Horror - Short

This story is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are fictitious and any similarities to actual persons, locations, or events is coincidental. This work cannot be used to train artificial intelligence programs.  No AI tools were used in the writing of this story.

All rights reserved. Over the Fields and Through the Woods Copyright © Eddie Generous 2026

OVER THE FIELDS AND THROUGH THE WOODS

There was no word that mutually described sore, exhausted, and worried. Likewise with too young to know relentless stressors while simultaneously knowing them too damned well.

In the fields, the sun overhead worked at bubbling and peeling the skin from our necks. Clanking heavy rocks into the loader bucket fitted on the front of the ancient Minneapolis-Moline tractor, we worked like boys on an invisible chain gang.

That old machine was once yellow but sat in a state of flaking oranges and browns, rotten peach tones of oxidization and rust. Colors fading like our childhoods and displayed right before our eyes.

The un-yellowed paint wasn’t alone, we’d been the color of Cheerios and became the color of tomatoes. I thought of Cheerios at the time despite the fact that the off-brand rings that went to mush in seconds were all we ever got for breakfast.

It was dirty work, field labor. A black rim of grime circled my mouth. I wiped and scratched at the gritty residue. Whenever I managed to get the caked dust-ring wiped away, more dust landed and ate up all the moisture, solidifying like paint. A black ring on a boiled red canvas.

I licked at my cruddy teeth and cracked lips, tasting all that our lives had become. My brother Jake and me tossing rocks from the field into the loader bucket. We weren’t born into this life, but it found us anyway. It was bad luck that put us on the farm. Ah hell, it was downright shitty luck. The kind you see on the news and part of you wants to disbelieve stuff like this ever happens to kids.

Our mother died two years earlier from lung cancer. I found that out later in life, back then I only knew something got her and ate her up from the inside out. There was no family left when she died and we went into the foster system. Home to home, trouble to trouble. Misfortune always finds some kids. It’s magnetic, or something.

The first home that took us was all right. There was lots of food and the mother was nice, so long as we didn’t break anything. There were four other kids there, at Ms. Kincaid’s house. All girls, three younger than me, one older than me. Shelley was oldest, in high school, and she kept to herself. I spent a good amount of time imagining the freedoms of high school. It was only two years away.

The younger girls were the first case of bad business that found us. A gang of conniving mini-criminals ages seven, nine, and ten.

We were all foster kids at Ms. Kincaid’s house and yet, the girls didn’t like boys on their turf. It made it easy for the girls that Jake was always so forward and nosey. He liked to go into their rooms to ask questions and touch stuff. Jake always needed to learn things firsthand.

“Little pervert, I think. Girls say they caught him in their closet when they was changing, peeking on them with his hands in his pants. I’m sorry, but I can’t do anything with them. You’d be smart only to send me girls here on out,” Ms. Kincaid said into the phone.

I asked Jake and he asked me right back why he’d ever have his hands in his pants if he was hiding in a closet, and looking at the girls change…nah, never happened. It was the perfect lie to send the opposite sex on the road.

A day later, we were boys with boxes looking at a new home. Short-term, that’s what they said. Mrs. and Mr. Schwartz had too many kids as it was, mostly boys. Rough kids. They policed themselves while the Schwartz’s collected the checks and then went to work at the printing press in town.

The first day was fine. We met everybody. A guarded niceness even peeked around the corners of their armor. It was different on the second day. Our new, temporary parents left for work and we learned about pecking orders. We discovered how the bottom felt. We were the worms and there were birds circling overhead.

It was short-lived. The too tight living arrangements sent us on our way. Fine by me. Fine by Jake too. Or so we thought.

We went to a stinky old house, Mr. Benn’s house. He had three dogs and only boys. Everyone was quiet and soft, and Mr. Benn liked to give shoulder rubs and bath times. It was weird from the beginning.

Even old as I was, same as another boy, Mr. Benn used to demand that we bath with the door open and all had to sleep in Boy Scout pajamas. My uniform was too small.

