Morpheus Tales 22 Preview

1

ISSN 1757-5419 Issue 22 – October 2013 The Off Season By Nate Jacobs

Page 2

Aftershock By Richard Farren Barber Illustrated By Tex McCranie

Page 6

Spiral of Flies By Jason Sturner

Page 13

Anne Sees The Dead By Jared Bernard

Page 16

Babble By Edward A. Taylor

Page 19

The Ritual By Paul L. Howard Illustrated By Danielle Ceneta

Page 23

Legal Tender By Steven Lee Climer Illustrated By Candra Hope

Page 28

The River Man By Alex Živko-Clark

Page 34

Plastic Surgery, West Texas Style By Meredith Doench

Page 37

Cover By Sarah Turkowski - http://sarahtillustration.com Proof-read By – Sheri White

All material contained within the pages of this magazine and associated websites is copyright of Morpheus Tales. All. Rights Reserved. No material contained herein can be copied or otherwise used without the express permission of the copyright holders.

2

March is a boring time of the year in my part of the world. Those who have year-round jobs start work, and those who don’t stay home and wait for something to happen. I’ve got a night job cooking at Gatsby’s, so I’ve got the whole day to myself when my girlfriend Cassie’s off at work.

As far as days in March go, this one is particularly ugly. We got a good deal of snow last night. My grandpa would say a “dusting”, but that wouldn’t fit here. It’s the heavy type of snow that’s great for making snowballs, but absolute torture when you’ve got to shovel a whole driveway of that cumbersome stuff. It sticks to your shovel, and if you can make it to the end without throwing out your back, you’re soaked in sweat. But the problem is the air is still cold and damp, so if you open up your coat while shovelling, you’re bound to catch cold. Classic lose/lose situation.

I’ve just finished shovelling the deck and the driveway when it starts to rain. Whenever there’s snow on the ground, rain brings out the ugliest in nature: it stains the bare trees all shades of dark and wet, and eats holes in the snow to reveal pits of mud and dead leaves. I hope the temperature will stay up. Then we’ll have some fog and I won’t have to look at the ugliness.

Around noon the temperature drops and the rain starts to freeze. I remember that I’m almost out of ice-melter salt. Though I’d rather try to make it through the last bit of winter without buying any more, Cassie will tan my hide if she slips on the ice one more time.

It’s just drizzling, so I walk to the hardware store. The village looks downright depressing in this weather. Some of the streetlights have come on. The ice hasn’t moved out of the bay, so rather than being a tranquil white field or an intriguingly ominous maelstrom, it’s just a motley expanse of alternating grey.

Being that it’s lunch time, there’s the usual collection of colourful locals gathered around the cash register, drinking coffee and chewing the fat. I have to elbow my way through so I can plop my bag of salt down on the counter. The cashier rings me up.

“That’ll be $7.99,” he says. I pay him.

“Hey, Will, maybe you could give us a hand,” one of the local guys, Eric, says to me.

“We need another pair of strong hands,” his buddy Frank adds. “You’d be perfect for the job.”

“Thanks for the compliment,” I smile. “What does the job entail?”

“There’s some problem with the septic tank up at Boris Stotmeister’s place. The little old lady who lives next to him says that it smells something fierce,” Eric explains. Boris’s next door neighbour is at least a quarter mile from him, so that’s got to be some stench.

I laugh and refuse to help. “Well, I’m no plumber, so I can’t help.”

“No, no, no,” Eric says. “We’ve just gotta go up there, have a look at what’s going on, and clear the snow so the proper technicians can get their gear in there if it is a problem with the septic tank.”

“Well, what else would it be?” I ask.

“You know Boris. He’s a total pack rat. Maybe one, or all, of his chest freezers went out, and everything’s rotting,” Eric continues.

“There was that ice storm last week. The power might be out at Boris’ place,” Frank adds.

“Why don’t you have Boris deal with it himself?” I ask. Boris lives out in the boondocks, and has one long driveway.

“He drives down to Arizona every winter, you know. He shouldn’t be back for at least another month. He’s got some lodger staying there, but I wouldn’t be surprised to find that the guy bailed after New Year,” Eric says.

