If for some reason you can't get enough of my writing…here's a shitty short story I wrote that I didn't think was good enough for the front page.
The Dead Day is Here, Brothers.
#
The sun had chosen the most luminous angle it could’ve for a July morning and little molten spikes of gold began to push their way into my apartment. My cereal bowl sparkled and the linoleum floor gleamed white. I was drinking a cup of coffee and reading Lost Horizon when Red Mike pounded on the window. “You look like shit.” He smiled.
“I’m not a fucking morning person.” I coughed, hacked. “You know that.“ I had smoked at least a pack of cigarettes the night before and my tongue felt slimy and burnt because of it.
“Too bad. Get your shit together, pussy.”
“It’s already together,” I shouted back, trying to be mindful of my girlfriend, who was still in bed.
“Then get your shit in the car.”
I got up, placed my bowl in the sink, put on a white t-shirt over my head. It was worn and wet and loose with sweat, but very comfortable. I only had one thing I needed to bring on the trip: a gym bag filled with pot, three pairs of pants, two more t-shirts and a large, teal bong that still had a little resin above the waterline. I grabbed it from the kitchen table, kissed my girlfriend on her sleeping head and met the guys in Red Mike’s truck outside.
#
At the campsite, I had been high for the better part of the day, gluing the business end of Epps’ kite back together. Perk had sat on its thin frame on our ride and it wasn‘t close to airworthy. I wanted to organize some sort of game involving attachment of things to the kite to see if it’d fly, but the others were talking about some dumb shit regarding the fire.
“Are you serious?” I asked. They were serious. The campfire was to be built right away and not extinguished until our exit from the woods.
“It’ll be a real test,” Red Mike said. He was pushing a plastic tent support into the soft ground, “to see if we can be like my ancestors. The sons of mankind.”
“Right,” I said. Red Mike was only a sixteenth Native American and only looked like it when he dressed up for Halloween in the full headdress, quiver, etc. etc.. This yearning to keep the fire lit was more of a stoned dream than some hidden need to tap into his oppressed history.
I watched him push another prong into the ground, two or three feet down. It was the fourth and last of the tent supports, but the finished product looked rickety, ungainly.
“You’re not doing that right,” I said.
“What?”
“You’re not fucking doing that right,” I laughed. “It looks like a shanty.”
“You couldn’t do it any better.”
“Bet I could.”
“Epps!” Red called out.
Epps was carefully sliding excess cardboard from the beer case between the twigs and logs of the unlit fire. He looked up to focus on Red, “Yeah?”
“Could he do this any better?”
“Nope. Too much of a skinny pussy,” Epps returned to the cardboard. It looked like a very complicated puzzle.
“I’m not a fucking pussy,” I said. I was the smallest guy in the group by forty pounds, but by no means skinny. They were all fatasses, country-bred, gravy-drinking rednecks, I thought. I figured they at least knew how to put up a tent. I became angry. I was the newest in the group and didn’t feel like getting tortured for the entire trip like a little brother.
“Skinny pussy!” Red Mike yelled.
“Fuck you, you fatass injan.” I glued another splintered piece of balsawood back to the frame of the kite.
#
Around dusk, White and I decided to take a good, long look at the woods around the campsite. The fire was getting boring for everybody but Red Mike and we needed something to pass the time, at least, until midnight. I passed the joint to Perk and followed White into a very wide clearing that promised some vague excitement.
Once we got a good ways in, he decided to tell me a little bit about his love of hunting. “I’d love hunting here.”
I didn’t say anything, just kept looking at my feet to ensure that I didn’t trip over a root or something. We walked along, about a half mile, until he told me again how great it would be to kill animals in the woods.
“What do ya think?” he asked.
“I don’t hunt.”
White scoffed, “Figures.”
“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?” I knew what it meant. I walked faster and turned his shoulder, forcefully with my right hand. White was the least likely to say something like that to anybody and in turn, it pissed me off.
His eyes focused on me for a second. But then I realized he was only looking above me. Something had caught his eye.
I turned to find that White was looking at a thick patch of briars and a few skinny trees. “What? Does that interest you? Did you see a fucking beat of nature you can shoot or some shit?”
“You see that?” White pointed over my shoulder to the top of a small mountain.
I didn’t see anything and told him so.
“There’s a fucking abandoned house up there.”
I, again, didn’t see it.
“It ain’t that big, but I think we should check it out.”
“What the hell,” I said and we climbed gently through the briar bushes–swearing, getting pricked on our arms and legs–to a clearing that lead up the mountain.
#
The house wasn’t a house at all. It was a one-room, old stone shed. Stretching up about seven feet, it looked like it could comfortably accommodate a housecat or raccoon. Still, the only door it had looked hardy and undamaged, and the windows–while not covered by glass–were sealed off completely by a set of very thick, unpainted, water-logged shutters.
