River Fish

Virginia watches the two pale headlights wobble their way up the hill. She knows the groan of Archie’s Chevy, the rusted creak of the axle in the potholes, the rattle of the wide, ancient truck-bed screaming threats of breaking from its body, of becoming wreckage, cleaved metal loping through darkness. She meets him on the porch and can tell by the way he hops out of the cab that he’s been drinking, his shoulders low, lupine, hunched forward in his mustard-tinged Carhart. It is a familiarity she had hoped to avoid, but one that speaks to the ways he has surprised her over these past couple of months. His dog eyes smiling so sweetly in the porch light. He makes his way, lifts a bottle of whiskey proudly to show her, then stops, raises a finger to his cheek. He hurries back to the truck, and when he shoulders the door closed again, he’s also holding a bouquet of wildflowers.

“I don’t need any more flowers,” she says. “Got a whole field of them up past the ridge.”

“Burn ’em then,” he says. And this makes her smile.

In the living room, after they’ve made love, she sits wrapped in a blanket in front of the wood-burning stove, and he brings her the bottle and two teacups. The flowers are resting safely in a mason jar on the counter. He sits down, and she lifts the blanket and feels the bristle of his leg hair against her naked side. He fills her cup before his own, which is when she notices the label.

“Where did you get this?” she asks, tapping the papered glass with her knuckle.

He only grins.

“This is expensive,” she says. “My father had a bottle of this in his office. Kept it in a lock box for special occasions.”

“Any good?”

She shakes her head.

“Never got to try it,” she says. “No one did. The day Mom left, he took it out and smashed it on the stone wall behind the cabin. I found the shattered bottle top. It was still sealed.”

“Hmm,” says Archie. She hears him sip as she stares into the bronze pool, the liquid transparent enough to reveal the spiraled, pencil-like marks on the bottom of her cup from spoon stirring. She turns the cup in her hand, watching the color go thin, staring into the penciled swirls.

“Did you steal it?” she asks him.

“No.”

“How then?”

He sips some more.

“You’re not going to try it?” he asks.

“How did you get it?”

He puts his arm around her, squeezes, kisses her ear.

“You ever think about leaving this place?” he says. “Going down south maybe, where it’s warm all year. In Mexico, you can buy a bottle of mezcal for five bucks, and it tastes just as good as this. You can live well down there for practically nothing, out by the ocean if you want, because the dollar is worth so much more. We could get a few goats, chickens, maybe a cow. We wouldn’t need much to be happy.”

Now she lets the cup go still and holds it with two hands, staring down before she drinks the whole glass in a single gulp. She sets the cup on the hardwood and pushes his arm off of her, stands, moving for her jeans, unsightly as they are, shed like snakeskin in the doorway to the bedroom.

“What?” he asks.

She picks up the pants, moves into the bedroom and flicks the light on, separates his clothes from hers, begins to dress.

“Virginia,” he says. “Come back. I know what you’re thinking, but that’s not it.”

She pulls on her sweatshirt, underwear, pants, walks out into the kitchen, and puts the kettle on.

“Virginia,” he says, puppy dog eyes on her now, that sorrowful, little boy lilt in his tone. “Virginia, it was Max who gave it to me. I don’t know where he got it, I didn’t ask.”

She looks back at him.

“You expect me to believe that?” she says.

He shrugs.

“It’s the truth,” he says. “Won’t change whether you believe it or not, so I don’t see the use in arguing.”

She spits into the sink and looks out the window over the shadowed backyard, with the garden freshly tilled and a host of seeds already planted just that afternoon for the spring harvest and the deer fence mended that afternoon too. No cucumber this year because of the rot the last two seasons that turned all the leaves a sickly yellow, despite the remedies Virginia tried. She’ll do peppers instead. Chilis and summer squash transplanted later in the spring from the seed bed in the basement and the tomatoes later on too. She’s left the beds on the far side to be filled when there’s no longer any risk of frost, still a few weeks out.

“Virginia,” Archie says. “You know what I thought the first time I saw you?”

She lets herself glance at Archie but doesn’t answer him.