3

She didn’t come back. She pulled open the door and slipped out into the night and she didn’t come back. Just like all the others.

“Four now?” Nick asked. His voice echoed within the tight room, close enough for me to taste stale meat on his breath. “That’s four now, innit?”

“Five,” I said. Although it was too dark to see him I pictured his face – the shocked expression as if to ask ‘how the hell did I get that wrong?’

“There was the old woman that went out at the beginning. Mary.”

“Five,” Nick whispered, as if somehow five was so much more terrible than four. What did it matter? Three. Four. Five. Over the last twelve hours they’d each slipped through the door and none of them had come back.

Leaving just the two of us.

“You’re not going to abandon me, are you?” Nick asked. I heard him floundering in the dark – scattering cans and discarded sweet wrappers and whatever else was on the floor below us. I heard him and then he grabbed my jacket and pulled us close together. The meat-house stench of his breath blew across my lips. “Please don’t leave me,” he said and then he was whimpering. His words were broken and indistinct. It was just the one thing over and over again: Don’t go. Don’t leave me alone. Don’t go out the door.

Because no-one who went out the door came back.

I pushed him away from me. I had to prise open his fingers to release my jacket; bending each digit backward. I heard his bones crack, but still Nick carried on clinging to me until I picked myself free. When I was done I scuttled across the floor as quietly as I could. I cut my hand on a broken glass bottle and cursed the sharp jab of pain in the pad of my hand.

“What is it, Joe?” Nick asked. His voice clipped, urgent. “Hurt yourself? You hurt yourself, Joe? What you done?”

I put my hand to my mouth and tasted warm copper on my tongue. The cut stung like a bastard and in that moment I would have given anything for a bit of light – just to see the severity of my wound. Because it felt deep. It felt like I’d cut down through skin and muscle and had scratched against bone.

I was tempted to use my phone – just for a second – just to get an idea of how badly I was hurt. But the light would draw Nick toward me.

“Hurt yourself, Joe?” Nick asked. His slightly breathless voice was going to drive me insane soon. There was a greedy longing in his words. I could imagine him sitting in the darkness, licking his lips, maybe able to smell the sharp scent of my spilled blood in the confined space. “You okay, Joe?” he asked.

Through gritted teeth I told him. “I’m okay. I’m fine. Never better.”

“You sure, Joe?” At that moment I wished that he would walk out through the door and never come back.

The bleeding had probably slowed to a trickle, but the cut still throbbed. It was the only thing I could focus on; more important than Nick and Mary and Phil and all the others. More important than the stink of burning that slipped into the room every now and then. For me. For now.

That cut was everything.

“You’re not gonna die on me?” Nick’s voice came across the room like it was folded inside bubble wrap. It was like listening to him underwater; each word distorted.

I thought about the wound. What if I’d cut an artery and the blood was rushing out of me?

What if it became septic? All the crap in this room, infection didn’t just seem possible, it seemed a certainty. I could feel my body becoming hotter and, although I knew my imagination was just playing tricks, it scared the hell out of me.

4

Asher took a long, hard look at the pair of stilts resting against the wall of his studio apartment. As the clock struck midnight, the heavy, hypnotic rhythms of the Deftones song “Change (In the House of Flies)” snagged his wavering consciousness. Now in a rage, Asher threw his beer can at the MP3 player, took up an axe, and chopped the stilts into a thousand pieces.

He awoke on his cigarette-burned couch a few hours later, disoriented and hung over. All was quiet but for the crackling radiator and the hum of the refrigerator. If it hadn’t been for a hint of sunrise pressed against the east window, and light from beneath the bathroom door, he’d have been in complete darkness.

Struggling to sit up, Asher cracked his back and wiped snot from the whiskers beneath his nose. As dawn slowly filled the room, he flinched to see that the walls now appeared forty feet high and made of amber. Dozens of flies zipped back and forth between them, bumping into one another and spiralling down in aerial combat.

Asher threw up his hands, mumbled something about having smoked some bad shit.

He rubbed his eyes hard and picked away the crust. As sight returned, a thin, looming figure shimmered into view beside the TV. It was elevated on stilts and perfectly still, black as a starless region of space save for five red orbs on a featureless head. A long, flat object lay across upturned arms, while a tiny mandrill squatted sleepy-eyed on its left shoulder.

