Turn The Page

There are boys, and then there are boys, and for a girl like me, a hopeless romantic with an uncanny ability to torture herself, there’s Paul.

I see him every day after school, at his granddaddy’s farm stand just outside of town. I have to walk passed on my way home and since the summer he turned eighteen and graduated high school, he’s been working there. I walk by each day just to catch a glimpse of his sun-kissed skin and that smile that steals my breath.

“Afternoon, Ms Emma Jean,” he says, in that lazy way of his that exudes confidence without any hint of arrogance. It only makes him more beautiful. He stacks a crate of fresh-picked peaches next to the snap peas that Mama asked me to buy today. “What can I get you?”

I smile, but only just, hiding the way my heart hammers in my chest. “A pound of those,” I say, pointing to his hand resting on the crate of peas. His fingers are long, and calloused from days spent in the fields. I wonder what they would feel like twined with mine.

He grabs a peach and tosses it to me. I nearly fall over trying to catch it and he laughs. My cheeks burn. “Pretty peach for a pretty girl,” he says. And then he turns away to pack up Mama’s snap peas. The peach in my hands is soft, perfectly ripe, and means more to me than any piece of fruit ever should. I wish it meant something to him.

***

Another day, another glimpse, another pound of produce that Mama really doesn’t need.  I should just walk by and not wonder how his hands would feel against my skin, or how soft his lips would be on mine. I should just keep going, but instead I say, “A dozen Granny Smith’s, please.”

“You gonna bake a pie?” Paul asks, as he sifts through the crate to find the best apples. He likes to be sure you get what you pay for, even if you don’t know what to look for in a good fruit. I like that about him. He takes pride in what he does.

“No. I mean, yes.” Heat creeps up my neck. “Apple is my favorite.”

“Mine too,” he says, handing me the bag. I reach for it and when my fingers graze his, he smiles. “Anything else?”

I look at the crates and try to think of something else, anything else that Mama might want. Anything to stay a moment longer. To touch his hand again. But there’s nothing, and my heart can’t take much more today. “No. That’s it.”

***

The next day I stay after school for softball practice and when I pass Paul’s farm stand, he’s already packing up the crates into the bed of his pick-up. My stomach sinks, realizing I have no reason to stop and talk to him. I hoist my backpack up on my shoulder and walk faster, trying to pass him without looking. Out of the corner of my eye, I see him bend and lift a heavy crate, and even though I can’t make out the details, I know the way his muscles move beneath his skin.

“Hey,” Paul says. I keep walking, hoping he didn’t see me watching him. “Wait, Emma.”

Me? I stop short, nearly tripping over my own two feet. Paul smiles and waves me over. I should keep going. Go right on home and forget about Paul. Forget about his dark brown hair and eyes like drops of chocolate. “Hey,” I say, walking toward him.

He closes the tailgate and leans against it, propping one foot up on the bumper. “Nothing for your mama today?”

“I was late. Softball practice.”

“Oh yeah? I used to play too. Baseball, I mean.”

“I know.”

He arches one eyebrow and I shy away from him. I’ve watched him for years, silently torturing myself with daydreams about a boy I can’t have. He could have anyone.

“So how was that apple pie?” He rubs the back of his neck and looks down at our feet. I kick at the dirt and gravel.

“It was good. Had to be with such good apples.” I close my eyes, not wanting to see the look on his face. I know how stupid I sound. “I’d better go.”

“Wait.” He grabs my wrist, but quickly lets go. He smiles. “Sorry.”

I can’t do it. I can’t stand here and pretend I don’t want him. “I really shouldn’t be here, Paul.”

He steps in closer. “But here you are.”

“Not in the way I want to be, “I mumble, not loud enough for him to hear. Or maybe I shout it, and I just can’t hear over my own heart beating. “See you.”

***

I pass by the farm stand but today it’s empty. No crates, no baked goods from his Mama’s kitchen, and no Paul. No Paul. Somehow I know he’s gone. I feel it inside, like when you spend every afternoon on the beach ‘til summer ends, then you don’t go anymore and something just feels off. Missing. Over.

Paul’s part in my story is over before I even turned the page.

I stop along the dirt road, stare at the empty spot at the edge of the field, and I notice how the sky meets the corn stalks in a way I never have before. 

