by Logan Keys
One of the men comes around the counter. “Here sit down. Take a deep breath. That’s it. Good. Now start over.”
“We went hiking. We got stuck up there. These people attacked us. They killed two of my friends and they are holding another hostage. Please. You have to help me.”
“No one has been up on Song Mountain in ages. No one lives up there anymore. The jungle grew back, how would you have even gotten up there?”
He stares at me with suspicion.
“My boyfriend,” my voice cracks and the tears flow, “he cut through the jungle. That’s how we got to the peak. But then it rained. We had to go down a different way. Then these people, these natives with spears…”
The other man sucks his teeth.
“It’s the truth! Okay. We got ambushed. There was a fight. They stabbed Everette and Katie and took Jasper and I…” Tears pour down my face. “They….they….ate them.”
“Wait a second.” He grins. “Is there a camera somewhere? Am I on some American T.V. show?”
The other man doesn’t smile.
“No. It’s not a joke. These people died!”
The other man stops the first from laughing at me some more. “Go ahead and take lunch. I’ll fill out the report.”
The first man stands and gets his keys, still chuckling to himself about “crazy Americans”.
The second man brings me a cup of water. “Here.”
“Thank you,” I say miserably.
The second man makes sure the door is locked before he turns to say, “No one around here believes in the cannibals. If you try telling them, they will just lock you up. Make you see a doctor.”
“But you do?” I ask with hope.
He nods. “I’ve seen them myself.”
“Oh, thank God! So, then you’ll help me?”
“Yes. But I can’t put any of that nonsense in the report, understand?”
I frown.
“Let’s just go get your friend now.” He grabs a shotgun out from under the counter.
I stand and follow him outside.
The man stops at a vendor and gives me a burrito that I devour in seconds. It’s pork and oozing sauce. After I finish it, he gets me a second one.
I’m so tired I don’t think I can make the journey back up, so it’s luck that the man has a scooter with enough room for me to sit on the back.
“My name is Big Mike,” he says, and I answer weakly, “Jules.”
“You think you can walk the last couple of miles?” he asks when we arrive at a spot where the trail is too hard to drive through.
I nod. For Jasper, I can.
“Jasper!” I call out when we arrive to the village.
We find the first body on the trail.
Big Mike had rushes ahead.
The closer we get the more the horror scene unfolds. Dead bodies all over the village. A fire had caught one hut, and the place was quickly going up in flames.
“Jasper!” I scream again.
He wasn’t in the enclosure.
I hear a weak cough and I approach a hut carefully. “It’s me,” Jasper wheezes, and I enter.
He’s propped against a wall of the shack. He’s sweaty, his eyes red.
“What happened? What’s going on?” I rush to his side.
“Poison,” he says.
“Poison? What do you mean?”
He gives a half smile, and coughs. Blood drops are on his hand when he pulls it away.
“What Poison?” I ask, dabbing at his mouth with my shirt.
“I gave…” His eyes roll back in his head.
“Jasper!” I cry.
Big Mike comes in behind me, his face pale. “Everyone’s dead.”
And when I look back, Jasper’s chest stills.
I rise, tears in my eyes.
I go over and look at the coffee beans. I’m afraid to touch them. “He made them coffee from these.”
Big Mike looks at the beans, his features twisted with realization. “He made coffee with these?”
“Yes, are they poisonous?”
“Very. That’s why they are illegal to grow. None of these people would have known. They probably never tried to eat them or ingest them until you all arrived.”
“Jasper had gone on and on about the super coffee bean.”
“Super deadly.” Big Mike shakes his head sadly. “Come on. We’ve got to go. I’ll have to get reports and have people handle all of this. It’s a crime scene now.”
“Okay,” I say, reluctant to leave Jasper and what’s left of my friends.
But Big Mike and I make our way back down the mountain.
He leaves me at my hotel to get cleaned up.
The front desk stares at me as I pass by. I’m still covered in blood and grime.
“Don’t ask,” I say, exhaustion making me drag my feet.