With a sharp break from rigidity, the monkey leapt onto the figure’s forearm and pushed the object — which came apart and wafted down like a pair of feathers — to the floor beside the coffee table.

Reluctantly, Asher turned his gaze to the mandrill. The primate squealed once, then nodded at the fallen objects. Now the red orbs on the figure’s amorphous face were moving scattershot.

All but convinced that his visitors must be the combined effect of hangover and some strange, waking dream, Asher nonchalantly reached down and dragged the flat objects up to his lap.

There they gave the impression of large, sturdy sheets of paper, partly sticky and gritty as if sprinkled with tar and slapped against dirt. He pinched a soft edge and wiggled it.

In that moment they became all too real.

And though his tongue was limp, and his heart began to race with fear, he managed to say, “What for?”

But the elongated figure was gone.

By now the apartment had reverted to its original state, a blazing sunrise pouring in through the east window. Asher sat and scrutinized the objects in the ruddy light. It was then that their true nature was revealed: they were large, transparent insect wings, highly veined, like those of the common house fly. The moment he realized this, they disappeared.

While smoking a multitude of cigarettes, Asher sat contemplating all he had seen.

Explanations arose and fell away. A few of them stuck, and in time, his nerves began to settle.

After all, it hadn’t been the first time he’d hallucinated.

By noon he was sprawled on the couch with a can of beer between his legs. Scantily clad girls argued and cried about something on TV. Annoyed, Asher shut it off. That’s when he heard, or thought he heard, moans coming from inside the nearby bathroom. Must be the neighbours, he told himself. But then the silent, bizarre creature and its servant monkey came to mind.

“So much for drowning nightmares in alcohol,” he grumbled to himself, staring down as he took long drags from his cigarette. That’s when he happened to notice the faded track marks on his left arm; and that’s when the most likely culprit of his hallucinations became apparent: smack.

5

PORT-AU-PRINCE – Geoffrey Anne, board member of the NGO Crucifix Blanc, was found dead yesterday. Autopsy reports confirm that he bit off his tongue and choked to death on it around 3 pm.

Dr Jean Hurbon, the Ouest Department psychiatrist who had been treating Anne, says that Anne was suffering from paranoid schizophrenia, which led him to have elaborate delusions.

Hurbon says Anne was fading in and out of reality. “Mr Anne exhibited isolated periods of lucidity,” he says. “During those times, he told me that he never believed in paranormal stuff, but he now believes—or rather he believed—that there was no other explanation.”

Critics such as Secretary of State Edmond Bazin are sceptical of Anne’s diagnosis. “The timing is extraordinary,” Bazin said earlier in a press conference, referring of course to Anne’s impending trial. Last week Anne was arrested by police and since then he has been held in remand on charges of stealing funds from the Electoral Council.

“There is no doubt. Anne must have been slowly descending into this state, which is characterised by degenerating cognitive ability,” Dr Hurbon insists. While he was treating Mr Anne in the remand centre during the past week, Hurbon procured some information from Anne during his lapses of sanity. As this evidence was meant to be used at trial, the manuscripts have been released to the public. Several weeks ago Anne recalled hanging up on a reporter in his living room when he heard a sound like shuffling feet or soft whispers coming from his bedroom. Anne said he called out a warning to whoever it was that they were intruding and that he’d call the police.

Hurbon reports, “He said he distinctly heard soft whispers and he knew it was the paparazzi.”

To prove that someone was breaking into his house, Anne said he decided to capture the perpetrator on his cell phone’s camcorder. He noiselessly walked toward his bedroom, trailing his cell phone at arm’s length. Eyeing into the dim bedroom from the corridor, he saw that his window was closed and, though his heart was drumming, he thought that at least the invader couldn’t easily escape. Rounding the doorjamb, he could finally see the dark corner into which the light from the living room could scarcely reach, and he glimpsed the form of a little girl standing there. He moved a half-step forward and she dissolved like smoke.

