is a picture worth 1000 words

Inspired by the current book I’m reading, Knockemstiff, by Donald Ray Pollock. A story that took until the end to figure out how it would lead to the artwork. Sometimes, you just need to trust in your subconscious.

Thanks for reading.

Artwork by Hethe Srodawa

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.

This image struck me with nostalgia. Not that I’ve ever been a schoolgirl before but something about the framing and lighting reminded me of my childhood.

Thanks for reading.

Artwork by Enze Fu

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

Aoi tied her shoes for the third time.

“Hurry up, Aoi!” Ren called from the sidewalk outside the school gates.

The tree Aoi sat under rustled what leaves were left on its spider-leg branches. The wind plucked a single leaf free and hurtled it toward Ren and Niko, who were crossing the street. Aoi shivered, thinking of graveyards and ghosts, then pushed her glasses up on her nose and followed after her friends.

“Wait!” Aoi called as Ren and Niko rounded the corner with the blue fence, the path below spattered with cherries.

They didn’t wait, so she followed their cherry footprints, which faded in the direction of the field they always crossed on the way home every day. But not tomorrow.

Aoi skidded to a stop as the world opened to grass she could get lost in, a sky that might carry her away, and her two best friends wavering on the horizon as if they were made of paper, two brush strokes barely there, ready to be crumpled and discarded.

“No,” Aoi said, but the wind stole her word and tossed it into the grass, which chittered with glee. She stuck her tongue out at it.

“What’s taking so long?” It was Ren, her soft face smiling below a curtain of bangs.

“Sorry,” Aoi said, “I just . . .”

Ren tossed a pebble at Niko who leaped as it hit the ground with a crack and bounded into the grass. Slender white shapes rose from where the pebble landed. Two cranes. Black tail feathers, neck with a red scalp that matched the color of the cherried path.

Aoi looked back the way she had come, to find the other bird. The third one. Finding nothing but the blue fence far in the distance, she said, “There are only two.”

Ren retied Aoi’s braid that had come loose. “Like us.”

Aoi beamed. “Really?”

Ren shrugged. “I guess so.”

“You guess?”

“Why are you being so weird? My parents will be mad if I don’t get home soon. We should go.”

“Why?”

Ren looked at her as Niko approached. “I just told you.”

“But remember when we played out in this field until it got dark and–”

Niko slung her bag off her shoulder. “And we all got grounded for a week. Even the weekend.”

“Yeah,” Ren said.

“But,” Aoi said.

“But what?” Niko said.

“It’s the end.”

Ren and Niko looked at each other and laughed. They both stood and brushed off their knees. The two cranes stood on the path, preening their wings.

“We have to find the third one,” Aoi said. “It’s us. Ren said so.”

Niko made a face at Ren. “Huh?”

Ren blushed, looking down. Her hair whittled her face into a sliver. If she didn’t have bangs, it would have been gone completely.

“You guys are weird,” Niko said. She faced the cranes and mocked their preening, croaking a song that sounded nothing like theirs.

The two cranes ignored her, exploring the edge of the path with their beaks.

“We’re the weird ones?” Ren said and rolled her eyes. She kicked Niko’s bag to get her attention.

Aoi stayed where she was, looking for the third crane that must be there, stalking the shallows she knew were there but couldn’t see. Far behind, like her. Left behind, like her.

Ren joined Niko in her charade, and they giggled when the cranes finally noticed them, spreading their wings wide and taking flight toward the sun where no silly girls were to be found.

Aoi closed her eyes and felt the sun on her face. Her glasses slipped down her nose, but she let them sit there, ready to slip off. All she had to do was scrunch her face and the parts behind her ears would rise over them and the weight would do the rest.

But she didn’t. Instead, she looked through her lenses which were as far as they could be from her eyes without falling off, noting the way they warped and bulged the world, making everything in the middle big and everything along the outside squashed. They did the same to Ren and Niko who had continued along the path toward home. Soon that path would split, and they would go their separate ways.

“And you’ll go away for the summer like you always do,” Aoi said. “Both of you. But it’s different now. You’ll be there and I’ll be here, and then you’ll be somewhere else after.”

