JASON FUHRMAN

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Worth 1000 Words | EP 57 | Sorrow

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The pain of last week’s story was worth it. With this one, I felt like things were falling into place.

Thanks for reading.

Artwork by Adam J. Middleton

https://www.artstation.com/artwork/zOdqDD

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

The walls seemed to close in. David stretched his hands out to his sides to push the wheelchair down the hallway, himself in it. The handrims were cold, the footrest, too, but it was the only place he could put his feet.

Another push and his fingernails pulled free a strip of the dead wallpaper that lay brittle and torn, a mysterious force of nature keeping the rest affixed to the wood boards beneath. No plaster to hide critters, a family of spiders fled to the gaps between the boards.

David hugged his arms to his chest and tucked his hands into his armpits where no spider dared go. Jimmy had joked as much, David being the first to produce that sour musk Dad carried around with him everywhere.

When he felt safe, David brought his hands back out but didn’t sniff his fingers. He thought he might cry if he did, and not from the smell. He grinned, knowing Jimmy would have said the smell was the culprit, then gone on and called him Onion Boy or Pits of Eternal Funk, and not the music kind, he would have specified.

Still some ways to go until David hit the fork in the hallway, he braved his hands to the walls again, giving himself a good shove. The wheels locked to the grooves in the floor, he was on rails. He threw his arms up as the fine hair of his bangs lifted, imagining himself on a rollercoaster, the kind he and Jimmy used to ride at the fair. The Minecart Massacre it was called, and when the carnie asked why he should let a kid who couldn’t walk on a rollercoaster, Jimmy had simply replied: Who better to ride in a minecart than a kid used to wheels. The carnie had shown all his teeth at that, the ones he had left anyway, and gave them a two-fer for being so clever. Well, Jimmy that was. Always the clever one.

The chair wasn’t a minecart, and there was no massacre when David reached the fork. A calendar stripped of all months except the final one was pinned too high for him to tear off. He couldn’t look away from that fat-marker circle right around the 15. A Thursday. Jimmy loved Thursday because it was named after Thor, his favorite god. Mom would slap his hand when he’d say that. She was too afraid to do anything else. Dad would just shout blasphemer! in the best impression of Pastor Wheland until they all fell into laughter. Even Mom.

David hung a right, done with the date that would come to pass without Jimmy, so what it signified didn’t mean anything to him anymore.

David faced all of Heaven’s glory and brought his arms up to shield his face. The wheelchair caught where the doorframe met the wall. It took some time for his eyes to adjust to the window that should have been closed. Jimmy liked it dark and cool, and God knew the sun beat down something fierce out here most of the year. Today fell into that most of the year part.

Sweat sprung up all over David, sticking his shirt and pants to him in such a way that made his skin crawl. He’d pick a part off just to have it fall back in an even ickier way. It was as if he were the walls of this crumbling house and spiders were crawling out from between his ribs to torment him endlessly.

The bedroom walls were just as bad. Cracked, peeling, and everything in between. The only decoration was the crucifix Jimmy had decapitated to look more like Thor’s hammer. Too high to reach, Jimmy had said it was for his own good, because he was the only one strong enough to wield it. And what would Mom think if she knew her son had that kind of power?

“Blasphemer!” David shouted not to the makeshift Thor’s hammer but to the window, where Heaven wanted nothing more than to blind him, but he didn’t blink. No, he didn’t blink. He let the heat dry his tears. They didn’t even make it far enough to salt his cheeks.

David punched the mussed bed. Angry dust shot up in clouds that made him hack and spit. Wheeze after all that was done.

“Blasphemer!” David called to the window again, this time tears too plentiful to be dried. Or maybe it feared him, that pure light that had done nothing but bleach and rot this house for years. Nothing at all like what Mom said God and Heaven did. David didn’t believe in it anyway. He and Jimmy could have gone lizard hunting on the flats or played chicken with Monroe and his wheelbarrow. But no, Sundays were sacred. And what had they done other than make them wake up earlier and suffer through a storybook for grownups?

David raised his hand, which had become a fist, trained it at the window, and–

“Davey!”

His arm was held by a force stronger than any god, even Thor. Mom.

She had no words for him, just the look of a mother, which was better anyway. She gave his hand and arm back, and he turned away from the light. He didn’t flinch when she touched his arm.

