find me.

If I lasted that long.

I rolled onto my stomach and kept moving.

The trail made it easier. No roots to navigate around, no hidden drops. Just a clear path forward. My vision kept blurring, edges going dark. I'd blink and find myself ten feet further along with no memory of covering the distance.

My injured leg had gone numb below the knee. I couldn't tell if that was good or bad. Maybe I'd left the tourniquet too tight. Maybe the nerves were just gone.

I didn't have the energy to check.

The shaking had gotten worse. My jaw ached from clenching against the chatter.

Somewhere ahead, I heard an engine. A truck, maybe, or a car with a bad muffler.

The trailhead had a small parking area. Gravel lot, room for five or six vehicles. I'd left my car there yesterday morning. If I could make it to the lot, even if no one was there, I could get inside the car. Turn on the heat. Call for help once I had signal.

The engine sound faded.

I crawled faster, arms pulling, good leg kicking. The trail curved, and I followed it, staying in the center where the ground was most even.

My hands were torn up. Palms shredded and bleeding from the paracord earlier, from rocks and roots and seven hours of dragging myself across the forest floor. They didn't hurt. Nothing hurt except my leg.

The rain stopped.

I didn't notice at first. Then I realized my face was dry, the patter of drops on my jacket gone. I looked up. The clouds were still there, but the rain had passed.

The temperature dropped further.

I needed to stop shaking. Needed to conserve energy. But my body wouldn't listen. The tremors ran through me in waves, muscles firing without my input.

The trail dipped into a small depression, then rose. At the top of the rise, light shone through the trees. Not daylight. Yellow and artificial.

Streetlight.

Light ahead. The solar lamp at the trailhead, yellow against the trees.

The last hundred yards took forever. The trail rose gradually, and my arms barely had the strength to pull me uphill. I'd move a few feet, stop, wait for my vision to clear, then move again.

The light got brighter. I could make out individual trees now, the edge of the parking lot, the square shape of the information kiosk.

The parking lot was empty. No cars. Just gravel and the wooden kiosk and the solar lamp throwing its yellow circle across the ground.

My car was gone. I stared at the empty space where I thought I'd left it. Maybe someone had dropped me off. Or maybe I'd parked at a different trailhead and gotten confused. I realized I was going into shock.

I pulled myself past the trailhead sign, onto the gravel. Stones dug into my elbows. My leg dragged behind me, the broken splint scraping.

The lamp hummed above me. I could hear it clearly now that I was out of the forest. A steady electrical buzz.

Beyond the parking lot was the access road. Single lane, poorly maintained. It connected to the main highway about three miles north. During the day there'd be traffic. Logging trucks, the occasional tourist.

But it was past seven now. Full dark within the hour.

I crawled to the edge of the road and stopped.

Asphalt under my hands. Smooth and flat. I pressed my cheek against it and closed my eyes.

I didn't pass out. I stayed conscious, aware of the cold and the pain and the way my pulse felt thin and distant. But I couldn't move. My arms were done. My good leg wouldn't respond.

I lay there and listened.

The forest behind me was quiet. No wind, no animal sounds. Just that electric hum from the lamp and my own breathing.

Time passed. I wasn't sure how much.

Then I heard something new. Faint at first. A low rumble from the north.

I opened my eyes.

Headlights appeared around the curve, maybe half a mile up the road. Two white beams cutting through the dusk. The engine sound grew louder.

I tried to lift my arm. Managed to get it a few inches off the ground before it fell back.

The vehicle was closer now. Quarter mile. It was a truck, high chassis, moving slow on the rough road.

I opened my mouth. My throat was raw and tight. The sound that came out was barely more than a rasp.

The truck kept coming.

I tried again. Louder this time. A hoarse shout that tore at my vocal cords.

The headlights swept across me, catching me sprawled half on the asphalt, mud-covered jacket, destroyed leg dragging behind.

The truck's brakes squealed.

It stopped twenty feet away, engine idling. The driver's door opened and someone got out. I couldn't see details, just a silhouette against the headlights.

Footsteps on gravel. Running.

Then a voice. "Jesus Christ."

I tried to answer, but nothing came out.

Hands on my shoulder, my arm. The person kept talking. Something about an ambulance, about staying awake.

I heard the beep of a phone. Numbers being pressed.

"Yeah, I need emergency services. I'm on Forest Road 38, just past the trailhead. I've got a guy here, he's in bad shape. Looks like his leg is... yeah. Yeah, he's conscious. Barely."

The voice moved away, still talking. I heard the truck door open, the rustle of fabric.

Then the person was back, draping something over me. A blanket.

"They're coming," the voice said. "Ten minutes. Maybe fifteen. You hang on."

I managed a nod. The smallest movement.

The person stayed next to me. I could hear them breathing. Beyond the parking lot the forest was dark, but the blanket was warm and I was still alive.

I spent eight days in the hospital. They had to do three surgeries to clean out the wound and repair what they could. The bone was badly fractured. Muscle damage was extensive. Nerve damage worse.

I still walk with a limp. My calf is mostly scar tissue now, numb in places, hypersensitive in others. I can't run anymore. 

The rangers went back and found the trap. It was ancient, probably from the thirties or forties, when people still trapped in that area. Illegal now, and it should have been cleared decades ago, but it wasn't. Just sitting there under the leaves, waiting.

They checked my car situation. Turns out I had parked at the trailhead. A ranger had ticketed it for an expired Discover Pass and had it towed. I laughed when they told me. Couldn't help it. I’d been meaning to get it renewed for over a year and kept forgetting.

The guy who found me was a logger heading home after a late shift. Right place, right time. The doctors said if I'd been out there another hour, I probably would have bled out or gone into complete shock.

Sometimes I still dream about crawling. I wake up, and my arms are moving, pulling at the sheets, and for a second I'm back in that forest with the rain coming down and no idea which direction I'm going.

