Call It An Offering (part 1)

The Stand literary universe flash fiction

Sam hung back, about seven breaths from the freshly dug hole at the foot of the magnolia tree. Call it an offering.

A sacrifice.

An apology.

At least she was somewhere beautiful.

He watched the silhouettes of his friends as they finished filling in the hole, his chest getting tighter with every shovelful of dirt spilled on top. He felt his breath catch as they began patting the earth down flat, imagining the pressure pulverizing her tiny shoulders, her cheekbones cracking and splitting with each pat pat pat of the underside of that rusty shovel. He felt his heart sink way down into his gut and get stuck there, dead as a stone, as they gathered brush and leaves to cover her up.

“Why cover her?” Sam asked, a bit belligerently, voice hoarse from overuse, “I don’t exactly think there are any cops coming to solve this homicide.” He spat into the dirt, which was unlike him, but he didn’t really feel like being ‘like him’ right now.

“Because…” Ditch began, looking up, searching the branches of the tree for the rest of his thought, “because it’s what you do, and it needs to be done.” Boomer nodded in silent agreement. Sam rolled his eyes, turning his back on his friends.

In the golden haze of the truck’s headlights, two shadows hovered and flickered, spirits doing the dirty work of the damned.

A third shadow, far left, looks off in sorrow.

Finally, he thought (finally finally finally, his pulse echoed)

It was done. You wouldn’t know she was there unless you were looking for her.

But even then, maybe not.

Suddenly Sam was seized by the possibility that he might forget where she was, forget all of the silent promises he had made to her as he held her body steady, clutched what was left of her as she lay in his lap, her head dark and heavy on his shoulder, the rest of her wrapped in that tarp. It occurred to him that the name of the tree could escape him, or even the look of it, it being the only landmark that might still be legible in the daylight. He knew he’d forget, he just knew it, and then he’d spend the rest of his days kneeling at the trunks of random trees, conducting his penance alone in dusky fields, always at the wrong place, always too little, always too late. Maybe that’s what he deserved, to search and to pray and to risk it all meaning absolutely nothing, risk being the fool left to wander alone, muttering apologies into his tightly clenched fists.

He had never been good with things like this.

When the unimportant things become the most important things.

Were her eyes hazel or brown? Was it always going to end like this?

The fact of these plants and all of their names.

He took out his buck knife and walked around to the side of the tree. He tried to think of what to carve. What was she to him?

She saw him. She’s the only one who ever did.

Sam quickly began carving.

Ditch and Boomer walked back up to him, shovels slung over aching shoulders, dusty palm prints covering their pants. Boomer was sweat-soaked despite it nearing 5 am, he swatted at the bloated summer bugs buzzing around his ears and went to the back and started packing things up. Ditch walked up to Sam and wordlessly put a hand on his shoulder, paused for a breath and squeezed, then kept walking. It had all taken longer than he thought, burying her. He could hear them busying themselves, pouring out water to clean their hands, lighting cigarettes, and so the tears that were falling might as well not have been falling at all.

If a tree falls in the forest and nobody is there to hear it, does it make a sound?

If a man falls in love and cannot locate his heart, is it in the ground?

If you drive past the rubble of scattered redwood cabins, past the warped and jagged chain link, take a left at the grazing pasture, and drive straight for twenty miles, there is a magnolia tree, alone in a field, with a small eye carved into it.

She saw him then, and now she always would.

_

Accidents

via Old French from Latin accident: “happening”

from the verb accidere: from ad- (towards, to) & cadere (to fall.)

They met by accident and of course, he fell:

Her, sticking her thumb out, feeling the wind through her vacant ribcage by the side of the road. She’d emptied her chest long ago.

Him, driving alone in his truck, having long given up on finding another heart to call home. He thought highway hypnosis was setting in, and then he saw her.

