Page 45 of Together We Rot

But like most plans in my life, things have a way of falling apart. My careful life shattered when I met Elwood’s parents. I’ve met men like Ezekiel Clarke. He’s not the first man with a secret, and he isn’t the last. I sensed it on him as soon as he walked through my office doors.

I shouldn’t have pursued it. I thought I’d learned to mind myself. Turns out I haven’t learned a thing.

I went to Elwood’s church. I know I’m an outsider, but they looked at me like I was a secular monster. Ezekiel’s sermon was short and brief, the lesson to the point: do not interfere in another man’s business. “You are responsible for your own salvation.” He’d been clipped and stern, his eyes locked on me the whole time. It was a biblical threat if I’d ever heard one.

Other people know to draw back when they touch a flame. I only know how to walk through the coals.

I set down the page and turn my attention to the prehistoric box TV across from Mom’s bed.

I pop the tape in and the screen fills with static. After a beat, the video plays at long last, a sunny day lost in time.

Mom’s calling after me as I race through the backyard. I can’t be much older than eight or nine. Back when I spent all my time outside and still had the tan to show for it, my hair lightened by the sun and my cheeks awash with summer freckles.

“Why would Mom hide this?” Such a simple video hidden away. Grass skirts around my ankles and giggles erupt from the speakers. “Mom, Mom! Watch! Look at what I can do!” Followed by a failed attempt at a cartwheel.

“You’re a future Olympian, Minnie!” It’s Dad’s voice, and the camera flickers briefly to his face. Young and carefree. His smile unmarred by worry lines, his eyes bright and hopeful. It makes me ache. His happiness is the most outdated part of this whole video. Another wave of static steals the memory away. A new video starts playing; summer’s come and gone and taken the sun with it. The film’s grainy and lit only by the moon. My mother isn’t smiling. Her face is hardened, her voice a whisper in the recorder: “I am about to do something very dangerous.”

Like mother, like daughter.

The camera fumbles to darkness. A circle of familiar faces grace the screen: church couples surrounding the very tree I ran from earlier—the biggest one in all the Morguewood. Its branches bleed with a fresh kill, red snaking a path from the hollow in its trunk to the roots buried deep below. Mom’s breath is shallow and rough.

There’s murmuring, spoken words the camera can’t decipher. It builds into a chanted prayer on all sides. In response to their lifted voices, the tree comes alive.

Tendrils jut from the darkness and coil across the ankles of Prudence Vrees. They dig into the flesh and burn shackles across her skin. It’s such a quick, shocking movement that even on camera, it takes my mind a second to process it.

Everything is silent. The video slides a nauseating path from my mother’s hand, slippery from clammy fingers, to a mound of snow. She scrambles with the lens, but the scene is wet and unfocused.

Elwood’s father is a livid blur on camera, his anger recognizable even when his features aren’t. “This is a mistake!” he yells into the night to anyone who will listen, Sheriff Vrees, the church, God. “There’s no way. No possible way the Lord would choose you.”

Vrees steps in front of his wife. I know the shape of him well—broad and large and taking up way too much space. “Who are you to question the word of God?”

“I am the Right Hand! I am His mouthpiece! I am—”

“A man,” Vrees finishes. “You are man in the end, and God has chosen another. The Lord is saying what we already all know—I am more righteous, more devout, more levelheaded. It’s high time, Ezekiel. That boy of yours is nearing manhood. Eighteen years the Lord has offered you. And now He has decided it is time to deliver and start over.”

But his words have no impact on Mr.Clarke. They brush right off his shoulders. “I will not stand down to the likes of you. We must redo the ceremony. There was a mistake, I’m sure of it.”

“You’re mad,” Vrees snarls. “You know the truth as well as I do. Once the seed is dug out of Elwood, you won’t have much of a say. It will be planted in my son, not yours. The Lord has chosen me for this honor, and you will have to accept it. Perhaps use this time to focus on your faith, hmm?”

A religious burn if I’ve ever heard one.

“We’re leaving!” Ezekiel yanks Elwood’s mother’s arm, ignoring her whimper of pain. “This isn’t over.”

Vrees’s smile is ribbon-thin, eerily similar to a slashed throat. “It’s only just beginning.” The scene cuts to static.

I think of all the times as a child I was genuinely afraid of swallowing a seed and sprouting a whole watermelon in my chest.

A darker corner of my brain offers a different visual. I see Elwood parting his lips and a muddy clump of roots snaking out from his open throat. Foliage breaking from every orifice, his ears and eyes and nose and mouth until he’s obscured by a crop of weeds. Before I know it, I’m putting my hand on his chest where his heart should be, feeling around for the squirm of roots. There’s no way he has a seed in his chest. There’s no way, and yet...

I feel a heavy thud instead. A turbulent thump-thump-thump in his ribs. Not a seed but a heart going wild beneath my fingers.

Elwood stumbles backward across the floor. He’s sucking in air with desperate lungs. “Shit.” I’ll never get over hearing him curse. “I can’t handle this, Wil. Holy shit. No, no, no. What were they talking about? Digging something out of me? Putting it in someone else?”

I’m used to pretending I’m stronger than I am. The mask I wear is chipped and worn, but I hope it does the trick now. “They’re out of it, Elwood. It’s probably just your heart, right? That would make more sense than having some demon seed inside you.”

He freezes at my voice, eyes bulging wide at my last word.

When he speaks again, there’s a strange understanding splayed across his skin. “They said I was dangerous. Sometimes I get these thoughts... I try to brush them off or pray them away, but they keep coming back. Things I’d never do. Violent, terrible whisperings in my brain. I... I saw Brian days ago, and for a terrible moment, I thought of his body mangled.”

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