******************

Thanks for reading! We come back next week with a brand new tangle started by Valerie!

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Untouchable

Me and Jeremy spent most of that summer down by the railroad bridge, jumping off the edge and plunging twenty feet into the water. The river was so clean you could see the trunk of a fallen tree all the way at the bottom of the deepest part.

I’d tried to swim down and touch it, but it was so deep, my lungs burned and my head pounded until I finally turned around and came back to the surface.

“That trunk is probably twenty feet around,” Jeremy said, skipping a rounded river rock across the surface of the water. “Where do you think it came from?” We both stared at the riverbank all around, but couldn’t find anywhere that looked like it was missing a tree.

“It’s probably been down there longer than the railroad bridge has been here,” I said, leaning back in the water and watching my toes bob. “I bet they cut it down to lay the tracks.”

“Maybe. Or maybe it fell from somewhere else.”

“What do you mean ‘somewhere else’?”

“I dunno. Maybe like another universe or something.”

“That’s dumb.”

Jeremy shrugged and skipped another rock. I swam to him, pulled myself out of the water and lay back in the grass. Green sunlight fell through the tree tops in clumps that warmed my damp skin.

“I’m gonna do it one day,” he said. “I’m gonna touch it.

“It’s too far. Nobody can swim that deep.” I felt Jeremy’s eyes on me but I kept gazing up at the bits of sky between the branches.

“You don’t think I can do anything.”

“That’s not true.”

“If I did it, what would you give me?”

I sat up. “If you did it--” Jeremy smashed his lips against mine, hard, awkward, and sloppy. When he pulled away, I asked, “What was that?”

Jeremy smiled. “When I do it, I want a kiss. A real one.”

“Then why’d you kiss me like that?”

“Cause I wanted to make sure it was worth it.”

***

I rode on the back of Jeremy’s four-wheeler, my arms wrapped tight around his waist. He stopped and hit the kill-switch turning the engine off, about half a football field before we got to the bridge. The woods were quiet, like they should be, but it felt weird after having the growl of the engine vibrating beneath me.

“Why’d you stop?” I asked. Jeremy didn’t answer and I followed his gaze to a muddy puddle in the middle of the trail. Something bright orange floated in the center.

Jeremy got off and I slid into his seat. He squatted next to the puddle, took a stick and poked the orange thing, making it bob like a buoy in the muddy brown water. One glossy round eye surfaced and Jeremy pushed it back down until the whole thing was just a blur of color down below.

“It’s a fish,” he said, but I’d already realized it. “It’s dead.”

“How did it get there?”

He shrugged. “Guess it swam here and then the creek dried up some and it got stuck.”

Watching him poke the fish, the way it floated up and sank back down, made my stomach pinch. “Let’s just go to the bridge. I wanna go swimming.”

Jeremy looked up at me. “Want me to touch it?”

“Gross. No. C’mon.”

“It’s not alive anymore. It’s just a body.”

“It’s gross. Leave it alone.”

He pushed it down and watched it float back up one more time before climbing back onto the quad.

***

Jeremy called me a few days later. “Meet me at the bridge,” he said. I rode my bike as far as I could until the trail turned too rocky to pedal, and I shoved my bike into the trees, half jogging the rest of the way. Jeremy sat on the bridge in just his shorts and ratty sneakers that he wore outside. His mama wouldn’t let him wear his “good shoes” down to the bridge.

“Hey,” I huffed, clutching the stitch in my side and trying to ignore the burn in my shins. I hadn’t ridden my bike much that summer and I regretted it.

“Hey.” Jeremy held a railroad spike, reddish-brown and flaky from years of laying out in the weather, discarded.

When I caught my breath I sat down beside him, setting my flip-flops next to me so they wouldn’t fall off into the river. The sun beat down on my shoulders and made the tar on the tracks look wet. The smell of it mixed with rust and iron was a comfort, as much a part of summer as Jeremy.

“What did you wanna meet for?” He didn’t look like he wanted to go swimming, and I didn’t see a fishing pole or a tackle box.

Jeremy dropped the spike down into the river. We both stared after it as it descended toward the tree so far down that we couldn’t follow it all the way. “Just had to get out, you know?” His voice sounded deflated, tired, and sad. When he looked at me I saw a darkening bruise on his cheek.

