Page 19 of Together We Rot

My father looks equally stunned at the gesture, unaccustomed to a challenge and despising every second of it. When the shock ebbs away, he swats the sheriff’s arm back to his side. “If you insist on playing the role of a small town jailer, you may station yourself around the perimeter with your men, but I will not have you risking our plan. I know Elwood. I have struck more than enough fear in him for tonight. He will not cross me.”

Vrees sneers. “He already has. Elwood is a curious boy, Ezekiel, and curiosity is a dangerous thing. That behavior should’ve been snuffed out sooner.”

It’s true. My curiosity started early on. It was born in books. Old encyclopedias my father deemed harmless enough to allow me to scour. Before I could read, I traced the photos on the yellow-stained pages. Curved wings and antennae. Butterflies. That’s when it all began. My father always curled his lip at every new crate that came to the house. He never minded so much as I stayed in my room and left him alone. One butterfly pinning turned to several, several turned to hundreds. It’s hard to be lonely when you’re surrounded.

“He. Will. Stay. Put.” Each word is a bullet fired through his teeth. “Patrol the perimeter if you must, but don’t overstep your station. Nothing has changed yet.”

Sheriff Vrees glares in my father’s direction. With the room so dimly lit, the shadows nearly swallow his eye sockets whole. “That boy takes after his uncle.”

My uncle. Dead before I had the chance to know him. There’s a lash on my skin from the time I asked about him. I’d found a picture of Dad standing side by side with a boy who looked an awful lot like me—there was a certain softness in him not found in the rest of my family. It made my heart pang, a wash of grief for a man I’d never know. I was crying long before my father snatched the photo and beat a lesson into my back. Never bring him up in this house.

My father says the same thing now as his fist latches onto Vrees’s collar. The sheriff doesn’t budge.

“Do you love Elwood?”

“No,” my father is quick to deny, his voice too quick and too harsh. He doesn’t pause to think about it. I’m not worth the wasted second. “I don’t love him. He is only a means to an end. Now be done with me.”

I smother a horrible keening noise as it threatens to rise from my throat. I don’t love him. I’ve suspected it forever and yet the words brand my heart like white-hot iron. He is only a means to an end.

The rabbit was a means to an end. So was the thrashing white-tailed deer, throat slit in a grisly red path, glassy eyes reflecting my own. Every creature skewered on a pike and gutted. The severed head of a black bear rolling in the snow. So many sacrifices my father made me watch.

This forest is God’s gift to us, Elwood. My father’s face was grim when he said it; he hadn’t bothered to look at me. He was too busy wiping the stain from his blade. We only prosper because He allows us to. The Lord has always called for blood. My fingers brush the still-smooth skin of my throat.

I don’t wait to listen to any more of it. I push my way back to my room, eager to place a door between me and them. Questions buzz in my head like biting gnats. They search for answers I don’t have.

I was never going away, was I? At least nowhere in the mortal world. My curiosity gives birth to a fear so potent that I can’t dream of shaking it off. The Garden of Adam has something planned for me. Something that involves my blood spilling out onto the snow. My “holy mission” was always destined to be six feet below the earth.

No... They wouldn’t.

Would they?

I slide down my bedroom door. The shattered glass and the audience of the dead beg to differ.

Butterflies torn apart to oblivion.

I think of my father praying over me, his hand resting on my shoulder like I were a prized pig. He knew. He knew my fate when he uttered the last haunting, damned words:

For with life there is death, but with sacrifice there is eternity.

I envision my blood spilling. Glassy eyes heaven-bound, tongue lolling from an open jaw, my heart sloshing in a bowl.

I stumble across the floor. The carpet skins my palms, but I ignore the pain. It holds no weight against the pain to come. I try to imagine the light bleeding out, the very last seconds of consciousness before I die. And then I imagine the wrath I’d face in hell. All my sins are catching up to me at once. I’m not going to die. I can’t.

Don’t dream of leaving.

Tonight, we will have men all around the perimeter.

I conjure my remaining courage. One deep, bone-rattling breath. My lungs wheeze as I slide the window back open. I steady myself and then I jump. My knee scrapes against the rock-hard ice. Blood drenches through the leg of my jeans, but I don’t stop to think about it. I can’t stop.

My mother never bothered enrolling me in the Boy Scouts. I might have been glad as a child, but I’m not now. Other boys liked to kick and punch and break, they liked to laugh at tears and dump soda on anthills, they liked to run wild and howl like wolves.

All I wanted to do was carve out a spot for myself in a garden patch, sit with a book against the ledge of the fence, study the sprouting plants and all the little bugs that lived beneath us in the soil. Now I wish I had been meaner, crueler, stronger—I wish I knew how to run and how to fight and how to get myself out of here.

The moon hangs above like God’s eye. He will follow me to the ends of the earth. Everything slides out of focus, a muddy world of green and brown and deep, dark black.

The snow picks up, gusts of white obscuring the world in front of me. Every stride forward is met with the scrape of a branch or a near-collision. Trees blocking my path, a frozen prison entrapping me here. The woods root for my death like spectators of a cruel sport.

But I run and I run and I do not stop.

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