[BLARGH. Incomplete story I wrote last semester in a weird state of mind. Brickwalled due to having zero time and motivation. Reading it now, I have a few ideas, but, AGAIN, no time. Fuggin’ school, brah.]
Don’t come near me no more, she whispered and she turned and walked away, her faded polka dot dress following with wavering reluctance. He remembered when those red dots on white used to burst with newness. The way they stood, arranged and apparent, so sharp they jabbed a man’s eyes and kept a little piece, that piece now tucked away in unknown nethers, faded too.
He remained sitting as the door chime jingled with departure. A dull smile hung below the curvature of his raked grey-black mustache and the Wendy’s continued to perpetuate with nonchalance despite Jeb and his profound new immensities. An unending patchwork of impatient and hungered customers maintained a dull hum that hung below the intermittent cries of children and raucous belches delivered anonymous. Greased paper bags cracked and customers sucked for the remnants of their sodas, an emanation then produced that paralleled volumed static on an empty channel. Tables were glossed with the strain of halogens, their flaws apparent in cracked shadow and uniformed, pimpled employees shouted numbers to the crowd and in time everybody received their number.
Jeb imagined the Wendy’s empty and silent and this thought troubled him. He left an hour before closing, just as the large windows that encircled him became heavy with the black of night and infinite reflections of the interior. He donned his orange hunting cap, adjusted the collar of his cracked leather duster, and left the building. That bell rang out, but not a soul would know it.
A man needs to have a complete set of skills. A complete set of skills is important. If you don’t have a complete set and only a little set or no set at all, women won’t want to go on dates with you and instead of going on dates with them you have to just follow them to Wendy’s and sit a little bit close and a little bit far and pretend it’s a date. Sometimes they know you’re pretending and remember you don’t have a complete set of skills and they get angry and whisper at you to go away like Miss Bethany did.
He found comfort beneath a haggard oak tree on a wide median that curved before the quaked blacktop of a Piggly Wiggly’s parking lot. The tree was dead, caked in dirt, strangled by the conformations of the concrete curb, which paralleled a road recently tarred and painted in the fog of midsummer heat. That is fresh, thought Jeb and he sank into the comfort of his grandpap’s brown leather duster. The duster stank of wet, warm dog in such a heat and as it mingled with the penetrable, sweet scent of the vaporous blacktop, and the dead must of oak and piss, Jeb thought of home, crying for a good while, falling to sleep beneath the comfort of a glowing, anthropomorphized pig.
Jeb opened his eyes to the clamored scent of salted waves and insistent cries of gulls aloft. A three-hundred pound king crab scurry-galloped toward in bellowed proclamation of a battle undone in the kingdom’s favor. The mouth was a mess of pincer, hair, and fang, moving in accordance with nothing but the ebb and flow of nihilism, sputtering yellowed salt water in sporadic gestures of what appeared to Jeb as exhaustion.
“JEB KING JEB, YOUR MIGHTY STE “– it skidded to a halt, eight jagged legs twitched independently as if in anticipation of a holiday’s imminent arrival or premature departure.
“Your mighty steed has arrived. I bring news of battle undone in the kingdom’s favor. Queen Miss Bethany and her master’s court have defected to our favor in hopes of chairing the throne with Your Majesty. We took the pig from the rear. His van approached our walls to find the lower city devoid of life—the villagers were evacuated as you commanded—and absolutely gutted his force’s right arm. They retreated immediately.”
“Okay.”
Stalked eyes blinked with anticipation of the rough hewn poesy of a king, glancing to the sea and sky, receiving nothing. Jeb only wanted to ride the crab, because it was large, and see the castle, because that sounded pretty neat. Jeb wasn’t the same king when he was present in his dreams.
“Also, your Peepaw and Nan-nan aren’t dead anymore.”
“Okay.”
So Jed boarded the creature, eager to see his loved ones again. The crab’s eight-legged vibratory gait and dense, pocked surfaces tickled Jeb where no living other had. In the relief of his metaphysical extremities, Jeb relaxed and scuttle-galloped away into his dream-kingdom, and he woke again to the moistening of his briefs, the premature croak of dawn, and the smiling pig. His prophetic life anew now the recipient of this warm requiem, dreams melting in the break of day. I do not want to live here anymore thought Jeb and he stood up, his freshly dampened Wranglers now sporting uncharted archipelago at the center of his gravity, and headed west against the blinding light and dopplered grind of early morning traffic.
I’m not a fan of roads. Miss Bradshaw in first grade Miss Bradshaw used to tell me all to make my own path and a path is pretty much a road maybe just a little bit bigger or a little bit smaller but you still go on it to get places like the store or to Peepaw’s house but when you walk a lot of times on the same path it just digs into the dirt and I figure if you do that enough then in time you’ll dig a path straight on to the devil himself even if you have done nothing all that bad and I did first grade a lot of times so I figure that it I kept in school then hell might be a lot closer than if I didn’t.