She knelt beside him, and for a long time, he didn’t look, couldn’t, knew he had to muster up a tight-lipped grimace.

But Mom’s face broke down all his walls, and he was a child again, unable to fight her off. Unable to run away.

“Come on,” she said. “Let’s go get you cleaned up.”

David had heard those words so many times before, mostly when he and Jimmy had come home from a day of adventure. But he had never heard it in the singular. Never.

David stood up, took Mom’s hand, and let her guide him out of the room and down the hall to a kitchen with a warm washrag.


Worth 1000 Words | EP 56 | Misfire

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A journey to the surface of a planet where something is amiss. Writing this was a clunky but great experience. Like getting that last rep in you couldn’t last time. To extend the metaphor, I tore a lot of fibers on this one, and some still hurt.

Thanks for reading.

Artwork by Leif Heanzo

https://www.artstation.com/artwork/0nJ9OK

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

A sky of smoke without fire. A sandstorm roiling. A streak of molten atmosphere. Hanging there. Burning there. A scar.

Karlson’s fingertips pound his visor with futile urgency. All he sees has seeped into his helmet, into his head, through his eyes, which burn like nothing he’s felt before. Maybe what he saw had been–

Sitting at the window, then standing when that became boring, Karlson’s toes flexed over the edge of the hemispheric view that might have been beautiful once. No reflection. No fingerprints. He might as well not have been there. He was the only one there. Had been since the sky had rolled in like sand suspended underwater, except there was no water. Anywhere on this moon.

Well, except–Karlson sipped from a thimble-sized container that recycled his sweat and piss. He popped some potassium and sodium for good measure, a little magnesium. It helped him sleep, staved off the hunger for which he had no device to recycle his shit. He’d heard about them.

An illusion. Maybe what he saw was a trick of whatever is in the sky, plus the blips of light from the incoming ship. That must be it. His left hand, the one that doesn’t try to rub his eyes has a gravity all its own, pulling his shoulder down, muscles straining just to keep his spine erect. Guilt is heavy as hell.

Something what’s-his-name-with-the-perpetual sneer had told Karlson, before he set off with that sneer to a new system. Karlson hoped someone had punched it off by now. Anyway, he didn’t have one of those devices. And he’d gotten a six pack for the first time in his life, the hairs on his belly falling into those symmetrical trenches to emphasize the sculpted-putty protrusions. There was no one here but him to admire them. Still no reflection on the glass, so not even him.

That arm, the heavy one–or is it his hand?–drops to his knee, and he lets it. It grew a mind of its own, and it decided it wanted to get the hell away from him but is limited to the fact that it is attached.

“It’s not my fault,” Karlson says.

His hand doesn’t answer, just works on a maneuver that feels like it might detach his shoulder from its socket.

The comm socket crackled. Karlson had smashed it a month ago when the last call he’d received had been the distress signal of a passing cruiser. A one-way communication when he was the one who needed help, him godammit!

He spit in its direction, a mist that forced him to take another drink from his piss thimble.

“Shut up,” he said to it.

It didn’t, and the crackle intensified, almost vocalizing its mutual disdain. Karlson tried to ignore it, folding his only pair of shirt and pants. He mostly walked around naked anymore. The crackle was incessant. He padded over to it.

“I said, shut up.”

The pattern hit him like the ship that had crashlanded him here, so hard he was sure to have a crater in his skull. He leaned closer to make sure, the circuit board throwing sparks at him.

“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.” He slammed a palm to the machine, then punched the arming code into the dialpad. He grabbed his shirt and muffled the comm socket and jumped on his bunk, training his ear to the ceiling, waiting for the buzz of extension. Would it be able to handle the storm outside?

Tired of standing, Karlson sits among the wreckage, chunks of his own watchtower smoldering in front and behind him. It paints quite the picture. A lake which, when the breeze is just right, like now, produces waves of flame. Small ones, almost like paper boats burning. Those flames underlight the hull of the cruiser that hangs on life support, along with the storm that never got closer, taunting him from the distance. With what little energy the ship has left, it makes sure Karlson knows it was his fault.

Wait, wait, wait, wait. Karlson took his palm to the side of his head, then shook his brain. That made no sense. Carvers didn’t come out this far, and why would they alert him of their existence?