Aoi sat down and untied her shoes. She undid her braid and shook it free in the breeze. She let her glasses fall off her face, but the frame caught a lock of hair and swung into the grass.

She searched the blur of color for her glasses. It was green and brown for a time. Then hands joined the search, and her pale fingers reminded her of the two cranes. She suddenly didn’t care about her glasses anymore and balled her hands until they didn’t look like cranes at all. Handfulls of grass were what they found.

“Aoi,” Ren and Niko said together.

Aoi looked up at her friends who didn’t look like cranes at all. Niko taller with hair past her shoulder. Ren shorter with hair above her shoulders.

Then they knelt down to her level. She felt her braid retied. She felt her glasses returned, which allowed her to see their faces, the sun behind them, dabbing the tops of their heads with red, just like the cranes.

Aoi tied her shoes for the fourth time.

“We can wait a little longer,” Ren said.

“We can,” Niko said. “Remember when we played tag out there one time and Ren fell into the stream and pretended she was drownin g?”

“You guys were crying so hard,” Ren said.

“So mean,” Aoi and Niko said in unison.

“Hey, look,” Ren said.

The two cranes picked there way through the reeds ahead before taking flight.

“It’s us,” Niko said to Ren.

Aoi smiled. “It is.”

This was the first time I attempted this style of horror. It was fun playing with what one may call an urban legend. I don’t feel it completely landed for me, but there are some things I enjoyed.

Thanks for reading.

Artwork by Svetlana Shuvalova

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

Jen touched the window. “It’s cold.”

“Of course, it’s cold,” Ivan said. “It’s snowing outside. That’s not the point, anyway. Don’t touch it. Just count.”

Jen’s reflection in the glass was a silhouette of black Longleaf pines, the lamp in the room behind her a–”Hey, what do they call those glowly halos behind angels?”

“A halo. Keep counting.”

“Nimbus,” Jen said. “That’s it.”

“That’s a cloud. The dark kind, full of rain.” Ivan pushed out a sigh. “Goddammit, Jen. You’re ruining it. Keep counting.”

“This is stupid. I’m not staring at a window counting to one thousand.”

Ivan looked over her shoulder. At her reflection, at the trees outside, at himself, she couldn’t tell. He touched her shoulder. “You’re almost there.” His fingers looked strange in the window. Crooked, almost broken.

Jen shrugged his hand off. “Fine. Eight hundred and eighty.” Ivan’s face in the window changed as much as his hand had. She closed her eyes.

“You have to keep your eyes open,” he said. “Or it won’t work.”

She laughed and shook her head. “You actually think this is going to work? I’m only doing this because you promised you’d paint the entryway if I did.”

Jen saw his eyes, then, in the window, hovering among the boughs of the pines, white as snow without irises or pupils. As if the trees themselves had eyes. As if two moons bore a hole through them.

“Count,” Ivan whispered. His breath was cold, his tone laced with static as if a recording.

“Eight hundred and eighty-one.” The lamp at the back of the room, her nimbus, dimmed. Ivan’s heartbeat thrummed on her shouldblade.

“Eight hundred and eighty–” She spun and pushed him away. “I’m done. You’re creeping me out. We can paint the stupid entryway together.”

Ivan’s face was slack. A glisten near his lower lids. His lips were almost blue, but it could have been from her staring at the icy tones of night. She rubbed her eyes.

“Please,” he said, trembling, trails of sweat running from his temples to his jaw. His hands were pressed together in prayer, then the fingers intertwined, and he squeezed, knuckles the color of bone.

Jen’s heart ached. She forgot the stupidity of this game, the frigid air by the window, the eyes in the wall of trees. She almost asked him if he was okay, but he hated that. Always hated that. Especially the last few weeks.

“Fine,” she said.

She faced the window and ran her tongue over her teeth to separate her lips from them, which had grown sticky and dry. The back of her throat felt like an ice cube had lodged there. Yet she could breathe. She swallowed. There was nothing there.

“Eight hundred and eighty two,” she said. “Eight hundred and eighty–”

“No,” Ivan said. “It’s fine. That’s good enough. You were right. This is stupid. Let’s go finish the movie.”

