Posted on by ajbrown · 2 Comments

A Note About Closing The Wound

If you’ve read my book, Closing the Wound, then you know several things right off the bat. First, this story would not have happened if not for a friend calling me early one Saturday morning and asking this question: What happened that night? You also know I went and had breakfast with this friend and we talked for a long time while sitting at a Denny’s. You also know Closing the Wound is a true story, at least as true as my memory recalled it. 

coverIt had been a while since I had seen that friend. His name is Chad and we were (and still are, though we don’t see each other often enough) good friends.I ran into Chad at my daughter’s graduation. He was there for another student, but he got to see my girl walk across that stage, too. Afterwards, we talked, as friends tend to do. We said, ‘Hey, we need to keep in touch,’ as friends tend to do, though often they don’t. 

Before we went our separate ways, I told him about Closing the Wound and his part in the story. A couple of days later, he purchased the digital book. When he finished reading the story, he didn’t leave me a review. Instead, he sent me an email. After reading it, I asked him if I could share it with the world. With his permission, I give you Chad’s letter to me.

Dear Jeff,

It is just passed midnight and I read “Closing The Wound”.  I thoroughly enjoyed reading it from your perspective.  Like you, I have somewhat boxed those memories away to be opened only one time a year, Halloween.  The book itself is very well written, it’s what’s between the front and back (that) really mattered to me.  It did dredge up a lot of memories.  I am still a bit hazy on our conversation that day, I do recall us talking about that night just can’t quite piece it all together.  It has been 24 years ago and after reading the book, a lot of those forgotten details and memories have crept back into my mind, which is a good thing.  I never want to forget those days no matter how horrific they were at times.  Each piece is somewhat of a building block of who we have become. Back to the book, you have a gift Jeff, you are a master story teller and writer.  I do not use those terms lightly either.  When I was writing, I had a similar style, but I can’t focus long enough to eat a sandwich let alone write a book!   LOL!  You have always had that gift, you can say you’re a natural at it. 

 I know we haven’t kept in touch over the years and meeting at the graduation was very refreshing to say the least.  I like how you write in the book to not live in the past.  There are somethings that I have been apart of where I too, ask could I have done something differently to alter the outcome.  I suppose we can all agonize over those questions, but questions don’t change events concerning the past.  I have struggled with Chris’ death, well at least once a year, yes it still haunts me.  I know he was tormented and I understood his struggles to a degree.  I truly believe he is in Heaven and no longer has those feelings of loneliness, depression and the desire to belong.  I still see his face when he was with all of us.  He admired you so much because you were such a good friend to him.  Like me, you helped alter some of his life Jeff.  His life ended at a very young age, but perhaps that’s how it was meant to be.  We can ask questions of “what ifs”, but I remember the best days with him was when we were all together hanging out.  Those are the days that I remember the most.  Yes, I remember that picture of us at the rest area off of I-77 in between the snack machine bars.  I had so much fun back in those days! 

 I leave you with this my friend.  After reading the book, I couldn’t help but to go back 25 years ago and think how you have helped so many people.  I know you are a little rough around the edges but that’s ok, sometimes it takes course sandpaper to get the splinters off of some of us knuckleheads!  But seriously, as time rapidly marches forward and our own families grow before us, take stock in your life and the people you have influenced.  I know for me, my family may not be here if it weren’t for you.  God uses us in different ways and He used you and a number of others from that church to save me from myself.  I suppose some emotions have been awaken from 25 years ago, but I just remember how happy Chris was with us, in a way we were his family besides his aunt and sister.  This Halloween let’s start a tradition at go and visit him and remind ourselves of the good days. 

BoyThank you for all you have done for me Jeff!  You are and will always be one of my best friends. 

 Keep in touch buddy! 

 PS: Do you remember his sister’s name or know of her whereabouts? 

 Chad *********

After reading this, I sat back for a while, just staring at the words, not really thinking in clear thoughts, but in pictures. Pictures, like the first time I met Chris at a church work day; like the time I saw him at the South Carolina State Fair just weeks before his death; like the hundreds of teens in a standing room memorial service; like finding his grave for the first time after not visiting for so long; at learning my sister’s husband new Chris and has his own theories of what happened that night. All of them were snapshots into the memories that I—that we—dredged up.  

Chad said some nice things to me, but the one that keeps coming back is this: He admired you so much because you were such a good friend to him.  Like me, you helped alter some of his life …

I wish I would have done more, been a better friend (despite what Chad said, I always think I could have done more), knocked the block off the punk who influenced him in the direction that ultimately cost him his life. 

Here’s my questions to all of you: Do you know someone who might need someone to talk to? Do you know someone who might be heading down a path of destruction? Is there someone you care about who is doing something you think maybe he or she shouldn’t, but you are afraid to mention it because you think it will hurt their feelings?

Here’s one more question: Does saving a life mean more than hurting someone’s feelings to do so? 

The story of my friend, Chris, in Closing the Wound, is just the tip of the iceberg. The story goes so much deeper and cuts down to the bone when I think about his life and death. I honestly don’t know if there is more I could have done, and that brings me guilt from time to time. Even so, I did some good in his life, and clearly, in Chad’s life. 

Sometimes our guilt overrides everything else. It torments us to the point of forgetting all about the good in our life, the good we have done. Chad is one of those good things. He reminded me of that. Now, I remind you: think about someone you have helped in some way. How is their life better because of you? Yes, take credit for that in your heart. Say, I did something great for someone and I helped someone and that person is in a better place because of me. Don’t let guilt ruin you. 

Until we meet again my friends, be kind to one another.

A.J.

If you would like to pick up a copy of Closing the Wound, you can find the digital version on Amazon, or you can get the print version directly from me (signed of course) by contacting me at 1horrorwithheart@gmail.com.

Posted on by ajbrown · 4 Comments

Free Fiction Friday–Rite of Passage

Rite of Passage

(The family and I took a trip one spring break to St. Augustine, Florida. It was a fun trip—at least I think it was. I don’t know what the kids thought. They might have a different definition of fun. You would have to ask them to find out if they enjoyed themselves or not.

We took I-26 toward Charleston and then I-95 toward Savannah, Georgia. I-95 took as all the way to St. Augustine. Shortly after we crossed into Florida, Cate saw a man sitting in a lawn chair by the interstate. He had a drink in one hand and seemed to be staring off at nothing. She pointed the man out to me.

Over the next few minutes, I jotted down a few notes, mostly about the man’s appearance. Then I wrote the word ‘Why?’ Why was he there? Why was he sitting in a lawn chair with a drink in his hand? What was he staring at? Well, he’s staring at ghosts,A.J., my mind chirped. Of course, he was. Over the course of the next couple of days I wrote Rite of Passage, mostly at night when everyone was going to bed in the hotel we stayed at.

Some stories you just fall in love with. For me, this is one of them. The reality for Jake Eberly is he was not long for this world and he knew the parade of ghosts was an omen of death, in this case, his own. He faced his mortality and he was ready to move on, to join the rag tag band of journey folk. But not before letting his grandson see the rite of passage.)

____________________

The truck slowed almost a full two hundred yards before it needed to. Jake Eberly held the steering wheel tight, his old hands hurting, the knuckles white. They would be sore later. His arthritis would flair up worse than it ever had. He licked his lips and his breath hitched. Jake swallowed dryness. He pulled off the road, coasted to a stop, and killed the motor.

“Grandpa, why are we stopping?”

Jake looked to the passenger’s side where his oldest grandchild, Camden, sat. He wasn’t an Eberly like him, not in name at least. His mother was Jake’s only child. She married a Hartnett. The bloodline might carry on, but in time it will be nothing more than an infinitesimal amount and the Eberly name will be no more. 

Staring up at him was a good looking kid. Hazel eyes stood out against his creamy white skin; his hair blond and his lips very much like his mother’s. At ten, he was older than Jake was when he was brought here, to the place he now parked.

“We’re here,” he said.

“Where?”

Jake looked out the windshield, then out both side windows. “Here. Now, help me get the chairs out the back.”

Jake opened the door as a semi went by and rocked the truck on its tires. He got out and held back a grimace as the raw pain of Cancer punched him in the gut. He didn’t think he had much time left. Maybe the end of the day. Maybe tomorrow. He was weak and tired and the pain that stabbed at his stomach constantly made him want to throw up. After today, after getting the boy home, he thought he might just lie down one last time and never get up. He looked over at Camden. “Come out this side, Son.”

Camden scooted across the seat, slid from it and closed the door behind him. They went to the back of the truck. Jake put the tailgate down. 

“Grab those, Camden,” he said and pointed at two folded lawn chairs. “I’ll get the table and the cooler.”

The table was nothing more than a square fold up card table, one that had sat in the basement of the old house on South Street since he, himself, was a young boy. Camden grabbed the two lawn chairs, one in each hand, and Jake grabbed the table. 

“Come,” Jake said and went to the front of the truck, his legs weak, and his insides being gnawed at by a disease only death would cure. He set up the card table, pushing down on it to make sure it wouldn’t topple over. With a nod of satisfaction, he looked to Camden. “Let me have one of those, if you don’t mind.”

Camden dropped one on the ground and unfolded the other. He set it down in front of his grandfather. Jake saw pride in his eyes. He couldn’t help but smile. The young boy set the other chair on the opposite side of the table, and then went back to the truck. A minute later he returned with a beat up red and white IGLOO cooler. He set it on the table. 

“Have a seat, young man,” Jake said, reached into the cooler and pulled out two sodas. He handed one to Camden, set the other on the table, then placed the cooler on the ground beneath it. He picked his soda up and sat down. His legs seemed to sigh in relief, but the biting in his stomach continued. He popped the top and took a long swig, letting the carbonated water both burn and chill his throat on the way down. 

“What are we doing, Grandpa?”

The kid looked at him with the curiosity of any young child, something he gathered most kids had at that age, one he certainly had. “We’re sitting down, having a drink.”

“Is that it?”

Jake gave a small smile. He understood impatience quite well. “We’ll probably talk some, but mostly, we’ll wait.”

“Wait for what?”

Another smile was followed by Jake taking a swallow of his soda. He wiped his lips with the back of his hand. “You’ll know it when you see it.”

Camden shook his head. There was no smile on his face, but more of a disappointed frown. He picked up his soda, popped the top and drank from it. 

They sat in silence, grandfather and grandson, both in their own world of thoughts, both probably seeing things far differently than the other. Though Jake didn’t know what Camden was thinking, he had a good idea. He, too, had sat on the other side of the card table between them, when he was only eight. His grandfather, known to him as Gramps, had brought him here in his old Ford back in 1952. ‘We’re going for a ride,’ he had said, and that is what they did. They stopped on the side of the road, back before it became I-95. It was just another road back then, and only two lanes at that. There were more woodlands and less traffic. Sitting by the road with a jug of water between young Jake Eberly and Gramps was as boring as watching paint dry. He would have rather done the painting than sit and do nothing. He told Gramps as much. Gramps gave him a nod, placed his yellowing ivory pipe between his lips and puffed on it. Gramps was patient with him then, just as Jake would be patient with Camden now.