The solar cannons clicked into place. Dust streamed from the ceiling tiles, landing in his eyes. Hand heels in his own sockets, he screamed, “Fuuuuuuuuck!”

The comm socket repeated the message. With his eyes closed, Karlson was sure of it now, their voices, twisted by mutilation were unmistakable.

“It,” Karlson said. “Fuck it.” His right hand busy trying to clear his eyes, he entered the code in with his other, those pads still retaining the grip coating of disuse.

The solar cannons fired, streaks frozen in time until they initiated a bolt of energy not unlike a fault line to split the sky. It was if that storm out there wasn’t a storm at all, but a shell incubating all of his failures, birthing them into one immense tangible force that was enough to take down a ship.

The storm shell divided, the target crashing through, to the ground. A clean nose, flawless hull, layers and shapes complex to a pointless degree, signifying the mark of the House Fleet.

He threw on his suit, still naked, climbed down to the surface to make sure it was real, because it couldn’t be real.

The ship’s final light flickers, then goes dark. The lake of fire ensures Karlson can still see the ship in the murk, since the sky appears to be darkening. Karl’s left hand, which posesses his trigger finger, lets him get to his feet. Maybe it decided there was no hope left, and they were in this together, despite its emergent consciousness, which grew to hate him. Most likely it feels his hatred, too.

Karlson turns his back on his failure and returns to his post where he can remove his helmet and rub the grit from his eyes.

Worth 1000 Words | EP 55 | Barn 4

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Another gem with nuggets of storytelling fodder. These ones are rare, and I can’t say this discovery made the story exceptional, but that is my fault alone. So come, enter the ancient treeline to follow a man named after one of those which is absent.

Thanks for reading.

Artwork by Andrej Rempel

https://www.artstation.com/artwork/ZGwoa8

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

Birch trudged through a forest that had none. The behemoths around him had no names he knew. All they did was loom dark, layered with prehistoric scabs that had never been picked.

He rested at the foot of one and went to try at one of those scabs, because he couldn’t be the only one out here bleeding. Not one gave. Maybe they were scales, armor of creatures yet to be awakened.

His flannel was a mess of sticky blood, and when he undid the buttons, each one a painful excursion, his naked torso was bare to the moonlight that cast on him like broken glass. He moved just to be sure the illusion wasn’t his own infected flesh, because that’s how he felt. Like he wasn’t his own anymore.

The last barn hadn’t been right. Too close to town, too clean, too well kept. It had been the third barn. But it hadn’t been a charm. He always hated that saying. Made him think of what got him into this ordeal, but just as he honed in on that memory, it was gone, lost to the trees.

“I’m not myself anymore,” Birch said, his voice vibrations through a long string tied to his ear drum. It itched. He scratched it, then examined his finger. No blood there at least. No parasites wedged under his nail.

“Get up,” he said. And he did, pulled by a something. He held his slick gut in case something might fall out.

“Heal,” he said. But the command didn’t work. And why would it? He wasn’t like her. That thought, like the first, dropped into a pit of tar.

The forest opened just when he needed it to. His knees staked themselves into the damp soil, so deep he though he might fall through. No such luck.

The sky flowed in gritty textures he could feel on his skin, the wash of moonlight filtering enough to make him feel naked out here, exposed. Tree cover had been all he’d known since entering the forest. Corpses of gray trees, some fallen, some not, cut the scene harder than the moon. He shielded his eyes, then peeked under his hand, which cupped the top of a dilapidated roof of a barn with two open doors, like eyes on a head sunken to the nose. Between those doors a foul gash rose to the roof’s peak. Made of flaky skin, it was ready to be peeled away by the softest breeze.

The air was dead still. He was dead still. Maybe that was his fate, to be a bleached messenger to ward off others who’d been cursed enough to find themselves here. Fate changed its mind. He was on his feet now, cold and bare and afraid. A swell of warmth produced a trickle that ran down his leg. Piss or blood wouldn’t make a difference.

“Fourth time’s a fortune,” Birch said. A saying that would most likely never leave this forest or this barn, but he was okay with that. Sometimes you deserved to keep treasures for yourself.

And so he set foot toward this barn, knowing, just knowing, this was the right one. It had to be. Every stride took something more from him, and he had little to give.