“I thought, if I could spend even one night with that girl, that would be worth the whole rest of my life.”

She turns to face him but makes sure he can see that she isn’t impressed.

“It’s the truth,” says Archie. “Another thing that won’t change whether you believe me or not. I thought you were just about as close to heaven as I was ever going to get. And I knew I had no business going up and speaking to you, but I also knew, if I didn’t at least try, I’d think about it for the rest of my life. What do you think of that?”

Virginia can’t help it. She rolls her eyes but betrays herself with a soft smile. The softest, but still enough to let Archie know he’s not in real trouble. 

“You roll your eyes,” he says. “You don’t believe me, okay, but it’s the truth. We could argue about that too, but it won’t change a damn thing, and you know it.”

He pours more whiskey into her teacup and then stands with both cups in hand and the blanket around his shoulders, hanging open down his midsection. He moves to her, careful not to let the blanket fall, and puts the whiskey down on the peeling linoleum counter beside her.

“And what is it you thought of me?” he asks. “That first night.”

She looks at the drink but doesn’t take it, thinks about not answering, thinks about giving him a lie, or something to shut him up, but then she pictures him across the room at that bar in town like he asked, and she decides the truth is better.

“I thought you looked sad,” she says. “And lonely.”

She can feel his eyes on her, studying her, his face almost certainly squinched in that difficult, concerted way that he has of squinching his face when he doesn’t understand.

“Is that all?” he asks.

“No,” she says. He reaches out, touches her shoulder.

“I felt kindness in you,” she says, and she doesn’t look at him but lets him pull her close and take her in his arms, his nakedness smooth against her wrist as he lifts the blanket suddenly, over their heads so it encases them both in a cocoon. She can feel the breath in her ear and the smell of whiskey wafting from their open mouths.

“What if we were to get married?” he says. 

She looks at him now, his shadowed face too close to guess what he’s really thinking. She tries to convince herself that he’s just drunk, that she can believe him about Max, that Mexico is just something someone told him in town, and now he’s speaking without thinking, without knowing what he’s saying.  

“It’s late,” she says. “And I have the market tomorrow.”

She feels him start to answer just as the kettle whistles, and she uses its song as an excuse to pull away, to emerge back out into cool air and the light of the small room, blinking, and seeing the flicker of the fire as it carves shifting layers of shadow against his blanketed form, the hurt in his eyes real but also maybe nothing, maybe just drunkenness, and confusion. She knows it’s no use getting into it now, parsing out the fact and fiction, the drunkenness from the soft, complicated heart of the thing.

“Virginia,” he says as she pours her whiskey from her glass into his, opening the cupboard, selecting, and setting a teabag into the wet cup. “Virginia, I…”

She wakes once, in the night, and he is not beside her. She goes to the kitchen, but he is not there either. His truck is still in the drive. She goes to the window and looks and maybe sees a shadow moving along the edge of the forest, but she can’t be sure. She pours herself a glass of water and goes back to bed, but when she wakes in the morning, early, he is beside her again, purring slightly with each inhale, like a kitten.

She dresses in darkness. Puts the kettle on, steeps her tea, then goes outside into the pallid, burgeoning light, and walks along the threshold of the forest. She sees nothing, checks the cab of his truck, but sees nothing. She walks halfway to her own truck, about to leave, but then she stops and bites her lip. She glances over her shoulder, takes a breath, and goes to check the shed on the other side of the cabin. The shovel has fresh dirt on the blade. She feels sick, like having swallowed something very sour on an empty stomach. She closes the door to the shed, walks back, gets into her truck, and drives off.

“Oh, he wouldn’t get mixed up with that stuff,” Pilar says, passing Virginia up another crate of bottles into the truck bed. “He’s a good boy, his momma was a nurse at the hospital, you know that, right? Before she passed, God rest her. If he got some fancy liquor, it was probably from Max, just like he said.”

Pilar rests her hands on her wide hips with authority, her breath only just visible in the morning air, her plum-shaped cheeks pink from the cold and from lifting the crates.