GHOSTSLike Gramps before him, Jake stared off across the busy roadway and spoke words he remembered as if he had just heard them. “I reckon this isn’t much fun.”

“No, Sir, it isn’t.”

“It wasn’t much fun when my grandpa brought me here either.”

Camden looked at him with his big hazel eyes. He was his momma’s boy for certain. “Then why are we here?”

“It’s a rite of passage, Cam,” Jake said.

“A rite of passage?”

“Yup.”

“What is that?”

Jake smiled again. It was a good question, one he didn’t think to ask when his time had come to be here. Even so, he knew the answer.

“My grandfather brought me here when I was a kid. His grandfather brought him before that and his grandfather did the same before that.” He took a deep breath. The explanation, he believed, only got harder from here. “A rite of passage is like a point in someone’s life, much like graduating high school or getting married. They’re important moments in life. Like birth. And death. This … this is one of those moments.”
“Sitting by the road drinking pop?”

Jake laughed at this, then took another swallow of his soda. He smacked his lips, said nothing and stared straight ahead. Cars, trucks, an occasional motorcycle and quite a few semis sped by, most of them doing well over eighty. Occasionally, Camden would let out an exasperated huff that Jake ignored.

“Grandpa, can we go?”

“Not yet, Camden.”

“I’m bored.”

“I’m sure you are, but …”

“I want to go,” Camden said firmly. His brows were creased downward, just as his lips were. His eyes held an angry storm in them. He stood and started for the truck. 

“It’s not time to go, yet.”

Camden turned around. His drink was still in one hand, but some of it had sloshed out of the can. “I don’t care, Grandpa. This is dumb. I could be at home, watching tv or playing video games, or I don’t know, doing anything but sitting here bored out of my mind, watching cars go by.”

“Camden, sit back down.”

“No. I want to go home. I thought we were going to do something fun, or just do something. We’re sitting here, doing nothing.”

“We’re slowing down, son,” Jake said. “We’re smelling the roses, so to speak.”

“The only thing I smell is smoke from the trucks going by. If I would have known this is what we were going to do, I wouldn’t have come.”

Jake set his drink on the table. With quite a bit of effort, he stood, even as his insides burned and grumbled. His shoulders slumped. Children weren’t what they were when he was a kid. They were more impatient and intolerant of things. They were less respectful and more argumentative. As he looked at his grandson, Jake realized something he hadn’t before. Maybe it isn’t the kids who are different. Maybe it is the adults who changed. He gave a simple nod. Yes, that’s it, he thought. And he, like so many others, had changed. 

“Okay, Cam …”

Then, as if time knew it was running out, across the road Jake saw what he came to see.

“There,” he all but shouted and pointed.

“What? Where?” Camden asked. “I don’t …”

Then they both grew quiet. The world around Jake Eberly didn’t matter at that moment. The rot in his gut that had grown worse over the last few months was nonexistent. His smile, something that had been forced a lot over the last year or so, was as real as it had ever been. 

“Grandpa …”

“It’s okay, Camden. Just watch.”

And they did.

From out of the woods came a young man. He wore a white button-down shirt and black pants held up by suspenders. His hair was brown, long and pulled back in a neat ponytail. He held one arm up above his head and slightly out in front of him. In his hand was a lit lantern that gave off no light at all. A rag tag processional of people followed, dressed in clothes Jake thought Camden had never seen outside of a movie, and maybe not even then. The women wore long dresses, and most of them had their hair up in some manner of a bun. The few children wore long pants, mostly browns and blacks, and button-down shirts tucked neatly into their waist bands. Some of the men wore long pants and long shirts; some of them carried muskets and wore floppy hats. 

“Grandpa, who are those people?”

“They are who we’ve been waiting on.”

“There’s something wrong with them.”

“What is that?”

“I don’t know, but …” Camden’s voice changed, as did the direction of his words. “Are they going to cross the street?” There was alarm in his words.

“They most certainly are, Camden.”

“But they’ll get hit by a car.” His voice rose with each word. 

“Just watch.”

The ghostly procession neared the interstate. 

“Hey!” Camden yelled. He stood beside the card table and waved one hand frantically, trying to get their attention. “Hey! Stop! Don’t cross the street!” 

The people neither looked left or right before the man with the lantern stepped off the grass and onto the shoulder and then into the road. 

Camden screamed as a semi rumbled by, going through the young man in the lead. Jake looked down at him to see his hands over his eyes and his back turned to the dead coming toward them. 

“It’s okay, Cam,” he said. 

“No! It’s not. That truck just hit that guy and …”

“It didn’t hit him,” Jake interrupted. 

“Yes, it did. I saw it.”

“You saw the truck go through him.”

“It hit him and …” His shoulders shook, and Jake heard the tears in his voice.

“No, Camden. The truck went through him. Cars can’t hit ghosts.”

“Ghosts?” 

“Yes. Ghosts.”

By the time Camden looked back up, the young man leading the parade of dead had made it to the center of I-95. From that distance, Jake could see his face was ashen and his sockets were sunk in. He looked more like a corpse than a ghost. When he looked back at Camden, the young boy’s eyes were wider than he had ever seen them. Jake didn’t think he was scared, but maybe awestruck by what he saw.

“Are they really ghosts?” Camden asked, his voice dreamy, as if he had just awoken from a long nap. 

“Oh yes. They are the ghosts of your ancestors.”

“My ancestors?”

“Your family—all the members of the Eberly clan who have died are right there.”

The young man was now halfway across the lane closest to them. His hair was dark, and his bottom lip hung open. His eyes were distant, as if he didn’t see them. Several vehicles went through him as they went along their way to wherever they were going. The drivers didn’t seem to notice the ghosts as they sped by. 

Jake looked at his grandson. His eyes were still wide, and his mouth worked up and down as if he were trying to say something but couldn’t find the words. He looked like he wanted to run away. The hand holding the soda can shook badly. His breath came in sharp, terrified bursts. His shoulders still shook, and his cheeks were wet from the burst of tears a few seconds earlier.

“It’s okay, Camden. They won’t hurt you.”

“Are you sure?” His voice quivered.

“I’m as sure as you’re standing there right now.”

“Grandpa …”

Jake sidled over next to him, put one arm around him and rested the hand on his shoulder. Camden wrapped both arms around his grandfather’s waist and buried his face in his side.

“No, Camden. Don’t look away. You may never get to see this again, and if you do, it won’t be for a long time.”

He felt the boy’s face shift from in his side to toward the road, but the kid’s arms still latched tight around him. By then, the leader was in front of them. Jake pulled Camden to the side and let the procession of spirits pass by and through the card table. One by one, men, women and children walked by, their eyes forward, never slowing for the last of the Eberly’s and his grandson. 

As the final ghost made his way across the busy interstate, the strings on Jake’s heart gave a tug. With cane in hand, his grandfather made their way toward them. Hanging from his mouth was the old ivory pipe he used to smoke. Jake remembered his mother asking if anyone had seen it after Gramps died. No one had—and no one ever did after the day Jake and Gramps visited the side of the road.

Tears formed in Jake’s eyes as he recalled being here as a kid and not knowing that would be the last time he saw his grandfather alive. The next time Jake saw Gramps, the old man lay in a coffin in the foyer of the church his grandparents attended. If he would have known then what he knew now, he would have hugged his grandfather tighter that last time; he wouldn’t have complained about watching paint dry; he would have made sure to say, ‘I love you,’ even if it wasn’t the cool thing to do. 

“Gramps,” he said as the elder Eberly reached them. Like the others, he didn’t stop. Unlike the others, he turned his head just enough to look at Jake. 

Not much longer, Jake, he whispered. He puffed on the old pipe, nodded and continued through the table and into the trees behind them. 

Jake didn’t know how long he stared into the woods after the dead were gone, but it was Camden who pulled him free of the trance he had been in. 

“Grandpa, are you okay?”

Jake took a deep breath and let it out. His chest shuddered and the pain in his stomach had come back. He fought the urge to double over and grab his midsection. He nodded and said, “Yes, Camden, I’m okay.”

“You’re crying.”

Jake wiped his eyes and then his nose. “Sometimes it’s okay for a man to cry.”

“Like now?”

“Yes, like now.”

He took one last glance at the trees. The remnants of the dead were gone, but he knew that wouldn’t be the case forever. They would be back. And so would he, most likely on the other side of the road. He rubbed Camden’s head. “Let’s get you home,” he said. 

Camden grabbed the cooler and made his way to the back of the vehicle. Jake reached down for the soda he had been drinking. The can held icicles all around it. He picked it up, felt the freezing cold on his fingertips. He squeezed the can. It was hard like ice. He set the can on the ground by the road and folded up the card table. By the time he was finished, Camden was back and closing the chairs. 

With everything in the bed of the truck, they got in, both doing so from the driver’s side. Jake turned the key and the motor rolled over, caught and rumbled to life. He put it in gear, looked in the side mirror and eased onto the interstate. He glanced in the rearview mirror at the can he had left behind. It didn’t matter that it would be gone when he came back. Like all the grandfathers before him, he left a little piece of himself behind, a little piece of familiarity so when Camden came to watch the parade of ghosts in the later stages of his life, he would remember the day he came here as a young child. 

Jake Eberly took the first exit, circled back across the overpass and entered the interstate going in the opposite direction they had come. He didn’t look to the side of the road when they passed. With a tearing pain in his gut, he drove, hoping he would get the boy home before the pain grew too intense. 

“Grandpa?”

“Yes, Camden?”

“Was that your grandfather—the one who spoke to you?”

Jake licked his lips, nodded and said, “It was my Gramps.”

“What did he mean by not much longer?”

Jake let out a long breath. “You’ll understand soon enough. Let’s just leave it at that, okay?”

Camden didn’t respond. He just turned his attention to the world passing outside the truck. 

At Camden’s house, he let the young boy out and talked with his mother for a minute or two. They exchanged their goodbyes. When he started to get into the truck, Camden went to him. He put his arms around Jake’s midsection and squeezed. It was everything Jake could do not to grimace and let out a groan from the pain. 

“I love you, Grandpa.”

“I love you, too, Camden.”

The boy held on for a few more seconds, then let him go. When he looked down at Camden, there were tears in his eyes. 

“It will be all right, Camden,” Jake said and patted him on the shoulder. 

“I’ll come see you.” He wiped his eyes. “I’ll come see you.”

“I know you will,” Jake said, and then his grandson, with Eberly blood running through his veins, but not carrying the same name, stepped back. 

Jake got in the truck and smiled. A minute later he drove off. In the rearview mirror he saw the boy waving. He stuck his hand out the window and returned the wave. The boy held his soda can in the other hand.

(Rite of Passage appears in the mammoth collection, Beautiful Minds, which you can find HERE.)

 

Posted on by ajbrown · 4 Comments

Unknown Boy, Aged Four or Five

My 2018 Christmas story. I hope you enjoy.

Marcia looked out the windshield at the throngs of people standing outside the toy store. It wasn’t seven in the morning yet and people lined the sidewalk and stood in the parking lot six and seven deep. She took a heavy breath. There was no way she would find what she wanted with this many people here. 

