TIME PASSES.
The days flow easily, one into the other without distinction. I go to school. I do my homework. I stop waiting for a punishment that is not coming. At night, I run.
I eat new things, stop eating others. My mom doesn’t object much. I throw salad and carrots and apples in the grocery cart, canned tuna and lean beef, skim milk. The dietician, Mitzi Lange, tells me three golden rules: cut all unnecessary calories, stop drinking calories, and no refined sugars. No more pop, no juice. She tells me to only drink water, eat green vegetables and lean protein and whole grains. Exercise every day. She doesn’t write me a meal plan, just follow these simple rules. And I do.
I’m making positive changes in my life.
The town absorbs Paul’s death into its ledger of tragedies, another poor dumb boy with anger in his heart. The circle closes. The very same fracking tank came back in the very same place, rebuilt within a month, as if nothing changed, nothing happened, nothing mattered. It did inspire a few more people to attend the group Concerned Barnesville Residents. They meet in church basements, where they pontificate on the right of humans to have clean drinking water and patiently await results on water samples from municipal reservoirs they sent to Ohio University for analysis. Sometimes a handful of them picket outside town hall with baggy flannel and peace buttons and cardboard signs that go limp in the rain.
There are other stories.
One of Demont’s higher-ups goes missing, our friend Luke Holt. He vanishes, car and all. Once again, Demont and Barnesville’s finest sniff around, but nothing comes of it. There’s a blurb in the paper. During the investigation they discover he had been embezzling funds for years. Demont suspects he fled the state, if not the country. There is no trail to follow. He’s just gone. Eventually Demont adopts the town’s outlook on such matters. In these foothills, not everything needs an explanation. Here the world cannot be made flat. This is an area most want to leave. This is an area that swallows people.
There are other stories.
Derek Styron’s wife killed a fracker in her house. That’s what those gunshots were about. She claims self-defense during a home invasion, rape. Wounds confirm her story. Nobody presses charges. Demont mails the man’s body back to his family in New Mexico.
I weighed nearly 270 pounds. By Thanksgiving, I weigh 250 pounds. Aunt Emily hosts the meal at her home. She greets us at the door with a wreath of red leaves around her blond head. Her rooms are decorated with autumnal garlands and gourds. We all gather in their dining room, Uncle Tom at the head, Grandpa Shoemaker at the other end, the rest of us in between with the steaming turkey. My little cousin Karl notices my dress fits looser and says I look good. We play rock, paper, scissors, shoot. Grandma Shoemaker commends me on my weight loss, says maybe I can teach my mom a thing or two.
Mom baked sweet potatoes and natural cranberry sauce. Dad brought a six-pack to ease his sadness, another holiday meal without his biological family. Stonewall sleeps in a high chair by the window because Mom fed him one of my leftover Xanax to keep him quiet. The hot pads beneath the serving dishes are made of frayed leather that everyone laughingly agrees look like Indian scalps. Tom says we are celebrating Abundance. He promises it won’t last. Dad says grace. For the first time I keep my eyes open and see that even Mom and Uncle Tom submit, entertain the possibility. Only Grandpa stares at me with that strange blend of cruel pride and sorrow. There’s an unexpected tenderness to his angular face, long and soft as a lamb’s, a delicate waxen mask stretched over a sneering skull. As Dad grovels thanks to a fantastical deity, Grandpa and I regard each other. He is pleased and welcomes me with a blue wink. He isn’t just a man. He’s a presence, a colossus that breathes deep and overshadows all of us. Blood drips from his strong old hands.
The days shorten, and the sun sinks quickly behind the hills, other stories.
Several miles over in Bethesda, a rival town, some varsity jock with a shattered knee slits his wrists in the tub like a botched Roman emperor. A scandalous post on Facebook calls him a sad sack of shit. His death is good news for the Barnesville Shamrocks, pulling in an unexpected Friday night victory over the Bethesda Hellcats, who’d just lost their star quarterback.
These are the town’s stories.
The first day of December, Dianna Freeport, a mom on Cedar Street, is cracked out on meth and leaves her six-month-old baby in the car overnight, where it freezes to death, wailing in the dark. The next week, on a snowy night, Larry the Loon breaks into the elementary school and hangs himself from a steam pipe. When the kids find him, he’s bloated and leaking all over the gymnasium floor like a rotting sack of trash. Trauma counselors from the mental health board get called in to do therapy groups for the children exposed. These same counselors are called in again before Christmas break when an anonymous caller threatens to blow up the middle school during a community blood drive for the Red Cross.
I never contact that licensed professional counselor.
I run in the cold rain and snow. I run no matter what. By mid-December I weigh 230 pounds. For Christmas I ask for new running shoes, and new jeans and shirts that will fit me.
Paul’s parents become ghosts. They haunt that little house and never come to church. On weekends I park in the municipal lot and run through all the neighborhoods under orange streetlights. I circle their home and still expect to see something warm and familiar, but all the curtains are shut. I wear black sweatpants and black sweatshirts like a uniform, a soldier in my own army. I exhaust myself in order to sleep without dreams.
By Christmas, I weigh 220 pounds. My face melts into something sharp.