He said he retreated in sheer panic, screaming in frantic spurts. Eventually, he surreptitiously crept back to his bedroom. In the dark corner of his room was nothing. With his breathing finally in check, he moved his shaky thumbs over the buttons of his phone and looked at the video recording. Nothing: the light balance had been adjusting because it was trying to compensate for the change in lighting. He told Dr Hurbon that he wasn’t even really sure that he had actually seen anything. It was just nerves, he decided.

Days later, a loud crash woke him in the middle of the night. “The noise was like a crack, like something hitting his roof, crashing into it,” Anne said in his testimony to Dr Hurbon. He was startled, but nothing appeared to be wrong after a quick surveillance of the room, so he went to the kitchen to get a drink of water. He had been having a vivid nightmare that he could no longer remember. Maybe the crash was part of a dream.

6

I have a limited time left to explain this all, so here it goes: In the Beginning There Was the Word, or so Saint John tells us in his first sentence of what would become his gospel. The Bible tells us a lot of things, and what John is saying is that God is the Word, and He has given us the Word, meaning He has given us Himself. So what happens when the Word goes away? They say that hell is the absence of God, which means the absence of the Word, which means that hell is a very quiet place. I know, you think that is an interesting play on words and all that happy horse shit but it's true. A short time ago I would have not believed it myself, or more importantly I did believe in it, Him, whatever and His Word, but now that is all gone and I am guessing that what they say is true: He has left us. Again, I would not believe it myself I was not there and did not bear witness to what happened at the end of days.

I will start as far back as I can, my name is Thomas Hughes and before the end I was a priest who no longer heard the Word. I no longer heard Him speaking to me and then in the end, I did not hear at all, save the maddening silence of the world. About five weeks ago things started to change, people started to forget things that they have known most of their lives. Words slowly left people and things became different. Sometimes it was just a word, sometimes it was an entire sentence or even a paragraph’s worth of characters; they all seem to have just up and left us. It's not that people forgot how to speak; it's just that the words were gone. I saw people who were as loquacious as a teenager in love just start speaking gibberish, and then just stop speaking at all. It was as if the words were leaving this world, but then I realized the simple truth of it all, because I, Thomas Hughes, was the only one still capable of using words. I tried to help those I could recover from the loss of the spoken word, but as time progressed it went from the spoken word, to the written word, and then to only nonsense.

So that is where I was but three weeks ago, the only person that I knew of who was able to read, to speak, to understand what was there; I was the keeper of the Word. I began writing everything down I could. I put down every Psalm, every song lyric I could; I wrote on the walls until words overlapped words and started to make as much sense as those around me. Day and night I wrote, I read, I spoke, but just to myself. At that point, the world began to fall apart; people were unable to communicate. Law and order, once words that had meaning were no longer words for anything. The breakdown began slowly, then like a train going downhill it picked up speed and then went off the rails and then off a steep cliff into the abyss. If all this is hard to understand, hard to believe, I understand. If not today, maybe someday these words will be used to teach others how to communicate again. I am only left to guess that we became like the people of Babel: God saw that we were growing too far for what we were, and He took our language from us. The Bible says that we all had one language once, and we built a tower to the heavens to see what was there, and God would have none of it. We would know all, even what He knew, and this caused us to be cursed to babble. Only God does not send the same plague twice, so this time instead of creating hundreds of languages, we lost all language and words.

7

Behold the magician at midnight! Revealed in the flickering glow of the candles that surround the pentagram he stands at its centre as if crucified. Holding the sword in his right hand and the chalice in his left he screams the final words of the invocation.

There is a brooding silence.

Suddenly, a series of thumps shake the room and a deep voice emanates from the air above his head.

“Will you shut the fuck up! Some of us have to go to work in the morning!”

“Oh, bollocks,” John mutters as he switches on the light and tosses the sword and chalice onto the old sofa-bed and sprawls down next to them.

Revealed in the harsh light of an unshaded light bulb is a young man in his early twenties with untidy short dark hair, wearing a stained dressing gown over a pair of jeans. The toy sword and beer glass now lie forgotten on the sofa. He sits with his head in his hands glaring at the pentagram chalked onto the floorboards of his shabby bedsit.