He caught his breath at the western door, where he swore he felt a tinge of the sun’s touch. He looked to the east, hopeful dawn would arrive soon. Facing the darkness ahead held a fiercer pain than what ate at his belly. Ate. That’s what it felt like. Something there gumming his flesh, nibbling away the softest ends to not alert him to its acts.

He made a fire to take his mind off it, to create a dawn all his own, and maybe, just maybe, the smoke would bring help.

Birch couldn’t rest. He was drawn inside to where the fire didn’t reach. Hay and twigs and bird bones crackled underfoot. Small things scurried to hide, kicking up the smell of mildew and rot. He’d fit right in soon enough.

He ignored it all, making his way to the center, where the barn’s gash let in a pattern of silver shaped like rows of arrowhead teeth. That’s where he sat, then lay, then lurched as something spilled out of him. And he was relieved, not unlike puking your guts out, catching your breath on the edge of the toilet, or wherever you found yourself. That moment of calm when you thought everything might be all right.

It wasn’t. When Birch allowed his eyes to open, he saw black stains that were not shadow trailing from his wound to where he could not see. But then he did see. Twin pearls regarded him, narrowed. Then another pair, and another.

He curled up in the patch of silver, hoping they would take him.

A draft of breath as old and black as the forest said, “Four.”

There were three, not four. But it could have been his addled mind, praising his genius from moments ago. When he saw the finger or tendril or twisted claw separate itself from the rest of the black, pointing right at him, he realized he hadn’t imagined it at all.

“Four,” it said again, coming from three locations as one. Him?

He guffawed, hacking out a glob of something, relief washing over him, though a devil in three lurked inches away.

That black finger elongated, bent with the pop of dry wood, and pointed to where dawn would be soon but a fire was now.

“More,” said the voices.

He knew just what they meant, what he was, and where he was going, for the first time in days.

“You are yourself,” Birch said. And he was, but not alone, not singular.

The threads of that connection didn’t dwindle with distance, and he didn’t have to look back to know the three of the four he was part of were watching him, expectantly, from the hollow of an old barn.

Worth 1000 Words | EP 54 | Old Man in the Morning

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An image I just couldn’t pass up despite the challenge. An old hitman reading a book. What does it say? I had to know so decided to step into that room and look over his shoulder

Thanks for reading.

Artwork by Alexey Egorov

https://www.artstation.com/artwork/aYnv2L

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

You always called them like you saw them, the old man read, sitting at the edge his bed of crepey sheets.

He turned the page with hands to match and read the next line.

“Don’t you dare,” he said to the words and the man who had written them, dead now, this book plucked from his corpse that hadn’t died easily enough.

I always thought the tattoo should have been bigger. I always thought you should have worn more sleeveless shirts, a tank top perhaps, to show it off. Isn’t that why we get them?

“No,” the old man said.

He turned another page, wondering why.

At first I thought I’d write you a letter, but then I worried I’d have too much to say, so I picked up this little journal, gridded, not ruled, because I found the tiny dots intriguing. It was difficult to resist the urge to connect them. To create mazes to get lost in. Where was I? Oh, yes. The journal. I fear with so many pages ahead of me, I may ramble. And God knows you don’t have much time left. I watch you from time to time, at the window you love so much, close to your arsenal that is a closet. How long did it take you to collect them all? If you added up their value, how many lives would it equal? I don’t mean in dollars, but in lives.

The old man took a moment for himself as the morning sun hit his back. It made his skin look worse. Gravity seemed to increase with the light. He looked over his shoulder and saw nothing but the wisps of hair sprouting from a single tattoo of a spade on shoulder that had borne so much.

He returned to the book but found it difficult to concentrate with his belt of knives tight around his midsection, as if it could be anything else. He slapped his belly like all old men seemed to do at some point in their lives. Few slapped a belly armored with a belt of knives, he supposed. The one thing that set him apart from all the other old bastards. That and the closet full of firearms, a kill count of, well, the number hadn’t meant anything for years so he’d lost track. He did like the way the sun fell over them all, except when it revealed their dissarray. Millimeters, but every one counted. He would have gotten up if his bones hadn’t fused together, hunched in this position for so long reading this infernal book. He tried to stand but it hurt to much. He tried to toss the book across the room, but that hurt more.

“Jesus,” the old man said.