The eviction notice sat on Jimmy "Eagle" Malone's kitchen counter. He threw it in the trash. 

He stood in front of the bathroom mirror in his boxing trunks. The waistband dug into his gut. The eagle tattoo on his chest had stretched and faded, wings drooping toward his ribs. He was forty-three years old. Two comeback attempts already. Nobody wanted to insure this fight.

Marcus had said no four times before Jimmy wore him down.

The venue was a casino outside Atlantic City, not the Garden. The undercard to somebody else's main event. Devon Cruz was 10-0 with 6 knockouts. Quick hands, quicker feet. He made old men look stupid.

Jimmy finished wrapping his hands in the locker room while Marcus watched. His trainer hadn't said much of anything since they arrived. The room was small and worn and the tile was cracked in the corners.

"You ain't got to do this," Marcus said.

Jimmy pulled the tape tight between his fingers. His knuckles were crooked from old breaks. He kept wrapping.

Marcus sighed, and didn't say anything else.

The walk-up to the ring took forever. The crowd was thin. Most of them were drunk, waiting for the main event. A few people recognized him. One guy yelled "Eagle!" and it hung in the air for a second before disappearing into the background noise of slot machines.

Cruz was already in the ring, bouncing on his toes. Twenty-six. Long reach. He kept his chin tucked, rolled his shoulders between bounces. Smooth dark skin. No scar tissue around the eyes, bridge of his nose still straight. He moved loose. Young legs, all that spring left in them. Hadn't been hit enough to learn caution yet.

The ref called them to center. Cruz touched gloves without really looking at Jimmy, already thinking past this fight to the next one.

Jimmy walked back to his corner. His knees ached. His shoulder ached. But his hands felt good in the gloves, and when the bell rang, he stepped forward.

Cruz came out fast. Two jabs snapped Jimmy's head back before he could set his feet. The kid was already moving, circling left, and Jimmy tried to cut the ring but his legs were slow. Another jab. Jimmy got his glove up but felt it through the leather.

He'd fought hundreds of rounds. Thousands. Tuck the chin. Hands high. Watch the shoulders, not the eyes. But Cruz was already throwing again.

A right hand clipped Jimmy's temple. Not flush, but enough. Jimmy backed up two steps and reset. Cruz followed, patient, measuring.

The bell saved him.

Marcus worked on the stool between rounds, pressing an ice pack against Jimmy's eyebrow. "He's fast."

"I know."

"You're reaching. Plant your feet."

Jimmy nodded. His lungs were already starting to burn and it had only been three minutes. Cruz was barely breathing hard in the opposite corner.

Round two. Jimmy tried to plant his feet like Marcus said. Cruz jabbed and moved. Jabbed and moved. Jimmy caught one jab on his glove and fired back, a straight right that Cruz slipped easy. The kid smiled. Actually smiled.

Jimmy got inside once, landed a hook to the body that made Cruz grunt. For half a second he felt it. The old timing. But Cruz tied him up and the ref broke them up, and by the time Jimmy got his hands up Cruz was already gone, making Jimmy chase, wearing him down.

The canvas felt unsteady under his feet. Sweat burned his eyes, but he kept moving forward because that's the only thing he knew how to do.

Round three was worse. Cruz opened up now, throwing combinations instead of single shots. One-two-hook. One-two to the body. Jimmy tried to slip and couldn't. Tried to counter and was too slow. A left hook caught him clean on the jaw and his legs went loose for a second. He grabbed Cruz and held on until the ref separated them.

Back in the corner, Marcus squeezed water into Jimmy's mouth. "I'm stopping it, Boss."

"No."

"Jimmy..."

"No." He spit the water into the bucket. Three rounds shouldn't do this to him.

Round four started the same way. Cruz moving, jabbing, making Jimmy look old and slow. The crowd was talking amongst themselves now, bored.

Then something shifted.

Cruz threw a jab and Jimmy slipped it. Weight transferring just right, and he countered with a right hand that caught Cruz coming in. Not flush, but solid enough that Cruz blinked.

Jimmy pressed forward. His legs still hurt but they were listening now. He cut the ring and Cruz went left. Jimmy was already there. Cruz's right shoulder had dipped, just a fraction, and Jimmy had seen it.

Jimmy landed another right hand. Then a hook to the body. Cruz backed up for the first time all fight.

The crowd woke up. Someone yelled and others joined in. Jimmy pressed forward and Cruz circled away, but his eyes were different now. Sharper and more focused.

Round five. Jimmy came out quick. His body hurt but his hands were working. He cut Cruz off in the corner and landed a three-punch combination. Not power shots, but clean. Technical. Cruz covered up and worked his way out, but he wasn't smiling anymore.

Between exchanges, Jimmy could see Cruz talking to his corner. The trainer was saying something urgent, hands moving fast. Cruz nodded.

The kid came out for round six differently. No more measuring. No more patience. He threw everything.

A right hand caught Jimmy on the cheekbone. A left hook to the ribs. Jimmy fired back but Cruz was already moving, and another combination slammed into Jimmy's guard. He backed up. Cruz followed, throwing in bunches now, and Jimmy couldn't slip them all. One got through. Then another.

His legs wouldn't move right. Each breath came up short. He swung his right hand, the punch that used to end fights, the one that had put twelve men down when he still had something left. Cruz just leaned back. Three inches of air between them. Jimmy felt something in his shoulder tear. He started to fall.

Cruz hit him four times before he could get his guard back up. Body, body, head, head. The last one, a left hook, caught him right in the chin, and his vision exploded in sparkles.

Time fractured.

Jimmy was falling but it took forever. The lights overhead stretched into lines. Camera flashes popped in the crowd, each one a separate burst of white that hung in the air like stars. He could hear his own breathing, loud and wet inside his head. The roar of the crowd became distant.

The canvas rose up slowly. He saw the ref's feet. Saw Cruz's corner already celebrating. Marcus leaned through the ropes, mouth open, saying something Jimmy couldn't hear.