He slowed to a stop and held up both his palms, a gesture of openness, “Hey, my name is Sam. Do you need a lift?” He looked her over for signs of the superflu that was raging. She looked healthy, strong even. She’d clearly spent some time on the road. He was on his way back to camp, gone on a supply run, everyone still worked up about this bug. It had all gone to hell already, based on what he’d seen driving around that day. Pretty soon there would be a lot more people along this road sticking their thumbs out, people much more desperate than her, and not nearly as kind as him.

Even at The Lodge (especially at The Lodge) people were going nuts about this flu. They say it’s everywhere, it’s gone global. They say it’s a hoax to liquidate the banks and return to year zero. Well, it depended who you talked to. It was either panic or party where Sam lived. Some people were terrified that what they’d planned for had actually come to pass, meanwhile the rest were patting themselves on the back, beaming out I-Told-You-So’s to the rest of society, the ones who made fun of them for hoarding canned goods and learning about underground air filtration.

She lurched up onto her tiptoes and peered into the backseat, into the bed of his truck. She seemed satisfied that he was safe, but she still put on an N95 mask before climbing inside.

“Can never be too careful,” she said, her first words to him slightly muffled by the mask.

She only had a backpack with her, but it was practically bigger than she was, although that wasn’t saying much. She got herself settled into the passenger seat and was quiet for awhile, listening intently. She didn’t hear any stray sniffles, no muffled coughs. He smelled sweaty, but clean. No grimy buildup. She dared a glance over. He was lean, late twenties, sun-burned to hell and back but not feverish. Thick black hair. His expression was calm. As silly as she felt thinking this, he seemed… nice. Normal. That was it.

In a world where everything had suddenly gone to hell, fallen to pieces, shit the bed, whatever you want to call it…

Sam was driving down the road like it was any old lovely Tuesday, complete with an easy grin on his face as he ashed his cigarette discreetly into a mug in the cupholder, casual as can be.

She liked this about him.

“My name is Cassie,” she said, rolling down her window and lowering her mask to breathe in the fresh air. “Can I bum a smoke?” He fiddled with the glove box, grabbed a cigarette, and lit it for her. She sat back after a few moments, just smoking quietly, and seemed to relax. He noticed that she had gold flecks in her eyes, a faint scar on her cheek. She smelled new, fresh, like she had just fallen to Earth that same morning. He spent the rest of the drive, his mind working intently, trying to identify the scent. Not a flower, not exactly…

Weeks later, he would see her do it. Early one morning, she carefully sliced a lemon and rubbed it on her wrists and neck.

“Lemon,” Sam said to himself, after wondering for weeks, “I’ll be damned.”

_

If the drive out to the magnolia tree had been an eternity, then the drive back to camp was instantaneous. (In grief, teleportation is oft-reported phenomena.) Sam blinked and they were home, the barbed-wire topped gate sliding open in time with the rising sun. They pulled in and were waved to go up to The Lodge. Boomer parked the truck, turned off the engine. He was older than Sam, ten years or so, and had been solid from day one. Sam wasn’t sure how he knew but he was certain Boomer had been a father once, but he also showed up here at the end of it all, alone. He was normally chatty, usually telling a crude joke about somebody’s mother, but tonight he’d scarcely uttered a sentence. He cleared his throat. Ditch leaned forward from the backseat, expectantly.

“I wish it didn’t have to be the way it was. Just… tell him you need a few days. He doesn’t need to know… the extent of it.” He looked exhausted and rubbed his hand through sweat-soaked hair. “You get it, Sam? She was just some girl. The boss doesn’t need to know.”

“Some girl. Right.”

The vein in Boomer’s temple started to, well, boom. That’s how he got the name. His head throbbed while he thought something over. He started to speak but Sam cut him off first, “I know. I brought her here. I got involved,” he said woodenly, eyes raw, staring out through the windshield into the morning light, “I’m lucky he didn’t dig a hole for me too.” It felt like poison on his tongue, but he knew he needed to say it. That’s the kind of place this was. They kill what you love and then expect a thank you for letting you watch.