You still keep Him on the wall don’t you? Did you appreciate the proper noun even though I think the whole thing is hogwash? And do you know why? It’s because I respect you, Julian. I respect you and all you are. All you believe. All you love. I’m not talking about religion, either. I’m sure you know that. You’re a smart boy. A big brain beneath all that hair you somehow managed to keep through decades of . . . well I don’t think I need to remind you of all you’ve been through, do I?

Julian’s scalp itched. The sensation dispersed like a thousand baby spiders escaping down his spine, across his shoulders, to raise the fine hair on his arms that had once been so coarse. Like him.

I apologize for bringing it up. I really do. I wish we could have had a conversation, but you don’t work like that. In and out, like a ghost. No, more like a rapist. Yes, that is the right word. Barging in, barging through until all is pulp. For a man with such soft hands, you’re a barbarian, Julian. But I’m not. That’s why I took care of him like you never could. I was gentle. He thanked me for it. Every night. With his eyes. With his mouth. Voiceless, but I knew. Body language holds more subtext and truth than words ever do. He was never much of a talker, anyway. And thank God, because his voice. Let’s just say it didn’t go with his face. Such a velvety peach it was. Go on. I’ll give you a moment.

Julian defeated his stiff limbs and got to his feet, watched his shadow grow to the man he used to be. Broad of shoulder and chest, a boy at his side, looking up to him for all the answers. He never had any. And in his frustration, he did exactly what this book said. Something out of place there. A word here. Innocent but infuriating. He punched, kicked, pummeled.

I hope you enjoyed your moment, Julian. I hope you saw him how you remember him, not how you found him. I pray those two aren’t the same. I did love him. You can have solace in that, I assure you. I know you did, too. In your own way. I can tell by your posture. How you face that wall with such conviction. A pity it’s just a wall. Can you face me?

Julian turned the page. This was the first book he’d ever finished, if one could consider this a book at all. The final page caught between the ridges on his thumb, but he was able to see through the thin paper. He was used to reading backward. In mirrors, in reflections of all kinds. Details were important, and he’d always loved to see the world through new perspectives.

Would you look at that, Julian read. We made it to the end.

Julian turned to the window, taking in the sun and all its glory. Taking in what was coming at twenty-six hundred feet per second. Taking in what he deserved but had defied for so many years. He saw no shadows, only light. That was fine, because he had no answers.

Worth 1000 Words | EP 53 | Be Stranded

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All right. The first story of the second year of this crazy project. A little horror, a little dystopian sci-fi. Keep reading to find out what these strange kids are up to, and what this creature is.

Thanks for reading.

Artwork by Luzhan Liu

https://www.artstation.com/artwork/5XzByO

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

Eve was happy to be lost at sea, because it had told her being lost was being free. A tornado of fish swept around her, and she swore she could see them smile. A silly thought. She smiled back anyway, then looked down, even though she thought she would be afraid, observing that infinite darkness. Strangely, she wasn’t. Maybe it was the fish dancing around her. Maybe it was the velvet light. A mist of bubbles flocked, sticking to her arms and legs. At first it tickled, then it felt like a new skin. Some collected under her chin, where she was the most ticklish, lifting her head up to face the surface.

A stormy sky, distorted by foamless swells drifed. Turning pages, she thought, and she suddenly wished she could read her book, the one that had told her of this place in symbols she couldn’t read but feel. She saw those symbols now, brushed by clouds, more alive than they had been on the page. Whispers came to her, called to her, and they felt like those symbols, though she didn’t understand their meaning. So many circles.

She opened her mouth to speak and found she could. “I’m here,” Eve said to the sky through the sea.

Fins and scales and tiny teeth scored her feet, legs, and tummy, a great big bite on the tip of her pointing finger from which a plume of red erupted.

The swells that had been so gentle now frothed as if rabid, rising to great waves that came crashing down, sending her somersaulting away. It was as if the sea were trying to chew her up and spit her out. But in pockets of calm, she saw something. Pale and beautiful and beckoning Eve to come into its arms. She couldn’t see its face but knew it was beautiful. An angel. The one who would save her. Eve kicked her legs and scooped her hands to no avail.

Dunes electrified with fractals came into view. The water and sand formed a wedge that she knew was the shore. The waves ravaged the sand into a storm that bit at her eyes. She closed them, wiped them, but that only made it hurt more.