  “Though Max,” Pilar says. “Max I wouldn’t trust to dig a hole in the ground. You tell Archie to steer clear of that one.”

Virginia stacks the crate and Pilar moves again into the shadow of the great barn, trailing little puffs of breath like a steam engine as she goes, the blood red of her flannel coat gone syrupy in the fresh light.

“But it wasn’t just the bottle,” says Virginia. “He was acting strange. He was talking about Mexico and…” She trails off.

Pilar emerges again from the cave with another milk crate in her arms, but her eyes are suddenly bright and curious.

“What else?” says Pilar.

Pilar has a nose for gossip, and Virginia knows better than to mention the ‘M’ word.

“Nothing, he just wanted me to go with him, wanted us to be together in Mexico, he kept saying. Buy a house down there, because he said it was cheaper to live.”

Pilar heaves the crate up, a grunt and a smile and the breath puffing and vanishing. Virginia takes it, stacks the rattling bottles, turns back, and sees that Pilar is still standing and smiling up at her. 

“I know you do not go to the bars anymore,” says Pilar. “But you should hear him, the fool he makes of himself over you, that boy. He tells everyone you’re an angel, that he will become rich somehow, that he can barely stand to sleep at night when he is not with you. A trout, he calls it, a trout fighting in his heart, flailing on the line because of how much he loves you, because of how happy he is that you are with him.”

Virginia frowns. She’s heard the stories of Archie in the bars all right, the fights he says are to defend her honor, the jealousy he feels when seeing one of her old boyfriends—it’s a small town, and Virginia has lived there her whole life—Archie insults these men, ignores them, challenges each to jaw-clinching, white-knuckled games of pool, with more on the line than he can afford. He keeps a photograph of her in his phone, a picture of her lying in bed in the early morning, her naked body only just barely covered by a bedsheet. He will show this photo to everyone and anyone, this is what she’s heard: old ladies, her exes, bartenders, shopkeepers, even kids. He’s so proud, and he likes to tell them she’s his girl. Look at my girl. Somethin’ isn’t she? Isn’t she?

“He is in love,” says Pilar. “It’s sweet, I think. And you should enjoy it while it lasts. Enjoy having a man crazy over you, because it fades. On that you can be certain. It always fades. And he is quite handsome, isn’t he? And he takes care of you in bed?”

“Please,” says Virginia. “Not today. We have work to do.”

“He has a nice carrot? Straight? Not too small? Is he all naturale?”

“Pilar, let’s go, or should we switch places? Do you want to be in the truck? I was telling you because I’m worried, not so we could talk about carrots.”

“Oh, you shouldn’t be worried. He is a good boy. He knows not to get involved with those men. His mother was a nurse, a good, honest woman. She raised him right. He only loves you, that’s all, and he’s poor so he thought of Mexico, because he’s heard stories, as all poor men have.”

“He would be poor in Mexico too, I think.”

“Maybe he would,” says Pilar, turning again. “But he can dream, can’t he? I dream sometimes too, don’t you, Virginia? It is good to dream. And if you’re drinking whiskey, it’s even easy.”

When she gets back home, there is a note from Archie on the counter saying he loves her and that he will be back later in the evening. There is not much in the fridge: beer, hotdogs, some kale. She will go fishing tomorrow, she decides. It is supposed to be warmer than it has been, and it’s also Sunday which is both her and Archie’s day off. She cooks the hotdogs and kale with sliced garlic and onion. She pours some beer into the pan so that the steam rises, and the kale turns a wonderful bright, green color. She waits for him, but he doesn’t come and so then she calls him, but he doesn’t answer.

In the morning, he is not beside her when she wakes, and there is no message on her machine from him either. She calls again, but he does not pick up, and so she gets into her car and drives down to the room he’s paying for in town. She talks to the old woman who lives in the apartment below, but the woman says she has not seen Archie, and that his truck was not outside when she went to sleep, and it was not there in the morning when she woke either. Virginia thanks the woman. She drives to look for his truck at one of the bars, but it’s not at the bars and it's not parked outside Max’s house and no one is home there.

