by TG Wolff
Here is a preview from Together They Were Crimson by Ryan Sayles.
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THEN
“Something needs help dying. You need to kill it,” Raymond said in that quiet whine of his. The girl with the jet-black hair looked up from where she was in her bedroom and saw her big brother standing in the doorway.
“What?” she asked, distracted from her studies.
“Didn’t you hear me?”
“No.” She looked away from him, sinking back into her concentration and carefully arranged a Barbie doll arm on the floor.
“Well...” A strange, ill-suited stillness was over him. His eyes bugged out some, his lips whiter than normal and thin. He looked around for a second, said, “Listen, I need you to come with me really quick.”
“Where?” She motioned at what was before her. “I’m busy.”
“My uh…place. My spot out back.” Where he’d go get high.
“No,” she said flatly and turned back to what she was doing.
Raymond walked over, studied her. Before her were several sheets of printer paper cut up and drawn on with anatomy depictions of animals and insects. With her exacting penmanship she could become an architect. She had arranged the paper scraps in a confusing way that made perfect sense only to her; Raymond knew his sister and her bizarre set of filters through which she processed everything in the world before she understood it.
Next to each scrap was a segment of a Barbie doll. A perfectly Caucasian tanned arm lying next to a drawn depiction of an insect’s multi-jointed leg. A plastic breast and belly next to an abdomen and thorax. The doll’s decapitated head crowned by numerous bug faces on their torn bits of paper; a thousand segmented eyes and pinching mandibles floating around Aryan blonde hair and blue eyes.
It went on. She was very thorough.
“This could really help,” he said, knowing she had absolutely no interest so he reached for anything to entice her.
“What?” she asked in a dreamy, detached manner, as if she had to float back up from her concentration and surface into the conversation with her pothead brother. In her hand was a different Barbie head and she gently rolled it the way a gambler will massage a pair of dice before casting them onto the table. Gripped in her palm, the hair spilled over the web of her skin between her thumb and forefinger. “Why would this help?”
Raymond exhaled, tired. She could smell weed on his breath. “Just come…come look. Please. I need you.”
She grumbled for a moment. In her eyes he could see that whatever world she went to when doing things like this was lost in that instant. She had it, was able to retreat to it for a moment after he interrupted her, but now it was gone.
“Fine.” She stood and they left her room. As she shut the door it struck and rattled a shoebox. Inside it were hundreds of insect wings she’d pulled off, along with numerous legs, exoskeleton husks and other parts. Rodent bones, razors blades she’d stolen from their father to use as scalpels. They made a dry, percussive sound that was lost to the emptiness of the room.
They entered the living room and the sound of their father digging through the fridge gave off the same beer bottle shuffle they were so used to. Their mother was sunk back into her recliner chair, passed out. Snoring.
“Mom is out cold,” Raymond said. “Drooling.”
The girl’s eyes flicked over her mother—her gender role model and flicked back. “Rohypnol.”
“Oh yeah?” Raymond asked. He went over to her as his sister stood still and silent, waiting. Raymond kept one ear on his father’s noise in the kitchen and rooted through his mother’s lap. It was damp and covered in small black and white pamphlets. He hoped it was from her spilling a glass of water she had next to her chair and not because she wet herself, but he didn’t know. Neither would surprise him. Found a baggie with four capsules in it, each filled with a dull olive-green powder. He took a capsule and stepped back.
He turned and there was she was, his younger sister as silent and looming as ever.
She said, “According to Mother’s 1989 edition of Standards of Care While Administering Medications, Rohypnol is a hypnotic drug banned in the United States which was formerly used to treat severe insomnia.”
“Isn’t that like, a sex drug?”
“I believe so. Its users have been known to engage in sexual activity during REM sleep. Is that what you mean?”
“Mom sleeps all the time.”
“It’s a shallow sleep, however. Adverse effects of the drug include both physical and psychological dependence, respiratory difficulties and more. You know how she vomits and loses control of her bowels now?”
Raymond hated how his sister was speaking just like a doctor already. “You mean how she shits herself?”
“Yes. More side effects.”