“Feel like going in?” I asked.
“We didn’t come all this way for nothing,” White said. He was soaked in sweat, his face looked as pink and as glazed as a Christmas ham. He approached the door and said, “Let’s see here.”
Inside, a big, white candle was burning. It was the first thing I noticed because like most people, I notice the startling shit first. The light was bounding from wall to wall, pressing up a full, hanging bookshelf that stored methodically arranged rows of little orange-plastic prescription bottles that were filled to the brims with various colors of pills. Baby blue. Baby yellow. Some dull green color. Some like little pearls. They reminded me of Easter. Glorious Easter.
“Shit!” White said.
“Goddamnit, what now?” I asked.
“This is a fucking dealer’s hideout.”
“Really?” I had been too absorbed in the colors to think of why the place existed.
“Look there,” White pointed to the left wall of the shack. Erlenmeyer flasks lined the floor along the walls. They were corked, filled with grainy white powder in some, clear liquid in others, reddish, greenish purple buds in the biggest. Coke and acid and probably really, really good weed.
“I wouldn’t call this a dealer–dealership?,” I said, not knowing any other word for it. I smiled and walked over the bookshelf and the candle and ran my hand over the flame. I noticed the place smelled a little of rubbing alcohol.
“No.” White said. “That candle’s probably only been burning for an hour…Somebody’s been here and they probably won’t like us snooping around.”
“Alright, alright.” I said, “But I’m stealing at least one of these.” I pulled a prescription bottle from the shelves. I uncorked one of the flasks and lifted out the biggest, hairiest bud I could find.
We left the shack, headed on our way to the campsite with the drugs. We were to be heralded as liberators.
#
“I‘ve been saving this up for this exact moment,” White said. He walked to the rim of the pit and began pissing on our campfire. The little orange flames cracked and a jet of piss smacked against the hot bricks that we’d stacked up. They sizzled, reflected a spray onto Red Mike‘s bare calves and ankles. Red Mike had fallen asleep by the fire about an hour before and we considered him fair game for stuff like that. It was part of some unspoken code of Manhood that the first man to fall sleep was also the first to get fucked with.
After we had smoked the rest of the weed, we drew little teepees and tomahawks all over his face with a black marker, then made war-paint markings on his cheeks with ash from the fire. He looked like an overfed Indian Chieftain and we laughed a long time about it. If he didn’t check his truck’s vanity mirror, he would marred for the remainder of our trip. This was a great prospect.
I noticed that White’s piss didn’t smell right, the piss on the bathrooms of bars and rest stops. It was bitter, more concentrated than that. “Goddamn, White.” I said, “What’d you drink?”
“Ah,” he was still going, “some of those pills.”
“Smells fucking awful.” I said, then remembered that I had also eaten the pills. I looked at my watch, “I guess it’ll be my day here soon.” I changed the position of my legs and tried to force some feeling into my bladder. Nothing. I was happy about it until I began to see a fierce neon orange color radiating from my crotch. I put my hand over my jeans to check for moisture. I felt none and realized it was all a shitty mirage. A poor side-effect of the pills.
“Do you realize that the reason we can smell your urine right now is because we’re breathing in little particles of it?” Epps laughed. His sunglasses bucked up and down on his cheeks. They were fat cheeks and red with cold.
“What? That’s not true.” White said.
Epps laughed again. His sunglasses–while totally unneeded before the break of dawn–were probably useful. He was pretty stoned. “You’re a fucking retard,” he said.
I’d seen White punch the guts out of a squirrel carcass on our walk back from the dealer’s shack and I was a little skeptical that he could keep that in check. Whatever it was.
Unlike Epps, I decided to keep quiet, remain with innards intact. Unfortunately, the pills I’d stolen were making silence difficult. They mixed up in my brain, caused some sweaty, coarse, angry feeling to begin rotting throughout my skull. I wasn’t angry at the others, but I was at the situation. The pills’ effect felt enhanced whenever I balled my hands into a pair of tight fists. “Goddamnit.” I covered my nose and mouth. “That piss smells awful.” I just sat there for a long time, centering myself in my hands, covering my mouth and nose, until White was done pissing and the campfire was out.
#
“I wish we brought pussy with us,” Perk finally said. He was rewinding fishing line along its reel, threading it through the small, black plastic holes of the shaft. It looked like a thankless, frustrating chore. “Seriously. This shit has got to be killer when you‘re inside a pussy.”
I couldn’t think of women. Maybe furiously fucking a woman. Pulling her hair back, biting for a little blood, but I wasn’t in the mood for a woman. I couldn’t think about them if I tried. Only frustration. “What pills did you take?” I asked.