She shook her head. She flipped her hair back over her shoulders and let the breath out. 

“I should have done this sooner.”

But she knew she couldn’t. It had to be on this day. It had to take place on Christmas Eve.

Marcia opened the door, got out of the car and closed the door back. She walked toward the crowd, stopping when she heard the murmuring excitement of rabid shoppers as the electronic doors opened and they began the mad rush for toys. People pushed forward, as if they tried to pack the store on the corner of Mall Drive. 

“We’re going to be like sardines in there,” she whispered. 

After most of the patrons had gone inside, Marcia made her way to the doors, took another breath, bracing herself for the craziness she was about to face, and stepped inside. 

It was as bad as she feared it would be. People pushed by one another without bothering with an ‘excuse me,’ or a ‘pardon me’ or anything even close. Some folks with buggies had no problems bumping into others to get them out the way. She thought there might be a couple of fights as some customers gave dirty looks or snappy, sarcastic remarks. 

Marcia made her way by most people, detouring in and out of aisles where the crowds were the worst. Though she walked and shuffled nonstop, it still took her twenty minutes to get to the back of the store where the stuffed toys were. Thankfully, there were only a handful of people back there, in the section that boasted the toys that weren’t highly sought after and worthy of being fought over. She thought it a shame that so few people thought their children might like one of the plush bears, dogs, rabbits and kitty cats. 

She frowned. The pickings were thinner than usual. All of the rabbits and doggies were gone. There were still a couple of kitty cats, but none that screamed ‘buy me.’ The small teddy bears were mostly the same, each one a solid color (either white, brown, tan or gray) with a bowtie around its neck, glass eyes, pink stitched nose and mouth. She shook her head and stood straight; her hands went to her hips. She rummaged the shelves until she came across a pink teddy bear and plucked it from the pile. She thought it was right for one of the two gifts she needed. Still, there was the other one, the one she knew would be harder to pick.

Marcia left the aisle and went to the next one over. No stuffed animals. The next one over from that one also held no stuffed animals. Neither did the other two. She backtracked and looked at the original aisle of misfit animals. She dropped to her knees and rummaged through the various teddy bears. Just as she began to give up, Marcia saw it, the animal that called to her, that said, ‘I’m the one.’ She reached for it, pulled it free.

It was a white lamb. Its eyes sparkled blue. Its lips and nose were the same pink stitched type as on the teddy bears, but on the tips of each foot was a split hoof. Its tail was a curly-q and the fur was fluffy and soft. Marcia hugged it and knew it was the one.

Pink_Teddy__19550.1386245092.490.588She didn’t mind standing in line for almost an hour. She didn’t mind putting the purchase on her credit card. She didn’t mind sitting in traffic for another hour, trying to get out of the mall area. She didn’t mind that she got home well after lunch. She didn’t even mind that she would have to get up early again the next day to make the two hour drive to Hope, South Carolina, a little do nothing town on the edge of the nowhere. She was happy. She found the toys she hoped to find.

It was cold when she arrived in Hope the next morning. She drove through the little town, across the overpass and down a road with sleepy houses on either side. She made a left and drove a couple of blocks. Then she made a right and pulled through the large entrance and onto the dirt road that ran between graves older than her grandmother, who was in her upper eighties. She continued along until she came to a grassy area along the side of the path where she pulled over and parked. 

“Come on,” she said and grabbed the lamb. It was colder out in the open cemetery on Christmas day than it had been in the parking lot of an old toy store the morning before. She zipped her coat up and her body gave a shiver. Marcia crossed the lawn, passing gravestone after gravestone, touching some as she went. Finally, she stopped near a chipped headstone with the carving of a square wooden wagon on it. Just below the wagon was the word UNKNOWN BOY. Below the name was a presumed age: AGED FOUR OR FIVE. 

The first time she came here was eleven years previous. Her little sister, Donna, was six then and her hair was pulled back into a ponytail that bobbed when she walked. Her green eyes dazzled and she had been excited to go on one of Marcia’s Christmas traditions, this time to the little cemetery in Hope. 

Donna had a fake flower in one hand and she gripped Marcia’s hand with her other one. 

“Why are we here?” she asked in all of her innocence.

“One of the things I do at Christmas is I go to a cemetery. I take a flower with me. Then I search the headstones for a name or a grave that I think would like a visitor. I place the flower on the grave and tell the person, ‘Merry Christmas.’”

“Why do you do that?”

“Because everyone should receive love on Christmas day.” That wasn’t the total truth, but it was really all Donna needed to know. She didn’t need to know that a friend of hers does something similar at the cemetery where her father is buried, only telling the dead, ‘Someone loves you’ instead of ‘Merry Christmas.’

“Oh.” Donna stood, staring at her flower for a minute. Then she looked up with that wide-eyed innocent look of hers. “Can I pick the grave?”

“Sure,” Marcia responded. “Go. Find the lucky person.”

Donna hurried toward the rows and rows of graves. She searched, diligently, pondering each stone, though she couldn’t really read the names. She asked questions about the ages of each person. Then she came across the stone with the wagon on it. “What does that say, Marcia?”

“Unknown boy. Aged four or five.”

“He doesn’t have a name?”

“I guess not.”

“And he was four or five?”

“I guess so.”

“What does that mean?”

“I guess they didn’t know who the boy was and they thought he was maybe four or five years old.”

“That’s younger than me.”

“It is.”

Donna looked at the flower again, then placed it at the base of the headstone. “Merry Christmas, Unknown,” she whispered, and patted the top of the stone three times gently. 

As they walked back to the car, Marcia holding tight to Donna’s little hand, her sister looked up and asked, “Can we come back next year, but bring him a toy instead of a flower?”

Marcia nodded, smiled. “Of course.”

That’s what they did. On Christmas Eve the next year, they went to the toy store—the same one Marcia has gone to since. 

“What type of toy would you like to get him?”

“A stuffed animal.”

“A stuffed animal it is, then.”

“But it can’t be just any stuffed animal. It has to be the right one.”

Like when searching the graves the year before, Donna took her time searching for the right toy, the right stuffed animal, and when she had, her eyes shimmered and her smile was as bright as it had ever been.

That was a long time ago, and so much has changed since the first year Donna went with her and now. She stood in front of Unknown with the lamb in her hand and tears spilling down her cheeks. Her heart hurt, but she thought it would break later. She knelt, set the lamb in front of the headstone, said, “Merry Christmas, Unknown,” and then stood straight again. She tapped the top of the headstone gently three times. When she took a deep breath this time, she let it go with a rattle and a sob. 

Marcia tucked her hands into her pockets, protecting them from the cold. She hunched her shoulders and walked away. When she reached her car, she looked back, saw the little ghost of a boy standing at his grave. He was pale and his hair was black. He wore a white button-down shirt and dirty black pants. His eyes held bruised bags beneath them. He was holding the lamb in his arms. When he looked up, he raised his hand in a wave. 

Marcia’s breath caught in her throat, but her hand lifted and her fingers moved in a slight wave. She watched as the boy faded, leaving behind the stuffed animal where she had placed it. She got into her car and looked at the stuffed bear on the passenger’s seat. She would make the drive home now, this time to a different cemetery, one with a grave still not a year old. She would go and sit next to it, ignoring the cold. She would set the pink teddy bear on the grave and pat the headstone gently three times. Then she would say, “Merry Christmas, Donna.” 

And she would cry …

AJB

12/23/2018

Posted on by ajbrown · 3 Comments

Voices, The Interviews: The Angel

SPOILER ALERT * SPOILER ALERT * SPOILER ALERT * SPOILER ALERT

Before reading today’s post, I want to tell you about our continuing project. In the coming months one character from each story in my collection, Voices, will be interviewed by Lisa Lee with Bibliophilia Templum. 

No, this is not your typical interview session. What I want to do is make each interview like a story, one that continues until we reach the end. Some of these are going to be short. Some of them might be long. I don’t know. Like you, I will find out just how long each interview is based on the questions Lisa provides me. I don’t know the questions ahead of time and neither do the characters.

Since this is an interview, I will go ahead and say up front there are spoilers in each session. If you have not read Voices, I urge you to do so before continuing (you can pick up a copy here. If you haven’t read the collection, you have been made aware of possible spoilers. 

One more thing: if you have read Voices and would like to ask a question of today’s character, leave a comment at the end, and I will see about getting an answer from the character for you. Don’t be shy, ask your questions. You may get an interesting response.

SESSION 9

Lisa releases Dane. It was an embrace akin to a mother and a daughter. It’s one she had experienced many times raising her own kids, but this one had been different. Dane had needed her touch, her reassurance—she ventures to believe she still will, maybe even always will. 

Dane takes a deep breath, goes back to her chair, and sits down. Lisa does the same. She picks up her pad from the floor where she dropped it. She flips through the pages until she comes to the next name on the list: Kimberly. She recalls the young lady whose boyfriend broke up with her before they could get married. She recalls the house, the room she knelt in. 

An eerie feeling crawls up her legs and into her spine. The room feels damp. The walls are somehow moldy, the ceiling sagging. Though the floor is intact, there are dips in it. More importantly, there is blood in the center of the room and there are images on the walls. Lisa tries to recall if they were there when she first arrived. She believes they were, but now, with Kimberly in front of her, the graffiti on the walls looks more real, as if at any moment they can come alive. 

The prophets holding Bibles wear black suits and their eyes are punched out holes—something she feels is different from before, but somehow the same. Graffiti gangsters hold boom boxes and music notes rise up from them in whites, blues, yellows and oranges. A knight in dull armor sits on a hobby horse, the lance he once probably used in jousting competitions splintered at one end. A snake slithers along the baseboard, but the image that holds her attention is the angel with black wings, like a demon’s, leathery and too short to actually carry him on the wind; blue eyes like bright lights that mesmerize, and shockingly white hair that covers his ears and flows down his back. It is this creature she feels uneasy about.

Screen Shot 2018-01-06 at 2.26.45 PMNonsense, she thinks. Kimberly is the one here to talk to you. She is right there, directly to your left.

And she is. Though she doesn’t bear the scars of the young woman who died in the story, her arms and clothes are covered in blood, as is her long blonde hair. She, however, doesn’t look at Lisa. She looks beyond her, to the wall where the angel hangs, painted there by an artist probably named K. Kwik (or something like that) with spray paint that is neither expensive nor cheap, but somewhere in the middle. 

“Kimberly,” Lisa whispers.

The young lady doesn’t react. She doesn’t blink, but her head slowly tilts to one side, as if she sees something no one else can. Lisa now knows it is quite possible she does. After all, so many of these characters have seen things she hasn’t, but she has seen things they haven’t either.

Lisa reaches over and touches the young woman’s leg. “Kimberly.”

Kimberly looks at her, her eyes focusing for a couple of seconds, then growing distant quickly. “To know me is to feel me.”

“But to feel me is to know …” Another voice says.

“Pain,” Kimberly finishes.

Lisa’s body jerks with the new voice, one she is afraid of. She looks to her right, to the wall of graffiti art. The angel’s head is free of its sheetrock home. His cartoon features have faded from his face. His white hair somehow flows behind him, as if there is a wind blowing through the millions of strands. His body doesn’t tear from the wall. It peels, like a sticker …

Like a Fathead, Lisa thinks.