She drives back, gets out of her truck, and goes to the shed. She gets the shovel and begins searching the woods where she thought she saw the shadow two nights before and digs whenever she sees a stone that looks out of place or a mound of leaves that maybe could have been used to cover something buried. She digs two large holes, and several small ones, but finds nothing except earthworms and a few startled pill bugs.

It is still early, just past noon. She goes back inside and eats the rest of the kale and hotdogs that she was saving for Archie. When she is finished, she rinses her plate and then drags one of the kitchen chairs into her bedroom and uses it to climb up and reach the top shelf where the rifle is kept in her closet. It is not much of a rifle. A twenty-two, for hunting rabbit or squirrel, which she does only when money is very tight. She loads the rifle and walks with it, dragging the kitchen chair behind her, back into the other room where she sits down in the chair at the small kitchen table and sets the rifle beside her to lean against the wall. It is still early, only one o’clock, and she watches through the front window as the sunlight sparkles in wonderful bright patches, widening and narrowing between the swaying arc of the trees and across the reflective windshield of her Ford. She does not have anything in the fridge for dinner. She remembers that she was going to go fishing and tries to decide if that makes sense still or if it makes more sense to go into town and buy food and then come back and wait around inside all day hoping that Archie will call and that the men she is worrying about will not come.

She can’t decide. She takes the rifle and goes back into her bedroom and lies down on the bed. She can still smell him on the sheets and on her pillow. She realizes he wouldn’t do that to her, involve her in anything dangerous, leave something here for them to find. He most likely went to the bars, got drunk, and passed out somewhere, probably at one of Max’s friend’s places. The two of them most likely polished off the bottle of expensive whiskey together because Max must have stolen it from one of the stores or—worst-case scenario—maybe held one up. The point was, Archie would never involve himself in something really terrible or dangerous. Archie is a good boy, that was a fact, a sweet boy whose mother was a nurse, who raised him right, just like Pilar says. She takes a deep breath, righting herself, and ignoring the sick feeling in her gut like she’s eaten something sour. She gets out of bed and walks back out into the kitchen and puts the gun down and puts her boots on. Maybe he was just upset she had brushed off his proposal. But was that even what it was?

The river is high because of the rain earlier in the week, and the moss bed where she sometimes sits is like a sponge and oozes rainwater when she presses down with her boot. Fishing always reminds her of her mother who disapproved of anything killed or caught in the wild.

“Do you want people to think we’re hicks?” her mother would say. “That we can’t afford to buy our own food?”

Her father laughed it off, called her mother a princess, but he was proud of the dresses she wore into town, the looks she’d get from men, and the breathless way children would speak to her like they thought she was someone famous, a movie star. It did not occur to him that the vow her mother took at nineteen—in sickness and in health, the promise that only death was capable of forcing their parting—might not withstand those looks, or the bars she frequented, or the dancing she would sometimes do until the early hours of morning. Dancing, that was all, she assured them. I’m just off to do a little dancing.

Virginia ties the rig to the line and then moves to the edge of the bank. She leans back and sets the cast upstream. The day is warm and pleasant like it is supposed to be, and the light dapples and shifts through the trees above, most of them only just freshly blossomed or starting to bud so that she can still see the white pines set on the other side of the river, through the branches and lined along the ridge like cursed spirits left to guard the wildflowers beyond. She watches the rig travel with the current down towards the eddy and watches it slow and spin and then disappear between the long wheat-colored branches of the hanging willow. There will be smallmouth there, she knows. It is warm enough now that they would be comfortable in shadow, hiding from the hawks, taking their leisure from the more forceful rush of the full current.