She couldn’t breathe. Then she couldn’t see. Then she couldn’t feel.

Slap, slap, slap.

She could hear. Clapping. Slow. Deliberate. She knew it: palms on wet sand.

Eve shot up in her bed, sheets sticking to her arms and legs, which she peeled off and flung to the floor. She sat in her soaked bed, forehead to knees, and she wept.

Slap, slap slap.

She lifted her head. Her room was still gray and small and lonely. On the concrete floor she dreaded the feeling of, tossed upon strewn clothes, was a small rectangle of a color that reminded her of the stormy sky.

Bam, bam bam.

Furious hammering now. A shadow broke the window’s light on the floor. She twisted around. It was James, his stupid teddy bear head ruining the color she loved so much, missed so much.

“Go away,” Eve said.

James wouldn’t stop, his palm turning into fist against the glass.

Eve huffed and donned her own gear. A large copper sphere with tiny circular windows, uncaged so she could see the world as if she wasn’t wearing it at all. She flipped the suction vent to her room and waited for that sensation of near-weightlessness before opening the window.

Eve drove her knuckles to her hips. “What do you want?”

James’s chest pounded as his fist had. “You have to come.”

“No I don’t.”

James froze then, dumbfounded, and through those stupidy beady lenses, Eve saw him. He stared. “You already know.”

“What?”

“Look at your arms,” James said. “It’s just like you said.”

Eve found marks. Hundreds. Thousands, maybe. They weren’t the work of fins, but they were the work of tiny teeth. Not fish teeth. Perfect circles. Bleeding.

“Does it hurt?” James asked.

“Yes.” Without another word, she climbed out the window, locking it behind her.

She recognized the sky overhead, but she didn’t smile. It wasn’t right. Once they left the neighborhood, they mounted the hills that blended from grass into sand. James fell more than once, but when Eve tried to help him up, he shied away.

The white noise of the beach blew over the dunes. James crested the one ahead, then dropped out of sight.

Eve wiggled her toes until her feet were buried in the sand. The pull of her small gray room was overwhelming, the sheets, even though they were wet. A nightmare brewed in her gut.

The wet sand. Not far now. Cold. Her collision with the shore hit her again just as hard. She fell to her knees. When she looked up, James was there again. So were Chris and Clive, the bucket-head twins. She let them help her up and take her to where she didn’t want to go.

Slap, slap, slap.

Eve heard it above the roar of the sea. Her helmet did nothing to muffle its horror. Deliberate no longer. Fists breaking jaws, bodies impacting concrete. The sound of dying.

It was. The poor little fish with their little O mouths unable to find water. Among them was something pale and angelic, but not at all beautiful. Seaweed and netting tangled in the creature’s tangled limbs, it lay heaped on its side, great wings broken by the surf, flattened to the sand, where its head of tentacles were piled, armed with circles of teeth.

Nina was there, too, inspecting from a safe distance upon a rock, and Liam, closest, bent over, ready to touch it. The angel that was a demon.

The rest of them gathered around the carcass from the sea, the angel that wasn’t, but Eve sat on the cold sand, knees to chest, head down. The air was full of hungry flies.

“See,” James said. “You were right. We’re saved.”

“No,” Eve said. “I wasn’t. We’re not.”

Worth 1000 Words | EP 52 | The Lookout

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Thus completes the anthology. Fifty-two stories. A little over a year. Thanks for watching/reading all this time. It’s been a great experience, and I have no plans to stop. Here’s looking forward to year two!

Speaking of looking, I revisited the old west in this one, through the eyes of a lookout. What is he looking out for?

Thanks for reading.

Artwork by Gavin O’Donnell

https://www.artstation.com/artwork/B1dQW8

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

Couldn’t breathe worth a damn, blue-hot sky beating Ambrose with a switch the size of, well, the sky. Look at Carlo, son of a bitch paddling around that swimming hole of mud as if that’s where he’d find it. Brave for a man who couldn’t swim, but Ambrose was the climber anyhow, and had better eyes, so the top of the rock was his spot. Carlo was still wearing his kerchief, too, as if Ambrose could make out his face from here, the fool. Their only rule: only names, no faces.

Ambrose scratched his shoulder with his rifle because that’s where it was. Gunmetal like fire on his naked hands, trigger finger sweating something fierce.