He hit the canvas and the impact jolted through him but distant, like it was happening to someone else.

The ref was counting. Jimmy could see his mouth moving. Could see the numbers on his fingers. But the sound came from far away, underwater. His arms were lead. His legs were lead. He tried to push up and his gloves pressed against the canvas but his body wouldn't listen.

Eight. Nine.

Marcus was yelling. The crowd was on its feet. Cruz's people were in the ring. Everything was moving except Jimmy.

Ten.

The ref waved his arms. The bell rang, or maybe it didn't. Jimmy couldn't tell anymore. His chest felt tight and then loose and then nothing at all. The lights overhead were so bright.

His vision narrowed at the edges, going gray, and the last thing he saw was the overhead lights blurring together into one perfect circle of white.

Then the white swallowed everything.

Jimmy opened his eyes. Canvas under his back. Overhead lights. No ring. A gym. Wooden floors, worn smooth in the center. Heavy bags on chains. Exposed brick walls. Speed bag in the corner still moving, tap-tap-tap against the platform.

He knew this place.

His father's gym. The one in the Bronx. They tore it down fifteen years ago for condos.

Same water-stained ceiling tiles. Same wooden bench against the wall where he used to sit and watch his old man train fighters. Leather and sweat and liniment.

Jimmy stood. His knees worked. Shoulder too. He looked at his hands. No gloves. No wraps. Knuckles straight. He touched his face. Nothing swollen. No blood. His gut was gone. He had his twenty-five-year-old body back. The eagle on his chest was sharp again, black wings spread wide.

A door on the far wall. He didn't remember that being there. Light underneath it. Gold-colored. Voices on the other side. Laughter. People.

He walked toward it. His legs felt good. Strong.

He opened the door.

The gym was gone.

He stood at the entrance to a hall. Big. Bigger than anything he'd seen. Ceiling lost in shadow. Massive wooden beams holding it up. Long tables filled with people. Men and women. Some in furs. Some in combat gear. Some in nothing but scars and leather. Eating, drinking, shouting, laughing.

Roasted meat. Wood smoke. Under that, sweat. The same smell every gym had after sparring.

At the far end, a man on a throne carved from a single tree. Old. White beard to his chest. Long braided hair. Furs and leather. Patch over one eye. The other eye was blue and looking right at him.

The man raised one hand. The hall went quiet. Everyone turned.

"Come forward, warrior."

His voice was deep. It carried.

Jimmy walked. The crowd parted. He passed a Roman soldier sitting next to a woman in Marine fatigues. A Viking sharing a drink with a kid in Vietnam-era gear. At one table, a man with fresh tape on his knuckles. White cotton still clean. The man nodded.

Jimmy stopped at the base of the throne. Up close, the old man was taller than tall. Took up more space than made sense.

"Do you know where you are?"

"No," Jimmy said. Then, "Yes. Maybe."

The old man smiled. It was warm, but there was weight behind it. The patch covered one eye, but the other saw everything. Measured everything. A coach watching a fighter, reading what he was made of.

"You died well, James Malone. You stood and fought when your body had nothing left to give. You fell in battle. That earns you a place here."

"I'm dead."

"Yes."

Jimmy looked around the hall. Everyone was watching him. They'd all done what he'd done. Stood when standing was all there was left.

"I lost," Jimmy said.

The old man leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees. When he spoke again, his voice was different. Like talking to a boy who'd scraped his knee and gotten back up.

"Scorecards? I don't count rounds." He paused. "The heart. The will to keep fighting when any sane man would've quit."

The old man stood, and when he did, the warmth dropped away for just a moment. Jimmy saw the warrior-king underneath. The general. The one-eyed god who'd hung on a tree for nine days just to learn. Then the old man was looking at him again, and there was pride in that one good eye.

"Here, warrior, you may fight forever. And the glory will never fade."

Jimmy thought about the apartment with the eviction notice. About his ex-wife's calls. About his son who never picked up the phone. About Marcus in the corner, trying to stop a fight that couldn't be stopped.

"Okay," Jimmy said.

The old man stepped down from the throne and clapped Jimmy on the shoulder. His hand was heavy and warm.

"Good. Now sit. Eat. Tomorrow, you fight again."

Someone handed Jimmy a cup. Someone else pushed him toward a table. The hall erupted back into noise and laughter. A woman with a scar across her face raised her cup to him. A man with a bronze sword did the same.

Jimmy sat down. The bench was solid beneath him. He ran his palm along the wood, feeling the grain worn smooth. His hands didn't shake. His chest didn't hurt.

He raised his cup and drank.

Psychological horror, ~2700 words. Would appreciate feedback.

Paradise

Somewhere east of Mendocino, 1979

The chickens don't know that the dream died. They still want their feed at seven, still peck at my boots when I'm slow with the scatter. I tell them they're capitalists now, same as everyone else. River looks up at me from the shade of the coop, tongue out, like she's in on the joke. Rain's off somewhere, probably chasing field mice she's never going to catch.

"You think it's funny, girl?" I say to River. She thumps her tail twice in the dust.

The goat, Cosmo, stands on top of the old VW bus we were going to fix up and turn into a mobile kitchen. Rust has eaten through the engine compartment. Cosmo uses it as a throne now. I climb up, scratch between her horns, look out over what we built. A few shacks. A barn with a leaking roof. The garden where we grew tomatoes and zucchini until the well started running brackish three summers back.

Nobody else wanted the land.  We got it for a pittance.

"Paradise," I say. Cosmo chews something, probably one of my t-shirts she pulled off the line.

Sunflower Jack. That's what I go by. It's been so long I forgot what my folks called me back in Riverside. Something plain. Something that fit in a high school yearbook under a crew cut photo. That person's gone, dead. I killed him in 1967 when I drove up here with eight other beautiful souls who thought we could opt out. Build something pure. Something real.

Funny how real turns out.

