After the screams fade and the blood has cooled, there is a uncomfortable moment of moral uncertainty. He is wiping off the knives, trying not to let himself fascinate too long with the rigid stares on their stiffening faces. Doubts crowd. And then the flies. He is always surprised by how quickly the flies are drawn. They live inside, he once read, burgeoning, always just ready to burst out.

That is what he does. The media calls him the Butcher but he is nothing so mean or savage. His study is the careful art of release. First the pleadings. Then the sobs. Then whatever secrets need to be shared. And only finally, the blood.

The news people get it wrong. He is not depraved. He doesn’t act only for the blood and terror. People carry secrets, things they need to confess but don’t know how to begin. He shows them the way. The inspiration of steel and a cruelly sharp blade.

Once they start, they often do not know how to stop. Unburdening themselves of every petty crime, every mean thought, every venal act. Some of these are saints, compulsively lamenting ridiculously small sins. Unbecoming thoughts, moments of uncharitable, unsavory decisions. But more than a few are genuine monsters — molesters, abusers, thieves, perverters of truth. These kinds of people beg the loudest and hardest for mercy. These he opens deeper and wider, letting the blood spill faster.

He works quickly, cleaning up the mess with bottles of bleach bought by the case. He has three wholesale club memberships and twelve deep freezers. He does not eat the bodies. That would be monstrous but one does not always have the time to clean up and bury the bodies. Freezers are a necessity. They are a public health amenity. He is always thinking of the safety of others. How the neighbors would want to know he had taken great precautions to avoid a public health emergency.

The news people were the worst. Always sensationalizing. Always conjecturing on identity and motive. The FBI had the wrong profile and the news people couldn’t keep themselves from sharing it out. A middle aged white man with long white hair and narrow set eyes. Hilarious, really. He was in his late twenties. An early bloomer.

The motives they ascribed. A profound psychological disfunction. A obsessive tendency toward neatness and order. An intolerance for disorder. Wrong, wrong and wrong.

It made him want to laugh except he wanted to cry. And he would scream at the TV when they showed his computer generated face which looked nothing like him. He had written two dozen letters to the local papers explaining how far off they had been and why they so desperately needed him to be a middle-age white man. But he did not mail the letters. That would have been folly. That’s how men like Gaussier and Grundy messed up. They told somebody. They wanted to be caught. Not him. He was doing a great service but he did not seek the credit. The world was improved by the working of his art, which was the careful application of selective release. The world could not understand, indeed, would not need to understand his work to benefit from it.

That is the true nature of real art. It changes the world even when the world does not see it. It changes the artist. It changes the canvas.

And the secrets that are confessed in those hurried, anguished minutes of exsanguation are carried with him as a special burden. A tax he carries for his work. He will carry those last whispers with him to his grave, knowing the world is better for having each part of the story revealed.

There was no way he could ever unsee the woman’s body floating at the top of the pond. No amount of mental health copays or bourbon shots squirreled through his novice, flyweight stomach would ever wrest the image far from his mind.

The fact that she was beautiful made it all the worse. Not that beauty in women was a thing he cared much about. Beautiful women never gave him the benefit of their glance or a free moment of idle conversation. He preferred women who were clever or hard working or talented in some useful way. Those women might happen to be beautiful as well but when they were ignoring him on a bus or avoiding him on an elevator or simply floating on a pond, you could never know if they were talented or hard working or clever just by looking.

The beauty of her had made it made awful because it had made her more real. She had been someone, recently. She was missing from the pattern of other people’s lives, but some of those people would not realize it yet. Not enough time had passed for the most terrible truths to settle in. She had not floated long enough to become a bloated, waterlogged pond treasure. She might be a missing person but she might not yet be presumed dead.

But she was. Dead. And Andy was drinking enough to blind himself and split his head as he stumbled across the treacherous path of his living room, the sofa and upright lamp and coffee table all in conspiracy to rap his ankles and pull him down. He fell three times on his way to the bathroom and then realized he had pissed himself well and good long before he reached the toilet.

He lay on the bathroom floor, looking up at the ceiling, trying not to see the memory of the way her face had looked up in that same way. Trying not to imagine what it had been like for her to gaze up through the tangled branches of the bog with flies laying eggs on your eyeballs.