She caught his shoulder as he turned. “You said I had to count to a thousand? Hey, listen to me. Are you okay?”

Fuck.

Ivan narrowed, withered, and she reached out to touch him, to say she was sorry, to say she knew he hated it, knew what he was going through, knew that she wouldn’t understand and she should just stop asking.

“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah.”

He did look okay. Filled out, taller even. Was that a smile?

Jen wanted to hug him, leap into his arms, buckshot his face with kisses despite the gross beard he’d grown since all of this started.

“Jenny,” he said. “I love you.” That static sound again.

“What?”

His eyes were white, like she had seen in the reflection. She desperately searched the reaches of his eyelids for a sign of iris, a twitch, a strain that he was forcing his eyes back into his head.

Then he burst out laughing, folding over, hyperventilating, then falling to the floor in a fetal position where he rotated slowly on his side, a spiral.

She kicked him, but he continued his strange ritual. Closer now, she saw he was crying, not laughing, as a ring of tears formed around his body, glinting in the lamp light that was so bright. He looked up at her, still sobbing, his neck not quite right, his eyes not quite right, as he focused on the space behind her, beyond her.

A gust of wind hit her back. The window was open, the stand of trees appearing closer, miniaturized, coming into the room in tangled strands. Spiraled strands.

Jen was yanked off her feet, Ivan pulling her across the room through the entryway where sealed paint buckets were kicked over. She burst out the front door onto the stairwell landing, but Ivan kept going, thrown down the stairs face-first, his head bursting on the eighth step, his fingers mangled, the bottoms of his feet as black as the trees.

Through the front door she saw their home, near and far at the same time, the window closed and dark and cold. She could feel it from here. Then she saw it.

She fell against the banister, catching herself, and bolted down the stairs, zig zagging down the five floors until she reached the bottom. Back against the wall, she paused to rest. The angularity of the stairwell had changed, rounded into a–

Jen pounded on the exit door, the knob somehow missing, then searched the frame with fingernails, three snapping off, flinging threads of blood across a white blur of a face who had opened the door, and she ran out into the night, out into the cold.

An owl screeched as the building’s floodlight ignited, and a scream sounded behind her muffled by wood and brick. She ran toward her long shadow, which grew longer with every stride, taller. Blacker.

Ankle-deep in the snow, then on her knees, she faced the trees, connected to her shadow, then on her stomach, where she felt a heartbeat against her back. It was warm. Then cold.

What brought this poor soul to such a fate? What was his name? What was his story? Well, that is what I venture to discover, through a dream.

Thanks for reading.

Artwork by Tomas Duchek

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 sough of the wind chattered the branches, carrying a memory. His name? His story? His love? For a love he must have had once. So said the ring encircling his finger, which encircled the roots of the forest bed, which was his bed, among the snow and moss and earth.

Who was that love? The memory carried by the wind was too high, too agile, too fickle, too unwilling to reveal its secrets, content in eluding him, until it bored of that and the forest was silent again.

That silence did not leave a space for his mind to discover what the wind had teased. It only enlisted a weight upon his eyelids to bring him to slumber.

He closed his eyes, for it was all he could do. His dreams were dark. A starless sky. A cave. A well. At the bottom of that well shone a coin, golden like the metal on his finger, what imagery stamped upon it too fine to decipher. He swam through the pitch and reached out what he imagined was his hand, for he could not see it either, waiting for his fingers to occlude the coin and then the sensation of its surface to manifest. Such a small thing could buy so much. He felt his mouth salivating at the thought of the feast it could yield. Mutton and bread and cheese washed down by sweet mead, which he would slam down on the table to demand more, more, more. And there would be a woman. His love? No, for she was laden in bruises makeup couldn’t cover, though cover it she tried, even angling her body in such a way to favor her unblemished side to the firelight.

This coin could buy flesh, and he wasn’t a choosy man, not yet, not until he found his love. Tonight was not for love, and he hungered for what love was not. He took her hand and stood, and with a turn of her head she showed him a hoop in her ear, polished to the coin’s luster. He reached for it, but could not grasp it, instead pulled stumbling up the stairs by the woman, who deposited him in a room as dark as a cave.