I check the traps I set for rabbits. Empty, same as yesterday. Same as the day before. Started thinking maybe I should check the woods. But I don't like going into the woods much anymore. The trees feel different lately. Like they're watching. Like they're waiting for something.

River follows me to the main house, the only building with four solid walls and a wood stove. Rain comes trotting back from her adventure, mouth empty, pride intact.

"Catch anything?" I ask her.

She pants at me. That's a no.

Inside, I fry up two eggs in butter going rancid, eat them standing at the sink. Used to be we'd all gather for breakfast, ten or twelve of us in here, passing around weak coffee and talking about the day's work, about the pigs we'd raise, the windmill we'd build when we got the money together. Someone always had a guitar. Someone always had a new idea about crop rotation or water collection or how to make our own soap. Good vibes, you know? Everyone contributing. Everyone part of the whole.

Now it's me and the dogs and the sound of my own chewing.

"They gave up," I tell River. She's curled up by the unlit wood stove. "Can't blame them, I guess. Got tired of being poor. Got tired of being cold. Got tired of ideals that don't pay bills. The Man won, far as I can figure."

Rain whines at the door. She needs out again already.

"You're worse than anyone," I mutter, letting her out. "In and out, in and out."

I spent the afternoon repairing fence posts the winter knocked over. Physical work keeps the thoughts quiet. Keeps me from thinking about the empty buildings. About the voices I sometimes hear at night that aren't the dogs or the goat. About the dreams that leave me shaking and sick come morning. The dogs wander the property line with me, noses down, doing their own investigations. They avoid the northeast corner, though. Always have, last few months. Won't go near that copse of pines where the ground's soft.

Smart dogs.

When the sun starts dropping, I feed everyone, check the water trough, lock the coop against foxes. The evening air smells like pine and dry grass and something else. Something sweet and rotten that drifts in from the tree line when the wind shifts. Dead animal, probably. Deer or coyote. Nothing to worry about.

Used to be we'd have a fire going by now in the pit out front. Someone playing harmonica. One of the women would dance barefoot in the dirt, spinning with her arms out, hair catching the firelight. Heavenly scene, man. Really heavy.

I stand where the fire pit used to be.

"We almost had it," I say to the dogs. "We almost made it work."

River licks my hand. Rain is already heading for the house, ready to sleep.

I light the kerosene lamp and pour myself a weak whiskey from a bottle I've been nursing for three months. It's almost cozy. I sit at the table we built from barn wood, and I try not to think about the quiet.

I drink and pet River's head and watch shadows move on the walls as the sun sinks lower.

"Going to be fine," I tell her. Tell myself. "Going to be just fine."

Rain's already asleep by the door. River's eyes are drooping. I should go to bed. Should try to sleep. But I sit there a while longer, listening to the sounds of nature, the wind through the distant pines.

I hope the trees don't start screaming again tonight.

I turn in, climb under the thick quilt.  River and Rain circle and lay in their favorite spots at the end of the bed. Sleep comes easy, but rest doesn’t.

The nightmares are back.

I can't breathe right. I can't think straight. The dream slips away before I can grab hold of it, but it leaves stains. Blood and screaming in my ears that's already fading. Faces I recognize but can't quite place.

I sit up in bed, sheets soaked with sweat, and River's whining at me from the floor. She knows something's off.

"It's cool, girl," I say. My voice sounds like gravel. "Just a bad trip."

But it wasn't a trip. Haven't touched anything stronger than whiskey in years. These dreams come on their own now.

I don't bother trying to sleep again. It never works. I pull on jeans and a flannel, stumble into the kitchen, and light the stove. The coffee's a year old, but I make it anyway. It tastes like boiled dirt. I sit at the table with my hands wrapped around the mug, watching the steam curl up toward the ceiling.

It's three A.M., maybe four. Time gets slippery out here.

I think about Candy Kane. She was the last one who really tried to make things work, you know? Kept the garden going even when the rest of us got lazy. She kept smiling, even when the winter of '77 nearly killed us. Young thing, maybe twenty, twenty-one? She had hair so blond it looked white in the sun. She wanted to be a dancer, talked about it all the time. San Francisco, she'd say. Going to dance in San Francisco. Make some bread, see the world, come back when she had her head together.

"You should go," I told her. Must have been March. Or maybe it was April. Hard to remember. "Chase your dream, sister."

Did she hug me? Did she say goodbye? I remember her smiling. Remember her saying something about missing this place. Then nothing. Just empty space where the rest should be.

I wonder if she made it. I wonder if she's dancing somewhere right now under stage lights, spinning the way she used to spin by the fire.

Then there was Hairy Terry. He was a skinny dude with a beard down to his belt and cracked glasses. His folks were getting old, he said. Needed someone to look after them. Couldn't keep living in the woods while they fell apart in some suburb in Sacramento. Made sense. Made total sense.

"You're doing the right thing, my man," I told him. "Family's family."

He promised he'd come back when things got settled. Bring his parents out, even. Show them what we built. Let them see that there was another way to live.

I believed him. I really did.

Except I can't remember him actually leaving. I can't picture him packing his stuff, loading up his rusted-out old Buick, driving away. Just remember talking to him one day, and then he was gone. Like he vanished. Like the earth swallowed him up.

And Big Pete. God, Big Pete. Huge guy, probably six-four, with hands like shovels. He just got bored. That's all. No big reason. No family emergency or career calling. He looked at me one morning over coffee and said, "Jack, I think I'm done, you know? I need to see what else is out there."

"I hear you, brother," I said. "Can't stay in one place forever."

"You could come with," he offered. "Hit the road. See where we end up."

But I couldn't leave. Someone had to stay. Someone had to keep the dream alive, even if it was just me and the animals and these falling-down buildings.

Did he leave? He must have left. They all left. That's what happened. That's what I remember.

They were the last three. The ones who'd stayed the longest. I loved them. I loved them so much.