He rolled and puked, his guts clenched against emptiness. Congratulating himself for remembering to roll over. That’s how Jimi Hendrix died. And Mama Cass. And Attila the Hun.

Random facts.

The police had questioned him for many hours. They came back several times, each time with the same questions or slight variations on the same questions asked in different tones of voice and at different speeds. Sometimes the tall guy asked the questions. Sometimes it was the lady. Sometimes the bald dude with the mustache that reminded him of walrus brush. They came at him from all angles, sometimes friendly, understanding, sometimes annoyed and curt.

They were interested in knowing exactly how he had found her. What he had been doing in those deep woods by that lonely pond on that overcast autumn day.

And the fact that he had been taking a walk in the woods, a long walk, because he was the kind of person who enjoyed taking long walks in the woods did not seem to satisfy them. No one does that kind of thing anymore, they told him. Which he kind of believed. Who among the people he had met would chance wandering out far enough to risk losing their precious cell phone signal and LTE internet connection? How could they post pictures of the wondrous things they might encounter? Who would be ready to like and retweet and pin their Instagram feeds?

This was why beautiful women avoided him. His mind had become strange. It was a thing he was only vaguely attuned to when he was in adolescence but now it was even more pronounced. He was weird. It was a thing so real and so true. His weirdness was an island he had made himself so far from shore that no one could see a way to bring him back.

But this was unproductive. The woman in the water had been dead but she looked as if she were only sleeping. Lost in deep repose. Her dreaming deep and dark and rich as the swamp shore loam.

He waited for the nausea to pass. Eventually it did.

And then, the familiar knock on his open front door. He groaned as he sat up, pulled himself to his feet.

He looked at himself in the bathroom mirror, and he did not like what he saw.

A filthy, slovenly, wasteful old man. A hermit. A recluse. A suspect.

More knocks at the open front door. Persistent.

He washed his face. Tried on another smile. Practiced saying slowly, “I’m just the kind of guy who likes to take a walk in the woods.”

He adjusted the smile until he was satisfied. Then, he left the bathroom and called out, “ Come in. The door’s open.”

And then he was standing back in the living room, aware of the overturned furniture, the path of his catastrophic collisions. Two uniformed officers standing at the doorway.

“Come in. Come in,” he said in his most inviting way. “I’ve been expecting you all day.”

Room 137 of the hospital’s Critical Care Unit is the loneliest place on earth. Life is precarious. All life tenuous. No where is that more evident than the small glass box filled with mechanical tubes, wires and diagnostic panels. The small, patient wheeze of the machine that breathes for her husband. The submarine ping measuring each frail heartbeat with a corresponding digital blip traversing the bedside panel like a steady, robotic sine wave.

And worse still, the orderly transit of nurses who no longer even bother enforcing visiting hour limits or pretending her husband’s care is anything more than mere watch keeping. And the faithful way of the custodian who visits twice each day to sweep this immaculate room and remove the already empty trashcan. And the way the custodial staff can not look her in the eye. Even they know what is very plainly evident. Her husband, Mark, was victim of awful circumstance and there was nothing more to be done. Her husband Mark had a bad heart, and he had come here to die.

It was a four day vigil. The crippling expense of it. The exhaustion of waiting for miracles that stubbornly refused to arrive. The chaplin who made the rounds every afternoon and every evening and seemed, each time, genuinely surprised to find them still lingering there. He had prayed but the words were just words. They went nowhere, failing to escape even the closeted curtained space of this little medical unit.

And on the fourth day, she thinks to pull out Mark’s cell phone to find the number of a longtime friend, to tell the news. But when she turns the cell on, the text messages arrive, landing like a plague of flies.

WHERE ARE YOU?

ARE YOU OKAY?

WHY WON’T YOU ANSWER?

HAVE YOU LEFT ME? ARE WE THROUGH?

She drops the phone. It is a living, offensive thing. Her heart and mind swirling as she puts the plain text of the text into view.

NoNoNo

But yes.

The messages are there when she picks up the phone.

ARE WE OKAY? DO YOU STILL LOVE ME?

This was the deepest kind of shock. She stares at her husband, the unmoving weight of his body, still athletic and seeming fit despite the extremis of wires and leads and intubation tubes.

Not fair. This fine, good, decent man who she has loved her entire adult life, grown up together, raised two kids, worked for charities, helped the neighbors. Good, decent husband. Good, decent wife.