Blind as he was, he probed the darkness for a hint of wall or anything. Nothing he felt, but something he saw. The elusive color tuned to the sound of the wind. He lunged for it and found a shuttered window where a golden orb gleamed. The coin, he thought at first, but his fingers went through as if it were a ring. A knothole, he found, splinters as well, and through that knothole shone the sun. He threw open the window to find anything but the sun. Darkness is what he saw, but at its core lay that coin, that permanent fixture of his madness, still out of reach.

Still, he reached. He crawled. Hands and knees pressed against stone, cut into them. Jagged and fierce, it rent his flesh, yet still he pressed on, his eye on the prize, because love could wound him more than stone.

Walls rose, so he stood, blood trickling into his boots, which gripped the stone well enough, rooted him, nearly. Careful steps he took, gaze flicking to the ground as if he could see it, until he heard the hammer and clink and eventual clatter of what could only be iron to stone.

Something did occlude the coin then. Something hunched and ragged with a crude swathe of ink set over its shoulder only to blur before he could make sense of it. A creature, a trial, to prove his worthiness of what he knew he had already won. His finger lay absent of that, but of course it did, him having yet to conquer what stood before him, seething with its weapon ready to feed on something more substantial than teeth of rock.

He charged forward with a bellow, his only weapon, and the creature did stir, did take notice, but lash out at him it did not. It eclipsed what could only be the cave’s entrance, as if to steal his prize, to never attain what mystery the wind sang.

A gasp broke through his shout as his hands took hold, and another glimmer hovered in the dark, a ring encircling a finger, catching what little light remained, and it would be his. He let his hands do the work, bringing this creature to its end before its blade found him. When his strength was spent, he looked again to be sure he had won, and there, staring back was a tooth in a maw with no others because he had taken them with his fist, silver as the moon in a starless sky.

He saw just that, then the moon itself faded away, and he was left with the sough of the wind tuned to a chime hanging from the eave of a cottage of a dead man at the edge of a lake near a forest with twisted roots that whispered through undulating soil like maggots just below the surface, feeding on the rotten flesh hidden by the skin of the earth.

He followed the whispers, as he had followed so many things, first at the bottom of a well, then in a chamber of lust, through a cave with a beast that was but a toothless man who had perished from his touch.

When his eyes opened he wanted to close them again, for he knew now why he was here. His ring was no ring to represent his love, for he had none. The forest told him what the wind had not, whispering his deeds now that he was close enough to hear them, consumed by the roots to the waist. For he was not a man of love, the ring a trinket taken from a man who had loved.

He closed his eyes, for it was all he could do.

Personification is used often in writing to bring more depth and perspective to things that otherwise have none. I took it a step further and wrote an entire story about such a thing.

Thanks for reading.

Artwork by Dmitry Vishnevsky

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 horse clopped across the bridge, which evoked the memory of its birth.

A slumber in mud. Deep and timeless. Time meant nothing to the stones that nestled there when the river had been but a trickle. But now the bridge knew what time was, so it could label that concept.

Wake up, said callused hands.

It’s time to grow up and move on, said a pickaxe.

You’ll do great things, said a mallet.

You’ll do terrible things, said a man.

The stone became many at the hands of these men. Separated, reconnected, and reshaped to itself and its brethren it didn’t know it had.

Hello, said the bridge.

Hello, it answered.

The trickle that would become a river became a creek. It played its music to the bridge as it passed beneath it, bringing all manner of thing. Leaves and twigs given new life though they were severed. The bridge never knew the dead could move with such vitality. It wondered where they would end up, because it couldn’t see far. The creek bent quickly and was hidden by the trees that hung low as if to drink from it. They would molt their dead from time to time, and if the bridge were lucky, they would do it upstream so the bridge could see them running toward it as if they were its children.

The bridge only had dead children, it seemed. If not leaves and twigs, then animals.

A man with a stick upon the horse upon the bridge evoked the memory of a death like no other.