He reached for his kerchief, caught sight of the hand that had done the bloody deed, then thought different for some reason. Should’ve shaved this morning. But he didn’t have a blade, anyhow. Would have used it for the deed, too. Cutting throats with blades is easier than with finger nails, though his were razor-sharp, hard to make a fist. That old braided Indian had taught him why claws were better than fists.

More than whiskers itched on Ambrose’s face at that thought, in three distinct lines that still hurt when it got too hot, like today. Funny how he couldn’t feel a finger on his face, but those scars burned like rivers of fire all by themselves.

Even she wouldn’t touch him there, ugly as it was. He hadn’t blamed her, but he still killed her, with those nails that the chief learned him of, hair spread around her like nightfall. He stroked that hair long after she died. Now both their spirits haunted him, leading him and Carlo off course from what they’d earned.

“What I earned,” Ambrose pushed through his teeth, the “I” splitting the “we” in two as he spied Carlo hauling something up out of the muck.

Ambrose shifted his stance in what must have been hours, legs cored by stone as brittle as the stone behind him. He trained his rifle on Carlo’s fat dollop of a body. Fuck if he was pale, neck and up and elbows and down as dark as the mud he climbed out of.

Ambrose returned the rifle to his shoulder and made a fist. Drew something hot there he knew wasn’t sweat. Slap that fat bastard in the face with the blood, the smell and taste of it would throw him off course long enough for Ambrose to fire a shot into his belly, maybe two. Fall back into that mud, sink down, preserved for someone else to find a thousand years from now after it all dried up, in this–

“God damn sun,” Ambrose said, pulling his arm across his forehead.

When Ambrose saw Carlo had found an old empty crate and not the prize they were after, he shuffled to the one barrel in a hundred mile radius he hadn’t shot up, but was, and took a swig of a memory. The bottle, left empty for some time, abandoned by someone else, but, closing his eyes, he thought he might feel the spirit of what used to be trickle down his throat. Like the two spirits that both scorched his face and wouldn’t touch it.

He threw the bottle against the ruined wall. Felt good, but seeing all that glass sparkle into dust made him think of rain. Hands planted on the window sill, nails embeded into rotted wood, Ambrose couldn’t win.

He kicked a bucket in his path that turned to dust as he rounded the corner to find shade or answers or solace, but more than likely dirt.

Ambrose did find dirt but also something else. Planks beneath the dirt of what used to be a floor. Who the hell would live up here, closer to the sun than anyone wanted to be? Ambrose took to what little shade there was and considered his question. He kicked aside some dirt and what he though was grains of sand scatter on tiny legs. The ground gave more than it should.

“Now why’d you go and do that?” It was Carlo, caked in dried mud, kerchief the only clean thing on him. “No faces. And now I have two reasons you ugly fuck.”

Ambrose looked around to the source of Carlo’s dismay. He saw of his nose than he should have. His kerchief was off.

“Now I’m gonna have to kill you,” Carlo said, revolver aimed.

Along with his kerchief, Ambrose had misplaced his rifle.

“A shame, really,” Carlo said. “A tough solo haul this is gonna be.”

Ambrose stepped toward him. “You found it?”

“Hey, hey hey,” Carlo said. “Watch it.”

Ambrose did. To the floor that matched the sill and the bucket. He smoothed dirt back over the spot.

Carlo frowned, then smiled. “You hiding something from me, Brosie? Nu-uh, don’t go doing that. Stay. Put.”

Ambrose dropped to the ground in a ball and broke through, taking Carlo along with him. Then Ambrose fell through something again: water. Plunging deep, the only thing he could feel were those scratches on his face.

He found the surface somehow and emptied his lungs onto a ledge of slick rock and kicked his feet to stay afloat, water the only purchase below he could find. Convinced he wasn’t going to drown yet, he listened for the man who surely had. Not a splash, or gurgle, or weak grasp on his shoe.

Ambrose smiled and looked up to a hole full of blue-hot sky. His scars weren’t burning for once, and it troubled him. He reached up for a handhold, found one, but his weight tore all his nails off except his thumb’s. Just as he reached his other hand up, light fell on it, then shadow, crawling across it like termites. Above were two sillhouttes, one with braids, one without. Sharp nails that weren’t his clacked on stone and echoed around him. That and darkness were all he was left with.