As They Seam

Judith was in the passenger seat, drumming her fingers on the dashboard in an anxious rhythm, her eyes flitting back and forth across the road before us, sneaking sidelong glances my way like she was trying to coax me into a conversation. The runners of mascara had been wiped from her cheeks but her hair still hung damp, framing her face in two wilted curtains of pastel bronze. She moved like a rabbit two feet from the boiler, fidgeting and scratching at her head and behind her ear. I glanced up to the rearview mirror. A single drop of rain left a tail that reflected in the mirror as it treaded down my forehead, over the blade of my nose and fell. It had been six months since Isaac’s funeral, closed casket. We drove in silence, the snare of raindrops our soundtrack as the headlights of my impala cut flickering swathes into the oncoming night.

“We… we’ve just got to get the hell out of Jersey, you know? Just for a little while. Clear our heads,” she turned to me, desperate to break the silence.

I hadn’t told her that we had missed the last ferry of the day, but I think she knew.

My hand grazed over the controls to the car’s stereo, keeping my eyes locked on the road. Feeling for the knob, I twisted it and a distorted guitar seared out of the speakers. Judith flinched and covered her ears. The strained half-scream told me it was Nine Inch Nails. This was that cover they did of old Joy Division song. Not their best, but I left it on, turned up loud enough to discourage Judith from making another comment. Isaac and I had gone to see Reznor in concert a year or so back. We drove up to New York for the day, ended up spending the weekend in the city. Good time.

Isaac could always put up with her shit a lot better than me. Yesterday, in my garage, she spent at least an hour and a fucking half telling us about how annoying it was to sit and listen to her friend Anna complain on the phone for hours at a go. I could imagine that this wasn’t entirely untrue.

We’d met Judith and Anna after a show we’d played in some shitty dive bar in Jersey City whose name I can’t recall. We were packing up our gear and trying to clear the stage for the night when the two of them came up to talk to us, stumbling a little and giggling to each other in whispered voices. They said they’d enjoyed our set and Isaac and I just sort of smirked and nodded, going along with it, a little bewildered at the good fortune and trying not to fuck things up too badly.

Anna went home with me that night. I was a little drunk and I’m pretty sure she was stoned out of her skull, so I’m not even sure how much of it she remembers. We’d hung out a few times since then, but we didn’t really keep in touch. Last I heard, she was stripping at an industrial club under the name Anesthesia in Baltimore. Judith, though, she had stuck around. She followed Isaac everywhere, attached to his side twenty hours out of the day. I started to cherish the few quiet moments I had alone with my friend as time wore on. Not that Judith wasn’t a bright girl or couldn’t be entertaining at times; she just never shut the fuck up.

Judith said Anna had been talking about me lately, that she’d been talking to her more and more. She said that we should pay her a visit, that she’s going through some rough times and needed the company of old friends. I don’t know how attached I was to the label of “old friend” but I knew a few guys up in Baltimore we could stay with and I’d been looking for a weekend away to blow off some steam. Even without Isaac we still made some decent cash at shows and I had some to burn.

So I sat next to her, cutting through the darkness of the Pine Barrens, watching as she tried her damndest not to speak. It was a sweet gesture, really, but I think her jerky squirming might have been even more annoying than her constant chatter.

“Derrick, hey, you’re speeding.” She nodded towards the window; the trees were blurred together into dappled green and black.

I turned the volume down as the radio switched over to the forced voice of the DJ, easing my foot off the accelerator. Not that I really had anything to worry about, we took this road whenever we wanted to head into the city and there were never any cops. Why post anyone on this glorified Indian trail?

“We’re going to stop for the night. I hate this drive in the dark,” I said, never taking my eyes from the windshield.

“Are you sure? I mean, we could be there tonight if we just drive through.” She turned back to me and it was as though she had solidified in the world now that the speaking taboo had been dissolved.

“No, we couldn’t. The next ferry isn’t until daybreak and I’d rather stop. Less of a chance of an accident.”

“Accident. Yeah. Hah, right.”

It was another fifteen minutes before we found someplace to stay. The Reznor song turned out to be a happy accident, the radio station was shit, as were the scant other stations that cut cleanly through the static. I switched over to the CD player and the opening trumpets of Keasbey Nights had just begun when we saw the hazy red glow of the motel lights through the rain-spattered windshield.

“We’re going to stay here?” she asked as we pulled into the parking lot.

“I guess so, why?”

“Because all their rooms probably smell like shame and burnt hair…” she groaned, pushing the car door open, and pulling her overstuffed suitcase out into the rain.

“So I’ll pick up some Febreeze. I saw a little mall-thing a few miles back; I’m going to grab some groceries. Get a room.” I slid out my wallet and handed her a couple of twenties as I leaned across the vast plain of the front seat to pull the door shut.

The car turned out of the parking lot and I let the music take my mind to a blissful state of emptiness. Everything that existed, for a few moments at least, condensed to the road, the pines, and “Day In, Day Out” on the stereo. My eyes left the lines passing by the side of my car for only a moment as I pulled into the lot. An A&P stood on one end neighboring a tanning salon in the middle by the name of FauxRays and a concrete box at the other end with a large blue neon sign that simply read “Wine and Liquor.”