I didn’t ask him anything else. Sometimes I wish I had.

***

It rained the next day, but the day after that it was hot as the dickens again and I raced down to the river to wait for Jeremy. I sat down on the smooth rocks that lined the bank on both sides, letting my bare feet bake on their sun-warmed surface. Watching the water skippers swirl around in tiny circles made me wonder if they ever got dizzy.

Jeremy came walking through the trees with his hands in the pockets of his cut-off shorts and a frown pinching his face. He didn’t say anything, just sat down beside me. After a long time he said, “I’m gonna prove that I can do it.”

“Do what?”

“Swim down to the tree.”

“Yeah, okay.” I nudged him with my shoulder.

“I’m gonna do it. Right now.”

“Don’t be dumb. You can’t—” He leaned in so fast our foreheads bumped and then his teeth hit mine in another messy kiss. I pushed him back. “You know, if you did do it, I wouldn’t kiss you now.”

He smirked, but it kind of looked sad, and started toward the water.

“What are you doing, Jeremy?” He wasn’t wearing his outside sneakers. He was wearing his good shoes. “Your mama’s gonna kill you if you get those wet.”

Jeremy didn’t stop, didn’t hesitate. He walked right into the river up to his knees, his waist. Then he turned around to face me. “Be my girlfriend.” His bottom half wiggled the way things sometimes do underwater, making it look like it didn’t belong to his top half.

“What?”

He shook his head, walking backward deeper into the water. “If I touch the tree, will you be my girlfriend?”

“Sure.” There was no way he’d be able to do it, but part of me kind of liked the idea of being someone’s girlfriend. Jeremy’s girlfriend.

He smiled at me in a way I’d never seen him smile, like he was really, really happy for the first time ever, and he dove into the water. He kept going, and going, until I knew his lungs must have been on fire, but he didn’t come back up. I'd never seen him so determined.

And then he just stopped swimming.

“Jeremy?”

He didn’t sink like the railroad spike had, but he didn’t float back up like the fish either. The crystal clear water made his hair fan out around his face. His skin looked paler under water than it had been above. All I could think about was that fish. It's not alive anymore. It's just a body.

The smell of tar and iron laid heavily on my tongue, the feel of Jeremy’s wet lips still on mine. Everything was so normal and so summer. It seemed impossible that he wasn’t there anymore, not in the real way that he should’ve been.

Jeremy was as unreal and untouchable as the tree at the bottom of the river.


***
We come back on Monday with an all new tangle started by Natalie!

Photo by L.J. Boldyrev

Food For Thought

Nobody ever said the end of humanity would be a picnic. I mean, what were the theories? The biblical thing with four guys on horses. The one about the sun being so hot everything melts, and all those natural disasters start happening. Then there’s my personal favorite, where we all turn into flesh-eating dead guys. But none of them are what actually happened. What actually happened was way worse.

It all started when one news caster misread her teleprompt. She skipped over a period or something, meshing two unrelated stories together. The result was mass hysteria. There was looting, murder, you name it. I remember my first thought being of my tenth grade English teacher, slapping my fingers with a ruler for not using correct punctuation. My second thought was I hope she was one of the first to go.

It was slow, the end of humanity. It started in my city, I think. With that one grammatical slip. Then it spread, like a fungus. Mushroom spores of violence planted their fungal little legs throughout every American town. With our country in total chaos, other world leaders took notice. I can’t blame any one of them. I mean, who wouldn’t want to take out the world super power that was the United States?

Long story short, we got nuked. We nuked back--Yeah, we had nukes. Who knew? Now the population of planet Earth is probably about two-hundred thousand. Seems like a lot until you realize there used to be eleven million in New York City alone.

I’m one of those survivors. Me and my neighbor, Jimmy, who now has two heads. One belonged to his dog, Bill.

Nah, I’m kidding. But half his face is melted off from radiation. I’m pretty normal. I lost my big toe to gout, but I don’t think that was related. Everyone I knew and loved is dead, except Jimmy. It’s just me and him now, and every day is a battle just to keep what we’ve got. I’ve seen knife fights break out over a rock-hard moldy cheeseburger from Mickey D’s.