She has been here many times, contemplating her options, feeling the pressure and currents of her own life, of people, boyfriends, events, changes trying to force her one way or the other. It worries her to feel that pressure again, so clearly, just because Archie did not come home to her last night. She never thought it would be anything serious with him (and still isn’t sure that it is) but the feeling seems to point to a certain surprising vulnerability. She realizes it feels a bit like it did when she stood at the same water’s edge right after her dad died, or after learning he'd died, and that the insurance wouldn’t pay because it was by his own hand. She could keep the cabin, they said, but there were still bills, even though the mortgage was paid, there were still bills, property taxes, and electricity, money shelled out just to drink the water in her own well, money for the school and the county and the town, money for bread and to keep the toilet flushing. She didn’t think she could make it then, but she did, worked three jobs, the market, waiting tables, the bar, and she kept the house, kept the land, paid off the bills, and got herself to a place where things were finally at least manageable. She just has to remember how desperate she was in those days, with the bank threatening to foreclose, and those lawyers and men in suits trying to steal just about anything they could get their lizard fingers on. She just has to remember how hopeless it seemed back then and know that whatever else comes, she can handle it, if she just keeps her head.

She reels in the rig and casts it again, upstream, taking pleasure in the soft whirr of the gears releasing, and the bend of the translucent line in the breeze, buoying out against the sky before slipping like a spider web to dissolve into the glittering rush. It does not take long for the lure to catch, the day too perfect and the rig too well tried in its temptation. The line goes tight and the rod arches, something almost erotic in its bend, she thinks, remembering Archie’s bare spine against her fingertips, the sudden rising, before the rushed downturn of his shoulders, set to punctuate a gasp.

Oh Archie, please, let it all be worry and nothing else, she thinks, slowly turning the spool back inside itself, feeling the creature beneath the ripple of waves, battling for life, for everything its small, poor self ever was. She keeps her head calm, turning the handle slowly and holding the rod firmly in her gasp, and only pulling back, only reeling in when there is a lull in the struggle.

Oh Archie, please…

Soon, she has the bass flopping on dry land, its beautiful, pea-green scales, gleaming in the afternoon sun, its mouth opening and closing, gills bright burgundy and almost like they were painted on. She takes the butt of her rifle and bashes the head, makes the fish go still and then pokes through the eye socket into the brain with her knife to be sure it’s killed. When she’s satisfied, she moves to the water’s edge and scrubs the body clean in the water with a rag. She cuts the fins away and scales the fish with the knife and rinses the body again in the freezing stream. Her hands start to ache from the cold but there is a strange sort of pleasure in it. She goes back and lays the fish down on the slab of rock that she has moved beside the bed of moss especially for this purpose, stopping a moment to breathe warm breath into her fingers. She slides the knife into the vent on its belly and cuts through the anus, dragging the blade up the stomach, careful not to cut too deeply. She moves the blade all the way to the gills and then stops and picks the fish up and walks and crouches beside the river with it. She uses her fingers, pulling out the insides and plopping them into the stream to be carried away for the crawfish and whatever else to eat. The kidney is stuck and needs to be cut from the spine with her knife. It is small and purplish and bean-shaped, and it bounces along the bottom of the riverbed, seeming almost joyful and alive when she lets it go. She cleans the gutted fish again in the stream, rinsing the raw flesh, and then she takes it and walks back and wraps the fish in a kitchen towel, placing it safely in a tote bag that she brought explicitly for this purpose.

She sees the man seated on the steps to the porch when she’s coming up the hill and stops. There is no extra car in the drive, and he does not look up to greet her. She sets her rod, and the tote bag with the fish inside, down on the grass and takes her rifle off her shoulder and holds it steadily at her waist with both hands.

“Can I help you?” she asks.

The man smiles, revealing a flash of yellow, tobacco-stained teeth, but he does not look up. He is thin and sinewy, with a glossy black mustache that curls inward, completely covering his upper lip. He wears black except for a buckskin vest which does not suit him and seems at odds with the crisp, ironed button-down shirt he’s wearing underneath. Virginia cocks the rifle and takes another step toward the man.

“You deaf?” she asks. “What are you doing here?”

Still, he doesn’t not answer, only continues to smile, and then from his shirt pocket, he produces a thin black comb. He opens his mouth and licks the comb on both sides with his tongue, before running it through one side of his long, glossy mustache and then the other.

“If I was,” says the man, “how could I hear ya asking?”

“What?” says Virginia.

The man spits to his right, into the weeds and against the trellis that protects the underside of the porch.