Perk thought for a moment. “The blue ones.”
“What’d they taste like?”
“I don’t know. I just got a major hard-on.”
The pills I had stolen tasted, undeniably, like how worn tires smell. “You didn’t take the pills Cosmos gave us?”
“The pills Cosmos gave us?” Perk asked. He looked horrified that he hadn’t heard of the drugs or the man. “Cosmos?”
“Yes Cosmos,” I lied, “the dealer you numb-nutted bastard. The fucking tire pills. Taste like tires. Fucking…What did he call them?” I stood up and stomped over to White. “What did Cosmos call these?” I took the orange bottle from my pocket and shoved the yellow pills up to his eyes.
White had no idea.
“Berserk. Berserk.” I said, trying to convince him of the lie. “You stupid bastard. Berserk!”
“Oh, yeah. Cosmos. Berserk. I haven’t tried them yet.” He reached in the bag and got two.
“None of us have, goddamnit.” Epps said. He walked over and took some out. He delicately placed them on the center of his tongue, then closed his mouth and stared at me. He was a fat, sarcastic, bull of a man-child.
“You took two earlier, White,” I said, “And killed that dead squirrel… again.”
“Oh yeah.” White said, then shrugged. “Guess I could always use more.”
“I see how it is. Hording the drugs,” Perk said.
“Nobody fucking reminded me to tell Red or you or Epps when we got back.” I slammed the bottle down, “Don’t fucking blame me for this. I already shared that massive bud with you earlier. You ungrateful fucks.”
Perk walked over, picked up the bottle and emptied the last four or five pills in his mouth. He made a tart expression, like the pills pained his defenseless tongue. He frowned, “How long this take?”
“I don’t fucking know, asshole,“ I said, “And we were supposed to save two for Red. Quit asking me stupid fucking questions!”
“Alright,” Epps said, smiling, “Calm that pussy down. Don‘t want that sand up in there to get too hot. It‘ll turn to glass, you know?”
An intensity welled up in my temples unlike I had ever felt before. It shot through my shoulders, down my arms, along the edges of my hands, into the bones in my knuckles. My fingers drove into my palms, the nails into the skin. I began to bleed pink. It was like I was wringing them dry, my hands. They wouldn’t stop pulsing pink liquid down my wrists. I smiled, felt a little satisfied with my rage.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” Epps asked.
“I don’t fucking know.” I smiled because I felt powerful. Like the Antichrist.
“Why the fuck are you smiling?”
“I don’t fucking know.” Above me, a the sky was turning into blue again, the sun was rising. It would be over the horizon soon.
In my arms, I felt stronger than anyone, everyone. I looked up, brought my elbows up and tensed my body. The blood ran down, pink turning to a bright, brilliant red. I stared at it, the beautiful color, the brisk feeling of it evaporating from my skin. I smiled, laughed.
“You’re creeping me the fuck out. Stop that.” Epps was covering his eyes and peeking through them every so often. He was very afraid. As was White. “He’s right. Stop that shit. Your bleeding man. Stop.”
It felt better than any drug, their fear. I wanted more. “The Dead Day is here, brothers,” I whispered, then grabbed a hot log from the fire. It sizzled against the blood, made me feel terrifying, “The Dead Day is here!” I screamed again, “The Dead Day is here, brothers! The Dead day is here!”
#
Epps ran first, then White. After Perk noticed something was wrong, he ran off too. They sprinted, barefoot from the camp like scared animals. Each with nothing to do but keep on going, knowing that some horrible shame would infect them when they stopped. The disgrace of submissive flight.
But there was still Red Mike, asleep, stained with ash and ink on the dirt.
I walked up to him and stuck the hot, ashen end of the log near his face. He didn’t react, only the heavy wheezing of a fat, drunken Indian on his native soil, already mocked and disgraced. He was pathetic and I soon became embarrassed for him. I sat the log down and wiped my arms and hands clean on my t-shirt.
It was only the trees and I, the pissed-out fire and a lingering silence.
I needed no more witnesses. I could smell the residue of an indefinite, overwhelming fear. It smelled delicious, like overcooked marshmallows or burnt hotdogs. Deep in that forest, I knew the others were still running, looking up through the new, green leaves, panting, crying. They would be waiting for their pills to kick in, their power, their revenge to come.
Or maybe, they weren’t running for the pills. Maybe, they were running for the comforts of morning, the reassurance that no Dead Day existed.
After you make it through the night, alive and unscathed, the morning is like that sometimes. You suspect that you won’t live another minute, but instead of fighting it, you run, blood-mouthed: a gutless coward sprinting towards that kindly old horizon.