Boomer was losing his patience. He groaned and slammed the heel of his palm on the steering wheel in frustration, “You know what she was. You knew what would happen.” He took a few forceful deep breaths, stepped out of the car, and started the long walk up to The Lodge, Sam and Ditch following a few paces behind, two pups following the big dog.

The door opened before their boots hit the top step. The Boss was greeting them himself, still in his damn slippers, steaming cup of coffee in hand. “Come in, boys. Have some java. Wipe your feet! I know what you’ve been up to,” he said, with a wink, as if this were some boys-will-be-boys shit. Sam’s vision swam and faded to black. He gave Boomer an urgent look as The Boss walked away, deeper into his home.

Well, it was all of their home, but there was a tacit understanding that until they were at full capacity, The Boss liked the big house to himself. The Boss had spent a lifetime planning for TEOTWAWKI (The End Of The World As We Know It.) Sam had been working a lot of odd jobs and he kept hearing about it on certain work sites. At first, Sam thought it was just a weird scam someone was running. Or just guys telling tales, giving themselves something to rant about. But when he heard it from his buddy, Sam paid attention. That Buddy was Ditch. They headed there together to start over. Ditch was certain that Sam checked enough boxes: young, strong, aimless, and most importantly, completely alone in the world. The world ended a few months later.

“Haven’t you ever just wanted to be left the fuck alone?” Ditch had asked Sam, one night as they sat on the same stools, at the same dive-bar that they went to every payday. Sam was getting worried he might just die on that same barstool too. Something had to change. Ditch wasn’t asking casually, he asked this from the bottom of a well, hoping Sam might drop down the rope, like he always did. The two of them went way back, before their town got gobbled up by Amazon distribution centers and opiods, before anyone would even understand what those words meant strung together in that order.

“Haven’t you ever just wanted to be left the fuck alone?” Ditch asked Sam, again, and he thought about it through memories of evictions and benders, through the haze of cigarette smoke and through the clicking of crickets on those nights when Sam’s mother would get a call from her latest Never Again boyfriend. She’d fix her face in the mirror and then go into his room and grab his pillow while bunching up his comforter and sheets into a heap before tossing them into the grass.

If you leave a little boy in the dark, he’ll cry, he’ll squirm, he’ll flinch at every sound.

He’ll lay awake, all night, never taking his eyes off of the moon. If the moon is watching me, nothing can hurt me, If the moon is watching me, nothing can hurt me… he will fall asleep to this mantra, night after night. In the morning, he will feel the first rays of the sun on his face, and he will shoot up from his makeshift bed in the grass, wet with morning dew. He will fly into the house, down the hall, fly to the safety of his mother, only to be met by a locked door. Always met by a locked door. One of Sam’s earliest memories is having that thought: Maybe love would always be behind a locked door and no matter how much he begged, nobody was going to give him the key.

If you leave a little boy alone in the dark long enough, he will stop being scared.

If you leave a little boy alone in the dark long enough, he will start to like it there.

Yes, Sam thought. I’d like that a lot, to be left alone. No more spam calls, rent hikes, insurance deductibles, credit cards, emails, news cycles. Yes, that sounds good. Some quiet in the woods. He was talking himself into it more and more, not out of some hidden libertarian streak, but mostly out of exhaustion. The world kept grinding him down and there was no sign it would let up soon, all signs actually indicated that it would get much worse as the years stacked up along with the sea levels. He was talking himself into it when he picked up Ditch, the day they started that drive deep into the back country. He talked himself into it the whole way there. How it would be a temporary reprieve, how it didn’t have to become his whole fucking life. Yeah, that sounds good. A little break.

An escape.

So, when they finally pulled up to the gate after hours spent following directions scribbled in the margins of an old copy of The Road, all in some made-up code using mostly doodles of landmarks and arrows, and the gate guard asked Ditch and Sam to step out of their vehicle, to put any weapons they had on the ground, and to raise their hands above their heads, Sam gladly threw his arms into the air.

Don’t ever say that our Sam didn’t lay down, belly up, and choose his surrender.

It just looked different on him.

photo via phoenix wolf-ray