There’s a banging at the door and I set my journal on the floor beside my bare mattress. I wait, holding my breath and listening. Three heavy knocks. Two lighter ones. Four quick ones. It’s Jimmy. I get up and unbolt all fifteen locks on the steel door and he tumbles in, wide-eyed and breathless.

“Dude? What happened?”

Jimmy clutches my arms. “I got it. I got the box.” He pulls a box of saltine crackers out of his coat pocket. His half-gloved hands fumble with it, till he drops it on the floor in front of us. We’re both so hungry we dive on the box like a pack of hyenas on a zebra carcass, tearing open the cardboard, ripping apart the plastic to get at the stale crackers. We both forget about the door.

They hit Jimmy first and send him sailing into the picture window where I used to sit and read comics before we burned them all to keep warm. My mind registers what’s about to happen, but my body doesn’t have time to react. They file into the apartment, a swarming mass of black and gray, and I have just enough time to utter “Wait!” before the butt of a riffle meets my head and everything goes black.

I come to in a dark room with steel chaining me to a cold, wet concrete floor. “Jimmy?” I whisper. Everything is in shades of black and grey, except the milky whiteness of my own pale skin. A window high up on the wall allows just enough light to get in that I can see someone, or some thing, is in the room with me. It’s too big to be Jimmy. Even with all his clothes and a parka, Jimmy is still about the size of a ten year-old. I wrestle with myself trying to decide if I should talk to the lump of dark clothing, or just let it be. But the need to know something eats at me.

“Hey? You know where we are?”

The lump wiggles but doesn’t speak.

My gut pinches and growls. “Um, sorry, but do you have any food?”

The lump hisses at me and I flinch back against the wall. “Okay. Jeez.” I rub the skin around my ankle where the chain has bruised it. It makes me think of that one movie where all those people got kidnapped and stuffed into a basement with nothing but a saw. A chill runs through me. I really should’ve watched better movies before they stopped making them.

I guess I probably should’ve told you what happened after we all nuked each other’s brains out, huh? You know how different people react differently to temperatures and whatever? Like, you could be cold and I could be sitting right next to you all sweaty. The same thing happened with radiation. I’m not a scientist, I don’t know the semantics. I just know that some people are normal, like yours truly. And others are like the lump of hissing laundry over there. Who knows what he looks like?

“Hey!” I shout. My voice bounces off the empty walls. “Hey! Can I get some food?” Nobody answers me. A watery drip is the only sound I hear in the darkness, aside from the heavy erratic breathing of Hissy Face.

Those guys, the ones with the guns? They’re the elite. We don’t really have a specific name for them. Some people call them the Sherriffs, but that’s not right because sheriffs are supposed to protect and serve. All they’ll serve you is a gun to the forehead. Jimmy and I had a good name for them. We called them assholes.

Nobody knows how the assholes got to be so powerful. The rest of us are starving, scrawny toothpicks, but not them. They’ve got muscle packed onto muscle. Like they eat some serious protein every morning and wash it down with a heavy dose of roids.

Hissy Face moves a little, shifting his weight. The light from the window catches in his face and reflects off his eyes like a cat’s. I catch a glimpse of a grayish colored face with black eyes and sharpened teeth. Gross.

“Help me!” I know it’s useless, but a guy’s gotta have hope, right? The chains around my ankle won’t let me go anywhere, except closer to Hissy Face. No thanks.

Why would they bring me here and where the heck is Jimmy? My stomach growls again. The assholes have gotta have something to eat. They’ve obviously been hording all the food. I can’t even imagine what it would be like to have a full stomach anymore.

Hissy Face moves again, this time inching a little closer to me. I inch back against the wall and slide along it until my ankle chain digs into the skin.

He comes closer still. I can’t move, but I’m sure his chain will pull him back before he can get to me. He creeps closer in the darkness, a mass of black and grey slowly rolling toward me not making any sound. I move again and my chain clanks. His doesn’t.

He’s not on a chain.

“Um. Help!” I stand up and try to wiggle free. He’s close enough now I can smell him. He smells like dead things—putrid and hot. He comes into the light and I see that he’s wearing the same black and grey uniform that the assholes wear, but he’s not quite as big and healthy as the rest of them. He’s as scrawny as me.

