summer barbecues. It was nighttime, pitch-black inside, and only a dimly lit blue shining on dewed grass before the darkness continued at the woods line. I don’t know why I stood there, no recollection of a sound that may have woken me up and brought me to scan the yard. It wasn’t my house, but that didn’t seem strange, and I didn’t question it. It all seemed natural. I knew I was at a house I’d gone to with Maggie and her family when I was little, her uncle’s house in Ellijay.
All of a sudden, one of those motion-sensor lights, the kind I always thought Daddy should buy, lit up the yard with a jaundice yellow and out of the woods came this bloody, naked body walking like a string puppet. As it got into the light I could see the skin bubbled up in the few places it still held around the jaw, the rest of the face just indistinguishable meat. When I saw where the knife had stuck him, I knew it was Robbie Douglas, but not until then. The place that skinning knife had hooked into him was lapped over and seeping with a yellow almost the color of black-eyed Susan petals, even yellower in the light. He was moaning something heavy, but no words, and he just kept walking closer and walking closer and nothing I could do could move me from that glass door. As he climbed onto the patio, I could feel that snub nose tucked down the back of my britches, cold steel riding right beneath the waistline, but my arms couldn’t move to grab it. My brain said go and my arms never moved. Wasn’t a goddamn thing in the world that could bring those arms to life, and before I knew it he’d slid that door open and was on me.
That was the part that kept shaking me from dream. At that same place I woke up out of breath, heaving for air as if I’d just had the wind knocked out of me. My arms were crammed under my body and dead as nails, and I had to roll my whole torso toward the edge of the bed to get those arms dangling so the feeling would run back into them. I hadn’t slept more than a few hours. When I closed my eyes that drippy face was taped up to the insides of my eyelids like a poster, and when that faded long enough to sink a bit deeper, that dream started playing again and before I knew it I was choking for air. With my fingers still prickly, I grabbed my cell phone and checked the time: 4:42 a.m. Scared of closing my eyes, truly scared of what would happen next if that dream played out any further, I just decided to get up.
There was a pretty blonde on the television trying her damnedest to sell some type of chopping gadget to housewives still awake after their husbands had pushed them past the point of sleep. The blonde cycled through a round of salsa just about as fast as she could pull onions, jalapeños, and tomatoes from the bag, and not long after she was hammering away at whole bulbs of garlic. That chopping gadget pulsed tomatoes way too thin for any sort of sandwich and I’d lost hope in it being of much use, but that pretty blonde kept my finger from surfing channels.
She had long curls tucked up behind her head and blue eyes. Light freckles dotted her cheeks just enough to be cute, and her teeth were set straight like someone had filed away at them and balanced bubbles in a level till it all lined up perfectly. It was that smile and how her hair wanted to just burst out and drape across her shoulders that made me realize how much she looked like Maggie.
I grabbed a cigarette from Daddy’s pack on the coffee table and lit my first. My eyes were melting into the glow of the television, but I couldn’t see what came next to the chopping block. My mind was someplace else, shooting back and forth between the way Maggie’d looked at my hands that night when Avery quit moving, and the way her lips had pursed just a little when she sat right beside where I was sitting now. I wondered if she’d wanted to kiss me, if somehow or another she had the feelings in her that were eating me alive, if maybe she’d forgiven
All of a sudden, one of those motion-sensor lights, the kind I always thought Daddy should buy, lit up the yard with a jaundice yellow and out of the woods came this bloody, naked body walking like a string puppet. As it got into the light I could see the skin bubbled up in the few places it still held around the jaw, the rest of the face just indistinguishable meat. When I saw where the knife had stuck him, I knew it was Robbie Douglas, but not until then. The place that skinning knife had hooked into him was lapped over and seeping with a yellow almost the color of black-eyed Susan petals, even yellower in the light. He was moaning something heavy, but no words, and he just kept walking closer and walking closer and nothing I could do could move me from that glass door. As he climbed onto the patio, I could feel that snub nose tucked down the back of my britches, cold steel riding right beneath the waistline, but my arms couldn’t move to grab it. My brain said go and my arms never moved. Wasn’t a goddamn thing in the world that could bring those arms to life, and before I knew it he’d slid that door open and was on me.
That was the part that kept shaking me from dream. At that same place I woke up out of breath, heaving for air as if I’d just had the wind knocked out of me. My arms were crammed under my body and dead as nails, and I had to roll my whole torso toward the edge of the bed to get those arms dangling so the feeling would run back into them. I hadn’t slept more than a few hours. When I closed my eyes that drippy face was taped up to the insides of my eyelids like a poster, and when that faded long enough to sink a bit deeper, that dream started playing again and before I knew it I was choking for air. With my fingers still prickly, I grabbed my cell phone and checked the time: 4:42 a.m. Scared of closing my eyes, truly scared of what would happen next if that dream played out any further, I just decided to get up.
There was a pretty blonde on the television trying her damnedest to sell some type of chopping gadget to housewives still awake after their husbands had pushed them past the point of sleep. The blonde cycled through a round of salsa just about as fast as she could pull onions, jalapeños, and tomatoes from the bag, and not long after she was hammering away at whole bulbs of garlic. That chopping gadget pulsed tomatoes way too thin for any sort of sandwich and I’d lost hope in it being of much use, but that pretty blonde kept my finger from surfing channels.
She had long curls tucked up behind her head and blue eyes. Light freckles dotted her cheeks just enough to be cute, and her teeth were set straight like someone had filed away at them and balanced bubbles in a level till it all lined up perfectly. It was that smile and how her hair wanted to just burst out and drape across her shoulders that made me realize how much she looked like Maggie.
I grabbed a cigarette from Daddy’s pack on the coffee table and lit my first. My eyes were melting into the glow of the television, but I couldn’t see what came next to the chopping block. My mind was someplace else, shooting back and forth between the way Maggie’d looked at my hands that night when Avery quit moving, and the way her lips had pursed just a little when she sat right beside where I was sitting now. I wondered if she’d wanted to kiss me, if somehow or another she had the feelings in her that were eating me alive, if maybe she’d forgiven
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