at the dark
by William Burtch
He lived with his widowed mother until she met that coal truck on a two-lane highway that needed three. Never wed. The house loomed above a lush central Pennsylvania cow pasture. Chipped leaded paint, once white, and cancerous wood rot. Native steps of stone consumed by insatiable grasses and weeds.
Rent on the century old farmhouse noshed up most of the disability check from his government job, his last and final. Rods and screws cobbled and coaxed his spine. Grief, unresolved, and recollections from his Army stint dogged him like hell beasts. Intrusions that nourished a creeping paranoia.
From the mine-dark reaches of the basement his fourteen year old nephew, Will, nabbed a three foot black snake barehanded. Will was a few days into his summer visit from California. The writhing reptile had entered through one of the gaping cracks in the foundation. It now drew its labored breaths in a dry glass aquarium on the kitchen floor. Flat black eyes peered out, vacuous.
Will’s solo trip was his mother’s suggestion. The passing of years and the three thousand mile divide had muted her understanding, her grasp of the gravity of her brother’s lonely plunge into madness. She fostered instead images of an uncle and nephew bonding over fishing and ball games on TV. They did fish. Late on a humid night in the Susquehanna River, near Harrisburg. Strewn boulders broke the currents like ghosts treading the water. Night crawlers in a milk carton bed. Sweet raw earth.
The next night uncle and nephew sat hunched at the dining room table. Solid oak accented with decades of cigarette burns. Will raked the playing cards into a pile. He shuffled them for another hand of blackjack while gleaning the blood tinged tells of his uncle’s eyes. Festering wells that betrayed. Eyes that offered up for confession the hard drink careening through his veins.
Gun-cleaning solvent fermented in the dining room. Assorted shotguns and rifles were housed in a glassed case against the wall. Draped like a trapper’s blanket in the ether of the room were tales of ice and rain and chill-to-the-bone cold. Deafening blasts that shocked dying autumns and winters past. Whitetail deer tracked, harvested, gutted and quartered. Then the ethereal summer silence, lush and still.
“You alright, Uncle Ted?” Will asked.
“Why’s that?”
“Don’t know. Don’t seem yourself.”
Will pictured the exploding thumb tacks that had been pushed into the fence post that day. Tacks struck at fifty yards through a scoped 5mm rifle. Blistered into sprays of black metal mist.
“Didn’t miss a single tack today. Either of us. Great shooting.” Will said.
“Can’t ever miss.”
“Don’t think anybody is that good.”
“Better be. That’s when they get you.”
Will looked his uncle. Tried to tease meaning from his face.
“We’re all just fodder. Remember that one. We’re just fodder for someone or something else,” Uncle Ted slurred.
Will sat back in his chair.
“Once I told you maybe I had been a spider. In a prior life.” Will said. “Remember that?”
“There are no prior lives or future lives.” Uncle Ted snapped. “We go cold as a miner’s ass. Pitch black for all of time. At the dark. Nothing. Thank the Lord.”
“Nobody knows that for sure. I think your soul, it gets freed. Your heat. Maybe straight into something else. ”
Uncle Ted shoved his cards away.
“What might you be, Uncle Ted? In another life.”
“Probably a goddamn snake. No better off than that serpent you have in the fish tank.”
“Most people are scared of snakes.”
“Damn well should be. I’m possessed. Eden’s snake.”
“No you aren’t Uncle Ted. You’re just tired.”
“Well look at me. Will you?”
“God won’t give you more than you can handle,” Will said.
“Shit. And what if it’s not God giving the orders?” Uncle Ted said, his eyes wide.
“It’s my fault. Been running you ragged since I’ve been here. Maybe I should go back home,” Will offered.
Uncle Ted became quiet.
Will edged away from the table. He expected his uncle to summon him back. Clarify things.
The wall clock chimed two in the morning. Will took the first steps of the brittle stairs. He stopped part way to peer back at his uncle. At the odd smile colliding with the entirety of his face.
Will shut the door of his tiny guest room and slid into his cot. He settled his gaze upon the sliver of yellow light under the door.
***
The wooden screened door slammed shut.