“Hey. Ah, I don’t have anything to eat. So, yanno.”

His head twitches and he licks his lips really fast. It reminds me of Jimmy’s iguana, before we ate it. I pin my back against the cold wet wall. Hissy Face is in my face. His breath smells like metal. I close my eyes and feel along the wall, hoping to find anything I could use to club him. His tongue, wet and stinging hot, swipes across my cheek. It makes me throw up in my mouth.

A stomach rumbles—his not mine.

Somewhere above me I hear voices and laughter—the assholes. A face comes into view in the window and I scramble for it.

“Hey! Help!”

The face, blurry behind the dirty window, laughs. “Nothin’ personal, kid. Captain’s gotta eat.”

Past experiences flood my mind and I keep going back to that one biology lesson in ninth grade—the food chain or whatever.

I slide down against the wall, allowing the cold of wet concrete to seep into my jeans. Hissy Face takes another long lick, then a nip at my nose.

And to think, all me and Jimmy had to eat today was a box of freaking crackers.


****
On Friday, Natalie will bring you something sweeter. Maybe. Hopefully. (She thinks dead birds are endearing.) Thanks for reading!

Photo by madc0w via flickr creative commons

Vampires And Almost First Kisses

Jack stands beside me, mouth open, eyes wide, as we stare down into an empty trunk. The heat of the exhaust burns my leg through my jeans, but I can’t move away from it. The trunk is empty.

“Where the hell’d it go?” Jack asks.

I shake my head. “How’d it get out?”

Jacky slams the trunk closed and turns around to lean against it. I do the same. The cicadas buzz so loud out here at night it’s impossible to hear anything else, so there’s no point being on guard. Besides, not even Jack can outrun a pissed off vampire. After being knocked over the head with a tire iron, wrapped in silver chains, and thrown in a trunk, I’m sure I’d be pretty pissed too. Vampires aren’t known for their happy-go-lucky attitudes.

“What do you wanna do?” I ask.

“I guess we go home.”

“We can’t go home without finishing a job, Jacky. You know that.”

He shrugs. “Who has to know?”

He’s right. Mama would kill us if she knew I was on a vamp hunt, on account I’m only supposed to be doing ghosts and only one hunt a week, so we didn’t tell her about it. And this was a side job; Jacky didn’t get the order from Mac, his boss with bounty hunting and at the garage, so he doesn’t know either. It’s probably not the smartest thing to do, going out without telling anyone in case something happens, like a vampire goes missing from your trunk. But Jack needed the money to fix the Chevelle, and the pay was right.

I steal a glance at Jack and watch him fish a pack of camel cigarettes from the pocket of his flannel shirt. I could tell myself I’m just along for the ride, but I’ve never been much of a liar. Jack taps out a cigarette and leans forward to light it. His dark hair falls over his eyes. I have to fight the urge to brush it back so I can see his eyes.

“So we goin’ home or you feel like lookin’ for it?” He blows out a puff of smoke, rubs his fingers over his sideburns.

“What about the client?”

He shrugs. “I’ll handle it.”

Mama isn’t home and she thinks I’m at Amanda’s house. I don’t want to go home and be bored and alone. And Jacky could really use the money to fix up the car. It feels wrong to back out now. “Let’s just go find it. Not like we had any other plans for tonight.”

“Fine by me,” he says, tossing his cigarette to the ground. “It can’t be too far. Split up?”
I want more than anything to prove myself to Jack, but splitting up on a vamp hunt? Especially one who is bound to be madder than hornets and was smart enough to get out of a locked trunk? “I think we should stick together on this one,” I say.

“Yeah, probably right. Damn things are hard enough to catch the first time.” Jack takes his Colt out of the glove compartment, double checks to make sure it’s loaded with the silver bullets with crosses etched into them, and then he grabs the bottle of holy water from the duffle bag in back of the car. He tosses it at me along with my stake--cow oak, Daddy made it for me.
“Get the chain too?”

“Good idea,” he says smiling at me. I turn away so he doesn’t see the blush on my cheeks. Once we’re both fully loaded, we head down the dirt road, leaving the Chevelle behind. Hunting is always done best on foot. If we get too far ahead, we’ll go back and move the car farther up the road. It takes a lot of time, but the car is too loud to find anything. And if we leave it too far back? Vampires are very fast.