… and he is much bigger than she had thought he was when reading the story of Kimberly’s demise.

He doesn’t walk, but glides across the floor; his legs are shrouded in gray clouds. He is beside them quicker than he should be. His leathery wings are not black, but brown and Lisa can see the many bones that make up its forearm-like wings. Unlike a bat or bird, she doesn’t think the angel’s wings could help him fly and she doesn’t believe they are anything like homologous structures, handed down from an ancestry of flying creatures. Heat radiates off him, and from the short distance between them, she feels as if she sits next to a hot furnace.

“What are you?” Lisa asks.

He smiles, though it isn’t radiant. There is something inherently creepy about him, and it’s not just because one minute ago he was firmly attached to a wall fifty feet away from them. 

“I am an angel, young lady.”

“Young lady? That’s cute. Flattery will get you nowhere. Neither will lies. What are you really?”

The angel’s smile doesn’t falter, but there is a twinkle in his eyes. Lisa believes he is about to try and deceive her. When he speaks again, she knows that is what his intention is.

“I am an angel. That is true,” he says. “But what I am an angel of does not concern you. It only concerns those … I visit.”

“Oh boy, I’ve got the evil version of the Riddler here,” she says, then adds, “Why have you chosen the image of an angel?”

“Because I bring release.”

“Angels bring the Word of God. You bring blood and death to the innocent.”

“The innocent?” The angel doesn’t quite laugh, but she can see humor in his eyes. She can feel the laughter spilling from the heat of his body. “No one is innocent. Everyone has sinned, young lady. Everyone. I only bring to the desperate what they long for.”

From behind his back, the angel produces a long knife, one with the blackened handle of ancient bone. The blade curves in the center, giving it a decided hook at the end. He holds it out to her. 

Lisa looks at it. A rainbow appears in the blade, shimmers, vanishes, then reappears. It’s mesmerizing.

“What are you?” Lisa asks again. Her voice is dreamy and distant.

“I am pain.”

The notepad slips from her hands but remains on her lap. Her right hand reaches up, hesitant at first.

“To know me is to feel me.”

A female voice comes from her left, soft and sweet and hypnotic. “To feel him is to hurt.”

“To hurt is to bleed,” the angel whispers. He turns the knife in his hand so the blade is on his palm and the handle facing away from him.

Lisa’s arm extends further. The blade glistens with its rainbows and the voices of Kimberly and the angel are a harmony in her ears that doesn’t scare her, but entices. Her fingers stretch, touching the cold bone handle. 

“To bleed is to live.” they say in unison.

Lisa takes the blade and holds it inches from her face. She can see a reflection in the rainbow of colors, but it is not hers, at least not the her of the here and now. The image staring back at her is younger. Her hair is darker, the lines on her face are barely there. Her eyes still hold the vibrancy of a little girl. 

“To know me is to feel me,” the duo says. “To feel me is to hurt.”

The image changes. The young girl is gone. Replacing her is a teenager, maybe even someone who she was in her early twenties. The vibrancy in her eyes, though still there, has dulled. And in her hand she holds a knife, just as Lisa does now. The young woman holds the knife to her wrist, as if she is going to bring the blade straight across it. Then she turns the knife, the point touching the base of her palm. If she pulls it straight up, it will flay the skin from palm to elbow and …

“To bleed is to live,” the duo chants.

She repeats it back. The tip digs into her palm. She feels pain as it breaks skin. A drop of blood squeezes from the small wound and slides down into her palm. Her breath catches.

“To live is to die.”

She grips the knife tight. Her mind screams, No. No. No. NO! but she can’t release the blade. Her other arm comes up. She watches as the blade moves toward it, almost in slow motion, but still entirely too fast for her liking.

He killed her! Lisa’s mind screams.

And now he is going to kill you. Mr. Worrywort says from his corner. He is not near. She knows this. She feels this. He is afraid of the angel or whatever it is.

She turns to Kimberly. She is holding her hand out in front of her, much like Lisa is, though there is no knife gripped in her fingers. “He killed you,” Lisa says.

The young woman looks at her. There are tears in her eyes.

Then a hand is on her wrists, one that holds scars on the fingers. Lisa looks at the hand, then up the scarred arm to the young man in front of her. Nothing takes the hand that holds the knife in it and pulls it away from her palm. There is a hint of blood on the blade, but nothing like it could be. Though he is clearly a strong man, he can’t remove the knife from Lisa’s hand.

Nothing looks at Kimberly. One of her hands is clenched into a fist, as if she holds a knife in it. Her other arm is up the way Lisa’s is. 

“Let her go,” Nothing says.

Kimberly blinks. Behind her, Mr. Worrywort appears. His face is nothing but a shadow, but the grin in the darkness is outlined in white, the teeth within yellow. A hand settles on her shoulder and her eyes widen, her lips become an O. 

“She can’t,” Mr. Worrywort says.

“I wasn’t talking to her,” Nothing says. Both of his hands hold the knife from Lisa’s arm. “I’m talking to you.”

Mr. Worrywort’s face changes. He doesn’t look as defiant now as he did seconds earlier. Then the smile returns and he laughs. “Make me.”

Nothing squeezes Lisa’s hand. The pain is sharp and intense and her fingers straighten involuntarily. The knife slides into his hand, and before Lisa realizes it, he lets go of her and slings the knife toward Kimberly. The knife doesn’t have to travel far, so the chances of him hitting her is high. It zips by her head and strikes Mr. Worrywort’s shoulder. He spins away from Kimberly, releasing her as he does so. 

Kimberly’s arms drop, her hand unclenches from a fist to an open palm. Lisa’s arms drop. She rubs the bleeding palm on her pants

“How did you do that?” the angel asks.

“I’m not weak,” Nothing said. “Suicide is a sin. You feed on the hopeless. You create monsters who feed on the blood and suffering of the living. You create them from the living.”  

“Why?” Lisa asks. “Why do you do this?”

The angel and Nothing and everyone else turn back to her. 

“Because I can,” the angel says. “You understand that, don’t you?”

“No, I don’t understand.”

“I think you do.”

“No, I don’t.  I don’t.”

“Everyone does things because they can. Everyone.” The angel stares down at her, his eyes like angry embers.

“Not everyone,” Lisa responds.

“Everyone.”  

“Even you?” Lisa asks. She knows what he is. She even thinks she knows why he is, but those two things could be different. “What are you?”

“I am Death, young lady, and I come for everyone.” 

“No, you’re not,” Nothing says. He steps between the angel and Lisa. “Death is indiscriminate. He favors no one and he doesn’t choose when someone’s time has come. He certainly doesn’t help someone kill herself.” He looks toward Kimberly. Her head is down. Tears fall from her eyes and land on her bare legs. “You are opportunity. You weed out the weak, one at a time. Those who are hurting are your prey, your victims. You are a bottom feeder, at best. And by that token, you are nothing, like me.”

“I can kill you.”

“No. You can’t. I’ve faced my demon and I conquered him. I have the scars to prove it. You exist on fear and if no one is afraid of you, then you … don’t exist.”

The angel steps back, not voluntarily, but as if he is pulled backward. He reaches for Nothing, his hand catching only air. “You fool.”

“Maybe once upon a time,” Nothing responds. “Not anymore. Go away. You are not welcome here.”

“You have no sway over me.”

“Not true. You have no sway over me. Go away. Be gone. No one here fears you.”

The angel looks to Lisa. “She does.”

Lisa stands, straightens her back and steps beside Nothing. “I’m not afraid of you,” she says, her voice strong. “I’m not afraid of the demons in the ceiling or Mr. Worrywort, who keeps trying to get into my head. You are nothing to me.” She looks to the young man beside her, “No offense meant.”

Nothing laughs. 

“She is,” the angel yells, his voice booming and bouncing off the walls in vibrating echoes. He points at Kimberly. “She is terrified of me.”

“She’s not,” Nothing says. “Are you?”

Kimberly looks up. The tears in her eyes aren’t from fear, but pain. “I don’t fear death—not anymore. I fear being alone, dying without ever being loved. But I don’t fear him.”

The prophets on the wall pull free. They tuck their Bibles under their arms and approach the angel. They grab him by his arms.

“No! You can’t touch me!”

They say nothing as they pull him away from the circle, away from the group of characters assembled for their interviews. 

“Let me go!”

One of the prophets howls when they reach the wall. He grips the sheetrock with one hand, the angel with the other. The prophet’s face distorts into a grotesque grimace, his jaw dropping to his chest, his eyes melting as he pulls, first himself, then the angel into the wall. The angel’s white hair bursts into flames; his blue eyes explode; his flowing robe smolders, then gets swallowed into the fire, consuming him. The other prophets follow the first one into the wall, but they don’t melt away like the first one, like the angel. They reattach themselves to the sheetrock, their eyes fixed on the smoldering creature on the artistic floor at their feet; at the angel’s hand reaching from the ashes of its body, its hand still smoking. Then they are all frozen in place and once again become nothing but drawings.

Nothing stands beside Lisa. At some point, he had taken her hand. He releases it now. 

“What just happened?” Lisa asks.

“An opportunity lost, I think,” Nothing says.

“What was he?”

Again, the young man laughs. “It doesn’t matter. He is nothing now.”

To be continued …

Posted on by ajbrown · 2 Comments

The Lyrics’ Tragedies

In 1972 The Statler Brothers came out with a song called Class of 57. I was two at the time. I can honestly say this is the first song I remember hearing as a child, though probably not when I was two. Sure there were probably others. Jesus Loves Me comes to mind, but it and most songs geared toward kids didn’t stick until years later. 

Class of 57 has an innocent sound about it, one that is tragic at the same time. The song is a recounting of the kids who graduated from high school and where they were now that they were grown ups. They sing of the places some of them work: the mill, driving a truck, fixing nails, a grocery store and so on. Innocent enough, right?

After the first chorus things get a little darker. One person was in an insane ward, another one was on wellfare. One of them breaks up a marriage and takes the guy’s wife, and well, the guy left behind commits suicide. At the time I didn’t understand what the song was about. I just know it stuck with me. Growing older and living life is hard. Things don’t always turn out the way we envision them. It’s kind of ominous, you know?

I have come to the conclusion that one of the reasons I like songs with tragic lyrics in them is because of The Statler Brothers’ Class of 57. The one verse I remember, even now, is the one where ‘Freddie took his life.’ The chorus is just as tragic. ‘Living life day to day is never like it seems’ and ‘things get complicated when you get past eighteen.’

I’ve always been drawn to those types of songs. 

One such song that comes to mind is A Day in the Life, by the Beatles. The very distinct sound of this lyric painted a picture in my head: He blew his mind out in a car.  I always pictured a guy in a nice black suit in a nice box-like car sitting at a red light with a gun in his hand. Every time I hear this song, and this lyric in particular, that image comes back to me. Only now it is a little more graphic in nature.