Raymond regarded their mother for a moment with sadness. “You’ll be able to wear her nurse’s scrubs one day, you know.”
His sister said nothing. She stared at her mother blankly. She grabbed a pamphlet from her lap and soundlessly started walking toward the backdoor. Raymond followed.
“Is that from those kooks that come door to door?” Raymond asked as they went outside.
She nodded, flipping pages. It was a comic strip that preached about burning in hell and how much God hated everyone who didn’t love these comics. Drawn there was an image of an old woman lying on a bed, dead. Another younger woman stood next to her saying, “Your pain is over now. Fly away, Grandma.” The young woman must have killed the Grandma, she thought. That made sense.
Apparently the grandmother loved the comics because the next panel showed a spiritual depiction of the grandma’s soul sitting up, separate from her corpse. She had wings, and she flew away, her face absolutely dominated by a smile. The younger woman muttered the word “mercy” in some context but the girl lost interest and tossed the comic aside.
They traipsed through the unkempt backyard and wound around a long bend that curved to match a hefty creek that ran nearby. The smell of the dirty water and clay-heavy mud wafted through the air as it always did after a good rain.
The creek had swelled for the past week as the spring rains were nearly record-setting that year. The grass was wet against their feet and shins and long enough to have gone to seed. They crossed through a thicket of trees Raymond believed sheltered him from outside observance. She didn’t know if it did or not; when she wanted to watch him, she knew where to go. They entered into the place where he’d made a spot big enough to hide from the world. To look at porno magazines and do drugs. He had a beat-up folding chair near a tree stump that he’d sanded down flat as a makeshift table. He’d dug a hole and buried two-thirds of a cooler into it; a watertight spot to store his trash magazines and paraphernalia. He’d packed the space between the hole and the cooler’s walls tightly with muddy clay from the creek banks to waterproof it as best he could.
She stood there, looking around. She didn’t like coming out here; she didn’t like seeing her brother on drugs or pouring over that smut like he did. She could tell he was deteriorating his mind when she had such high hopes for him. One day they wouldn’t live with their parents anymore and if she’d learned anything from those worthless D.A.R.E. programs in school, it was that marijuana was a gateway drug that led to worse drugs that led to unhealthy lifestyles that led to death.
She turned to Raymond with the blank look she always wore that he hated so much and she said, “I want to remind you that marijuana is a gateway drug that leads to worse drugs that lead—”
“It’s over there,” he said, pointing. She followed his finger and saw a bit of furry brown inside the first row of underbrush just outside his spot.
“What is?”
“It fell out of a tree right there,” he said, nodding. “The maple right there. See it? It’s over there.”
She looked. “T
hat’s an oak.” She stared at Raymond and the glaze over his eyes didn’t change. She walked over to the underbrush, saw the furry brown. A squirrel. Trembling, lying on its side, weak and gravely injured. “It fell?”
“Yeah. I heard it rushing through the trees. It jumped. I think maybe because it was wet from the rain or whatever it slipped or something but, uh…it just…it fell.”
She knelt to examine it. It looked like it had been in a fight, maybe caught by a predator but escaped after being mauled. Little red scratches like claw marks along its bulk. Either way, when it fell it didn’t land on its feet. That much was evident by how its fore and rear legs on its left side were now contorted. Its beady eyeball swirled in its socket, frantically examining everything around it.
“I think it’s dying.”
“I think you’re right,” she said very plainly as she stood. “So, let it die.”
“But can’t you—you know, help it?”
She thought about that. Yes, her mother was a nurse—at least was until a few months ago when they pulled her license for something she wouldn’t discuss, especially with the children—and she herself wanted to be a nurse, but that did not include veterinarian medicine.
“I can’t. It’s not human.”
Raymond threw his arms up in the air. “But you were just—you and the bugs back there in your room—you do stuff like that all the time.”
“That’s…different.” She didn’t like to explain what she did with the bugs. “Anyway, there is a large species difference between insects and mammals.”
“But mercy is a constant, though, right? A rescue from undue suffering and pain?”
“So kill it. It’s not hard.”