With a sudden air of decision he blows out the candles, picks up the mismatched plates and saucers that they are sitting on and dumps them noisily into the sink. He then heads towards the fridge, rolling down the threadbare carpet on the way. From the fridge he grabs some cans of strong lager and yesterday’s half-eaten pizza before slumping back down on the sofa.

Angrily ripping off the ring-pull he reviews the ritual. Surely he had done everything right according to the poxy instructions he had downloaded? He finishes the can and rips open another, and another. He lies back, his eyelids heavy. ### He is in a large wood-panelled room with small, high windows and a fire burning brightly in the grate. On the dark floorboards there are four large candlesticks, each next to a silver bowl which stands within the annular ring of two concentric circles meticulously chalked onto the wood. In the light of the candles he can see the silvery reflection of water in the bowls and the various magical invocations that are written concentrically between the circles.

Feeling rather cold John looks down and finds that he is naked.

“Oh, that is just bloody perfect,” he mutters to himself.

When the lights and the fire begin to dim he realises where he is; in that old Hammer film.

The one with the giant spider! On cue the spider materialises and John hastily steps into the circle.

As it wanders aimlessly around and occasionally tries to enter the protective circle, John can see that it is obviously just a tarantula filmed close-up inside a glass tank.

“How much longer is this going on for?” he thinks after some time. “The film was boring enough without having to stand bollock-naked in this bloody cold draught.”

Suddenly the spider disappears, reappearing where it was a moment ago. It moves forward then disappears, reappears, disappears, reappears. Back and forth like a badly edited film loop. The fire and the shadows it casts are also stuttering. The flickering light is making John feel nauseous and he is freezing cold. John’s breath plumes in the frigid air as he wraps his arms around his goose-bumped body in a futile attempt to keep warm.

Everything stops. A voice emerges from the spider somehow, a voice that feels like cold, razor-edged steel scraping over bone.

“This spider isn’t very scary, is it? I sifted through your paltry memories, most of which seem to be of video games by the way, to try and find something appropriate. This, I’m afraid, was the best available. Let me see if I can make it rather more convincing.”

Subtly altering its shape and stance, the spider now looks and moves like something large, heavy and extremely dangerous; it also reeks like a sewer.

8

“I must admit, this is the most unusual place I’ve ever taken a deposition.”

Grace London’s black high heels clicked on the tile as the attendant led her deeper into the high security wards of Eloise State Mental Forensics Facility. She followed closely behind what she assumed was a mental health professional, for the young man wore a picture badge and was dressed in hospital whites.

“Here we are,” the attendant said as he opened a conference room door for her. “I think Mr. Powder’s lawyer is here already. The court reporter is here, too. The guards are just outside and the entire room is being watched on closed-circuit television. Ever since he’s been on medication, though, Mr. Powder has been quite manageable.”

“Thank you very much.” She went inside and looked at the equally well-dressed lawyer sitting at a meeting table with Louis Powder, his client and her enemy.

Powder’s wild and wiry hair stuck up all over the place. Tats like graffiti tagged his face and hands. Below his left eye was a spider that looked as if it was crawling from the socket. Possessing a dark charisma, he sat next to his lawyer. Grace knew of his reputation as an ambulance chaser, but even she didn’t think another lawyer would stoop to such means to sue a big company.

“Ms. Grace London?” The lawyer stood and offered his hand.

She refused. “Mr. Coyne.”

“It’s common to be uncomfortable around the mentally ill for a lot of people, but they have rights, too. They have the right to sue a company just as much as anyone else.”

Grace prickled at Wallace Coyne’s arrogance. “I’ve been over this case with the best lawyers in our firm, and this deposition is just cursory. We have no intention of settling with Mr. Powder out of court, and we fully anticipate a win from a jury or arbitrator. As I understand it, we’re being videotaped and there are guards just beyond the door, correct?”

“Yes, and Mr. Powder is securely shackled to the table.”

“All right, you are Mr. Louis Powder, correct?”

“Yes.” “You are serving an undetermined amount of time in the Forensics Unit of the Eloise State Psychiatric Hospital for killing five women over the span of two years.”

“It’s a facility!”

“Excuse me, facility.” Grace struggled to remain composed. “You killed... ” “Allegedly,” Coyne chimed in. “Can you read that back, please?”