After a few months, Jake told me that Mr. Benn called him a dirty little boy. I asked what he was doing and he said, “Nothin’, but he keeps on it. I don’t like him.”

This could’ve gone so much worse than it had. We caught a lucky break, sort of. Simon, one of the other boys, got sick and went to the hospital the night after one of Mr. Benn’s milkshake parties. He gave all but two of us boys milkshakes. The milkshakes were great and conked us right out. Two boys always had to stay up and help with Mr. Benn’s guests. Jake and me never got singled out to miss the milkshakes.

That last time Simon did and so did Robbie. The other boys told us that Simon almost always missed out on the milkshakes. The others explained this sadly and told us they couldn’t tell us what the parties were like, just that we’d see.

Turns out, gonorrhea isn’t an easy illness to explain away in a little boy. The police came and took us out of there. Jake and me had no real emotional scares, while the other boys…shit. The bad turn put our names to the top of an adoption list. Like we were minor celebrity survivors of a horrible train derailment that sent most of the ticket holders to dirt.

Jake prayed every night. He prayed to Mom instead of God, prayed she’d come back and save us. Back then, I wanted to slap him, explain the ways of reality. It’s a hard world and I was learning and so should he. I wanted to tell him, Dead is dead, there’s nothing after that. Dead is dead.

Nathan and Emma Abbott adopted us and moved us to the farm.

They were monsters. Emma was a sharp-tongued drunk and Nathan was straight cruel, had a set of heavy fists. I remember the coin taste and black spots in my eyes like floating reverse halos when punches connected, seemingly out of nowhere.

The punches were short bursts, the opposite of the field in every way aside from the torment.

Jake clanked a stone near my head.

“Watch it, all right?” I said to him.

His skin seemed ready to curl off his back in great bubbles. If we burned anymore, I think we would’ve turned into raisins. 

“Ya know, school should’ve started already. Must run different here, huh?” Jake asked.

“I bet it already did start. I bet we don’t get to go to school.”

“No way. Not fair,” Jake said, a good-sized rock in hand.

“I know, but we’re slaves. You learn about slavery in school. Nathan and Emma own us, they adopted us, so they own us, and the police can’t do nothing ‘bout it. It’s all legal, that’s what adopted means, means nobody wants us unless we’ll work all day,” I explained and I thought, without doubt, that that was what adoption meant.

Often enough, I guess, that’s exactly what it means.

“Bullshit,” Jake said, and he fired his rock at the bucket after a pitcher’s windup.

The extra effort skewed his aim. He missed and hit a gummy steel coupler just above the word Quicke on the loader arm. Black liquid sprayed into the air.

“You dummy. You’re gonna get it now,” I said.

“No, no, it can’t… I can fix it,” Jake said, tears already spurting like desert springs.

 It was a mess. It was all kinds of trouble.

 “It’s busted.”

Bent metal wrapped around the cracked rubber hose.

Jake jumped up on one of the front wheels of the tractor and attempted to push the hose back together. The fluid continued its oily trickle. It had already pretty well painted Jake. Blackish stains like rainy clown mascara streaked his face.

We were so involved with the hydraulic hose that we didn’t hear the steps coming from behind us. Nathan tossed me away from the tractor before I so much as sensed him.

“No, no, it was an accident, I swear. It wasn’t my—” Jake started.

A fist into his mouth stopped his plea. Jake toppled from the tractor’s wheel. Nathan looked at the hose, saw the bent steel, and recognized what happened. Carelessness.

“You no good, thankless little shit,” he seethed through a clenched jaw and grabbed at Jake’s collar.

Jake rose from the ground and slid from his shirt. His back was so white it seemed to reflect light as if he was part mirror. Healing belt scars lined and crossed this fleshy plain. I didn’t feel too bad for him. My back looked the same.

Nathan tossed the shirt away and went after Jake who’d taken to scurrying on all fours. Dust floated on the air as Jake kicked for footing.