The coffee's gone cold in my hands. I'm staring at nothing, at the dark window over the sink, trying to sort out what's real and what's a dream, when I hear it.

Faint at first. Like wind through branches. But it's not wind.

It's screaming.

My chest tightens. River's on her feet now, ears back, a low growl in her throat. Rain's awake too, pacing by the door.

The screaming gets louder. Not just one voice, hundreds. A chorus rising from the tree line, voices crying in agony, in regret, in endless suffering. They all blend together, high and low, men and women, and something that might not be human at all. 

"Stop," I whisper. Then louder. "Stop it. Stop it."

But it doesn't stop. It never stops when it starts.

I'm on my feet, hands over my ears, but it doesn't help. The sound gets inside anyway. Gets into my bones. The dogs are barking now, frantic, and I'm stumbling toward the bathroom because it's the smallest room, the darkest room, the room where maybe I can't hear it as much.

I collapse on the floor, back against the tub, hands pressed so hard against my ears that my jaw aches. Rocking. Can't help it. Just rocking back and forth while hundreds of voices scream and scream and scream from the forest.

"I'm sorry," I'm saying. Maybe out loud. Maybe just in my head. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry."

The screaming doesn't care.

It goes on until the sky starts turning gray outside the tiny bathroom window. Goes on until my throat's raw from sobbing. Goes on until there's nothing left of me but this shaking, broken thing on the bathroom floor.

Then it stops.

Just like that. Silence drops over everything.

I sit there. Breathing. Shaking. River noses the bathroom door open and licks my face. Rain whines from the hallway.

The sun's coming up. Another day on the commune. 

Another day in paradise.

The memories are coming back now in pieces. Fragments that cut.

I stand up slowly. My legs don't want to work right. River watches me from the doorway, head cocked, like she's trying to understand what I'm about to do.

"It's the blood," I tell her. My voice sounds hollow. Sounds like it's coming from somewhere far away. "The trees are screaming because of the blood. I have to make it stop,” I say, as I stagger into the kitchen.

I lean against the kitchen wall and wipe the tears from my eyes. I know what I have to do, if I can find the strength. The whiskey bottle calls my name, and I pour the last drops down my throat.

The shovel is in the barn. The same one I used to dig the garden beds and the fire pit, and the graves.

River and Rain follow me across the property toward the northeast corner, but they stop at the edge of the pines. Won't come any closer.

They sit and watch as I walk into the trees. It's cooler here. The pines grow close together, branches interlocking overhead, blocking out most of the light. The ground's covered in dead needles, and the smell is stronger. Sweet decay. Meat gone bad. The smell of things returning to earth.

I don't have to search for the spots. I know exactly where they are. Three graves under the same copse of trees, close enough that I could stand in the middle and touch all three with the shovel.

I start with Candy.

The ground's settled some, but it breaks easily under the blade. Soft earth. Good soil. I dig and dig and try not to think about what I'm doing. Try not to think about her smile or her dancing or the way she looked at me when I wrapped my hands around her throat. When I squeezed until she stopped struggling. Until she stopped asking why.

The smell hits me before I reach her. I gag, pull my shirt over my nose, and keep digging.

There she is.

What's left of her, anyway. The earth's been busy. Insects and decay and time did their work. I can still see blond hair, matted and dark. Can still see the flannel shirt she was wearing. The one I gave her because she was always cold.

"I'm sorry," I tell her. "I'm so sorry, sunshine."

But sorry doesn't fix anything.

Hairy Terry's right there, close enough that the graves almost touch. He fought more than Candy did. Actually tried to run. Made it maybe ten yards before I caught him. Before I hit him with the shovel. Before I did what I had to do to make him stay.

"Your parents don't need you," I told him while he bled out in the dirt. "This place needs you. We need you."

He didn't understand. Kept saying he had to go. Had to leave.

The glasses are still on his face somehow. His beard's gone mostly. Animals got to him.

I can't look at him long. Can't stand what I'm seeing.

Six feet to the right is the third grave. Big Pete's next to the other two. All three of them laid out in a row under the pines.

He was the hardest because of his size. Took three hours to dig a hole big enough. It took everything I had to drag him into it after I'd caved in his skull with the shovel.

"I can't let you leave," I told him after. After he'd stopped breathing. After his blood had soaked into the ground. "If you leave, it's all over. It's all for nothing."

He's in worse shape than Terry or Candy. Been in the ground the longest.

He was a huge man, full of muscle and hard work. Now there's nothing. No laugh. No life. Just bones in the dirt.

I stand there between the three open graves, the shovel hanging from my hand. The sun's moved across the sky. Must be past noon. I've been digging for hours, and my hands are bleeding, blisters broken open, dirt under my nails and in my lungs and in my soul.

The trees are quiet.

Just wind through branches and birds somewhere far off and the sound of my own breathing, ragged and harsh.

My knees give out, and I'm kneeling in the dirt between them. Between Candy and Terry, and Pete. Three people who just wanted to leave. Who just wanted to live their lives somewhere else. Do something else. Be something else.

And I killed them. Killed them because I couldn't stand to be alone. Couldn't stand to watch the dream die. Couldn't let go.

"I just wanted someone to stay," I sob. The words tear out of me. "I just wanted someone to stay with me."

River barks from outside the copse. Wants me to come back. Wants me to leave this place.

I stay in the dirt until the sun starts dropping. Until the shadows grow long and the air turns cold. Stay there until I can't feel my legs anymore. Until the only thing left is the weight of what I've done pressing down on my chest, crushing me into the ground with the people I buried.

This is paradise.

Somewhere east of Mendocino, 1979

The chickens don't know that the dream died. They still want their feed at seven, still peck at my boots when I'm slow with the scatter. I tell them they're capitalists now, same as everyone else. River looks up at me from the shade of the coop, tongue out, like she's in on the joke. Rain's off somewhere, probably chasing field mice she's never going to catch.