There was only one purchase I needed to make that night. I left the liquor store with a brown paper bag wrapped snugly around a bottle of ten dollar vodka. I stuffed the bottle in the ragged, stitched-together duffel bag that held the small amount of clothing I had managed to scrounge together during the fifteen or twenty minutes in between the time we decided we were going and our actual departure.

The drive back was uneventful, just another chance for me to lose myself in the music, for the lines of the world to disappear in the colors and shapes, pushing the glare of my headlights through the darkness. I pulled back into the lot of the motel, grabbing a spot near a rusted out old van with a mural on the side. I couldn’t make out the details because of the darkness and the whole lot had a brushed red glow. Tossing the strap of the bag over my shoulder, I walked out into the rain, raising my hand over my forehead in an attempt to keep some part of me dry.

The check-in office for the motel was actually a lot cleaner than I expected. The lights in the room washed it out in a dull orange haze, the wallpaper a muted brown with a forgettable pattern repeating endlessly across its surface.

“Sorry, can I help you?” came a voice from a short, stocky, balding man of about fifty. He stood behind the formica counter at the end of the room, black pen clasped between fat fingers and running over some sort of ledger.

“Yeah,” I cleared my throat, “I’m looking for a room rented by a Ms. Coyn. She should be expecting me.”

He nodded, looking back down to the ledger as he spoke, apparently finished with this conversation, “She’s upstairs, room twenty-seven.”

“Thanks.” I turned and shouldered my bag again, giving the desk clerk my back, making my way out into the rain.

The room was upstairs, sitting in the middle of the face the motel offered to the highway. It was easy enough to find, the single window that overlooked the parking lot was the only one lit on that side of the building. I leaned against the door, tired in ways I couldn’t articulate as I brought my knuckles up to the painted wooden surface and knocked. The reply was long enough in coming that I thought I might have somehow gotten the wrong room, perhaps the desk guy had told me the wrong number to fuck with me, but eventually I could pick up the soft, lilting tone of Judith’s voice over the rain.

“Come in… it’s open,” she said, slurring the last two words together where they met.

The door opened onto a room that didn’t smell of burnt hair. It was clean, if a little sparse. Up against one wall was a single large bed with a floral comforter that dominated the floor space, off to the side stood a desk of some dark stained wood, and against the wall opposite the bed was a low, wide dresser of the same material. A large mirror hanging on the wall behind it and a simple white vase of flowers in the center; the walls were painted a dull salmon that helped channel the warm glow of the lights.

Judith was sprawled across the center of the bed, lying on top of the covers. She had already changed into her underwear and a tank top, both a faded black. The top had a rip that started near her stomach and crawled up seven inches towards the neckline held together by a handful of safety pins. It didn’t seem like the safest thing to sleep in. In her left hand she held one of the flowers from the vase, a hyacinth I think, trailing the edge up and down along her stomach. The right clutched what looked like a bunched up sandwich baggie.

“You know,” she said with a soft giggle, “All those anti-drug PSAs and lectures always show something like a bag of skittles… a whole rainbow, different strokes for different folks… but the white ones are always the most fun… like snowflakes,” she laughed again and I caught that hazy, somehow faraway look in her eyes. Like the middle distance was suddenly the most interesting thing in the world.

I dropped my bag next to the door and brought out the plastic bottle, unscrewing the cap and bringing it up to my lips.

“Should I be worried?” I asked before taking a long swig.

“Call me Goldilocks. I always aim for just right.”

My throat went off like napalm, the burn rolling like a wave into my stomach. My eyes watered and my nostrils flared as I wiped my lips with the back of my hand. I turned to face the window, looking out into the Barrens, the clear, sharp vodka sloshing in the bottle at my side.

There was a ringing silence. In a few minutes she started again.

“So there’s this woman, her name’s Leeds, right?”

“Alright,” I took another mouthful. The burn came with less vigor this time.

“She’s got twelve kids and she’s pregnant with the thirteenth. You’d think that they’d be walking right out without even having to stoop at this point, but it’s in labor with number thirteen that she’s really having a rough time.

“Understandably,” she took a breath, eyes fluttering closed, almost nodding off for a second before going back into her story, “Understandably she’s not having any of this. So mid labor, she mutters some deal with the devil. Says she’ll give this kid’s life to have her youth back, to be free of her marriage.

“Apparently, somebody takes these half-mad whispers seriously, because the kid’s born but it has wings and fangs and claws and the face of a jackal. It kills the screaming midwife and bolts up the chimney. It’s been roaming the Pine Barrens ever since.”

I throw back another shot, “So?”

“How lonely is that kid? I mean he never asked for that, it’s his bitch mother’s fault. But because of her, he can’t ever have a normal life. He’s stuck in the woods all on his own for as long as he lives …”

I sighed and rested my head against the glass. It was cool and smooth, lightning forked through the sky between the choking shapes of the towering pines.

“It’s my fault,” she said, somewhere behind me.

“What?”

“I told Isaac I was leaving him. That’s why he was so drunk that night.”