Fast forward to the 1980’s and Video Killed the Radio Star by The Buggles. Just the title did it for me. Then the accusatory lyrics of ‘What did you tell them?’ solidified my love for the song.

Two years later another song came out that I fell in love with, not because of a tragic event in the lyrics, but because I misheard the lyrics and thought the song was about someone dying. The lyric: ‘A little ditty about Jack and Diane.’ What I heard: ‘A little ditty about Jackie dying.’ I thought a kid named Jackie was dying and at the end when Mellencamp sings about two American kids doing the best the can, I thought Jackie had died and the two kids had not been able to save him. I pictured a teenaged girl sitting on the ground by a tree and Jackie lying beside her, his head in her lap. She stroked his hair as he faded from life. 

The End, by the Doors and Bohemian Rhapsody, by Queen have equal standing in songs with tragic lyrics, though the deaths in those songs came across as intentional. 

The Offspring’s The Kids Aren’t Alright has stuck with me since the first time I heard it. The tragedy is though Jenny had a chance (you know she really did), she ended up taking her own life, much like Freddie did in Class of 57, though for different reasons. Both songs are similar in that the singer is looking back on childhood and dreams of a splendid life full of hopeful success. Yet, success didn’t happen for some. 

I could go on for pages and pages about this, but there is one more I want to mention. I’m not particularly an Ed Sheeran fan, but the song Castle on the Hill struck a chord with me the first time I heard the end of it. I almost switched the channel in the car, but when The Boy said he liked the song I left it on. Then the last verse happened and someone’s brother overdosed. I was hooked. 

Morbid, I know.

The thing I find to be common denominators in most of these songs is how life can be cruel. It can be tough. It can be heart wrenching. It can lead us down paths we never thought we would take. Things are complicated. It’s that simple. I related to these songs and many more like them because they speak about life, and they are honest by saying life is not always easy and sometimes it is tragic.

I guess that’s why I write darker stories. Horror is nothing more than a mirror of the real world outside our doors. There is tragedy in every life. I explore those tragedies, with as much tact and care as I can, just as The Statler brothers did in Class of 57. 

Thank you for reading, and as always, until we meet again, my friends, be kind to one another.

A.J.

Posted on by ajbrown · 1 Comment

Closing the Wound, The Final Chapter

[[~…life is just a highway, then the soul is just a car…~]]

If you’ve read this far, then I thank you, from the very top of my heart. I never understood why folks say ‘from the bottom of my heart’. To me it makes no sense. The bottom is where you bury things, where you hide the memories you don’t want to recall. The top… the top is where your thoughts and emotions truly lie.

And if you’ve come this far, take one step further with me. There’s one more order of business that needs to be taken care of.

[[~October 29th, 2011~]]

The afternoon was blustery with the wind blowing in. It had rained the night before, but by the time we made it out to the cemetery, the sun was up high and the day had warmed just a little, but not enough to keep the chill off the skin.

Chad was already there in his old Nissan pick-up. We pulled up on the same lane, got out of the car and looked around. It had been a few years since we had visited–too many, to be honest with you.

We had a bag with six tiny pumpkins in them. Catherine had two Ziplocs with a pumpkin in each. Those two had been carved out and a little light had been placed in each one. One of those lights was for Chris. The other one was for a little girl who died shortly after Catherine and I got married and before the conversation Chad and I had that led to this story.

“His grave is on a corner, near a tree,” Catherine said.

The cemetery is huge and finding someone’s grave in there without knowing exactly where it’s at is near impossible. The three of us walked in the wrong direction, looking at the markers in the ground. Somewhere along the line, Catherine turned back and went the other way. Turns out Chris’s grave was less than a hundred feet from where we parked, but in the opposite direction of the way we had originally walked.

Remember what I said about the memory being an interesting thing? Catherine thought his grave was one place and she was mostly right. It was on the corner and there was a tree just a couple feet from it.

[[Sidebar: When I was a teenager, there was a guy who resembled me. Or maybe I resembled him, since he was near two years older. We went to the same school and every once in a while I would get called to the office (and I assume he did as well) for something I had or had not done and/or something he had or had not done. I’m just going to call him J.W. for the sake of this story.

I found out that not too long ago J.W. passed away. I can’t remember how, but I want to say a car accident. I say not too long ago, but as of today, it’s been six years since his death.

While searching for Chris’s grave and before Catherine let me know she found it, I came across J.W.’s marker. It was kind of surreal. There I stood, in a cemetery looking for one person, but finding another–one that could have been my twin if twins were separated by years instead of minutes.

I stood there for a while, not really thinking, just staring down at his name, at the dates of birth and death. Then I moved on, the search continuing for the person I originally came to find, however J.W. wasn’t far from my mind the rest of the time there. End Sidebar.]]

We stood around Chris’s grave. Someone had put flowers on it. His Aunt Barbara, who had cared for him before he died, was buried beside him, her death coming nearly fifteen years after his. For a few minutes we said little, just stood there.

“So, how are we going to do this?” Chad asked.

Honestly, I didn’t know.

“With the candy,” Catherine said. I pulled out a Three Musketeers, gave Chad a bag of M&M’s and handed Catherine her Butter Finger. We opened our candy. Not that it matters, but Catherine dropped half of hers to the ground.

“To Chris,” I said, lifted my Three Musketeers in the air. We touched them together like you would wine glasses and then ate our candy. Chris was fond of the Halloween treats, so what better way to honor him, than by toasting him with our favorites?

For the next few minutes we talked about the events, what happened to Chris. I told them about the goodbye–THE GOODBYE–Chris had given the last time I saw him. I told them my theory on how things went down. Catherine made a good statement, in that it could have been a drug deal gone bad, that Christopher could have been the supplier and Chris the buyer and that Chris may have owed him money. We all know how dealers don’t like not getting paid for their goods.

Yes, that could be the way it happened.

But, that doesn’t explain the goodbye, the way he sounded, the handshake, the lack of a shrug of his shoulders. It doesn’t explain my gut feelings and it doesn’t change my mind.

We talked about suicide, the way I think things unfolded… things became impassioned. That’s a good thing.

Chad left a few minutes later and Catherine and I stood there a moment longer. We placed one of the lighted pumpkins on Chris’s grave, turned the light on. On his Aunt Barbara’s grave we placed one of the six tiny pumpkins.

For the next half hour or so we searched for the little girl who had died after our marriage. We never found her. Or any of the other folks interred there that we hoped to find. So, we did what we always do when visiting the deceased: we left pumpkins on the graves of others, of folks we didn’t know.

Why did we do that? I like to think that for those who had no flowers on their graves, that by leaving some or, in this case, leaving a small pumpkin, they would feel loved, that they would know they were thought of, even if just for a minute.

[[Sidebar: Before we left, I went to one more grave, this time it was J.W.’s. I placed my last pumpkin above his name, gave a nod, then made my way back to the car. Not, that this has anything to do with Chris’s story, but it was like saying hello to an old friend. Then saying goodbye within the same breath. End Sidebar.]]

Our respects paid to Chris and his aunt–a woman who I was told never got over Chris’s death–my wife and I left the cemetery and headed home. The day was still moderately young and there were things to do. That is the way of life, isn’t it? Someone dies, you greave for a while, then the wound begins to heal. Occasionally, you have to go back and pick at the scabs in order to make them heal better. So often after someone dies we go to the funerals and then move on with our lives. It’s the nature of the human being. If we didn’t move on we would be in an eternal state of depression and that’s not living, folks. After a while, you have to move on. There are things to be done, a life to live…

As for Meatloaf and that song, objects in the rearview mirror are always closer than they appear, even if those objects belong in the past. Again, that’s just the way life is. The trick is to not dwell on that past, to not let it get you down and hurt your heart to the point of drowning.

Now, it’s time to let that deep breath out. Let it go. Let it go.

Goodbye holds such finality to it.

So, to you, the reader, I say farewell until we meet again.

To Chris, we all miss you greatly.

Goodbye, my friend…

Posted on by ajbrown · 1 Comment

Closing the Wound Part V

[[~She used her body just like a bandage, she
used my body just like a wound.
I’ll probably never know where she disappeared
But I can see her rising up out of the back seat now
Just like an angel rising up from a tomb…~]]

Life has a way of moving on and for the most part, time does heal wounds. It just leaves scars behind to remind you that you were hurt.

There are no band-aids for death. Those wounds—mental, spiritual, emotional—they never completely go away. Sometimes a memory comes out of nowhere and your mind goes back to that time… that time where you were hurt deeply.

Like flipping through a portfolio of drawings.

I used to draw and paint and experiment with all sorts of imagery. I loved drawing comic book superheroes (and villains). Chris thought it was cool that I could draw Wolverine and Superman and Spiderman and a whole host of others.

“Can you teach me how to draw like that?” he asked me one Sunday before life took its downward spiral.

“Sure.”

And I did. Chris came to my house several times and we’d either sit at the kitchen table or at the picnic table in the back yard drawing. I showed him a few basics on using circles, squares, triangles and rectangles to frame out the characters’ bodies. All simple sketches that created the foundations of the actual pictures.

He got better as time went on. After meeting Christopher, Chris stopped drawing, or at least he stopped coming over for lessons.

While flipping through my portfolio—one my grandmother bought me when I was in high school and wanting to get into a local art school—looking at pictures I had drawn over the years I stumbled across a brown envelope, one I don’t recall putting in there.

I opened it and pulled out several drawings of a superhero, but this one I didn’t draw. They were signed by Chris. My skin tingled as if I had stuck my finger in a light socket. My breath caught and my chest tightened. I wiped my mouth.

The character on the images had a name that could be considered an omen if I had thought about it back when Chris died. His name: Funeral.

No crap. Really.

There were four images, but two of them stuck out. The one of Funeral with his mask pulled over his face, a cape apparently flapping in the wind. His hands were on his hips in that classic Superman stance. Chris had shaded a good chunk of the costume in grays and blacks. It was a good picture.

The second image was simply a casket. Not all that much of a sign you say? What if I told you the casket was closed? That’s right. The casket was closed.

Sometimes little things… little things bring those angels back from the tombs.

Like a picture.

A picture of four guys—two in their early twenties and two in their mid-teens–at a rest stop between Columbia and Charlotte on their way to Carowinds. They stand behind the snack machine bars as if they are prisoners in a slapstick comedy. Four young men, two of them with more in common than I guess they knew and the other two good friends at one time.

Who would have thought that image taken in the summer of 1995 would be the only image of the four of them together? It would also be the last time one of those four seemed genuinely happy with life, however short lived it was.

The picture disappeared long ago and I looked for it every once in a while when Chris came to mind. Then my dad gave it to me one day out of the blue. And memories… oh my goodness the memories that flooded me, that threatened to drown me. All these thoughts and sidebars and random whatevers and lyrics to songs and… and… and events that changed a lot of lives.

They are all things that I never forgot, but pushed way back to the recesses of my mind. They are in one of those books that normally sit on the shelf at the very top where no one else can reach it. But, there it is, sitting on the coffee table of my soul, the pages turning, the images all black and white and some of them a little grainy. If you flip the pages together starting from the beginning of the book, you’ll see the stop motion images play out in a cartoon-like movie. Isn’t that the way of memories?

