2019-12-28 - This Damn Town

May 15th - 2015

He wasn’t there when she reached for him, had he gotten out of bed? What for? Maybe he had another bad dream and was trying to not wake her up? Tia took a long breath and almost sat up, but her eyes were heavy and the bed was still warm. She closed her eyes and drew a breath to call out for him.

The hands were at his shoulders, the hands that had bore him up and away, leaving a shadow of himself in his place. They felt damp, but were paper dry. There was breath on his neck and ear, too wet, too warm. “Thewlis why did you just… take it?”

The kicks, the punches, the pipe across his stomach. He could feel it, but knew it to be phantom pains. “Thewlis, you could be more, could be strong…” the hands are at his shoulders, firm and caressing like a lover, but it’s a false love, a lie, like everything else about these hands that massage at the tension in him. He looked to these kids, barely younger than him, children just legal to drink. Crushed under the weight of expectations. Given positions to cement power in businesses. Nepotism to reinforce rule. Neo-Feudalism at its finest. The next step in the cycle, bullied children becoming bullies hunting their own That night they chose the man who kept to himself, kept quiet.

The moment comes, Thewlis watches Not-Thewlis lash out, but instead of a wild swing with cuts in flesh erupting in the wake. Not-Thewlis’s hand closes against the face of the one. Fingertips like hooks against the soft skin and yielding tissue.

The scream that rises is like nothing that he has ever imagined before. It’s not a sound, but terror and agony made manifest. Blood sprays, coating the faces and clothes. Mixing into the water in the small puddles on gathered in the street of the alley to stain the reflection of the guttering street light.

The cry grows louder, wet, and Thewlis tries to look away… but here, right now, he can want to, he can stretch and strain, but there is no success. He watches the head of the first young man suddenly crush inward. Eyes erupting and brain squirting out with blood mixed in, spattering over Not-Thewlis.

They lord over you, they laugh at you. You are a thing. You could be infinitely more. The clothing of the dead man strips away and flesh flays, stretching, growing thin enough for light to shine through before it tears, landing on the form that looks like Thewlis, becoming like armor, like a mantle. One of them runs, who wouldn’t? Why wouldn’t he? But Thewlis can feel the pressure in the mind, the shift of glimmer, and on the next step snapped bones snap and rip through skin, leaving him howling in the alley, sobbing and begging as his hands clasp at his knee, above the break.

His name might have been Chet, or Toby, but that might be his own bias, for their type, for their origin. For all Thewlis knows the young man’s name - no, he does not it. Scott. Scott VanByrne. Not-Thewlis is looking at him. The hands on Thewlis’s shoulders caress and massage while voices, so many of them, whisper like lovers just behind his ear, “Thewlis, this could have been you, it can be you. You can be strong… so much stronger than you have let yourself be.

Scott is screaming again, fear and pain together. Thewlis can hear his ribs crush and see the lesion open in his chest that splits into more, skin and tissue peeling back. Not-Thewlis’s hand dives into the tangle of guts, twist and yanks. An outpouring of rubbery intestines following, blood, and strings of snapped connective tissue. Not-Thewlis is concentrating - healing the wounds he can to prolonge the pain.

The one with the broken leg is dragging himself away, sobbing, vomiting with fear. His bladder lets go, then his bowels. He’s sobbing hysterically, trying to pull himself away. Thewlis watches, feeling the jabbing pain in his mind, more and more. Something wants him to relish this, but he only feels sadness.There is a bulge as if the air is thickening and then the crawling man’s jacket is on fire. Then his shirt, his pants, it spreads into his hair. His last scream sucks air in to scorch his lungs and throat, his sound is cut off and he falls forward, a burning hump in the middle of the alley.

Not-Thewlis is walking towards him, festooned in banners of flesh and intestine. One hand bears a bicep, raw and dripping. There are bite marks in it. A hunk of pectoral in the other, cooked by fire, steaming. “Why can’t we be like this, Thewlis? We could be such a thing of power, never afraid again, for we will consume that what threatens us? Isn’t that a better life, Thewlis?”

“No… I… No it’s…” Thew is cut off a screaming voice that curdles his blood and chills his very soul. His words are caught in a sob, choked. The hands that failed to feel gentle and supporting are gone and there is a sensation he knows too well. Like being struck by a bag of bricks.

“THEWLIS MOORE YOU WORTHLESS SACK OF SHIT!” He is on the ground, curling up, fists and feet now, all around him. Invective bathes him under a deluge of poison screeched at him. She batters him, asking him why he’s worthless, why he couldn’t be a better son, a proper son. Thewlis weathers it as he has before, sobbing with each strike.

“Why do you let this happen? Why do you let any of it happen? All you need to do is use what you’ve been gifted. Why do you accept this?” the voice is Thew’s, but not his mouth. His head rocks to one side of a kick and he feels his jaw crack and a tooth flies loose. More voices join, sibilant, trying to sound soothing.

“Thewlis why don’t you do what you’re supposed to? You’re supposed to fight back. But you let her do this. Why?” the whispering chorus supporting the voice of Thewlis that is not coming from Thewlis. “Why don’t you fight her?”