The court reporter stopped and rolled the spool of paper in her hands. “Mr. Powder shouted ‘it’s a facility, and Mr. Coyne interjected ‘allegedly’ into the statement of Ms. London.”

“Thank you,” Coyne said. “Please continue.”

Grace rolled her eyes. “Are you Louis Powder who was convicted of the murders of... ” Grace held up a notebook with notes on it, “Lilly Norris, Alice Anderson, DeJuana James, Chantal Rainy, and Laura Grimes?”

“The lawsuit was filed on behalf of my client against the Hawthorne Appliance Company for false advertisement of a product that did not perform as stated in the advertising or brochures.

The Bone Crusher In-sink Garbage Disposer was faulty.”

London closed her eyes and centred her rising anger. “In your complaint, you allege that because of the Bone Crusher In-sink Garbage Disposer’s inability to crush - human remains - you were subsequently captured.”

“Yes, that’s true,” Powder answered.

“You were apprehended after DNA evidence, including skin and hair samples, were retrieved from your Bone Crusher unit.”

9

He roams the fields; his purpose unknown. Black on black: night his domain. Three tons of thunder in the orchard. Apple tree branches groan as he brushes past. Does he feed, or hunt, or crave companionship? Questions unanswered. His province is darkness, his bodyworks rendered in stone. ### “I saw him last night,” said Toby Baxter. His friend, William, surveyed the river bank. Then he kid-glissaded down to the water. He kicked dirt and lobbed a pebble at the facing embankment, scrambled back up and blew an almighty raspberry at the hot sun. “I said I saw him last night.”

“Oo did yer see?”

“The river man,” Toby said, glumly. He was burdened; oppressed by the weight of knowing he’d witnessed a miracle and would only attract ridicule for it.

“The river man! He says he’s seen the river man!! Jeeezuz wept, Tobe. And was he playing the guitar with Buddy Holly? Listen pal, and listen to me good and proper—nobody over eight and a half believes in river man stories. Do you remember Penno? He was sixteen, I think. Good coupla years older than us, anyway. He used to bang on about the river man something rotten, and you know what happened to him? His parents put him in a home. Come to think of it, he’d been sliding in that direction for a while, but hey, don’t you end up like him, will you, kidder?”

Good speech. On another day, Toby might’ve reacted with a blur of arms, dynamic counterclaims, insults made for buddies, a war cry, and a mock fight entered into with gusto. But today, beneath the maddening sun, he had nothing to give. “You’re a good lad, Tobe; you know I’ve always thought that, but these daydreams will get you into big trouble one day, so be careful.

The nuthouse choir is said to be legendary, but you don’t wanna be hearing it 24/7, do you?”

And to that, a smile. “Good boy,” William said, slapping his friend on the back. “Good boy.”

Summer rain had been hammering this part of Yorkshire for days on end; it’d looked biblical for a time. Fields flooded and crops looked to be on the brink. Sewers had their fill and disgorged effluence into the roads. Rivers and streams swelled up good and looked fit to burst their banks, but then the rain stopped and out came the sun. River levels dropped and the silt and deposited vegetation began to bake.

“Phwoar, what stinks?” William cried. “Man, I’m betting a goat’s died in the storm and fallen into the river. Keep your eyes peeled, Tobe; it’ll have washed up somewhere along here. You know what happens when corpses are in the water for a long time, don’t you?” Toby looked as though he couldn’t give a fig. His thoughts were channelled elsewhere; channelled into stone giants romping through this familiar landscape. Giant men of stone powerful enough to force entry into the home, resist the interventions of a beer-wasted father and a feckless mother, lift boys from their beds and carry them away into the night, should the wish arise. “Well, I’ll tell you what happens-their innards rot and give off gases which inflate the body like a balloon, so when we find Mr. Goat, I’m gonna give him a good poke with a stick,” he said, prodding his friend just above the navels.

“And I’ll make him fart his guts out. Whaddya say, does that sound cool, or does that sound cool?”

Toby’s hands were bunched up inside the pockets of his Bermuda shorts, his thoughts still in another place. The river man didn’t ‘sleep’ during the day. No, that’s what an infant would think.