“Ungrateful little shit!” Nathan said. Guy was a broken record, most hard bullies are.

His foot swung back and then flew forward against Jake’s ass. Jake face planted into the dirt, taking a mouthful of soil on his first inhale.

“You can’t do nothing right, ungrateful little shit!”

Nathan dropped to his knees and punched Jake in the back of the head with two swift pops.

By this point, I wanted to move, I swear I did, but if you’ve never witnessed a beating and felt absolutely helpless at the same time, you can’t relate. As humans, we all pretend that if the time comes, if our number’s called, we find our inner heroes. It doesn’t work like that in me and I watched Nathan flip and pound my brother like he was pizza dough.

“This is how you repay me? I take you in and this is how you repay me? Ungrateful, thankless, little shit!”

Nathan landed two more shots into Jake’s face and Jake stopped fighting. Limp in the dirt. Typically, Nathan stormed away after a whooping and then I’d help my brother, but this was different. Nathan meant to harm in a way that would teach us both a lesson over and over again, forever. Nathan stormed toward me and a lightning fist connected with my forehead. I smelled metal, like batteries, and saw black. My body fell in slow motion.

Nathan kicked. “Ungrateful, both of ya!” he yelled, and his foot connected with my thigh and then my hip and then my arm.

The pain shot all over my body and I tried to cry out.

The kicks stopped and I opened my eyes, Nathan stood over me, his massive frame casting a horrid shadow. “Little shits, little shits! This is the thanks you give me? I didn’t even get to plow your mama, but I get the thankless shits anyway!”

He dropped his knees into my chest and my body shrank. I gasped and dirty fists smacked, each hit offering a second of numb shock before the pain came.

“No, please,” I begged, no sense pretending otherwise. Nathan kept at me and I squirmed to avoid direct strikes. Then he fell forward, draped over me like a heavy damp blanket. A new shadow covered me. I looked up at my brother who held the same dirty stone that broken the hose.

“You’re gonna get it,” I said, busted lip stinging, thinking Nathan was apt get up and beat Jake senseless.

Jake leaned down to look and Nathan turned sideways to look up.

“Thankless little—” Nathan began anew.

Jake slammed that rock into the soft surface of Nathan’s face nine more times, splashing away as if playing in a red mud puddle.

“You killed ’em!” I said, so scared I thought I might die of worry.

Jake tossed the rock aside and grinned. Glad at what he’d done. He’d saved his big brother and kicked some ass in the process.

“Come on, Austen, we gotta get out of here,” Jake said and then he spat muddy blood.

“You can’t just kill people, you can’t. We’ll get in trouble. He owned us. He adopted us, that’s how it works... Oh you’re in trouble.”

“Not only me, come on. I don’t want Emma comin’. I don’t have no skid marks either, she’s a liar,” Jake said. “Come on.”

I saw right then that my little brother had the hero stuff that I did not. I’ll admit it irked me in a way that made me want to punch him silly. But I didn’t.

We ran from the open fields of the farm to the neighbor’s property, three hundred acres of fields another two hundred of forest. We ran long and far, when we lost the energy to run, we walked. By evening, we came to the forest. It was probably no more than an hour, but time’s different when you’re a terrified kid on the run.

Jake had an uncanny way about the woods. I was a wreck. He led us right to the creek. Off and on all day, I cried about what was surely coming for us. The punishment structure for bad boys that don’t mind their adoptive parents was surely the kind of thing that scared even the hardest types.

“What are we gonna do?” I whined.

I remember the scolding expression on Jake’s face.

“Well, what?” I said.

“Umm, let’s have a drink and think.”

“Of what?” I shouted and he pointed at a shrub.

Beyond the shrub was the two-foot-deep creek. It was cold and glorious. I drank until my belly hurt. Then I splashed away all the dirt and blood. 

“Now what?”

Jake was still filthy. I wasn’t in charge of keeping him clean, so I didn’t say anything.