“Uncle Ted, I’m back,” Will called out the next morning. He lifted the lid of the aquarium on the kitchen floor and tossed a small frog inside.
“Who is that?” Uncle Ted bellowed. “Who in Christ?”
“Just me.”
Flat footed in his chair amid a roiling specter of exhaled smoke Will found his Uncle Ted. Punk beer in a glass sat on the side table. Next to it a near empty bottle of bourbon. Uncle Ted drew on a cigarette, burnt to its filter.
Beside the bourbon rested his Colt .45, a surplus semi-automatic from his military service.
“Sit down,” Uncle Ted commanded. “Right there.”
Will obeyed, sagging into the sofa adjacent to Uncle Ted. Crazed crimson eyes assessed him.
“How am I supposed to know who you are? Tell me that goddamn much.”
Uncle Ted picked up the weapon.
“You know who I am. It’s just me.”
“The hell I know. Breaking into my house. Why wouldn’t I just shoot you dead right now?”
“Uncle Ted, you’re scaring me.”
Uncle Ted waved the Colt around as though a piñata spun about his head.
“I’m possessed,” he growled.
“You just need some help Uncle Ted.”
“Yeah? You can just help yourself the hell out of my house is what you can do.”
“But Uncle Ted…”
“Get out. God knows what I might do if you don’t.”
Uncle Ted lowered the gun toward the side table, looking at it as though it might leap from his grasp like a feral cat.
Still quaking, Will advanced on a path to the kitchen. The glass aquarium was as he had left it. The snake was breathing, its tongue slow and heavy. A bulge had emerged in its scaled side, roughly the size of the frog. Will sought to get a handle on the aquarium. His probing fingers discovered a ridge under each side at the top, just below the lid.
Humidity had swelled the oak screened door snug to its frame. With a curt tug it squealed. He paused.
Uncle Ted heard the door. His eyes rolled from the bottle to the handgun.
Will slipped outside, the door left ajar. The morning sun struck him in the face like an open palm. Collecting himself, he descended the rickety steps of the porch. Through the dense dew cloaked fescue he crept toward the edge of the cornfield. Fish tank and reptilian cargo firm to his chest. He reached the edge of the wood lot.
Dead steel, icy to the touch, like his mother’s skin under the coal truck.
Will pushed deeper into the trees. To the small clear creek. Native trout hid beneath its overhangs. Late summers, the creek became only a trickle in its veiny lower reaches.
Will rested upon its bank.
Immense rocks nudged the course of the creek to the wider waters, to currents that quenched the greater rivers. Upon reaching the oceans, the waters carrying the spark of life, the heat, would resume the trek again in the warm renewing rains of spring.
Always the raging. The imagery. Frenetic. Bastards.
The rock where Will often sat warmed him. Dappled morning sun shimmied through a gap in the towering trees. Upon this rock he thought of what had come and gone. Conflict. Constant as breath.
The cadence of an odd prayer. Confessions. The commands. Sir, yes, sir!
The snake at first adapted to the tank being turned on its side. The gentle lapping of the brook the lone sound. It then advanced toward the lambent opening, as if called to the surface of the rock mere inches from its nose. Its tongue devoured the morning air.
In a final elegant torsion of its full length the snake became one with the rock. The sun’s heat, its energy, gulped throughout the snake’s scales. Its head held just above the surface, eyes keen, tongue frenetic.
Will and the snake were motionless. They basked and they breathed as though air was precious. The earth’s delicate linen. Will cupped his hands with the cool fertile water. It cascaded down his throat and over his cheeks onto his shirt.
The icy steel then like fire. Like red coals.
Hoisting the empty aquarium and its lid, he backtracked. He reached the field of feed corn plump with blackening silk. The dew had dried. His steps crackled in the fescue. Autumn would soon leer, sowing its solemn pauses. Sowing death.
Will wiped sweat from his brow. He shaded his eyes back to the rock by the brook. To a rock now bare but for the frolicking rays of the sun.
William Burtch has recent work published in American Fiction Volume 17 (an anthology of New Rivers Press) and was a finalist for the American Fiction Short Story Award in 2018. His writing has appeared in journals and magazines both in print and online. He tweets at @WilliamBurtch2. More at: williamburtch.com