It doesn’t take much to dislodge The Great Big Book of Memories from the highest shelf.

We live with those memories and we live with the deaths that happen in our lives. If we don’t, then we just die as well, but I’ve said that already. The dead are just that—dead. The living, however, are alive, unless they choose to never let go of the past.

Maybe that’s why I write this. That picture my dad gave me shook those cobwebs off that book of memories and opened up a little sadness that had passed years ago. I haven’t pulled out the images Chris drew. But, I did go back and read the original version of this story. So much was left out before that I tried to put into this one.

This is how I remember things and some may disagree with me on how events unfolded. That’s fine. To each their own and to those I say, have your memories. Again, this is how I recall things. Other folks may have had a different view, but they can tell their own stories, write their own words. This one belongs to me and I tell what I know, what I remember, what I feel…

There’s a lot of negative stuff in here–I’m quite aware of that. It is what it is. But, it’s not always that simple, is it? Chris was a good kid. I can’t stress that enough. Chris was a good kid. Understand that. Know that. Believe that. Like all teenagers, Chris searched for his place among his peers, among those he trusted and liked, among a world that wasn’t necessarily good to him. He and I had a lot of conversations in the course of the short time I knew him. A lot of them centered on that Laura girl I mentioned earlier.

Chris had a lot of questions about life, love, religion and why things happen. Many of those questions no one could answer for him, and to the same, no one can answer them for you. You have to live life to discover them on your own.

In an interesting turn of thoughts, sometimes you don’t realize how sad someone is until they are gone and you spend some time in solitary thought–just you and your mind. That’s when you notice things you missed before. The part of your mind that analyzes things until they are beaten into the ground takes over and you see things for what they were… or your mind tricks you into seeing things that weren’t necessarily there to start with.

I almost feel like Chris was doomed the day his momma gave birth to him. It’s bad to say that. The truth is so many people didn’t listen to him while he was alive. And now that he’s dead, they can still hear his voice…

I’m rambling. The thoughts are all scattered about and there is no real closure to something like this.

October is my favorite month of the year. The leaves are turning colors, the cool breeze is just that: cool. The mornings become nippy and my wife and I tend to snuggle a little closer under the blankets. Should I do one of those smiley face things here?

Halloween has long been my favorite ‘holiday.’ The creepy things, the horror movies, the scary shows, the cheesy songs, the Halloween theme, trick-or-treating and dressing up. I love everything about Halloween. The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown is one of my all time favorite Halloween themed shows.

Halloween was also Chris’s favorite…

Maybe at some point this month, my wife and I and maybe even Chad can get to the cemetery and visit him. If we do so, I’d like to do something special. I’m not going to say what that is… just in case. But, if we do make it, I’ll let you know.

***
[[~But it was long ago, and it was far away
Oh God, it seems so very far;
and if life is just a highway, then the soul is just a car. And objects in the rear view mirror may appear closer than they are…~]]
Before reading any further, I would like for you to consider opting out at this point. There is only one other thing that needs to be told, though the actual details of it are a bit sketchy at best.

You see, this story doesn’t have a happy ending. No, it has the type of ending so many senseless deaths have. One with more questions than answers and, really, only two people know the real answers to those questions. One of them is dead. The other one is in jail.

I intentionally left out this part because I felt there was no real need to go into detail with: Chris’s death. I did that because I only have the mixed up confessions of the last person to see him alive as the map to what happened and when it happened.

It was a suicide pact.

It was a drug deal gone bad.

Chris tried to kill Christopher… blah, blah, blah.

Why and how Chris died isn’t the important thing. His life is. Remembering him is.

However, there are those out there who will feel cheated for reading over ten thousand words of this story and not finding out how he died.

Before you read the next couple paragraphs understand something: most of this is speculation, simply because of the information given and where it came from. It is the information put together by word of mouth, the newspapers, the local news stations and the court proceedings that ultimately found Christopher guilty of Chris’s death.

The police searched for a couple days for Christopher. They found him at a friend’s house, a little disoriented, tired and hungry. That’s what happens when you’re on the run and you have no where to go and no way to get there. I’m not certain if the friend called the police to let them know of Christopher’s whereabouts or if the cops had just followed him until he sat still long enough to move in for the arrest. No need for two young adults to die, right?

I gather he was interrogated. With or without an attorney present, I don’t know. I’d like to think he was scared, terrified even. Yeah, that’s what I’m going to say.

His first confession was that it was a suicide pact. That Chris was supposed to shoot Christopher with a shotgun, then turn the gun on himself. But, when it came time to do it, Chris couldn’t pull the trigger, so Christopher did. The problem here is that Christopher then chickened out and instead of following through with the pact, he set the trailer on fire and fled.

He recanted that statement and said it was a drug deal gone bad and that he didn’t even pull the trigger. Someone else did. Then why wasn’t Christopher dead as well? And why couldn’t he give the name of the person who supposedly killed Chris? Fear? Hell, I’d think going to jail or possibly facing the death penalty would be scarier than giving the name of the dealer up, especially if that person could go to jail for a very long time.

He recanted that statement as well and said that Chris tried to kill Christopher, that they struggled and that ultimately Chris was killed.

Whatever.

Then he went back to his original statement, the suicide pact. Only this time he said it was Chris’s idea.

When all the information came out about what happened, I called bullshit on a lot of it. Chris told me he was getting away from Christopher. I believed him. I speculated that Chris told Christopher that he wanted nothing to do with him anymore and Christopher got mad about it. Do I think drugs were involved. It’s possible. But, I also thought that Christopher stood to lose a lot if Chris told anything to anyone about the drugs and wear they came from. In a panic, Christopher took the shotgun and took off part of Chris’s head before setting his body on fire to hide the evidence. That’s what I speculated then.

As I’ve thought about this over the last few weeks, I’m becoming more and more convinced that my speculation was wrong. My thinking has changed. Why?

Goodbye.

Goodbye is so final.

Chris told me goodbye that morning as if he knew–KNEW–that I would never see him again. At least not alive. I keep coming back to that. Do you understand? He said GOODBYE. If I’m completely honest with myself, I think I knew as well, though I might have thought he would run away and not come back. I never thought he would die…

As I’ve pondered this I’m closer and closer to believing that the two boys had a suicide pact. I’m not so certain that it was Chris’s idea. After all, he was a follower, not a leader. I also believe that it was more a murder/suicide pact where one would kill the other then turn the weapon on themselves. Chris wouldn’t have been able to follow through on this. Christopher would have been–or so he may have thought. I believe Christopher shot my friend in the head and the scene that played out in front of him as and after he pulled that trigger was so devastating that he couldn’t follow through. Panic probably set in for him–that Oh Shit factor that we’ve all experienced from time to time–and he had to do something with the body, but have you seen what a shotgun does to a person? There was a mess to clean up and Christopher didn’t have it in him to do that cleaning. Instead, he set Chris on fire and ran, hoping that by burning the body and the trailer that there would be no real evidence that a murder had taken place.

The problem with his thinking is that the fire department was quick to react to the phone call it received about a fire in Starmount. They were able to put the flames out before the trailer was completely burned down. And what they found inside was the body of a teenage boy, shot to death and burned.

There you have it. The somewhat inaccurate/accurate portrayal of the death of a friend. I only wrote this part for those who wanted to know, who would have been angry to not find out, who would have bitched and moaned and groaned about me wasting their time and not giving out the details of the murder/suicide or whatever it was.

I write. I paint pictures for readers by using words and showing them what I see in my head. I give them scenery and try to build characters and try to create situations for my characters to figure out and I let them figure out how to deal with it. But, I’m not painting this picture any more than what I have in these last few paragraphs. If you can picture the scene, go right ahead. I, personally, don’t want to see it anymore than my mind will allow…

There is one final piece to this story, one final thing that needs to be told. Until tomorrow…

Posted on by ajbrown · 1 Comment

Closing the Wound Part IV

The sun was going into hiding for the night. The moon seemed to rise earlier than normal. I guess she didn’t want to miss anything. She probably got her eyeful the night before when she watched the events unfold in a single wide trailer in Starmount.

Steve pulled up in his pick-up truck. He was the youth leader at that time and one thing you could bank on is he really cared about those kids. I know–he told me so on many occasions. If there was ever a fault in that guy it was how much he worried about stuff and those teens were chief among those worries. We were close friends–at least at that time we were–and I could tell you how much he talked about the various problems they had, how much he tried to figure out how to help each one of those youths.

I sat on the steps outside the pastor’s study, which was part of the Children’s Wing. Steve got out and I stood. He rounded the front of the truck, his keys in hand and gave me a curious look. “Jeff, I got a call to be here early tonight. Earls said it’s important.”

I nodded. What was I thinking when I said I would tell him? I wasn’t prepared for this.

“Do you know what’s going on?”

I hesitated. “Yeah.”

“What?”

“Steve–”

“Does it involve any of the kids in the youth group?”

It’s an honest question, one that rightfully was asked. There were a few troubled kids in the group, most of them girls, and being the youth leader, it was a legitimate question with a legitimate concern.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Who?”

“Steve–”

“Who?” I think he knew before I said it.

“It’s Chris.” My voice felt so small I wasn’t sure I had spoken.

“What about him? What about Chris?”

I looked at him. Could he see it in my eyes? Could he see it in the way my lips were turned down? Could he see it in the way I stood?

“Steve.”

“Jeff, what’s wrong with Chris?”

And it came out. Two words, so simply stated and carrying all the weight in the world and wielding all the impact of a hammer to a nail. “He’s dead.”

I saw that hammer strike that nail right on the head. Steve’s face screwed up tight as the words reached his brain and the realization hit home. He turned, slung his keys toward the pastor’s study and walked a few feet away.

I looked away. Part of me felt like the meanest person in the world for telling him. I spotted his keys on the ground. It may not have meant anything to anyone else, but those keys became important to me. With what had happened, with the loss of a teenager to a senseless crime, those keys couldn’t be lost. I walked over, picked them up and held them tight in my fist. They were hot. Or maybe it was just me.

***

That Wednesday night service was nothing like it normally was. I guess that goes without saying. There was no singing and there was no message. The youth didn’t meet in the youth room. The only thing that seemed semi-normal was the nursery had kids in it.

We sat in the sanctuary on light colored pews with green cushions that matched the carpet. No one did much talking. For those who knew about Chris, they sat or stood in shock. I sat a few pews behind Steve and next to the girl I would marry one day.

Pastor Earls stood. His face, a study in grief and pale, his eyes rimmed red as if he had been asleep or crying. I believe it was the latter of those two things. He straightened his blazer, cleared his throat and began to speak. His voice was strong, without the first quiver.

I don’t remember everything he said, but the gist of it remains. He spoke of Chris’s death without going into any details–details most of us would find out over the next few days as things began to unfold.

Then the quiver came right along with the tears that followed. With the exception of people crying quietly in their pews, no one spoke.

The weight of a young life, gone way too soon, now sat squarely on each of our shoulders.

***

“How did… umm… how did Laura take it?”

“Who cares how she took it?”