“Umm, can we make a fire like on TV?”

It was, and still is, true that everyone that sleeps in the woods on TV builds a fire, but they also come prepared, and I didn’t have a clue.

“We don’t got any matches! How can we start a fire?”

“Umm,” he said and started walking.

We crossed the creek to a grassy shore on the other side. The reedy grass was long and Jake continued right through it, punching cattails. I was tired and hungry, my face stung, and I re-experienced each kick with every step I took.

Jake found a small clearing not far from the creek. It was sandy and the high grass offered us some shelter from the police that I was certain were out looking for us. I banged rocks and Jake rubbed sticks. We gave up after two minutes. The new plan was to spend the night cool and damp under the stars. Washing all the crud from our bodies opened the buffet doors for the mosquitoes. I slapped until I didn’t care anymore. I cried from hunger and fear. I cried from being cold and being who I was.

A howl stopped my tears. Jake crawled tight next to me. We had no way of knowing how close the owners of those sounds were. Howling carries like little else when the moon is high and the night is quiet.

“I think they’re close.”

“You think?” I said.

“The grass moved, and I saw eyes, like a dog,” Jake explained, whispering. “What if it’s wolves?”

I thought not. Coyotes were common. Wolves lived more north, like way up where there are lots of moose and bears.

“Scat!” I shouted. “Probably just coyotes,” I whispered into Jake’s ear, hopeful.

The grass moved and a growl met us. My heart pounded.

Jake leapt to his feet and grabbed for my arm. “Run!”

Hand in hand, we sprinted. The sound of animals behind us fueled our tired and haggard bodies beyond the bruising and sunburns and skitter bites. I could be wrong, I may have imagined it, but I was sure something nipped at my heels, toying with me. With us.

There was a tree ahead with a low branch and Jake steered us in that direction. The moon silhouetted the shape and made it seem to shine in the shadows. Onto that low-hanging branch, we climbed.

The limbs cradled us and we looked down, huffing and puffing at the sticky air. There they were, out of the shadows, eyes aglow yellow, teeth blinding white. Three of them, grey and tall, I didn’t know much about coyotes, but I didn’t think they got so big.

Jake was right.

Wolves, three wolves. They strode around the tree, taunting us. In the summer, there’s food everywhere a wolf looks. These weren’t normal animals. Normal, fed, summer wolves don’t spy boys as if they’re supper.

Right then I knew that because Jake killed a man these wolves had the task of doling punishment. I wanted to yell out pleas that it was Jake that got Nathan, not me. That I was just taking my licks when Jake came up with that rock, it wasn’t me at all!

I dug my fingers into the dark wood and waited. Jake looked to the moon, ignoring the wolves.

“Mom, please help us. We won’t be bad anymore. I swear we won’t. Please, Mom, make’m go away,” he begged.

“The dogs came to punish us, and Mom is dead. It’s ‘cause you hit Nathan. Mom can’t do nothing for us.”

As I spoke, the wolves lost interest, or at least understood the game better than we did. Jake swore up and down that our mother saved us.

“See, see,” he said making ready to jump down from the tree.

“What are you doing?” I asked and grabbed him.

“It’s okay. Mom’s protecting us.”

“Like hell she is. She’s dead and we aren’t getting out of the tree until morning. It’s dark and scary, we have to wait until morning, that way we’ll see everything.”

“Oh...”

Jake wore a thinking face. He’d prayed to our mother often, but this was the first time I’d told him it was pointless.

“You don’t think Mom can hear me?” he asked.

I shook my head. I don’t know why. Right then it seemed of utmost importance to crush his sense of the afterlife.

“But, I... No, she hears me.”

“No, Mom is dead. She can’t help us.”

“Nuh-uh, she’s out there helping.”

I can only say in my defense that I was overwrought and exhausted. I shook Jake and screamed, “Mom’s dead! Mom’s dead! She ain’t helping shit!”

“Don’t touch me,” he said, jabbing two fingers into my chest.