He was ‘immobile.’ Resting, perhaps. Whatever; Toby knew that old rock-pile—old, yeah; certainly. But how old: fifty years? A hundred? Five hundred? Five thousand? Christ, to think that every night for the last five-thousand years, that monstrosity had been jolting to life and searching for whatever it is that eight-foot-tall men of stone get their kicks from—was too cunning to move during daylight hours and draw attention to himself. He waits for nightfall and then he starts up.

10

Most people say there’s nothing much out here in the rurals of West Texas. But what part of West Texas isn’t rural? If it weren’t for the pumping oil horses, vintage trucks, and the long stretches of flat highway that go on and on for days, we’d only be known for our dust and wind— both of which we have entirely too much of. I’ve been living out on this flatness forever just like my daddy and his daddy before on ranch land my great-great granddaddy purchased from the state for a little more than $500. I doubt it would be all that much more valuable today, but that’s neither here nor there—I’ll never sell the family land. If ranching wasn’t already rooted in my bones at birth, it poured in with my first few dusty breaths of life.

Most people don’t understand that this wild landscape isn’t only hard on the livestock. It takes backbone to live out here, and with that secrets always come. Everybody’s got something to hide. Take Franklin, for instance. Most folks don’t know what really goes on out in his barn Wednesday through Saturday nights. Franklin’s late-night showgirl extravaganza would ignite Pampa’s multitudes of Baptists and Seventh Day Adventists to picket against such an abomination, and they might only stop short of stringing Franklin up by his shrivelling nuts. One thing I’ve learned growing up around the mighty religious right is that violence, sanctioned by God of course, is never far from hand.

My daddy always said there’s a cruelty out here on the Plains. Call it nature if you want, or the food chain in action, but nobody survives long out here without seeing something that breaks his heart. Whether it’s the slaughter of a pet pig for ham and beans or the death of a mother horse during a gruelling childbirth—savagery surrounds us. We see it when the friendly neighbour’s ranch goes belly-up or a tornado levels all that a family owns. Out here, it’s a branded cruelty that simply doesn’t flinch.

Iris, sweet sweet Iris, does flinch and bucks hard against the wrist and ankle restraints. The hanging light bulbs in the cellar cast her in shadows, and I can tell she’s a timid fighter. I’m not worried—I’ve used spools of plastic wrap rather than the standard hospital cuffs. I’ve learned the hard way how the rope and metal clasps tear the precious skin and burns screaming welts that cannot always be hidden with make-up. Iris is spread out like a steaming holiday feast, her arms and legs tethered wide to the four corners of the table. Her neck is bound with the plastic so that all she can do is follow my movements with her eyes. I watch her, breathing in every inch of Iris’s naked, young body before me, that sweet mixture of Downey detergent and oil from the deep fryer at the café. I let her smell engulf every part of me, filling my lungs, and I imagine that scent sailing through my innards only to eventually stream out through my every hair follicle.

“Please, Mr. Jackson,” Iris calls to me. Her voice is shaky and as soft as breath. I chuckle.

Even bound to a death table in my cellar, Iris shows her manners. The West Texas pleasantries are inbred so deep, nothing could wipe a Sir or a Ma’am out. “Just let me go. I won’t tell anyone.”

“Why do y’all say the same exact thing?” I stand over her, my naked belly brushing against her hand. Her fingers fist with the slight touch. “I know it’s scripted in all those slasher films. But tell me this, Iris. Has this line ever worked for the girl bound in such a precarious way as you?”

I drag a fingertip down her young throat to her full chest. The collar bones are not defined and there’s no well at the bottom of her neck. This one has been well fed and built strong. Iris moans and chokes back a cry as I continue my tracing finger toward her breasts. How rare, I marvel, to find skin so pale in West Texas, a body so round and smooth. Caressing her enlarged, blue-violet nipple, it grows engorged between my fingertips. Iris’s navy blue eyes, so wide with fear, shift when the understanding finally comes. She’s the Chosen One. Iris screams for what seems like the hundredth time that hour, her voice ratcheting up to a phlegmy soprano. Her face, that sweet round moon of a face that swells to a crimson as she strains and bellows enough to pop out the ropey blue veins that line her neck.

11

12