“Because she’s supposed to love me!” his mother’s face fills his vision, a snarl of hatred making a mask of her visage. It’s her features, her expression, but he realizes she’s not his mother. The teeth are caps over points and razors. The eyes aren’t right, the skin doesn’t move right. Like a mask.

“Who could ever love a worthless shit like you, Thewlis?” Maggie Moor’s fist, but that’s not Maggie, that’s not mom, rams into his chest and he feels his heart become wrapped in chains of ice. She lifts him off the ground, blood pouring out of his chest, and then he’s swung, screaming and crying.

Tia awoke with a start. He was in bed, but it was another nightmare. He was sitting up, sobbing, and then he was out of the bed, tripping over blankets and curling onto the floor. A naked sobbing thing… no he’s… not a thing. But she felt so sad. She couldn’t help it. Looking at him on the floor, like this. Shattered thing… man.

She’d been living with him for the last week, not moved in, but not going home. Six weeks, five dates, the fifth date hadn’t ended yet. Even with Thewlis’s night terrors, it was a good week. She had been dared, goaded, and encouraged by friends to ask him to dinner when they spotted him entering the hardware store. Ask him out, bring details. How much of a freak was he?

She hadn’t ‘reported in’ yet. Not once in all her time with him. She’d given excuses. So cruel, to treat him like a zoo animal. He’d only been kind. One of the kindest people in town. Asking what she wanted, making sure she was comfortable most often silently. A gentleman, but shy, and troubled. She stole the first kiss they had, on date four - when she had them go to the Frightday Movie Marathon. Scary movies. A passion for him. But she could never discern why.

On the fifth date she asked him out to picnic in the woods, in a little clearing. She’d made her move there, and they’d spent the past week enjoying each other. But he was always so so filled with doubts, to the brim with nightmares he would not speak of. For all his kindness… he made her sad, and she couldn’t stay any longer.

He didn’t know she was gone from the bedroom that was soon no longer his. Nor hear the SUV pull out of the driveway he was going to have to give up in thirty days. He only knew she was gone when he managed to pull himself off the floor and climbed back into the bed, reaching for comfort and finding cold sheets. Drawing the pillow she had been using to his chest, Thewlis’s weeping grew quieter, taking in the soft scent of of honey that was strongest in the organic shampoo she used. She’d stayed the longest. She came in quietly and left like a whisper. Maybe this should be the last time. The bright spots leave too much empty when they fade.

Tia Monroe made only two stops, the first to go to her apartment, slinking in and gathering up her things, boxing it up, it wasn’t much. Some nick-knacks, clothes, laptop… Barely anything - slipping back down to pack it in. Her roommates, who were eager to learn of what she had discovered, still slept. Leaning into their rooms it felt like spying on a viper or a spider at repose. The shadows were darker, wind was colder, and people whom she thought were, maybe, a little too negative now were recalled as feeling downright villainous. Those people in town who were polite seemed a little brighter. The ones who were truly kind like beacons in the dark. She didn’t know if she would shine, or become a snake hiding in the shadow… Didn’t care. She had to get out of town.

The second stop was at the gas station on the edge of town. The old guy at the register leered, and tried to flirt by making off color comments while staring at her chest through the shirt… Through Thewlis’s shirt that she’d stolen on her way out of his life. A charcoal gray cotton thing, it had an egg on it, with a green crack in it. ‘In space, no one can hear you scream’ boldly printed in glow in the dark screen printing. She left him there in the dark, and he’d only ever been kind. Something prickled at the back of her thoughts, urging her to come back.

Somehow it felt like the few good people in town were wishing her luck. Urging her to get out. Escape. Take her opportunity.

When she passed the sign reading ‘Please come back to visit Gray Harbor!’ she spat out the window, not realizing she did it. Eyes on the rear view mirror she sighed, considered calling and then realized that was the last guaranteed hook to tie her back to this place. E-mails could be ignored, social media too. But a phone…

As the smart phone screen ran with cracks and then shattered, tumbling across the street, cartwheeling and flipping merrily along before halting with a scrape of plastic on asphalt in the lane. A small shape that would be destroyed minutes later by a truck heading for town, to visit the mill and collect lumber.

Tia didn’t notice, the phone out the window felt like the last rope snapping to release her, “This damn town…” she mutters, disappearing around a bend in the forest road.

Sitting on the edge of his bed, body glittering with drying sweat, Thewlis stares at the screen in the dark. Her name. Her number. A new message that he reads again,

‘I’m sorry - I had to get out of this town. I hope you get out too. XOXO’

A deep emptiness following a bright spot. Slowly he deletes the text, all of her texts, her name and number. The small collection of pictures she had him take with his, the one of her unaware of his taking while she was looking serene. He looked to the rumpled bedclothes, and could almost see them and not just empty linens.

Sleep sounds terrible. Sounds like a prison. He starts to dress, to go up to the Gardens early. Two years in… he couldn’t possibly be still working there by the end of the year.

Could he?

This damn town.