I don’t want to shower, I just want to fall into bed, but instead, I sit on the floor under the spray and cry and cry, until I blearily make my way to the bed, and sweet darkness.
The next morning Big Mike is waiting for my statement.
“I’m still half asleep,” I say, “Sorry.”
“They brought you up breakfast.”
I reach for it, suddenly awake. “Pancakes.” My stomach growls.
“So, let’s just…start from the beginning.”
I tell Big Mike everything. How we arrived, where we went, who gave us directions even. Then I had to stop eating at the hardest part. Because I couldn’t choke down the food while saying my friends were murdered then eaten.
I take a drink, trying to push down what’s lodged in my throat.
“They just…cut them up and…” I cough. “I’m sorry.”
I cough again.
Big Mike’s gold tooth flashes. “It’s okay, you must be starved.”
“Yes,” I say, coughing some more. “I am.”
“Why don’t you finish first.”
I nod and take a sip of water, but it doesn’t help.
“How’s the coffee?” he asks me.
I frown.
I try to say, “Delicious.” But nothing comes out.
Big Mike watches me carefully.
When I move to stand, I wind up face planting into my breakfast.
“Whugh?”
Big Mike leans over when I lay on the floor. “You feeling okay? That ‘super bean’ does the trick, eh? We can’t have pretty American girls like you run home to tell them about cannibals. It’s bad for business. You understand?”
“Help. Me.”
I lay on my side barely able to move.
“Just relax. Isn’t what why you guys came here? To relax.”
My vision is shrinking.
Someone knocks at the door and I try to call out.
Big Mike waits until they go away.
He leans down until he can look me in the eye. He pulls out a pen and pad. “Let’s see. American tourists get lost in the jungle. The one lone survivor comes up here to the hotel so upset when we cannot find them, she overdoses out of survivor’s guilt.”
LOST LANE
There is nothing so plain in the world as a bright and sunny day. You can glare at it, and it glares right back at you. But now I squint through a lovely blanket of hazy air around the house’s “For Sale” sign.
I am looking to buy this house, but more so I want the fog. More than this giant and singularly ugly abode, I want to feel the thick air and tendrils of clean smoke writhing around my limbs as I walk through the weed filled garden, leaving a wake behind me as if I am a Salem Witch of old, calling forward my magic.
I nod at the man who stands with me. Yes. For certainly, brick by brick, this God-awful house will be mine and I am only too happy to pay for the location, location, location.
Don’t judge me. I need this in my life right now. Since Cameron died and made me a young widow, there’s nothing like a bit of fog to remind myself that my grieving is not done alone. The world grieves with me, for him, for us.
&
nbsp; It’s time for some new scenery—or rather, a lack of it.
The echoing knock at my door last fall had changed my life forever. A crowd of people standing around me but I’m left alone, told to plan his funeral, to put him into a hole, but I won’t—can’t, not my Cameron. He wasn’t ever supposed to die.
“Burn him,” I’d said, and they’d given me a box of what was left.
And then, well then, it happened. Life had moved on but I couldn’t. The sun rose so very bright that next morning and I had wanted shroud myself in gray. So, we came here, together, Cameron and I…. To Rosewood.
The fog is eerie, and has a stillness to it, a quiet, but I sense that it understands. Words can’t describe what it means to me, this gloom, because that feeling you get whenever the weather matches your moods, it’s so numbing, if you like that sort of thing.
Only here, in this town, it’s said to be foggy almost the entire year. And why I climbed mentally under the covers as soon as I arrived and never wanted to leave again. Now, as I claim my keys, I don’t have to.
Mr. Bransard is nice. A local, born and bred in Rosewood; so peculiar. He’d sold me the house with a very pathetic, (cough), apathetic expression. He wilts beneath my gaze when it’s too direct, and then he blossoms when I finally force a haphazard smile from my place across from him, where I sit finalizing the documents in his office.