I snatched at his fingers and Jake pulled back his arm. I twisted and he squealed. He was my brother and I wanted to hurt him for everything that had happened to us.

“Austen, please.”

I let go and Jake fell backwards out of the tree.

I stared down into the gloom of the forest floor, there was a momentary silence and then Jake said, “You’re a jerk, I ain’t getting’ back in that tree!”

“Get back up here!”

He stared up at me with glistening eyes and a filthy face. Pained all over. I had to jump down and try to convince him. I caught up to him and then I heard the steps in the grass, slow and close behind us.

“We gotta run,” I whispered.

Jake took my hand and then took off. It was uncanny his sense of direction. He led us through a thick brush right onto a deer-run trail. The trail led straight to an old hunting cabin. It seemed like a desert mirage.

The wolves sensed the safety ahead of us. They snapped and snarled at our heels. I stumbled and Jake dragged me to my feet. I could almost feel the breath of those wolves, feel their teeth and their tongues, chewing me, savoring me.

“Come on, Austen!”

He pulled as I labored. We reached the cabin and I winced, knowing one was on me. Jake tossed open the door and threw me inside with a strength beyond his size and years. Adrenaline is something I did not learn about until much later in life.

It was pitch dark in there and smelled of smoke. None of that mattered. We were safe from the wolves. We leaned against the door and slid down to sit.

“Think they’ll go away?” Jake asked.

“No,” I said, my heart thumped a parade on my ribs, “they want us. They’ll keep after us. Why did you do it? It’s all your fault. You shouldn’t have hit him. You killed him, Jake.”

Jake whimpered, “He was gonna hurt you and he already hurt me. Mommy, please! Mommy, help us!”

“She’s dead and dead is dead, there’s nothing after that!”

The wolves began butting against the door. There was a thump and a whine with each contact. Then they’d run away only to charge back again seconds later.

“Mom can hear me... Why don’t they just leave us alone?” Jake’s words vibrated in his chest.

The door thumped.

A wolf snarled.

The door thumped.

A wolf snarled.

“Mommy, please!” Jake cried into his hands.

I was ready to slap him, on principle, how dare he not know the same things I knew, and believe the same things I believed. Instead of slapping him, my body went limp and anything I wanted to say sat dry in my throat. Just under the boarded window, a match struck out a blazing glow.

“Sounds like you boys are in some trouble,” a gruff, mannish voice said. It was something like a muffled chainsaw on concrete set to language.

“Who are you?” Jake asked, his fear abated at the sight of the face floating in the black above the match.

The man lit a lamp and then a cigarette. He was old and dark. His skin looked almost blue or purple. Tattoos of bright oranges and reds danced, moving with the glow from the light, like florescent veins, luminescent blood.

“So yer killers, huh?” He smiled a mouth of shining yellowy teeth.

“Who are you?” Jake said.

“I killed plenty, ma’self,” the man said.

“Who are you?”

I didn’t utter a peep and moving had become a foreign language. The man looked like a devil and I was some damn kid run out of luck. And yet, there was my little brother Jake, taking all the necessary stands. Fighting for two because his big brother didn’t have the same heart to fight for himself.

“I died a few times too. Dead isn’t dead, not always. Ya got that bit wrong, boy,” the man said to me and then he laughed. “Sure, dead’s only a matter of will.”

His grin crawled over my back like army ants.

“Who are you?” Jake repeated.

“Who me? I ain’t nobody important. Not like you, Austen.”

“Me?” I said, croaking it out.

“Oh yeah, see, you got to face the punishment owed. You’s killers, no matter who did the killin’.”

He leaned forward into the light. The tattoos and veins wriggled frantically. He was a man of glowing snakes and worms and horrors.

“But it was Jake.”

“Like I said, boy.” The man blew out the lamp and only his cigarette and the colors on his skin remained aglow. “And you. Ya wanna know ‘bout me? I come to make sure the toll’s paid before anyone crosses the bridge.”