Her voice wavered. I turned and brought the bottle back to my lips, taking a bigger swallow, clearing my throat as it burned its way down to my stomach, “What? Why? I mean, you couldn’t leave him alone.”

“I could, it’s just he was kind of,” she looked up to her fingers, spinning the stem of the flower between them, “Paranoid. Didn’t want me out of his sight.”

I shrugged, took another drink, I was nearing the halfway point of the bottle. “I can imagine that would be difficult to live with.”

“He used to get angry,” she looked away, “When I didn’t want to go over. Really angry. Some of the things he said,” she laughed, this time with a wry tone, no humor in it. “I just couldn’t stand to be around him anymore. He criticized everything from the clothes I wore to my goddamn tone of voice. He was convinced I was hell-bent on cheating on him.”

I capped the vodka bottle, the world spun beneath me and a new blurred mural asserted itself in the pinks and yellows of the hotel room, “You should probably go to sleep.”

“I can’t.”

Tears started just beneath her lashes, blurring into obscurity as they rolled down her cheeks, “I should have been with him. Hell, I should have been driving.”

Judith used to flake off on these painkiller binges before. I couldn’t remember if she had the night Isaac died. If she had, she would have been in the same position, only Isaac probably would’ve been thrown from the vehicle. It would’ve been Judith pinned to the seat with a steering column in her chest like some kind of NASCAR cenobite.

I sat down on the edge of the bed and felt her shift behind me. My hand made its way up to the side of my face, rubbing along my cheek to try and straighten out the wrinkles in the world as she crawled around next to me.

I knew as soon as I walked in that I would regret letting Judith book a room with one bed but I thought that would fall more along the lines of a sore lower back from sleeping on the floor. Now I began to doubt whether we would make it down to see Anna tomorrow.

I closed my eyes and was not met with ice or flames but with a whimper and a kiss and her weight, slight but insistent in my lap. I let out a tired sigh and felt the press of her lips on my neck, laying there, her body on mine, surrounded by the warmth of the hotel room and the starless, moonless black of the sky outside. I fell back against the floral print as she slid the shirt over my head, feeling the cold metal of the safety pins pressing against my side.

You Were Gone When We Found You

I

It’s the old road that draws Kendra down. She’s always liked those twisting back pathways in the forest, the way they hint at things that very slightly (and only very slightly) were not. Her car rumbles over the trodden path and for a moment she questions the wisdom in coming. She had no idea what lay beyond this twisting old road, unpaved and studded with those iron gray rocks that jut up from the clay. If she were to scrape bottom on one of these, she would never hear the end of it from her father, he hated it when anything happened to the car.

She stops then and locks the car against merry men in the forest around and steps out into the really real world. Behind her windshield she can convince herself that the trees and the path and the clouds and the sun are a movie playing before her, inside she controls the score and the air conditioning is more than cold comfort.

Out here she is an actor, the winds tug at her hair in a playful way and she wraps her coat more tightly around her body because winter’s bitterness still ensconces spring like a shroud yet to be cast aside. She bows her head and walks into the wind, making her way up the winding path as it twists like a crawling serpent upwards.

The trees begin to thin out and she knows that a clearing is coming. It slowly opens before her, the bare branches giving way to an open field of swaying yellow grasses. In the middle stands a cabin, abandoned, a dark brown more in common with the forest behind her than the vibrancy of the grasses that surround it.

It has no roof, the charred beams that push up from the frame claw black at the clouded sky, struggling for purchase amongst the white. Fire took this home from the world and she can imagine it: flames loving this place intensely for one night before casting it aside.

The sun has moved higher in the sky and she turns to leave. She promised she’d meet her mother for lunch; they have a lot of planning to do.

II

Shaun is not a sentimental man, that’s why it’s been so long since he’s been to the cabin. He isn’t even certain himself why he is going. When his wife asks him whether or not he has a particular destination in mind for his walk that autumn afternoon, he tells her no, but is convinced that he will be seeing the cabin before nightfall. As he walks up that country road, his thoughts should perhaps be upon trips with his father along the selfsame trail, parking his truck at the base of the mountain and reaching the clearing around the cabin in the darkness before dawn.

Instead, he thinks about how much his back has been hurting him, how walking wasn’t helping, no matter what the doctors said. He thinks about that dull ache and the way he needs to be especially careful on this odd little side road because he could slip up on any one of these rocks and twist an ankle and then he’d really be in a jam. He wonders whether he’ll miss all of this, the trees with their curled red and brown leaves and the slight chill in the air that worked at the back of his throat. He’s not sure, and it’s odd for him to have a thought that isn’t certain.

When he reaches the cabin there is no flood of warm memories, although perhaps there should be. Instead he sees a rotted out old husk: an old log dinosaur eaten by fortune’s fire from the inside out, leaving only a shadow of what it was standing in the world.

He sighs as he stands there in the chill, old wool jacket hanging off his bones. The sun glows low and red in the cloudy sky but he’s not worried about making it back before nightfall. He’s made this walk plenty of times in his life and he’s certain he’ll do it again.

At least once.