He frowned, confused. “She was his girlfri—“

“No, she wasn’t.” I was a little too sharp in my tone.

“She said she was.”

“She lied. Chris was nuts about her. Absolutely nuts about her. He worshipped the ground she walked on. He would have done anything for her. Anything.”

I could feel the heat rising. My face was probably flushed red. I talked through gritted teeth.

“And you know what she did? She ignored him. He followed her like a lost puppy and she wouldn’t give him the time of day. He bought stuff for her and she took it, said thank you or maybe not and then had nothing to do with him.”

“But, I thought she loved him.”

Bullshit.

That’s the first word that came to my mind. I didn’t say that, but I wanted to.

“You know,” I said and picked up my drink. I took a big gulp, swished the somewhat watered down soda around in my mouth before swallowing. “She never loved him. She toyed with him. Played him like a fool. It really pissed me off to hear her say how much she loved him after he died and to go on and on about how her boyfriend was murdered–you know he was murdered, right?” I probably shouldn’t have mocked her at that point, but damn I was angry.

I looked down at the table.

Deep breaths, man. Deep breaths.

Back up at him, I could see his eyes were a little wider behind his glasses.

“Chad, she wanted a pity party. Oh, poor Laura lost the love of her life. She wanted the attention. I think she liked it. The truth is it wasn’t true. She didn’t love him at all, and if she did, she had a funny way of showing it.”

He fidgeted with his cup for a moment, then changed the subject. I don’t blame him. If I were him I would have tried to do the same thing.

“How was the funeral?”

“It was nice,” I said. Totally the truth there. It was nice, even if it left me feeling a bit like the way Laura acted did.

***

I thought I got their early enough. Not so. I arrived at the church nearly an hour before the ceremony. The parking lot sat packed with vehicles. I only recall a couple times when the lot was packed like that and, sadly enough, they were all for funerals.

I went around to the front of the building like everyone else. I guess I could have gone in the back way, but no need making the entrance where folks paying attention would notice. At the door stood the ushers, members of the church who I knew well. I thought back to that blue teeth incident and forced a smile as the ushers greeted me and handed over one of the bulletins that held the order of service in it. On the front of the single folded page was a school picture of Chris, taken the year before. He smiled happily.

Teenagers filed in, most of them dressed nicely, some of them looking as if they belonged in a fashion show instead of at a funeral. As I watched the many youths enter the church I began to wonder… Admittedly, it’s something that probably should have never crossed my mind, but it did and if I’m going to be honest with you all, I have to tell you what that thing was. If you’ve paid attention throughout this, you would remember that I said Chris was a follower, someone always searching for people to fit in with. He’s the polar opposite of me. What do I mean? I’ve never cared if people like me. If they do, great. If not, well, their loss. Chris, however, did care if people liked him. He wanted his peers to like him. In some way I think he needed people to like him.

As teenager after teenager packed the small Nazarene church in Cayce, I couldn’t help but think, just how many of the well over a hundred kids there were actually friends with Chris and how many of them just wanted a day off from school or just wanted to say ‘hey, I knew him and he was a friend of mine and I went to his funeral and…’ You get what I’m saying? We all know those people. We all know them quite well; those people who use someone else’s tragedy to bring attention to themselves. People like Laura…

I met Catherine and we took a seat near the front of the church. The casket sat closed in front of the pulpit.

Closed.

That’s pretty final.

Catherine sniffled and we talked in hushed tones. I had the hardest time taking my eyes off that closed casket. Goodbye came to mind. You know, goodbye? That thing you say when you don’t ever plan on seeing someone again. That goodbye has lingered with me for years, even when I think Chris is in the rearview mirror a long way off.

[[~…and there was so much left to dream…~]]

The next part of that lyric is ‘and so much time to make it real.’ Time ran out on Chris. Whatever dreams he or anyone had for him died on Halloween night of 1995.

I think about that goodbye and part of what Christopher later said when being interrogated by the police made a lot of sense as to why he said that. I’ll get to that later…

But, it’s still there. I can still see his face, hear his voice. I can still see it in his eyes–I would never see him again and I believe he knew. That feeling that crawled all over me when he said that… I should have gotten out the car, walked over to where he went and pulled him away from there. At the risk of him being pissed at me for doing so, I should have stuck my nose in his business right then and there…

…but I didn’t.

No, I don’t blame myself. Like so many others, when someone dies, we wonder if there were anything we could have done to prevent it. Maybe. Maybe not. We often kick ourselves or worry ourselves over what we could have done. The past is the past and no matter what, you have to move on. You have to live or you just die with the person who left already.

Pastor Earls gave his message that day and Michael W. Smith’s Friends played over the P.A. system. I think it was at that point that most of the tears fell. Catherine wept on my shoulder…

To be continued…

Posted on by ajbrown · 1 Comment

Closing the Wound Part III

“I picked you up. Remember?” I asked Chad and took a bite off a piece of bacon.

“Yeah, I do.”

“I dropped you off at the front of the school like always and you went inside… and Chris walked up to the car.”

“He did?”

Oh yeah, he did…

The sun was out. It was nearing eight in the morning. I picked Chad up in a little blue Escort. Yeah, I was cool. We drove to Brookland Cayce High School, home to the fighting Bearcats.

[[Sidebar: Like most small towns in the South, football is a religion and it was/is no different here. Though, really, it’s been a long time since the football team did much of anything on the field. Truth be told, the B.C. football team has only had three winning seasons in the last sixteen years including abysmal 0-10 seasons in 2007 and 2009. Thankfully, other sports have done well over the years. I’m rambling, aren’t I? End Sidebar]]

I dropped Chad off and went to leave. I stopped before I got started. Chris stood across the street in front of a building that used to be an old bait and tackle shop. Next to it was the barber shop–long gone now. Later that bait and tackle would become a coffee shop called The Pavilion. It’s no longer there anymore.

Chris saw me and I reckon he knew I saw him. He moseyed across the street, met me at that super cool Escort. We exchanged pleasantries, though I think they were a little strained, much like two guys who had been in a fight over a girl would exchange them, both knowing that fight was stupid, but neither being able to take back what was said or done. Especially since the girl chose someone else. He had that sheepish, kid with his hand in the cookie jar look again.

“So, are you going tonight?” I asked.

He didn’t shrug. Not in the least. He said, “Yeah.”

“Good. I’ll call you around four and we’ll figure out what time I need to pick you up.”

“Okay.”

Then Chris did something I don’t think he ever did, not even on the day I first met him. He stuck out his hand as if we had made a deal and a handshake sealed it. I took his hand, shook it once, maybe twice and let it go.

“I’ll talk to you later,” I said.

He replied with, “Goodbye.”

Goodbye? I’ve thought a lot about that over the years. How many people still say goodbye? Not many I would think. They say, see yah, bye, later dude, tata for now, ciao, and a whole host of other things, but goodbye?

You say goodbye to someone you don’t plan on seeing again. You say goodbye to a lover you broke up with. You say goodbye to a crappy boss when you quit a job. You say goodbye to someone moving away. You say goodbye to someone who’s dying. You don’t say goodbye to someone you plan on seeing later that afternoon… unless you don’t plan on seeing them.

I watched as Chris walked away, his shoulders somewhat slumped, hands deep in his jean pockets. He crossed the street and who stood at the corner of the old building that was once a bait and tackle shop? Christopher and a couple other teens I never met. Chris disappeared down the street that ran along the building.

I never saw him again…

***

At four o’clock I called Chris’s aunt’s house from the job. No answer. Fifteen minutes later I did the same thing. Again, no answer.

Since I’m trying to be as honest as I can here, I’ll tell you I got aggravated. I called twice more before I left the shop at five. You guessed it. No one answered.

When I got home, I tried again. And again. And again. At quarter of six I gave up. It crossed my mind that he was out with the weasel boy–yeah, that’s how I thought of him: one rat faced punk with the beginnings of a moustache that could have been his filament whiskers for all I cared. My jaw clenched tight at the thought of being stood up for weasel boy.

I went on to the church, we did our Harvest Festival. Chris never showed up. Neither did his sister. Before we left for trick or treating, I tried calling Chris one more time from the church. You know by now what the result was of that phone call.

My future wife, her sister, my sister and myself piled into my car and we made our way to our first trick or treat stop. On the way we were passed by several fire trucks, their sirens blaring.

Catherine looked back after they passed and said, “I hope everyone’s okay.”

If that’s not something right out of a movie, then I don’t know what is.

***

[[~But I can still recall the sting of all the tears when he was gone.
They said he crashed and burned I know I’ll never learned why any boy could die so young.~]]

“How did you find out?” Chad asked from across the table. Our plates were gone by then and our drinks sat in front of us. My coffee had grown cold and I nursed a soda for all it was worth.

“I got a phone call the next day.”

“Really? From who?”

“Maurice Applegate.”

“Really?”

Yeah, really.

The day had been one of those so-so days where work came in spurts. Normally November was a busy month right up until the day before Thanksgiving, but on that day we all just kind of hung out and did what little work came in for us.

The phone rang and someone answered it. A moment later I had the receiver to my ear and there were few pleasantries in the conversation that ensued.

“Jeff, this is Maurice. I need to ask you a question.”

I didn’t speak right away. Maurice was a cop at the time. He’s since retired, but at the time he was as active as they came. Why did he need to call me? And why call me at work? He didn’t have my work number. Where did he get it from? Red flags waved in the landscape of my mind.

I spoke, but cautiously. “Sure, Maurice. What is it?”

“Have you seen Chris?”

“Chris?”

“Yes. Have you seen him recently?”

“I saw him yesterday morning at B.C.”

“Do you remember what time it was?”

“Before eight.”

“Did you talk to him?”

“Briefly.”

“Do you mind telling me what you talked about?”

Interrogation. That’s what happened. I was being interrogated and that could only mean something bad happened. I remembered how I felt the day before, when he shook my hand and said goodbye, you know something you never say to someone you plan on seeing again.

“I asked him if he wanted to come to the Harvest Festival. He said he would go and I told him I would call him and let him know what time I would pick him up.”

“Was he with anyone?”

The truth was no. He wasn’t. Not while we talked. But, was it the complete truth? Chris walked away and met up with a few people across the street, remember?

“He met some people across the street.”

“Was Christopher one of those people?”

Well, damn. What was I going to do? Mike was in cop mode and I had a feeling the questions were official business. Lying could be bad. Lying could be detrimental.

“Yeah.”

He paused with the questions. In my head I saw him jotting down notes on a little pad that sat within a black leather hard cover. I could see him with his head cocked to the side, pressing the phone against his ear while he wrote.

“I appreciate your time, Jeff. If you hear from him, can you give me a call?”

“Maurice,” I said. A sudden desperation swept over me. I knew something was wrong and a huge part of me knew it was the worst possible thing in the world. “What’s going on?”

“Jeff, I can’t go into that right now.”

“Maurice, please.”

He was a cop and he had a job to do. But, more than that, he knew my family. He and my mom went way back to when they were both single. He probably shouldn’t have told me anything. “There was a fire last night in Starmount. A body was found. We can’t determine if it was Chris or Christopher and we can’t find the other one.”