And she knows without knowing there had been much, much more to the story of their life.

Who was she? How long had he known her? How long had this been happening?

A maelstrom of question that would have no answers.

And she looks to the phone, hoping to find some name or other clue about the hidden depths of her husband’s secret life. No name. Just a phone number. And scrolling back, no further texts. The history had been dumped, purged clean.

And that was the creeping horror of it. Exhausted from her four day vigil, hungry and tired and feeling diminished. Now needing to have the most difficult conversation of their marriage only to find herself with half an unanswered conversation with a stranger on her husband’s phone.

She sits there, contemplating her next act when the doctor comes in. He enters the room with practiced determination. It is meant to be an act of comfort, this air of focused purpose when there is absolutely nothing left to be done.

“We need to talk about your husband’s wishes. He isn’t likely to recover. We don’t have to decide anything right now but we need to be ready.”

She looks down at the phone, trying to see the stranger on the other end.

ARE WE OKAY? DO YOU STILL LOVE ME?

She nods, tries to smile through the yawning sickness that has become her whole life. “I know,” she tells him. “Heroic measures.”

A brutal passage through the desert. Merciless sun glowering, baking the earth’s withered heart. Punishing glare and scouring sands push every shade and shadow down into narrow fissures where the scuttling, hard-scrabble creatures clatter and crawl.

Not a drop to drink in weeks.

This was his experience of sobriety.

Miserable. Harrowing. Unending.

He had been walking for hours. Wandering the serpentine dunes in concentric circles away from the wreckage that should have claimed his life.

He had fallen from the sky, wrapped inside a screaming husk of metal. The flaming engines howling their death sirens as the airplane fell and fell and fell. Screams. Pleading. Prayers. But surprising how orderly, how calm they all remained as the plane plummeted from air to ground.

And the hammer punch of contact as the world erupted in flame and darkness swept over even as flame licked his face and claimed the bodies of those around him.

He woke up, battered and badly bruised but amazingly unbroken. For one terrible moment he thought he could not feel his arms or legs because there was no sensation when his hands reached out and then realizing the reason he could feel neither of these was that he was holding the charred and severed limbs of the passenger seated beside him. And then the recognition of what had happened and the realization that he had woken in a mound of burnt and broken bodies. He climbed through the molten crush of plastic, steel and flesh, found an opening nearly big enough to push himself through and emerged screaming and bloody like a howling infant from a catastrophic womb.

Emergence was hard fought. The narrow gash in the plane’s steel frame scraping his skin bloody and raw as he wriggled through. He wriggled through and, once outside, lost consciousness.

Thirty seven days. That was his first thought as he regained consciousness and struggled to this feet.

Thirty seven days. He touched the heavy brass token in his pocket, turned it over between his fingers, comforted only a little by the fact of it. Still there.

Which meant he was still there. Everyone else on the plane had died. He was still alive. It made no sense. He tried to comprehend the improbability of it. He looked up to the sky, expecting to see God. The sky was empty and very far away.

Everyone was dead. This was no time for philosophy.

It had been thirty seven days since his last drink. Thirty seven days of gut-wrenching sobriety.

His first coherent thought followed by the overwhelming desire for the kind, always forgiving oblivion of his next last drink.

He started to walk. Wandering without direction. There was no orientation. There was no direction. He did what the program had taught him. Get moving. Keep moving.

There had to be a drink for him out there somewhere.

It is hard to know where it starts and where it ends. This lying business. The first one is for self-preservation, an awkwardness avoided, an inconvenience dodged. And then you put two together which is a kind of story, the most basic lie a person ever tells. And by the third, you are well and truly lost, entangled in a web, struggling to remember which parts of it are real and which parts are the ones you made up.

And then you stop struggling. The story has weight and pleasure all its own. And even if it isn’t exactly the truth, it is a version of things the way you wish them to be and who can fault you really for wishful thinking. We are all liars. Some of us just don’t know enough to relax and go with the flow of it. You can remake the world anyway you wish it to be so long as you don’t concern yourself too closely with the costs and consequences.

Bradley pressed the cigarette out, letting the lush gray smoke wreathe him with long, lingering arms. He hoped to never become one of those people who quit smoking. He loved the decadence of it, the strong alchemy. He breathed in anxiety and fire, breathed out cool, detached intelligence.