Fish swim along the wall in a large tank—ordinary fish, the sort you’d expect to find in a creek for free, and here he’s bottled them up, these brown boring specimens, and put them in his office as if they’re some kind of prize. Peculiar indeed. They remind me of my dearly departed. I too have bottled him up and carried him away.
“Come to tea,” I find myself saying, and Bransard blushes furiously, his slightly bulging belly moving with a sudden breath as he looks me over.
No ring on his finger that I can see.
“Tea?” He casts about for words a moment and then straightens. “Certainly, Mrs.—that is Miss...”
“You can call me Ali.”
“Ali? Oh yes, of course, short for Alicia. Okay, Ali…what time would…?”
“Any. Day or night.” My voice has a bit of a husk when it pushes out this time but I don’t mind it and Bransard certainly doesn’t.
For all his blustering, he’s a young, seemingly strong man, built like an ox—a softer one, I suppose. And since I’m a rather tall woman, I need to feel a real man like a felled oak on top of me when it comes to the bedroom, if you like that sort of thing.
When Mr. Bransard shows that evening, I’m still drying my nails. My new house is already creaking as it does in the night. She, like me, has a certain ache within her, and groans at all hours, but mostly in the dark she will call these long whines that would terrify most. I am not terrified.
“Mr. Bransard,” I say, with the door pulled not quite wide enough for him to fit through, “can I help you?”
He steps back with that flustered look on his face. Charming.
“I thought you’d said…well maybe I heard wrong…then should I just be going?”
I smile at his sweet intentions. “Come in, I’m just having a night cap.”
I open the door just wide enough for him to pass through, before shutting it, flat-handed, behind us. A habit of mine, keeps the neighbors from prying and snooping. But then I relax again, remembering the fog. It has so many uses.
Bransard stands in the entry way with obvious awe at my—our—antique furniture and old-style chandeliers.
I lead the way to the sitting room. “I do prefer candlelight, it’s more genuine. A drink?”
Bransard nods when I lift a decanter and I leave my robe open over my negligee while pouring us two glasses, (he notices), before sitting across from him in the dimness on my velvet settee.
“To health,” he says, raising a toast while taking a seat.
“To my husband,” I say, lifting my glass to the large black urn that sits on the mantle.
A wicked smile creeps across my lips as I watch him pale at that. But a man should know his place in the company of another man’s wife. He diligently sips his drink, though, albeit with hesitation.
I study his discomfort. He’s dressed casually tonight, in jeans that fit much better than his slacks had, and a lumber-jack-checkered shirt, buttoned with rolled sleeves, that is actually quite a fantasy of mine.
“Do you mind?” I ask, lifting up my pack of smokes.
He shakes his head, even takes one when I offer. The working-class man is losing years right before me. He leans back and relaxes, grace returning after the second drink is poured. His curly black hair that had seemed frazzled and unkempt in his bright office looks slick and nicely styled in the candlelight. The boring pale skin has a hint of a tan if I shift my head just right. He isn’t in great shape, and no, he’s not nearly as good looking as I, but he has that edge to him like a man who’s eaten too many tv dinners and watched too much Discovery without doing enough discovering of his own. A man like this needs to hunt, to firm up his body sweating out in the wilderness for his meals, and return home to a wife who’d make him sweaty all over again…
Bransard catches me staring, and he sucks on the cigarette, making his cheeks hollow a moment before pushing his lips out into a sly smile that causes my heart to do a little hiccup.
“How do you like our little corner of the world, Ali?” he asks, leaving off with niceties.
“I love it. Tom.”
He laughs and sucks another long drag before putting the butt out in my clean ashtray. Smoke billows out of his mouth like fog when he speaks. “My mother is the only one who calls me Tom. I’ve been Bran for as long as I can remember. My father is a Tom and my brother’s a John, so we all come running at anything with an O in it. Mom calls me Bran and my brother Dane.”
“Dane?”
“His middle name.”
A big, strong-sounding name. His mother had pushed out not one but two strapping boys. I feel gloomy at the thought that I’ll never have a babe so heavy as him at my breast, at all really.