A human child. The boy had been playing on the bridge with his fishing pole, which was only a branch with an imaginary line.

The bridge wanted to tell him to be careful, to not get too close to the edge, because it knew the perils that lay beneath the mist and the mirrored surface of the creek that had grown to a river. Though the bridge tried to speak, it was made of stone. The boy sat on the edge with his feet hanging. He raised his pole like it was a sword, and it seemed to transform into that, because the boy stood and swung it and then spun in the other direction to thrust it like the bridge had seen men do across it, who had also fallen to their deaths. The bridge had been forced to look at their faces until the animals and bugs stripped them clean enough to be washed away.

The bridge didn’t want to look at the boy like that. Not ever. But it was a particularly damp season and moss had grown over the bridge like skin. It wasn’t hard for the boy to find it. The bridge felt the boy’s heel press hard and then slip. The bridge was forced to look at the boy fall with a look of confusion and fear, much like the child who had been born under its arch to a woman who lived there for some time. While that child was fearful of life, this boy was fearful of death. Not because he knew what was to come, but because he didn’t.

The bridge knew. It watched, helpless, as the boy smashed his head on the rock, his eyes looking about calmly as blood trailed from his nose. His mouth moved as if to speak, but he didn’t speak. Soon the boy’s eyes stopped looking, and his mouth stopped trying to speak. The bridge watched him decompose as it had all the others.

There were many years of stillness after the death of the boy, as if the world mourned its only son. The bridge savored the stillness, because it, too, mourned the boy.

“Nearly a hundred years it took,” the man upon the horse said.

The voice of the man and horse upon the bridge evoked a memory of its family.

When the snow cleared, they came. Men with great machines that nearly separated the bridge, stone by stone. For that is what the machines carried. The bridge recognized some of the stones and spoke to them in the old ways. Some spoke back. Some didn’t.

After a time, the bridge saw where its distant cousins were taken. To assemble a tower so tall only birds could reach it, and they did, flocking around its peak and perching upon its stones to be shooed away by men hiding in its nooks.

Many came and walked across the bridge. Man and woman and child and animal. Often, the bridge saw the same ones pass back again. It was nothing like the bridge had ever known. The boots and wagon wheels and horse hooves cleared the stones of moss, even in the damp season. No children fell to their deaths. The river widened and raced with a ferocity the bridge had never witnessed. Mist tickled its underside, where it was fine for moss to grow. And grow it did, into great beards to rival those of the elder men who crossed it.

The man and horse crossed the bridge to evoke the memory of its death.

Chipped and bowed and moss-ridden with the traffic and absence of traffic of the people who had built and visited the great tower made of its cousins. It spoke to its cousins in the old ways, to tell them what was to come. Some denied the bridge. Some did not.

Year after year, fewer of the living and the dead visited the bridge, and in that negligence, the concept of time was lost to the bridge. It lost the concept of waiting, of watching, of remembering.

The river became a stream, a trickle, and then nothing at all. The bridge forgot its birth. It forgot its death because it was experiencing it now. Dry and buckling and too much for its own weight, the bridge collapsed.

Stone by stone, it returned to the mud.

Sleep, said the mud.

The bridge did not dream. The bridge did not wake.

In honor of who is quite possibly the greatest living American writer, Cormac McCarthy, and his announcement of two new novels coming out in the fall, I wrote this story. The art hit me immediately and it fit his tone so well, I had to give it a try.

Thanks for reading.

Artwork by David Bocquillon Carrasco

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 two men drove long into the night because the dawn was their destination.

“Almost there,” Holden said, who drove.

“Where?” Tom said, who rode beside him.

“Where we need to be.”

“We don’t have to be anywhere. I like driving at night.”

“Night’s almost gone. See that?” Holden pointed at the windshield.

Tom looked at it but just saw Holden’s finger with his long sleeve pulled to his knuckles. He stretched it all the time to hide the scales on his skin. Like he was stretching his other sleeve now. Holden thought he was hiding it between his seat and the door, but Tom saw.