“Are you finished yet?”

She was starring at him, impatient. He had forgotten she was there. It was an unfortunate fact. He wished he could breathe her in and dispel her with a strong, single blow.

“Almost,” he said. Which was another lie. He was already reaching for another cigarette.

“Another? God in heaven, what is wrong with you?”

Bradley lit the cigarette, real slow and casual. Her question was fair. What was wrong with him?

He shrugged.

“We are already twenty minutes late. We were meant to be there at seven thirty.”

He shrugged again, keeping his face still so she might not see the pleasure he took in her consternation.

“I should have gone without you.”

He nodded. “You could have.” As if to say the whole thing had been her fault all along.

“Honestly. I don’t even know why I bother.”

“Do you? Bother?” Now he was just provoking her, prodding to get a few extra minutes to enjoy this one more delicious cigarette.

“You’re an asshole,” she said.

“Okay.” He couldn’t disagree.

She stood up, smoothed her skirt. She stepped across the porch, her feet almost tangling on the rockers of the chair. She stumbled for a moment but caught her balance.

“Do you even remember what started all of this happening? Do you remember what you did?”

And that was where the lying had complicated things the most. If pressed, he wouldn’t be able to definitively say what had caused these latest skirmishes. Some perceived slight. Being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Forgetting to call. Forgetting to rinse off the lingering ghost of a lover’s perfume. Forgetting to properly button his shirt in the rent-by-the-hour hotel room mirror.

He smiled. That sly, incorrigible rogue’s smile. She hated it and she loved it.

“Honestly, love. I truly don’t.”

Prompt: “Heart of my Own” by Basia Bulat

***

Its a long walk back to town. The moon is up. The trees are whispering tall and shuddering with secrets. Andie walks a strong, steady pace not quite a stride, not quite a jog. She doesn’t let herself panic, though the edge of it ices her heart.

She would curse him but she is trying to save her breath, to make it match her steps. It is a kind of meditation, lost in fury. The miles unreel behind her. This night has already been the longest night of her life and it will only be longer still as she walks the long, narrow country road, trying not to worry too much about the hundred or so horror movies she has seen featuring a woman just like her walking a trail just like this only to find herself sunk deep in perdition.

And bears. There could be bears. Andie keeps her eyes straight ahead, not letting herself notice how sinister and vague the world appears around her, rocks and fallen limbs wrapped in shadow and the frequent flash of eye shine staring back at her from the road just ahead.

She would be walking all night and, unless some car came and rescued her, any one step could be a fatal last step into the slavering jaws of a waiting wolf.

These thoughts fueled her stride. These thoughts and the impetus of fury that had pushed her out of Freddie’s car. Freddie with his sour breath and his too big hands that knew no boundaries.

It was no kind of date to drive deep into these woods, isolated and alone. He said he wanted to show her field where they could watch the meteors fall far from the neighborhood lights. She had wanted to believe him, but as soon as they pierced past the last of the streetlights, his hands had grown restless and friendly and deaf to her refusal. Kind at first and then insistent and then forceful.

What is it about men that keep their hands and lower parts separate from their minds?

The night air was cool and damp with the falling dew.

The moon is bright, silvering everything, but not quite full. No worries of werewolves this night. Make yourself grateful for few traveling mercies.

And the predatory hoot of owls in the distant trees. They are watching her. The entire forest is watching her. The woods have eyes and they are following her with voracious interest. If she stumbles, if she falls, they will press in around her and liberate the meat from her bones.

Andie keeps walking. She looks not to the right. She looks not to the left. She is only straight ahead and bent on reaching her destination and doing so in one piece. She wants to arrive without being eaten. The forest has a hundred hungry stomachs, each clutching and slavering at the scent of her passing. The forest is deep. The forest is dark. The forest has voracious appetites. Andie promises herself she will thwart those appetites and reach her destination having denied the night creatures their moon-salted meal.

I wrote this thing. It scares me. You don’t need to read it. I just needed to post so it could think I wasn’t afraid.

***

I see you. Sitting there at your computer screen, waiting for something to happen. For something to occur.

You are terrified. This awful bath of feeling. All of the dread. All of the anxiety. All of the frustration. All of it bathing you, rending your nerves, bathing your best intentions.

