Read Online A Gentle Hell by Autumn Christian - Free Book Online Page A

over her dead-weight ribs.
    “I never stopped,” I said.
    “Where are you taking me?”
    “I told you, somewhere safe.”
    She turned her head and laughed, leaving a sticky trail of blood against the back seat in the shape of her. I drove faster, bit the inside of my mouth, and glanced at the wrench in the passenger’s seat.
    I didn’t know where I was going exactly - I passed the hospital in about twenty minutes and got onto the interstate. I kept driving. My hands turned into wrecks. June fell asleep in the back of the car and rolled over, clutching the blanket. And all the time, the wrench like a love crime on the passenger seat, obstructing my view from anything else, the same wrench once long ago cleaned of blood and matted dog hair and viral spit.
    I left the town and kept driving down the interstate. The sun rose over the flat horizon, a hot organ. I knew of a place that I’d been too long ago, once on a summer vacation before I’d ever met June or the monster inside of her, before I’d been confined to the three mile space between my work and her outstretched hand. So long since I’d thought of it. A woodland lake, surrounded by miles of trees and hush spaces. It’d be quiet. We’d be alone. Me, my wife, and the wrench.
    In the backseat, June coughed. In the rear-view mirror I saw her curl and uncurl her hands. Stiff, trembling hands, the fingernails caked with gore. She bit at her knuckles and whispered my name. For only a second, I saw the sixteen-year-old girl in the backseat, naked underneath the blanket with the white dress, bloody and mangled, tied around her wrists.
    At the next exit, I turned the car around and went back home.
    I drove back up our gravel driveway and shut off the engine. I sat in the driver’s seat for several minutes, shaking, looking at the wrench, looking back at June.
    “Where are we going?” June asked me.
    Without responding I got out of the car and opened up the back door. I gathered up June’s limp body in my arms. Once more she reached up and clasped her arms around my neck. Her head lolled across my chest, smearing blood.
    “There’s nowhere to go,” I said. “We’re not going anywhere.”
    Though I didn’t see it, I felt it pressed against my skin. Her cold smile.
     
     
     
    The Singing Grass
     
    I told him that in the singing grass I saw a deer tear out the heart of a cougar, but instead of staying away he went out there to paint. He didn’t want to believe me about the deer, but he didn’t want to believe that I was a virgin either, so I let it go. It wouldn’t matter how many times I described the way I knelt at the edge of the singing grass, barefoot and tearing at my dress, eyes shaking like psychotropic leaves. And it wouldn’t matter how I described the raw mass of heart quivering on the ground at my feet, the deer on the other side of the meadow licking the blood off her muzzle with her black-tipped tongue. And all the while the grass, the blue aberrant grass, singing to lure me over the edge, press my face into its depths and drown me.
    Because I said to him once, when we first met, “all writers are liars,” like a badge of honor, and I’ve never managed to escape it since.
    So I stopped trying to stop him from going up there. Instead I watched him from my hiding place in the cover of the trees as he carried his painting supplies out of town to the side of the mountain, past the woods and the angry, gray-bottomed spring and then finally, the meadow on the edge of the singing grass.
    He didn’t paint landscapes outside on the edge of the singing grass, at least, not the kind of landscapes you see on bathroom walls and in the sterile, white-proofed halls of psychiatric wards. What he painted was alien and uncomfortable, anthropomorphic beings with exposed nerves and melting skin, balloons like vats filled with saline and brains. He painted clowns with holes for eyes and bodies made for flatworms, apocalyptic fog, empty skies that crackled like