Raymond looked afraid. She could read on his face that’s why he brought her out here. He’d seen her dismantle insects plenty of times. She’d caught frogs and dissected them without the slightest hint of being squeamish. Raymond never had the stomach for any of it. The closest thing he’d ever come to on observing the insides of anything where the spread-eagle centerfolds he worshipped out here.
“You want me to save it from ‘undue’ suffering?”
“Rescue from undue suffering. Yes, yes. Please. I just feel so—terrible for it,” he whined. “Please.”
“Why the compassion?”
“Look at it.” He had something under the surface, a slight rippling beneath his pimpled cheeks. But his eyes gave it away, stoned or not. That was something she was good at. Raymond communicated everything with his eyes and she could read them.
“You made it fall.” Like an accusation written on the blade of a knife and then stabbed into the accused, she spoke it into the world. Her voice flat, matter of fact.
“No, I didn’t. I did not—”
“Raymond.” His name an order. Don’t lie.
His face twisted. Tears. “It got away from Paula’s dog. I saw it.” He pointed to a nearby decrepit chain-link fence that separated their property from Paula’s. She kept a pack of ugly, unruly mutts on her side that Raymond enjoyed tormenting. His sister actually had one of the dogs picked out to dissect but hadn’t executed her plan yet.
“The squirrel ran over here by me, went up the tree and I…I just…I threw a stick. I always throw sticks at everything. But it…” He weakly motioned to the thing on the ground. “It jumped for another branch and…and this.”
More tears.
She didn’t understand the crying—never did, not from anyone, for anything—but she knew that something inside Raymond hurt.
“Why didn’t you just toss it back to the dogs?”
“That’s cruel. You should have heard the sounds it made. Look at all the pain it’s in…just do it. Please.”
A flash of the comic came to mind and the smile on the grandmother’s face as she flew away, her pain all over. What a gift that appeared to be. All of a sudden it didn’t seem like such a strange imposition or an insurmountable task to aid the squirrel and she shrugged.
“For you.” She said to her brother. “For you.” She looked around and saw a thick stick lying nearby. The end was jagged and cruel looking, but even an axe or a gun looked cruel. How effective they were, how quick and painless. Those were what mattered. Substance, not appearance. Always the intent.
She picked it up and neared the squirrel. It jittered and shook so hard, so fast it looked like a blur. “Nervous.” She said in a soothing voice she didn’t know she had. “It doesn’t understand I’m here to help.”
She placed the jagged end of the stick on the squirrel’s neck.
She stood and gripped the stick with both hands, using her above-average height to position herself on it. She inhaled and widened her stance, imaged herself stabbing the earth with the intention of piercing it deep enough to strike oil. She heaved down, watching the top of the stick sink down four or five inches.
“Aww, c’mon, sis.” Raymond immediately whined. He turned away, threw his hands in the air.
She looked down. The stick had slid off the squirrel’s neck and she simply had drove it into the ground. “That was ineffective.”
“C’mon, you just…you—”
“Shut up, Raymond.” She knelt down and grabbed the squirrel. Her hands consumed it. She brought it up near to her lips and feeling an otherworldly bond with that young woman in the pamphlet, she quietly said, “Your pain is over now. Fly away.” She squeezed and envisioned herself opening a beer bottle like she did for her father and twisted with a sudden jerk like a gun going off.
The tail jerked once, trembled as if electrified and then flopped down. Still. Peaceful. Just to be sure she twisted again, not wanting to repeat her mistake like with the stick. The body did not react this time and she twisted a third time. She felt the head and shoulders separate in her hands. She let go, felt a new, odd peace. The squirrel’s beady eye was empty now; the fear and agony had gone away. Her touch had done it. “What a gift I gave,” she said, considering her hands. Wisps of blood and wet hairs sprinkled her palms.
“Thank you,” Raymond said, and he sat in his broken folding chair, a joint hanging from his lips. “Thank you for that.”
She heard his words, heard him sparking his lighter, but she focused on that odd peace. How easy it was to obtain; how helpful it was for everyone involved. She saw a ghostly image of that stupid, mindless squirrel flying off into the sky on wings she gave it.
She focused on that for a long, long time.
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