Jake leaned into me. “Be ready to run,” he whispered.

The devil before us made the wolves seem like kittens. They hadn’t banged in a while and I was willing to let Jake dictate my survival or my death. Thinking too much is a scary place.

Jake turned his focus back to the dark man standing above him. Little arms jerked out like a double-fisted gunslinger. He snatched the oil lamp and smashed its hot contents over the man’s face. The man cackled maniacally as the flames danced about his skull, his wide eyes reflective pools that likely trailed back to the River Styx.

“Run!” Jake yelled.

I swung open the door, took two steps, and saw the world brightening all around me.

“Dead ain’t dead, not always!”

Terror stole my strength. My legs refused movement, not one step more. There were the wolves and there was another man, just his silhouette in the shadow of a tree ahead, but I recognized him nonetheless. Nathan Abbott. Jake pushed at my back.

“Go, go,” he said.

The wolves growled but refused to approach. It was all a part of the game. The toll we owed. They wanted us to run so they could chase. So fear filled our veins and made our meat reek of it while they lapped at the buffet.

“Dead is dead! Nathan is dead! Dead is dead!” I said as we ran.

“Keep…moving...please, Mom…help!”

The gaps between the trees shrank until we had to step sideways to get through. On the other side of the tree wall, a pond waited, a fog drifted from the cool air against the warm water. We’d never been any place like this before, but Jake…he understood everything.

“Come on,” Jake pulled me toward the shore.

I thought that was it, game over. I couldn’t swim and Jake couldn’t swim. And yet, he dragged me over the muddy bank, looking toward the water. In the fog, a canoe floated tied to a rotten wooden peg driven into the shore. It was too convenient. It was more evil, but we didn’t have a choice.

We hopped into the boat as it shook, but never dipped far enough to take on water. I unraveled the rope and used one of the stark white paddles to push us adrift.

“Bones,” Jake said.

“Huh?”

Then I got it. Bone paddles. I fought off another scream. How big was the monster who bore a paddle as a bone?

Jake stopped the effort and lifted his paddle from the water. I did the same, monkey see, monkey do, and from behind us, we heard it. Little splashes, the wolves swam. We didn’t spot them yet, but felt fear enough as if we had.

Jake dropped his paddle back into the pond and swung furiously. I mimicked him. We picked up speed. Wind whipped frozen air against us and my teeth chattered.

“What now?” I begged, a big puff of steam leaving my mouth.

It was snowing, in the middle of summer. Snowing!

“Do you hear that?” Jake asked.

I did but I had no answer as to the how or the what.

Jake turned toward me and for a heartbeat, I didn’t see my brother, not as I knew him anyway. His burned skin paled and melted from his bones. His eyes popped and rolled like marbles. He lifted a skeleton’s arm at me.

“Get ready,” the bone-boy said.

I shrieked and snapped my lids tight.

The murky waters rushed in a great wave. I opened my eyes at the sound. Jake was back to being Jake. He pointed at the water ahead of us. Thousands of fatheaded fish bounced on the solid surface. Their mouths chattered gulps in the open air. We continued moving despite our ceased work.

The little canoe rode up onto an invisible ice shelf occupied by endless suffocating fish. The boat tipped and we spilled onto the cold ice surface.

A blizzard ensued and I hugged myself against the frigid temperature as I slipped and skidded on the frozen pond. Jake prayed to our mother. This time I nearly joined in.

The wind blew the shelf clean beneath us. I pushed forward with my face down against the wind and then I saw them.

“No more,” I said, the words coming out on a moan.

Rushing below the ice, high-speed doggie-paddle, the wolves swam and charged their noses against the clear ceiling beneath our feet. The precarious layer cracked and I slipped. It cracked more as I pushed from my knees. Jake tugged on my arm.

“Come on, Austen!”

The cracking ice creaked a horrid din and we splashed down. Close enough to shore that the water only came up to my chest. Jake’s neck. The wolves moved faster and gained ground on us. The weather shifted as we approached the shore. Warmer. A summer night once again. Impossibly.