“If I was deaf, how could I hear ya asking?” says the man, and now he looks up at her, still smiling, his brown eyes cold and so without feeling that Virginia must stifle the urge to shiver. She lifts the rifle protectively but does not yet point it at him and does not answer. The man slips the comb back into his pocket and stands. His hair is curly and black and cropped short but not cleanly, with little tufts of longer hair creeping down the back of his neck like the same unruly weeds now dripping with spit against the trellis.

“I thought you liked games?” says the man. “That true?”

“No,” says Virginia.

“No? Then why are ya pretending ya don’t know why I’m here?”

She swallows.

“Is this about, Archie?” she asks.

“No,” says the man. “This is about you.”

Virginia readjusts and tightens the grip on her rifle.

“Is Archie, okay?” she asks, but again the man only smiles, then he takes a step towards her, down the slightly warped plank of the cabin stair, making it creak.

“Stop,” she says, raising the rifle and pointing it at the man.

He stops, but his smile remains, tobacco teeth, dead brown eyes.

“I think…” she says, “you should get off my property now.”

The man lifts his head to the sky.

“Yer property?” says the man now dropping his gaze back to her. “Well, that sure sounds official, but tell me, how can I be certain it is yers?”

“What?”

“I don’t see yer name on it,” says the man. “So how’m I supposed to know it’s yers?”

Virginia takes a step towards him, lifting the rifle and pointing it at his head now.

“I have the papers,” she says. “You can go down to town hall if you want.”

“Ah, papers, but tell me, do you believe it’s papers that makes something belong to someone else?”

“If it’s the right words on those papers,” says Virginia.

“Ah,” says the man. “But paper, paper can be burned, can’t it? And words, well, people forget words all the time, ain’t that the truth?”

“It’s the law,” says Virginia.

“Ah,” says the man. “But law’s written on papers too, ain’t it? And I thought we established that papers can be burned.”

Virginia swallows, readjusts her grip, and shakes her head.

“What do you want?” she asks.

The man takes another step towards her.

“I just want us to be clear,” says the man. “Law is just papers and words, but that gun there, that one yer pointin’ at me, well now, that’s something else, ain’t it? That’s sure a way to tell what’s yers, alright. Don’t matter what the law says, don’t matter what kinda words you put to it, it’s that gun right there and the fact that yer willing to use it, that’s what makes the difference. Ain’t that right, darlin’?”

Virginia swallows again but doesn’t answer, and again the man smiles and takes another step towards her, showing the full breadth of his yellow teeth.

“Problem is,” says the man. “There’s two other boys standing behind ya with rifles of their own, standing on the edge of the forest there, which means I don’t wanna hear no more talk about the law or papers or whatcha think is yers, because yer boyfriend didn’t seem to care about no law or papers when it came to taking from my people. So why on earth do ya think I should give a good hoot about what you say is yers now?”

She is afraid to look. Instead she stares at the man for a long time, pointing the rifle and looking into his dead eyes until she can’t stand it anymore, and then she does look and he’s right, there are two of them, just like he said, rifles resting easy, standing at the edge of the forest, just like he said. Bearded men, one light-haired, one dark-haired, and there is no warmth in their eyes either, and she feels cold running down her spine, and tries to understand, tries to tell herself that she just needs to keep her head, but she can’t think, and she can’t know what to do except to continue to stand for a while, trying to think, trying to think, and then she drops her gun to the grass and steps back.

“I don’t have it,” she says. “Whatever he took, I don’t have it. He didn’t tell me, I swear. He was here two nights ago, and I saw him in the woods and thought he might have buried something there, and I went looking, but I couldn’t find it.”

The man nods, still smiling, and he walks over to her, picks the rifle up off the ground, and nods again. 

“I believe it,” he says, his voice softening a little. “Maybe you can show us where ya saw him though? Where ya think he buried it?”

“Yes,” she says, realizing that she’s trembling, and her thoughts are moving so fast they feel blank, a kind of static replacing everything inside her. “Yes, of course, it’s right over here.”

“Go on then,” says the man, and he gestures that she should walk ahead and so she starts to walk, teeth chattering a little, and her whole body trembling, and her mind a swirling static blank.