There’s more to the conversation, but really, that’s all the detail I need to go into. I don’t remember a good chunk of the rest of it, anyway.

I hung up the phone and sat down on a case of paper beneath the counter. I stared at the copier in front of me, its beige and white sticking out much brighter than ever. The floor stood out, the dimensions like stacked blocks. Voices echoed in my ears and somewhere off in the distance the phone rang again.

“Hey man, you okay?” I looked up. Eric the Red (as we called him) stood above me. He had a cigarette dangling from his mouth and his red goatee seemed to shine against his pale white face. His bald head glistened.

My face felt hot.

“I don’t know,” I said.

***

“Wow,” Chad said.

I looked at my watch. It wasn’t even nine-thirty yet, but it felt much later. I wondered if Catherine was awake and wondering where I went. I wondered if Chloe was awake. I wondered if I would even be awake if Chad hadn’t called me.

“What happened next?”

I shifted in the booth seat, putting my back to the wall and stretched one leg out on the cushion.

“We had church that night.”

***

The pastor was a good fellow, last name of Earls. He had been a chaplain in the military. Don’t ask me which branch–I couldn’t tell you if I wanted to. A couple years later he would preside over the wedding of me and my lovely bride, but that was still off in the future and troubles all their own would happen between those two points in time.

Pastor Earls gave me a call. I had been home only a couple minutes when the phone rang. I answered it and on the other end was Earls’ somehow very calm voice.

“Jeff,” he started, stopped, then picked back up again. “Is it possible for you to be at church a little earlier tonight? Something happened last night and I’d like to discuss it with a few folks before the service.”

“Yes, sir,” I said, then added, “This is about Chris, isn’t it?”

In my mind I could see him nodding, the pinched way his lips came together when he was in thought. I could also see sadness in his eyes. I heard it in his voice. “Yes,” he said, then it was his turn to add something. “I guess you’ve heard.”

“For the most part. Maurice called me at work.”

A deep sigh followed. “I just got off the phone with him as well.”

“Anything new?”

Silence can be so damn loud it says everything you could ever need to hear. It spanned the space between us. Another deep sigh followed. I wondered if Earls was struggling to stay composed.

“Well, they’ve confirmed the identity of the young man in the fire.”

He didn’t have to say who it was. I knew.

“So that means they’re looking for Christopher?”

“Yes.”

I squeezed the bridge of my nose. A headache was forming and I think it started somewhere in my chest with that confirmation.

“Does Steve know?”

“I don’t think so, but I’m going to tell him soon.”

“Don’t,” I said. “I’ll tell him.”

***

“You told Steve?”

I nodded, lips puckered. “Yeah. One of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do in my life.”

To be continued…

Posted on by ajbrown · 1 Comment

Closing the Wound Part II

I said earlier Chris was a good kid, but a follower. In the summer of 1995 he had met this other kid. His name was Chris as well, but for the sake of this story, we’ll call him Christopher. Okay? Good.

Christopher wasn’t really a leader or a follower. He was one of those middle of the pack kids who dabbled in drugs and liked to talk big, even though he was thin like a rail and looked like a damn weasel. He looked like he could be mean and controlling and Chris was just the person he needed to associate with, someone he could push around, someone he could control.

They became friends. Don’t ask me how. I don’t know. During the time period from late July to Halloween, Chris took a decided step backward. I think Chris knew better, but who was I? Just someone he knew from Church and Christopher wasn’t about church. Christopher was about Christopher.

Chris stopped coming to services and in the months that followed he went from a smiling, seemingly happy teen to a brooding, frowning, grump.

Talking to him did no good. It just pushed him further away and made him hang out with Christopher more. I know. I tried. Maybe he thought Christopher was the only person who ‘understood’ him. Maybe he felt like he ‘belonged’ while hanging out with Christopher. Maybe he was just trying to be friends with the new kid in town. Why not? It makes sense to me. Chris had been the new kid at once and I don’t think he ever felt fully accepted among his peers.

A couple weeks before Halloween, Chris came back to church. He brought Christopher with him. Could he have been trying to sway Christopher to a different path? Could he have realized something was terribly wrong with the way things had gone? I don’t know…

They were both dressed in jeans and t-shirts and their clothes weren’t clean. That really doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things, but what it showed was significant. For Chris, it was a far cry from how he would normally dress for church. Or, really for anything. Sure, he wore jeans from time to time, but he always wore a nice shirt and occasionally a full on suit. He wanted to look his best for the girl of his dream, a former girlfriend who had dumped him long before he met Christopher. He also wanted to be accepted by those in the youth group and possibly by the adults at the church.

[[Sidebar: I can relate to the brooding personality–I am one.

I can also relate to the need to be understood. Maybe not necessarily accepted, but understood. I was once the new kid at a church where none of the other kids were like me. They all came from mostly well off families and they all spoke alike and their humor was different than mine and they were all… joyful. What a contrast for me, a brooding thinker by nature.

The need to be understood went so far as to one evening at the church I went to when I was a teen having the kids sit in front of the congregation and answer questions from the adults. It was daunting and most of us sat quietly.

I don’t remember the question that was asked of us, but I remember responding to it. After no one spoke up for a few seconds I finally did and what I said was that, as teens, we needed the adults to understand us. Not to just write us off as teenagers who don’t know anything. To understand that we are smart and that if we were given a chance by the adults that we could be counted on for more than showing up for the youth group and playing games.

At the time I was sweet on one of the girls there and the comments were aimed more at her father–who was not fond of me at all and with good reason–than anyone else. Sadly, the comments went over his head.

I can relate. I bet many of you can as well. End Sidebar]]

The two youths sat on the back pew and they reeked of what many of us thought was marijuana. But, there was something else. They smelled like crap and that’s not a metaphor or an analogy. They smelled like crap. Not to try to sound funny (or punny), but it raised one hell of a stink with several members of the congregation.

They were confronted by a few folks. I’m not sure those folks were in the right or the wrong, but I know Christopher was indignant to the whole affair, even smiling about it as if he did it on purpose, as if he meant to cause a ruckus among those holy rollers who spoke of God. Maybe Christopher was trying to make a point to Chris, that the church members didn’t care about people who weren’t like them, who didn’t dress nice and give their tithes and sing in the choir and… Hmmm… all the things that Chris had done. Maybe he wanted to show them to be hypocrites.

Maybe he succeeded.

Chris would only come back to the church once after that.

The day before Halloween fell on a Sunday, much like this year. I headed down to the Sunday School wing to do a head count while services were taking place. There were kids in children’s church and the nursery still was not accounted for. I did this every Sunday. Just the normal routine. I opened the door to head into the Children’s Wing and stopped.

Chris stood in the small breezeway between the two buildings. I closed the door and stood in front of him, a little shocked to see him there, especially after what had happened a couple weeks before. He was dressed nicely in clean jeans and a button down shirt. He had a tie on. He didn’t reek of dope or… well, you know. He looked sad, terribly sad.

“Hey, Chris,” I said.

He gave his hello and it was as if he were the kid caught with his hand in the cookie jar. He looked down at his feet, then out toward the road, behind him to the Children’s Wing; anywhere but up at me. His hands were shoved as far as they would go into his front pockets. I think he wished they could have gone further and maybe taken the rest of him with them.

“How’s it going?” I asked.

A nod followed and then that shrug–that simple gesture of the shoulders that said he didn’t know just how things were going. He confirmed it with his answer. “I don’t know.” His voice was small. It cracked a little. He still didn’t look at me.

I looked passed him, beyond the steps and sidewalk behind him to the blue pick-up truck that belonged to Steve, who also served as the youth pastor. The road ran along that side of the church, ending at the main road that ran along the front. I scanned what little bit of area I could see. From where I stood it was about ten feet to where the sidewalk T-boned. If you went right, you headed toward the front of the church and the main road. If you hooked a left, you went toward the parking lot and the Fellowship Hall. I couldn’t see much more beyond the walls of the building and that blue pick-up.

With Chris standing there all sheepish acting, I wasn’t sure what was going on myself. Part of me wanted to step down the steps and look around the sides of the building. The other part of me–that cautious bastard who I normally toss aside like any other stupid male–said it would be wiser if I stayed put. For once in my life I listened to the cautious side.

“Where’s Christopher?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he said and looked up at me. His eyes were the color of bruises, not that they were blackened by a punch, but more that shade because of exhaustion or maybe drugs. “I’m done with him.”

I couldn’t help but lift my eyebrows at this; maybe I cocked my head to the side. “You’re done with him?”

A nod. A shrug. “Yeah.”

“What’s that mean? ‘Yeah?'”

“I’m done with him. He’s into drugs and he scares me and I don’t want to be around him anymore.”

It was my turn to nod.

“I’m sorry,” he said. I believe he was sincere. It’s hard enough being an adult and saying you’re sorry, but being a teenager faced with the reality of things that you’ve done wrong… that’s tough.

“You’re sorry?”

“Yeah. I want to make things right. I want to apologize to everyone. I want to get right with God and with everyone here.”

[[Sidebar: This last part I had to think about a little. In my head I recall this conversation clearly. It was a Sunday morning and we were in the breezeway between the two buildings. That part is correct. However, I was wrong in my earlier recollection that it was the day before Halloween. The day before Halloween didn’t fall on a Sunday in 1995. It fell on a Monday. I called my wife at home as I sat and pondered this. She even said Halloween fell on a Monday that year.

Not satisfied with both her and I thinking the same thing, I looked it up, that’s right on the world wide spider’s web. I went to the Almanac and lo and behold, Halloween fell on a Tuesday that year. That would put the conversation Chris and I had on Sunday, the 29th of October.

It’s funny how trying to remember the past sometimes escapes you. The finer details have a way of fading out in the wash and leaving only the major part of the story to be told. It’s kind of like having a pair of socks and both of them go in the wash and then the dryer, but only one of them comes out when everything is said and done.

“You know we’re having the harvest festival on Halloween. It’ll give you a chance to talk to some people, you know? If you want to come, I can pick you up and bring you.”

“I don’t know. My sister might be here and if she is she’ll want to go trick or treating and–”

“We can bring her along, too. Then afterward we can take her trick or treating. I know I’m taking my sister and Catherine’s taking hers, so you guys are welcome to come along.”

I should have known by the slow nod, by the way he had that trapped look on his face, the one that said I have other plans that I don’t want to tell you about. I should have known. In hindsight, I guess I really wanted to believe he was done with the other Chris, that he wanted to make amends and get things right… to straighten his young life out. Maybe he did, but he hadn’t worked up the courage to tell Christopher yet.

“I tell you what, I’ll call you before I get off work and you let me know. If you want to go, then I’ll pick you up.”

“Okay.”

I find it interesting and sad that I don’t remember anything else of that day. I don’t recall if he went into the church or if he turned around and walked away. Did we go out to eat after church? Did he stick around long enough to make those amends he claimed to want to make? I have no clue. I’m willing to bet not many people remember things that don’t seem to matter at the time before a tragedy. Little things that are said or actions that are done are forgotten as soon as they have occurred.

The next thing I remember is Halloween morning.

To be continued…