"You think it's funny, girl?" I say to River. She thumps her tail twice in the dust.

The goat, Cosmo, stands on top of the old VW bus we were going to fix up and turn into a mobile kitchen. Rust has eaten through the engine compartment. Cosmo uses it as a throne now. I climb up, scratch between her horns, look out over what we built. A few shacks. A barn with a leaking roof. The garden where we grew tomatoes and zucchini until the well started running brackish three summers back.

Nobody else wanted the land.  We got it for a pittance.

"Paradise," I say. Cosmo chews something, probably one of my t-shirts she pulled off the line.

Sunflower Jack. That's what I go by. It's been so long I forgot what my folks called me back in Riverside. Something plain. Something that fit in a high school yearbook under a crew cut photo. That person's gone, dead. I killed him in 1967 when I drove up here with eight other beautiful souls who thought we could opt out. Build something pure. Something real.

Funny how real turns out.

I check the traps I set for rabbits. Empty, same as yesterday. Same as the day before. Started thinking maybe I should check the woods. But I don't like going into the woods much anymore. The trees feel different lately. Like they're watching. Like they're waiting for something.

River follows me to the main house, the only building with four solid walls and a wood stove. Rain comes trotting back from her adventure, mouth empty, pride intact.

"Catch anything?" I ask her.

She pants at me. That's a no.

Inside, I fry up two eggs in butter going rancid, eat them standing at the sink. Used to be we'd all gather for breakfast, ten or twelve of us in here, passing around weak coffee and talking about the day's work, about the pigs we'd raise, the windmill we'd build when we got the money together. Someone always had a guitar. Someone always had a new idea about crop rotation or water collection or how to make our own soap. Good vibes, you know? Everyone contributing. Everyone part of the whole.

Now it's me and the dogs and the sound of my own chewing.

"They gave up," I tell River. She's curled up by the unlit wood stove. "Can't blame them, I guess. Got tired of being poor. Got tired of being cold. Got tired of ideals that don't pay bills. The Man won, far as I can figure."

Rain whines at the door. She needs out again already.

"You're worse than anyone," I mutter, letting her out. "In and out, in and out."

I spent the afternoon repairing fence posts the winter knocked over. Physical work keeps the thoughts quiet. Keeps me from thinking about the empty buildings. About the voices I sometimes hear at night that aren't the dogs or the goat. About the dreams that leave me shaking and sick come morning. The dogs wander the property line with me, noses down, doing their own investigations. They avoid the northeast corner, though. Always have, last few months. Won't go near that copse of pines where the ground's soft.

Smart dogs.

When the sun starts dropping, I feed everyone, check the water trough, lock the coop against foxes. The evening air smells like pine and dry grass and something else. Something sweet and rotten that drifts in from the tree line when the wind shifts. Dead animal, probably. Deer or coyote. Nothing to worry about.

Used to be we'd have a fire going by now in the pit out front. Someone playing harmonica. One of the women would dance barefoot in the dirt, spinning with her arms out, hair catching the firelight. Heavenly scene, man. Really heavy.

I stand where the fire pit used to be.

"We almost had it," I say to the dogs. "We almost made it work."

River licks my hand. Rain is already heading for the house, ready to sleep.

I light the kerosene lamp and pour myself a weak whiskey from a bottle I've been nursing for three months. It's almost cozy. I sit at the table we built from barn wood, and I try not to think about the quiet.

I drink and pet River's head and watch shadows move on the walls as the sun sinks lower.

"Going to be fine," I tell her. Tell myself. "Going to be just fine."

Rain's already asleep by the door. River's eyes are drooping. I should go to bed. Should try to sleep. But I sit there a while longer, listening to the sounds of nature, the wind through the distant pines.

I hope the trees don't start screaming again tonight.

I turn in, climb under the thick quilt.  River and Rain circle and lay in their favorite spots at the end of the bed. Sleep comes easy, but rest doesn’t.

The nightmares are back.

I can't breathe right. I can't think straight. The dream slips away before I can grab hold of it, but it leaves stains. Blood and screaming in my ears that's already fading. Faces I recognize but can't quite place.

I sit up in bed, sheets soaked with sweat, and River's whining at me from the floor. She knows something's off.

"It's cool, girl," I say. My voice sounds like gravel. "Just a bad trip."

But it wasn't a trip. Haven't touched anything stronger than whiskey in years. These dreams come on their own now.

I don't bother trying to sleep again. It never works. I pull on jeans and a flannel, stumble into the kitchen, and light the stove. The coffee's a year old, but I make it anyway. It tastes like boiled dirt. I sit at the table with my hands wrapped around the mug, watching the steam curl up toward the ceiling.

It's three A.M., maybe four. Time gets slippery out here.

I think about Candy Kane. She was the last one who really tried to make things work, you know? Kept the garden going even when the rest of us got lazy. She kept smiling, even when the winter of '77 nearly killed us. Young thing, maybe twenty, twenty-one? She had hair so blond it looked white in the sun. She wanted to be a dancer, talked about it all the time. San Francisco, she'd say. Going to dance in San Francisco. Make some bread, see the world, come back when she had her head together.

"You should go," I told her. Must have been March. Or maybe it was April. Hard to remember. "Chase your dream, sister."

Did she hug me? Did she say goodbye? I remember her smiling. Remember her saying something about missing this place. Then nothing. Just empty space where the rest should be.

I wonder if she made it. I wonder if she's dancing somewhere right now under stage lights, spinning the way she used to spin by the fire.

Then there was Hairy Terry. He was a skinny dude with a beard down to his belt and cracked glasses. His folks were getting old, he said. Needed someone to look after them. Couldn't keep living in the woods while they fell apart in some suburb in Sacramento. Made sense. Made total sense.

"You're doing the right thing, my man," I told him. "Family's family."

He promised he'd come back when things got settled. Bring his parents out, even. Show them what we built. Let them see that there was another way to live.

I believed him. I really did.

