DISCLAIMER: This work has not been edited beyond what was done in the video. The goal is to capture a story in a short amount of time and keep it as raw as possible.
The Story
Mammy always said I’d die at the hands of a pack of wolves. To which I’d answer, “Wolves don’t have hands.”
I’d get the switch real bad every time I said it, but it was worth it, seeing the look in her eyes, which weren’t unlike those of wolves that hit the headlights like those fancy new reflecting things they put out on Nettle Highway. Not that I’d ever seen any, wolves that is. Just heard stories, both from the woman who lashed me good when I spoke of them and from the man who didn’t give a shit if I ever spoke at all.
“Simon Says,” he called me after that game that just came out where you try to remember the colors. He laughed himself ripe every time, seeing as I didn’t talk much. Purple as a plum he got. More like a bruised nut sack with his neck veins running all the way to the top of his bald head, where all was left were a few scraggly black hairs. I hear you, calling him a dickhead would have made more sense, but you didn’t know my Pap. I swear on his grave, which I dug myself in the deep of winter, that his head looked far more like a nut sac than a dick.
I told him that once, all of it, even how his head looked more like a nut sac than a dick. It was like the words had no meaning, and for the span of Reggie’s tongue-curl yawn, who lay at his feet, he just sat there with his hands tucked into the front pocket of his overalls where he kept salt water taffy from California. I could hear the wax paper rustling like the dead leaves outside my window that always woke me from sleep, wind or not. He must have been so stunned I said a damn word. He got so purple it was almost black. And his eyes, the whites usually yellow from all the piss he was full of, glared at me, ready to pop from their sockets. I swear I heard steam begin to whistle from his ears, but I ran like hell before I saw any.
Through the two acres of land we had, I ran, tearing through thickets that lashed me harder than anything Mammy had sent my way. Dove through the tire swing on the old oak just for sport, ’cause I was feeling good, feeling nimble, and I thought even if a pack of wolves was chasing me, I could turn around and blow them a raspberry, even drop trow and shake my ass at them before they’d make it to me, and I’d still outrun them.
“Simon says, fuck you all to hell!” I shouted at them wolves and Mammy and Pap who shook their fists on the porch of our shitstack house, like cartoon villains. Mammy did almost have a mustache, and I laughed at that, still running with my head turned, watching them all dwindle into the distance.
Then something stopped me cold. Cold being the right word, cause that’s what I felt running from my heel to the bottom of my spine, like all the bones in my leg had become one giant icicle. I was afraid to look down, cause I knew it couldn’t be no good, and the wolves were coming. So I kept going, fast as I could, tumbling down the canal bank with my peg leg. I hooked my finger to take my mind off it, but I ain’t never heard of no pirate getting away from a pack of wolves, let alone Pap’s ’52 Chevy pickup, no matter how rusted or beat up it was. And the latter barreled down the old dirt road leading from house to highway, pluming like a freight train running on Pap’s hellfire.
I was halfway across the canal when I saw the blood in the water. I thought maybe it was a trick of the light, the sun being so low and all, burning off the smoke and fire from the coal-fired plant at the edge of town. But it wasn’t that time of year when the sun turned red, so I knew it was me. The cold I’d felt turned to fire, and I couldn’t help but throw my head back and scream. My voice at the time was still riding the edge between man and boy, so it sounded like the dying squawk of one of them old ring-necks Pap is always trying to rid the fields of.
God damn it hurt. Like nothing I’d ever felt. I just knew I had to keep going. Keep going, cross the highway, maybe hole up awhile in that abandoned van behind Molly’s corner store she used for extra storage.
I did make it to the highway, stopped like I did in the canal, about halfway, again to see red in the form of a truck bigger than one I’d ever seen.
Lying here in the bed, some twenty years later, I still can’t see it. They told me what it was, I even saw pictures, but for some reason I can’t see it in my mind. The only picture I see now is on the old TV sitting on a folding chair across the room, which I share with a dead man. They don’t know it yet, and I haven’t bothered to tell. I like the company, I suppose. And if I say something, they’ll come in and take me out and away from my TV, which has been playing the same movie for years, ever since I’ve been here. I never tire of it, even laugh sometimes.
It’s an old western, where this man is running from the law and hides in the woods. He’s alone until he isn’t. Three wolves come out of the shadows, eyes all gleaming like they do. He takes out his knife, but he knows it won’t be enough. And he waits, cornered.
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