A wolf jumped onto my back. I thrashed and wailed. Its boiling breath singed my throat through the tomato red burn. Jake swung a fist into the wolf’s nose and it lost balance. He dragged me ashore like a superhero lifeguard.

“Where can we go?” I shouted at him.

He stared at me with stern and hard eyes. I felt my insides settle. If my little brother could manage then I could to, sure as shit.

“Got to move,” he said and tugged me again.

My soggy jeans made it difficult to run. I had trouble keeping up.

“Stop right there, thankless little shits,” that familiar voice said. “Ungrateful, lazy, shits, this is the thanks I get, a rock to the head?”

Nathan Abbott’s hands landed on both of our necks and we fell to the ground together as if facing matching nooses.

“No...! Please, we’re sorry!” I sobbed.

“Please, Mommy! Mommy, please!” Jake prayed into his palms.

Nathan Abbott laughed himself into a transformation. It was him all along. The devil from the cabin, playing a monster’s game. The snakes and worms danced about his flesh, poked out around his eyes and out of his nose. The wolves circled us, pacing.

Something clicked in me.

The world isn’t logical. It wasn’t built on rules. The real world is not solid and calculable. It is murky and improbable. I was too young to have any hard notions about the universe anyway. I was angry. I was ignorant. I was scared.

I put my hands together.

“Mommy, please, dead isn’t dead! Dead can’t be dead! Mommy!”

The hand left my neck and the sky shifted, lightening the world around me. The universe changed its course with a great whoosh that roiled into my veins. I felt happiness and love. I felt it all. I understood what my mother had to offer; dead wasn’t dead, not always. I fell forward and cried tears of grace.

Footfalls approached me.

“You all right, boy?”

I opened my eyes and looked up at an unfamiliar man. Then I saw the gas station, the town just one short hill away. Trouble was behind me, and me and Jake had beat it. I knew it without a doubt. Beat the devil, beat the wolves, beat the elements.

“We had to do it,” I said calmly. “He was gonna kill us, we had to do it.”

There was no need for tears anymore.

“We who?” asked the old man.

I stood and looked around for the other half of my we.

Where the hell? I cupped my hands and called out, “Jake...Jake!”

“Jake? Wait, are you called Austen? You lived with those scumbag Abbotts?”

“Yeah, but we had to do it,” I said, it seemed very important that this old man standing in the gas station parking lot believe my story.

“It’s all right, boy.”

“Where’s Jake? Jake?” I couldn’t understand where he’d go. Why he left me.

The old man took me inside the gas station and we waited for the police. I knew for sure I was done. My prayers didn’t work without my little brother there.

We drove to the hospital and the officer took me to a weird little room at the back.

“This Jake?” he asked.

I looked down at the dirty face connected to the body on the table. Both his nose and mouth, smashed into barely recognizable shapes. The sun bubbled and scaled a burnt film over his cheeks and forehead. There were several holes in the flesh.

“Doc’ says the birds got at him.”

It looked just like Jake, but it couldn’t have been Jake.

“Appears Nathan Abbott pounded on this poor kid a while. Now that I see you, looks like he pounded on you a while too. I guess then you took a rock and smashed him when he wasn’t lookin’, that about right?”

“No,” I said coming to my senses. “He was on me, then Jake came with a rock, and we went through the forest and over the pond. There was a man in a shack and...” I read the look and I shut up. It was the look adults give to children when they’re sure they know better.

“It’s okay, son. We aren’t going to press charges or anything. Abbott shot his wife right before he went at you. I’d say you’re lucky you got ’em with that rock.”

I wanted to remind him that it was Jake, but it all fell apart in the logistics.

It couldn’t have been Jake, not the way the cop knew the world.

Jake had died in that field. I know that now. I don’t even question it, but dead doesn’t mean dead, not always, for the good ones and the bad ones alike.

XX