Some glum eighth grader named Shirley Quartz kills herself just before Christmas. Apparently she always wrote bad poetry in a composition notebook. One night she takes a bottle of her mom’s sleeping pills after she posts a note on Facebook that has lines like ’cause I never feel like I’ll ever belong here and people are mean and life don’t mean much when your hurting inside. This call for help produces a massive eye roll from her followers and produces this sentiment from her faraway ex-boyfriend in Youngstown, whose profile name is Swift Dickins: Yes, please, go kill urself and never have kids. This starts a communal discussion on bullying through social media but soon all agree that she was probably the one responsible for that bomb threat. Flyers go up in our school about suicide prevention awareness and the dangers of stress and depression and anxiety and how tough life can be for aspiring adults. It only makes me mad that Paul’s name will always be associated with such pathetic shit.
At the grocery store I see Steven’s wife and child. She’s gotten fat and sad. Her yellow hair gathers knots. That little boy, who is a miniature him, sits in the cart and nibbles on a free cookie from the bakery. He swings his feet while she hunches and reads the ingredients on a loaf of white bread. For a moment I consider speaking to her, a sorry for your loss or something while I sincerely pat the boy’s tiny back. But I just follow my mom down another aisle and place a bag of apples in the cart. On the drive home, the words I killed your husband I killed your dad circle through my brain like a bug flushed down the toilet.
At night I wander dark rooms and watch shadows move.
On national news a boy named Gavin kills nineteen students at a high school in Illinois, and a couple of weeks later another named Christopher manages to kill twelve and wound seventy in a movie theatre in Maryland. Nobody seems to know why they did what they did except that they are young, angry white men with guns who seem determined to prove that no space is safe. The nation is shocked and appalled, but something within me twitches understanding, and I quickly change the channel.
All my hard work is over, and I’m just waiting for that acceptance letter. I murdered my best friend to ensure a future that may never happen. But I keep moving.
Every Tuesday and Thursday after school I immediately go home and place Stonewall in a carriage and wheel him around town. I bundle him up in winter coat, hat, and mittens. We both get away from them. His first word is sis. He smiles at sunshine and snatches at snowflakes. He never has seizures when we are alone together, out in the great wide world. I spend time with my brother because I love him. Because I didn’t do it just for me. I begin to think of Stonewall as my own child. I could save him, save us both. We could go far away from this place. He would be only nine when I became a veterinarian. That’s still enough time to make it right.
I can no longer figure out if I have always been this way or if I have designed myself this way. Occasionally I will sit back in awe that I am still free. But it wasn’t luck or chance or fate. I did this. I secured a future for myself. I did what I had to do. And I made it through.
Sadie watches me from long distances. We never speak. She condemns me with that same beautiful stare. But it doesn’t matter. She’s getting lost, too, dating a twenty-three-year-old named Brian Pierce who works construction and lives in a trailer. Her cum dumpster days are trickling to a close. She is disappearing into him. Most days I don’t even notice her.
I always speak the same lines to people: College. Scholarship. Veterinary science. They ask if I want to do livestock or pets, if I want to have a practice in a town or city. Choices and options and avenues for my future that will never, ever remove me from what I did.
I have my moments when I hate myself. But it can’t be for nothing. It just can’t.
I see things, black shapes out of the corner of my eye. Sometimes the whole world seems animate, buzzing, flickering between constant rifts. Insects scurry along the floor, crawl up the walls. Tall dark forms watch from dim corners, always following me, lurking up behind once I turn my back. They are only fleeting glimpses. I don’t believe these things actually exist.
I’ve always loved winter because the forest is silent. No bugs, nothing to bite or sting. No sound but my own footsteps, the crunch of snow, creak of a frozen limb. My breath makes ghostly shapes, and I can imagine my soul rising. I can see something, and so I can pretend such a thing exists. If I come across a deer, a squirrel, some little lost thing, I share a moment, something tranquil. But without a warm place with food to return home to, I know I’d eat that creature. Maybe it’d eat me. All the bears are gone, the mountain lions. The Shawnee are gone, too. We’re the apex predator now, nothing to fear but ourselves. I’d eat someone to survive. No doubt in my mind. In a cold, dead world of infinite winter, without sunlight or crops or plants, where nothing grows, a fallen world, I’d chain people up in my basement, harvest them as resource, choose the finest cuts. I’d remove their tongues first, a kind of delicacy. It would stop their talking. Words would have no power in such a world. Words would have long ago failed. But the noise would trouble me. This is what I think about, when I lose myself and the snow collects in my lashes and chills my hair. The trees claw up to the violet sky like skeletal squids. If I look too long, the limbs and branches darken. The trees stop being trees.
Beginning in February I check our PO box every other day. One afternoon I find a thick document with gold lettering and an embossed collegiate seal. I open it in front of Elwood. I’ve been accepted to Ohio State. I didn’t get the Appalachian Scholarship. I didn’t get any scholarship. Federal aid will get me a couple thousand dollars, but that’s it. My parents and I sit quietly around the kitchen table, an open bottle of cheap celebratory red wine. Mom makes a toast to my acceptance. But now they look defeated, like they failed me. I’m not angry. It all seems very, very small. I tell them I will just take out student loans.
“Debt,” Dad warns me. “Debts that will have to be paid. You could go to the community college up the road.”
“I’m leaving this place,” I say.
Mom reads over the acceptance letter again, wipes tears from her cheek, and pulls me close, kisses my head. “Congratulations. I knew you’d do it.”
One sleepless night I remove the Bible from my shelf and walk to the ruins of my grandparents’ house. I fan the pages in the cold dark, consider the testaments. Then I burn it. The flames sting my eyes. If I do have a soul, it is black. And if there is a Devil, let him take me.