Except I can't remember him actually leaving. I can't picture him packing his stuff, loading up his rusted-out old Buick, driving away. Just remember talking to him one day, and then he was gone. Like he vanished. Like the earth swallowed him up.

And Big Pete. God, Big Pete. Huge guy, probably six-four, with hands like shovels. He just got bored. That's all. No big reason. No family emergency or career calling. He looked at me one morning over coffee and said, "Jack, I think I'm done, you know? I need to see what else is out there."

"I hear you, brother," I said. "Can't stay in one place forever."

"You could come with," he offered. "Hit the road. See where we end up."

But I couldn't leave. Someone had to stay. Someone had to keep the dream alive, even if it was just me and the animals and these falling-down buildings.

Did he leave? He must have left. They all left. That's what happened. That's what I remember.

They were the last three.  The ones who'd stayed the longest. I loved them.

The coffee's gone cold in my hands. I'm staring at nothing, at the dark window over the sink, trying to sort out what's real and what's a dream, when I hear it.

Faint at first. Like wind through branches. But it's not wind.

It's screaming.

My chest tightens. River's on her feet now, ears back, a low growl in her throat. Rain's awake too, pacing by the door.

The screaming gets louder. Not just one voice, hundreds. A chorus rising from the tree line, voices crying in agony, in regret, in endless suffering. They all blend together, high and low, men and women, and something that might not be human at all. 

"Stop," I whisper. Then louder. "Stop it. Stop it."

But it doesn't stop. It never stops when it starts.

I'm on my feet, hands over my ears, but it doesn't help. The sound gets inside anyway. Gets into my bones. The dogs are barking now, frantic, and I'm stumbling toward the bathroom because it's the smallest room, the darkest room, the room where maybe I can't hear it as much.

I collapse on the floor, back against the tub, hands pressed so hard against my ears that my jaw aches. Rocking. Can't help it. Just rocking back and forth while hundreds of voices scream and scream and scream from the forest.

"I'm sorry," I'm saying. Maybe out loud. Maybe just in my head. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry."

The screaming doesn't care.

It goes on until the sky starts turning gray outside the tiny bathroom window. Goes on until my throat's raw from sobbing. Goes on until there's nothing left of me but this shaking, broken thing on the bathroom floor.

Then it stops.

Just like that. Silence drops over everything.

I sit there. Breathing. Shaking. River noses the bathroom door open and licks my face. Rain whines from the hallway.

The sun's coming up. Another day on the commune. 

Another day in paradise.

The memories are coming back now in pieces. Fragments that cut.

I stand up slowly. My legs don't want to work right. River watches me from the doorway, head cocked, like she's trying to understand what I'm about to do.

"It's the blood," I tell her. My voice sounds hollow. Sounds like it's coming from somewhere far away. "The trees are screaming because of the blood. I have to make it stop,” I say, as I stagger into the kitchen.

I lean against the kitchen wall and wipe the tears from my eyes. I know what I have to do, if I can find the strength. The whiskey bottle calls my name, and I pour the last drops down my throat.

The shovel is in the barn. The same one I used to dig the garden beds and the fire pit, and the graves.

River and Rain follow me across the property toward the northeast corner, but they stop at the edge of the pines. Won't come any closer.

They sit and watch as I walk into the trees. It's cooler here. The pines grow close together, branches interlocking overhead, blocking out most of the light. The ground's covered in dead needles, and the smell is stronger. Sweet decay. Meat gone bad. The smell of things returning to earth.

I don't have to search for the spots. I know exactly where they are. Three graves under the same copse of trees, close enough that I could stand in the middle and touch all three with the shovel.

I start with Candy.

The ground's settled some, but it breaks easily under the blade. Soft earth. Good soil. I dig and dig and try not to think about what I'm doing. Try not to think about her smile or her dancing or the way she looked at me when I wrapped my hands around her throat. When I squeezed until she stopped struggling. Until she stopped asking why.

The smell hits me before I reach her. I gag, pull my shirt over my nose, and keep digging.

There she is.

What's left of her, anyway. The earth's been busy. Insects and decay and time did their work. I can still see blond hair, matted and dark. Can still see the flannel shirt she was wearing. The one I gave her because she was always cold.

"I'm sorry," I tell her. "I'm so sorry, sunshine."

But sorry doesn't fix anything.

Hairy Terry's right there, close enough that the graves almost touch. He fought more than Candy did. Actually tried to run. Made it maybe ten yards before I caught him. Before I hit him with the shovel. Before I did what I had to do to make him stay.

"Your parents don't need you," I told him while he bled out in the dirt. "This place needs you. We need you."

He didn't understand. Kept saying he had to go. Had to leave.

The glasses are still on his face somehow. His beard's gone mostly. Animals got to him.

I can't look at him long. Can't stand what I'm seeing.

Six feet to the right is the third grave. Big Pete's next to the other two. All three of them laid out in a row under the pines.

He was the hardest because of his size. Took three hours to dig a hole big enough. It took everything I had to drag him into it after I'd caved in his skull with the shovel.

"I can't let you leave," I told him after. After he'd stopped breathing. After his blood had soaked into the ground. "If you leave, it's all over. It's all for nothing."

He's in worse shape than Terry or Candy. Been in the ground the longest.

He was a huge man, full of muscle and hard work. Now there's nothing. No laugh. No life. Just bones in the dirt.

I stand there between the three open graves, the shovel hanging from my hand. The sun's moved across the sky. Must be past noon. I've been digging for hours, and my hands are bleeding, blisters broken open, dirt under my nails and in my lungs and in my soul.

The trees are quiet.

Just wind through branches and birds somewhere far off and the sound of my own breathing, ragged and harsh.

My knees give out, and I'm kneeling in the dirt between them. Between Candy and Terry, and Pete. Three people who just wanted to leave. Who just wanted to live their lives somewhere else. Do something else. Be something else.