“What is it?” Bran asks, catching my mood unmistakably.
My gaze sharpens on him. “Nothing, why?”
He shakes his head slowly, but his blue eyes stay dead straight on with my own. “You’re a beautiful woman, you know that?”
I put out my cigarette, ignoring the heat in my cheeks.
“Let me take you to bed, Ali.”
My spine stiffens with surprise, but when I look at Bran, the hiccups begin again. He’s as dreamy as any fitter and younger version that I can imagine, or maybe I am truly desperate after Cameron, but he, Bran, is the one who’s here, alive, and if I look at him just right he’s as handsome as Cameron ever was.
I find myself nodding, and he does not disappoint.
“Marry me, Ali,” Bran says to me six months later from his place next to mine perched on the second story balcony.
He is enjoying a cigar while we lay sprawled out and naked on the settees cooling our skin. I am learning that Bran enjoys pretty much anything if it’s enjoyable. I, on the other hand, enjoy very little.
Bran is much fitter, and stronger, and brazen because of it lately.
“No,” I say watching the fog move its slow creep along the balcony floor and up my legs.
It caresses me quite obviously, and I smile. I supposed I do enjoy something: the fog. My house as well.
“Why not?”
“Because I’m still mourning Cameron. What we have is fine as it is.”
I can’t tell Bran, he’d never understand, that somehow, someway, Rosewood has changed me. I am no longer the little girl who lost her husband in these last few months. Living here all his life and still, he doesn’t get this place. Not like I do
Bran stubs out his cigar and rolls to face me with a frown. “What we have is a good lay session twice a week.”
I jump to my feet, the moment gone, I’m so tired of the arguments. Bran has been incessant, and I hate incessant.
Bran’s ruining my good-bad mood, and I decide to send him home sooner than later, which I find myself doing more and more often. The fog is the only thing that understands me, it’s the only thing…
“Don’t cheapen it, Bran. Maybe you should go.” I stomp into the house and close the doors on his answer with a slam.
I move through the bedroom, past the rumpled bed sheets strewn only half on the bed, and keep going straight through to the stairs. My fury is sudden and I feel restless, and I can’t explain to Bran why we can never marry.
Bran, like the bull that he is, barges in after me and storms down the steps, hot on my heels. “Wait, Ali. Fine. It’s a good lay then, is that better, Ali? We… are a good lay!” he taunts, and I stiffen my arms at my sides, giving a closed-mouth scream.
“I think you should go, Bran,” I call over my shoulder without looking as I run down the steps with a naked Bran breathing down my neck.
“I’m in love with you, Ali, from that first day I’ve wanted more, and I know it’s stupid but…”
“It is stupid, Bran. Idiotic!”
His growling voice as he grabs my arm is the last thing I hear because when he spins me I trip backwards with a scream loud enough to shake the rafters. I tumble head over heels, rolling down, and then bouncing the rest of the way with painful cracks on each step, until finally I land with a thud and slide across the marble flooring.
And then I am in my beloved fog.
“Oh no, please, Ali, please Ali, oh God no!”
I come to, hearing a mewling sound that brings to mind a dying cow. I want to laugh but the air is too hard to get into my lungs. It’s stopping at my nostrils, refusing to go any further. I can’t breathe!
“What have I done? What have I done!” More mewling. “Oh, God, no Ali, please, Oh God!” Bran is crying loudly in my face and I want to slap him, or at least push him away, but instead I can barely open my eyes.
When I do, I see his large face looming above me, it’s swollen and red, and when he sees me staring back he shrieks and drops my head onto the floor with a thud. Pushing me from his lap, he crawls backward away from me, his clumsy self now quick and nimble with fear.
I roll my eyes in irritation and sit up—try to sit up. I have to wiggle sideways and then finally, I find myself leaning to the side, almost sitting but not quite. Only, now, my front is back—or my back is front. I look down in shock to see not my chest but rather my own two shoulder blades poking out.