Out of all the monsters we hunt, vampires are my least favorite. Fast, strong, and on top of that, they’ve got God-only-knows how many years of intelligence and experience. The perfect predator.

“Any theories on how it got out?” Jack asks.

“Um.” I rack my brain for something smart to say. I’m no expert on any of the Darks, Jacky is. He usually knows everything, but he’s asking me what I think. “They’re strong. It could’ve just broken the lock and we didn’t notice.”

“The lock looked fine to me.”

“Oh.” I ramble off a few other theories, just to have something to say. Then all of a sudden Jacky stops at a wall of trees. He sniffs at the air.

“It’s in here.”

“You sure?”

He nods. “I’ve been out here before. Lot’s of times. It smells different.”
“You come way out here? For what?” My lips snap shut as soon as I ask. None of my business what he does when he’s not working, much as I want it to be.
He shrugs. “It’s quiet.”

I listen, expecting to hear the cicadas, but there’s nothing. No sounds from the main road. No bugs. No owls. Nothing but heavy quiet. Jack hears things ten times louder than normal people, so I get his need for quiet. “It’s nice.” Well, except for the vampire somewhere in the dark.
“Yeah, and look at that.”

I follow his gaze up to the sky. It’s the most velvety blue, with more stars than I’ve ever seen. “Wow.”

Jack laughs and nudges my shoulder. I smile at him, close my eyes and breathe him in; cigarettes, cologne, and something else. Something unique to Jack that I can only describe as woodsy. His fingers find mine and lock together. He squeezes my hand. “You ready to go in?”

“Yeah.” I try to let go of his hand, even though I really don’t want to, and take the first step into the dark woods, but he pulls me back.

“Wait. Hey, Charlie?”

“Yeah, Jack?”

“There’s somethin’ I been wantin’ to do. And I know now ain’t the best time but--” He looks up at the sky, so full of stars, “--before we go in there.” He brings his free hand up to touch my hair. His thumb brushes my cheek and I suck in a breath. “I wanted to thank you. For comin’ out here with me tonight, even though you didn’t have to. And for, you know, huntin’ it twice.” He chews on his lip, brings his face a little closer to mine.

I draw a breath, steeling myself. This is it. He’s finally going to make a move. He leans in closer. I can just imagine how his lips will feel on mine. I’ve imagined it thousands of times.

A twig snaps. Jack’s shoulders stiffen and his head flips up, looking over me. “Aw, sh—”The vampire sails into him sending them both flying into the trees.

“Jack!” I chase after them, cursing the whole way. Stupid vampires.

The vampire throws him into a tree, splinters of wood go flying, and then he pins Jack up against it. “I’ve never tasted a werewolf before,” he says. “I’ve always thought you guys had more hair.”

Jack shoves him back. But the vampire is up and after him again before he can get himself away from the tree. They wrestle, the vampire hissing and Jacky growling. Then the vampire shoves Jack up against another tree.

“I’m a hairless. It’s a new breed,” Jack says to the vampire, but his eyes are on me. He sees me sneaking up from behind the vamp. We both know the damn thing could hear me miles away, but the big bad wolf never expects much from little red.

The vampire laughs. He throws his head back, mouth open, in that annoying way they all do right before they bite. I take that split second to pull my stake from its holster and drive it into his back. He screeches, then falls dead at my feet, shriveling up into the old, moldy corpse he should be.

Jack brushes some wood splinters and tree bark from his shoulders. “Damn thing almost bit me.”
“Now you know I wouldn’t allow that.” Especially after it interrupted what I hope was our almost first kiss. I really hate vampires.

“Nice work,” he says, pulling out my stake and wiping it off on his jeans. “Let’s get this to the client and collect.”

“Yeah.” I kick the corpse.

Jack, only slightly out of breath, eyes glistening with adrenaline, grabs it by the ankle and starts dragging it back toward the car, forgetting all about what almost happened. I could tell myself I’m glad the vampire turned up so that Jacky and me could get paid for finding it. But I’ve never been much of a liar.

*******
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Photo by {peace&love♥} on flickr