And I killed them. Killed them because I couldn't stand to be alone. Couldn't stand to watch the dream die. Couldn't let go.

"I just wanted someone to stay," I sob. The words tear out of me. "I just wanted someone to stay with me."

River barks from outside the copse. Wants me to come back. Wants me to leave this place.

I stay in the dirt until the sun starts dropping. Until the shadows grow long and the air turns cold. Stay there until I can't feel my legs anymore. Until the only thing left is the weight of what I've done pressing down on my chest, crushing me into the ground with the people I buried.

This is paradise.

Ashes of the Sun

The day did not end with a sudden cry.

No trumpet split the air, no skyline fell

In one clean motion anyone could name.

It thinned instead, a fabric worn too long.

 

We woke to smaller mornings, dimmer light,

The sky a tired metal, rubbed and dulled,

Its blue withdrawn behind a patient gauze.

The seasons slipped their timings, lost their marks.

A winter came that tasted faintly warm.

Summer rains fell sour, then vanished into haze.

 

The cities learned a slower kind of breath.

Their towers did not crumble; they stood still.

Elevators paused between two floors.

A thousand offices kept humming on,

Though fewer hands arrived to tend the keys.

 

We spoke of fixes long past use,

Of plans that might have worked in gentler years.

We kept the words like tools without a grip,

Their edges worn from touching nothing real.

 

Out on the coasts, the water took its time.

It did not surge in anger, but it rose

As if remembering Silurian seas.

A road went under first, then half a town.

The maps were slow to change, though people knew.

 

Inland, the fields grew hard and dry.

The soil held shape but would not answer seed.

Machines crossed over it with careful lines,

Performing labor out of long habit.

The harvest shrank to something like a thought,

A rumor passed from ledger into mouth.

 

We marked the losses, then forgot to mark.

The knowledge did not vanish all at once.

It was simply gone when someone looked.

 

The power failed in increments, by choice.

A grid was not a thing that snapped in two.

It dimmed where it was costly to maintain,

And held where something vital still depended.

A hospital remained a brighter square

Amid a widening quilt of patient dark.

 

We learned to live with less without remark.

It was not a loss if nothing else remained

That we could measure against what was gone.

We shaped our days to fit a narrowing frame.

 

There was no single moment one could point

And say, "It ends here." That was not the shape.

The ending was a field we walked across,

So wide the far edge never came in sight.

We moved across it, naming what we saw,

And kept those names as markers failed.

 

We kept them as one keeps a steady step

Across a ground that offers less each mile.

We walked because the ground was still beneath.

The world did not end. It had no reason to.

The land continued after the last foot fell, 

This is something I've been working and I don't know if I like how it's turned out. It's out of my comfort zone for what I usually write.

The Trains Don't Stop Here

This world came to me in a dream. I woke up and frantically begin to write this down before I forgot it. Two main caveats. 1. I'm not sure what I want to do with this world, I'm not sure what story I want to eventually tell. and 2. I know I have too much "world-explaining" and not enough narrative, this was mainly just to get the ideas down so I didn't lose them.

I live in a Post-Collapse Dystopia and All I Got Was This Stupid T-Shirt.

Shopping is a surreal experience for someone from my generation. Protein is either cricket powder or farm raised catfish. The cricket powder has the FDA purple star. "This product is price controlled and subsided by the US Government." The catfish, bred in giant underground lakes under layers of insulating concrete, is fifteen dollars a pound. I grab the cricket powder.

Food has ceased to be a background item. When I was a child, even though we were poor, I never had to wonder where my next meal was coming from. I splurge with a small bottle of sunflower oil.

That's what most meals are for me, anymore. Rice, cricket powder and a vitamin multipack. I look over at the specialty goods. A pound of Wheat flour, a small bottle of real olive oil, a loaf of whole grain bread. All locked up in a metal cage that requires two keys. All over eighty dollars each.

When I say dollars, I mean adjusted dollars, of course. Greenbacks have been rare for years. I have three twenty-dollar bills pressed into a old book of Audubon's prints. I take them out and look at them sometimes, a reminder of a different world. Adjusted dollars look like euros, plastic-feeling with holograms and little clear windows. Colors based on denomination. I never get used to the cricket powder.

I add the rice, a teaspoon of oil and a scoop of the powder to the rice cooker. It dings tiredly a short time later. I add a few dribbles of hot sauce, imported from Thailand, or what's left of Thailand. My only luxury. It cost most of a weeks worth of wages. There are some small things I refuse to give up.

I have a single window in my apartment. A small 6 inch by 6 inch square of reinforced, insulated glass. People much younger than me don't believe it when I say my first nice apartment in downtown Louisville had floor to ceiling windows on two sides. "How did you keep it cool? How did you keep it warm? That seems so wasteful." They weren't alive when the sun wasn't as angry, when winters weren't so brutal.

We're on the cusp between monsoon, or what we used to call spring, and summer. Moving from torrential rain and the smell of mold into wet bulb days and timing errands around the heat alerts. Most of these people have never seen snow.

Today the sunset is an bruised purple and red that hurts the eyes. The fires in Kentucky burn unabated. Fields that at first grew tobacco, then soybeans, now lie fallow, choked with weeds and scrub that catch fire every year. It's an orange air quality day. Not the worst, not the best. Yellow, orange, red, black. I've only seen a code black twice. The sky looked apocalyptic, and tasted like ash.

A lot of people my age talk about the food riots in Nashville and Louisville as the turning point, but I really feel the ChemStar lynchings in New Hope were the smallest domino that started knocking everything down. The Tennessee state government issued a class A heat alert. The bean counters at ChemStar mandated return to work in 114° weather. They threatened to fire anyone who didn't show up. This was one of the last good paying jobs in that small town and things just kept escalating.

Everybody knows the picture. The executives hanging from the ChemStar roof in their rolled-up dress shirts, turning slowly in the heat haze. They print it in history books now beside the Kent State girl and Tank Man.