Jeb heard the bear before he saw it. Garbage on garbage sounded with spacious intervals, crinkles snubs and cracks. Tin on tin on plastic. Snuffs like a fire hose shot through a screen door. Jeb was reminded of the sound a raptor made in pursuit of scent. Jurassic Park, he mumbled just before recalling the raptors’ equally acute hearing sensibilities. Shoot.
The bear tilted his snout toward the patchwork canopy of pine. There was no perceptive threat, only the curious bystander effect in act, drawn out by the bear and his more immediate interest in Cracker Jack crumbs and what’s that? damp Kleenex. He continued to rummage unperturbed while Jeb, concerned with the diet of this enlarged pig-dog and, oblivious to the fickle nature of the general bear population’s reaction to being physically reassured, thought that it might be a good idea to physically reassure the bear. You smell familiar. What you eatin-
Jeb ran his fingers through the matted black hair, against the grain. For the smallest portion of a second in which this behavior was being process by the bear’s varying fear-producing glands and matters—grey to pink—Jeb’s chest warmed and became lighter than the surrounding air. He continued to smile as his own glands and matters were inefficient in the ways of producing fear, even as the bear bellowed and leapt higher than a bear ought, disturbing the lower branches of dense pine before blinking off into the darkened forest, a wide swath of brush swaying in his departure.
Pig-dog seemed friendly enough, thought Jeb having no preconception of what a bear actually was. Better follow. And so he did, his duster catching on shadowed branches during his night walk. Jeb stopped and silently acknowledged this as a fault in such a style of clothing, sighing once and returning to his journey with admirable diligence. A crescent moon hung in the sky and for the first time in a fortnight, Jeb did not preoccupy his mind with the existence of a man on its imperfect surface.
He tracked the bear with a dedication unbeknownst to man of his predisposition. Despite comfort relative problems due to a massive case of anterior pelvic tilt, Jeb trudged up and down mountainsides, only stopping to marvel at “tree mouses” and eat whatever was green and buried. He whistled an amalgamation of nursery rhymes, the only songs he knew by heard and independently invented hip-hop, lyricizing about his Peepaw’s advice and the color of Miss Bethany’s dress, but always came back to Pig-dog:
So fat of a dog
And he looks like a pig.
I like pig-dogs
Because they are friendly and big.
And he remembered the matted black hair, finer than one might anticipate, but still riddled with the varying imperfections of outdoor living, Jeb a master of each.
A Peepaw is a good thing to have. They take you hunting and teach you all the great skill for survival. I know how to tie some knots and take the inside of a fish outside of a fish. Also I know how to eat roots and berries because they are in the forest and they are good for you and nutrition. Peepaw says to stay away from the mushrooms though because some of them can make you crazy and go to adult restaurants and shoot people like my dad did he says. I still want to try and eat them though because Emril made a spaghetting with them and he hasn’t shot anyone yet but sometimes he yells BAM which is close to the same thing and makes me not want mushroom spaghetting anymore.
Jeb pawed at the base of a gnarled deciduous, caving to the luminous craving of mushrooms. Several confusing stumps revealed themselves, their heads tilted off-axis like a family gathered in a reckless attempt at one more Christmas together, amok in their difference. Jeb smiled, collected the mushrooms and threw them into a pile in which he had previously assembled a beaver stack pile of limp dandelion stalks. Yum. Spaghetting. thought Jeb as he forked a handful of the bitter mix into his mouth, chewing with a modest satisfaction that he had fixed up the best spaghetti he’d ever had.
Razorblade gut-rot had enraptured Jeb as he curled his duster tighter around his bubbling midriff. He wound himself into an impacted fetal position and willed not to move from the pose, unexplainable in its comfort. The night sky was blotted out in layers, first by clouds, abundant and amorphous, and by the black silhouetted ink blots of the canopy. In the distance a hawk cried out in predatory anticipation, but choked on the tail end of its call as if warned by an acute immune system of an impending head cold. Gotta find Pig-dog, thought Jeb just before losing sight of himself and dozing off into something one cannot quite call sleep.
Pig-dog nuzzled a paralyzed leg, stirring Jeb into a shifting form of self-awareness in which the sky and ground were indifferent, their emptiness and omnipotence mutual, and in which Jeb could hear and see, but not move so much as a finger if he willed it.
It is important not to waste. This is important because if you waste then stuff just builds up into a pile and you can’t get out of the house so easy anymore and getting out of the house is important because exercise. Nan-nan said my dad wasted too much and didn’t get out of the house much and that having no exercise made him really angry at the world because his skills were so incomplete and that is why you always finish what is on your plate even if it is stupid cauliflower.
And in the fleeting moments of Jeb’s life as the bear began to gnaw on his kneecap, pulling it off with little effort, severing the popliteal artery in a surprising geyser of vessels, Jeb only thought to himself Thanks, friend, and could have swore he heard—among the snap of femur and wet lick of chops—that the sentiment was returned, but with no witness to confirms the oath, Jeb, with no real say in the matter, drifted off smiling in silence into the cold, dark night.