“All I see is a window you forgot to wash,” Tom said. The glass was smudged with circular marks that looked like the radial metal pattern Holden had been working on at the shop when Tom had first met him. The light had struck the metal in a way Tom had never seen light strike before. Holden struck him that day.

“It was your turn,” Holden said.

“It was my turn to fill up the tank,” Tom said.

“Doesn’t change the fact that dawn’s coming.”

“I still don’t see it. Look at the time. It’s only 2:30.”

The clock was analog and did read 2:30 with a minute hand that wobbled from the road. It couldn’t make up its mind if it wanted to go to the past or the future by a minute.

“It always says 2:30,” Holden said.

Maybe the clock was broken, but Tom didn’t feel like arguing.

“Can I roll down the window at least?” Tom said.

“I’m cold already,” Holden said. He wore a puffy vest that glimmered when the headlights reflected off the reflectors on the side of the road. Beneath that he wore a hooded sweatshirt. The hood was pulled over his head.

Tom moved closer to him. “Feels all right to me,” he said.

“There’s a draft in the door.”

“I can’t feel anything.”

“I told you. It’s here at the door.”

“You can have my jacket.”

“I don’t want your jacket.”

“Okay.”

Holden turned on the high beams and it hit the fog and painted it bright and gray and solid.

Tom found he wasn’t wearing his seat belt, so he moved back on his side against the door and clasped it on. “You’re going to get us killed,” he said. “I can’t see anything out there.”

“You don’t have to,” Holden said.

“I’m serious. You know what I mean. It will be all for nothing.”

Holden hit the brakes and the car skidded to a stop. A french fry cardboard slid off the dash and fell on the gear shift and swung there. They’d bought it and shared what used to be inside at a burger joint ten miles or so back at a town of fifty people called Two Shores where they’d killed the girl.

“You don’t know what it was for,” Holden said. He hit the french fry cardboard off the gearshift and smashed it with his heel.

“The hell I do. I was the one who did it.”

Holden thought about that squeezing the steering wheel like he was wringing clothes dry. He didn’t notice his sleeves fall back to show his scaly skin.

Tom touched his hand where the scales were.

Holden threw Tom’s hand off the wheel and grabbed him by the collar of his denim jacket. “Don’t you ever touch me.”

Tom looked at Holden and his eyes that were like gems, and he wished he knew something about gems so he could give them a name. He put both of his hands over Holden’s.

Holden’s gem eyes closed and he fell into Tom with his forehead pressed to his chest and he wept. Tom went to put his hand on the back of Holden’s head to pull him closer, but Holden moved back into his seat and then opened his door and got out.

Tom sat in the car until the dome light went off and then he sat there longer. Holden was a shadow outside that was darker than the night, which had become blue. It reminded Tom of the color of Holden’s eyes and he wanted to see them so he got out too.

One of the two shores that had left the town of Two Shores behind crashed and roared beneath a solid sky. Holden paced on the beach pulling at his sleeves. Tom followed Holden’s footprints like he’d seen done in a movie before so it looked like there was only one man. Tom passed Holden to get a better look at the water and there was evidence of two men.

“What are we doing here?” Tom said.

Holden still looked like a shadow ghost. Something that wasn’t his hand extended from his sleeve.

“Stopping for good.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I think you do.” Holden held the gun so Tom could see it.

“All we been through and you want it to go down this way?”

“I do.”

“I don’t believe you.”

Holden pointed the gun at Tom. “Do you believe this?”

“I believe that killed a woman who would have ruined our lives.”

“That’s not all it’s done. Or about to do.”

Tom looked at the ocean and then looked at Holden again. He saw his eyes now and suddenly knew what a blue gem was called.

“I’m sorry I did what I did that got us into this.”

Holden saw gems in Tom’s eyes then. “It was both of us.”

“It was.”

“But it can’t go on.”

“Why not?”

“It just can’t. I’m sorry.”

Holden aimed the gun at Tom and pulled the trigger. It clicked. It clicked again.

“I thought you were different, but I suppose I always knew.” Tom reached in his pocket and pulled out the rounds he had removed from the gun after killing the girl and threw them into the ocean.

Holden watched Tom in the half-light of dawn and Tom watched Holden.