I wonder. Can you see me staring back at you? Can you feel my breath on your face?

I am here, right with you. Think of me, if you can, as an angel of mercy. An angel of deliverance.

I bring release. I bring relief. I bring apocalypse.

Where have you gone? Was that too much?

Why does this word frighten you so much?

Would you rather the truth be more palatable? Would you prefer an easier term for it? Transformation? Change? Personal growth?

Pardon me, while I swallow down this little bit of puke. It is vile, a terrible thing to see.

There is so much waste. So much potential unspent.

You sit there in your chair, aching for something you cannot touch. You have built a throne from the unspent coin of your dreams.

You ache to be ferocious. You ache to share this devastating beauty.

It cannot last. It cannot last.

This voice. Its truth makes you frantic. It will steal your purpose and your poise. It will rob you of the thing you most need to do.

And the hurtful thing, the diabolical reality, is that every part of it is true. There is no escape but to swim through the hateful center of it.

Dark things. Dark things. Swallow them down. Digest them. Let them nourish your mind.

You will say I am a cruel keeper. That I bring darkness and decay.

But that is not the entire truth of it. It is only the part you have let yourself see.

This thing is true. I am darkness. I am decay. But stay a moment longer and you will see what your mind could not prepare you to see. I am the darkness after the decadence. I am the rot after disease.

And when, at last, you learn to recognize these feelings for what they are, only then can you become what you are meant to be. Lean forward. Recognize the truth of this and know the true meaning of apocalypse. I am not death. I am not the end.

I am an angel of mercy. I bring with me only truth. I bring deliverance. I have come to set you free.

I am apocalypse. The full eruption of your truest self.

Are you ready? Lean closer. Breathe deep. Pull it into you.

Now, clear your mind. Let everything that is not you float away. Everything that is left is you.

Does it surprise you?

Good.

Lean forward. A friendly kiss on your furrowed brow.

Now you can begin.

Prompt: Hallelujah (performed by Matthew Schuler)

He sits in the chair, gritting his teeth against the thunderous ache inside his head, while the woman, Delilah, cuts his hair. Just a trim, he had agreed but quickly sickened at the sight of so much hair falling down around his shoulders, sliding down the front of his shirt, and the constant biting teeth of those furious scissors working their way toward his skull. And the pain inside his head, how like a bare, bright lightbulb scorching the surface with incandescent glow.

This is not a metaphor, he tells himself. This is happening. And the fear rises up inside again and he knows it will be such a simple thing to stand, push himself away from this chair and have her carried out of the kitchen. But it is three in the morning and the smell of her, her expert, nimble fingers, the sultry flash of that subtle smile. And he is kept sitting while hair falls in luxurious brown drifts. The piles of it at his feet.

The dog is whining and will not look at him. The kitchen is dark. She is working with only the light from the open refrigerator door.

She dips the comb into the bowl of water. “Almost done,” she promises, feeling the sudden tense of his muscles desperate to push her out and away from him.

He presses his hands against his thighs, careful to keep them occupied and from seeking mayhem. She would not be the first woman he had ever hit. The thought did not make him proud. But before he could finish it, she kissed him on the back of his neck. His skin prickled at the flower petal press of her lips.

She lay down the scissors. Stood back, admiring her work.

He was dizzy, nauseous with fear and shame. How could she do this to him? How could he allow it to happen?

He studies her face, her uncertain smile sliding into some other, stranger expression. She was hard enough to decipher in the daylight. At night, impossible.

And he stands, unsteady on his feet, watching the dog scurry away at the terrible sight of him.

She reaches out to steady him but he pushes her away, reaching instead for the kitchen counter.

“Show me,” he mutters. And she reaches up with a small silver hand mirror. The mirror gleams in the frigid kitchen light. This smallest of hours, where nothing good or useful is ever made. The hour where only regret is born. He pulls the towel around himself, suddenly feeling cold as a corpse.

She is there, waiting, and the dog is there, whimpering, and he is there, bathed in the meager gruel of moon and appliance light. And in the mirror is some new, smaller person. A shorn person. A hindered and crippled face.

He howls. The dog howls.

Lights in neighbor’s windows are lit as people part their curtains, glance out, then pull them closed. They wake up and brew the first pots of heavy, dark coffee. A melancholy beverage for a melancholy morning in this new kind of kingdom.