She looks up and there are no clouds, and the trees sway a bit, and the fresh leaves hush and flutter and the branches clack. They walk around the house and to the edge of the forest and she points to one of the places where she had tried digging and looks back at the man but not at his face for some reason, for some reason she only can look at his shoulder and then to the ground.

“This is where I saw him,” she says. “I went looking but I didn’t find it and….”

She can’t go on.

“I know,” says the man. “I talked with yer boyfriend, and he said the same thing that yer saying now, that you didn’t know a stitch about it, he never told ya, and it was all just his own idea in the first place.”

She looks up at the sky again, there are no clouds, and the wind has stopped now too.

“But you didn’t believe him?” she asks.

“No, I did,” says the man.

She swallows, gooseflesh on her arms, her heart thudding.

“What did he take?”

“A dream,” says the man, “what else? The whole world, and all anybody ever really chasing is dreams. Only a few got the stomach for catching one though. No gentle, rich men in this world, darlin’. No kindly or sweet ones neither. It’s always been that way. Since the beginning, I’m afraid.”

Virginia tries to swallow again but she can’t

“I didn’t know, I swear I—”

“Don’t matter now,” says the man shaking his head. “And since you told us all ya know, I guess we better start digging.”

Tears fill her eyes, but she wipes them quickly, feeling in the blue expanse, in the trees, in the stillness, a kind of potency, a kind of clarity rising and settling all around her. 

“I could show you,” she says. “The other places where I looked, where I dug and—”

The mustached man hands Virginia’s rifle to the man with the dark hair and the man with the dark hair hands the mustached man another larger rifle, and then the mustached man lifts that rifle and points it at Virginia’s head.

“That’s all right, darlin’,” says the mustached man. “No need to worry yerself about it no more.”

She doesn’t answer, and her mind is a blank static. Wait. She wants to say. Wait, but she cannot think of the word and then she reaches for the knife in her back pocket. There is a flash of light, the blade glinting in the sun, she knows, then she feels oddly relaxed. She can see the grass blurred, tangled against her face, and the smell of the earth grows more pungent. How did she get here? She wonders suddenly, with alarm. She knows she must get up, but she can’t bring herself to rise. Did she trip? She would feel it if it had been the gun. Was it an earthquake? Why aren’t they speaking? They must be waiting for something. She can smell the earth, can feel the depth of it beneath her, a whole planet beneath her, a mossy pebble of a world floating in a tremendous void, an infinite expanse, a depth, stretching, opening, widening, forever and forever and then, something else…something shiny, materializing in all that dark, a curve, a fantastic, bright curve of shimmering pointed silver. Beautiful, she whispers, and she cannot help herself, she moves, she reaches out, she—

There is an old tarp hidden behind a rotting oak, with blades and twine and butcher’s paper. The dark-haired man and the light-haired man go and fetch the tarp now and unfurl it beside the body and then they roll the body into the middle and begin their work.

“Funny that she was the one who didn’t scream,” says the dark-haired one.

“Not funny, a shame,” says the man with the black mustache. “I like it when they scream. I like to think it means they might have remembered somethin’ sweet before they died.”

“Sweet?” says the other. “How do you figure?”

“Well,” says the mustached man, “I like to imagine maybe it’s a glimpse of somethin’ they had never dared to guess they would ever be without. I like to imagine they think of it and scream, and that means that they loved somethin’ in this world very, very much.”

“Hmm,” says the other. “Maybe, but I don’t think I’ll scream when the time comes.”

“Oh, don’t say that,” says the mustached man. “Oh, that’s terrible.”

But the other doesn’t answer, just lowers his head, continues his task.  

“I think ya will,” says the mustached man, after a time, taking out his comb and licking it and running it thoughtfully through his long mustache. “Really, I mean that. I think ya will.”

---

 Originally from Stone Ridge, NY, Jason Pfister has an MFA from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. You can find more of his fiction published or forthcoming in Swamp Pink, Ruminate Magazine, Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Swamp Ape Review, and elsewhere.