It’s just after midnight and Sage is shooting his Glock off his porch into the cemetery. Crying too, because I just beat his ass bad at Rocket League. That’s what he says at least, but really he’s just a mean drunk. Sally is sick of us. Time to go. Leave the gun. I don’t want to. Please? Whatever.
Sage and me walk down the street. Sage a few feet ahead of me. After a few blocks, Sage’s posture shifts. He speeds up, drifts to the right and starts trying cars. First one’s locked. Same as the next. I laugh. We haven’t done this in forever. Fifteen years at least. A door pops open. I keep walking, eyes down. Faster. Sage catches up. Three pairs of sunglasses on his head, pockets jangling with change. I laugh loudly and Sage brings a finger to his pinched mouth. It’s a game. Watch out for the blinking blue light on the dash. Don’t set off an alarm. Don’t get caught. There’s guys in this part of town that sleep as much as we do. They’re on their porches chasing ghosts away, cigarettes dangling, drinking, not moving. Scarecrows, bear traps.
Sage marked three years clean from junk yesterday, but it might as well have been three minutes. I’m on the lookout for bad behavior. When he’s sober, Sage is like a wild animal. I love him for it.
We hopfrog our way downtown to the church with the big ass stairs. I piss on the library bike rack. Yonder, a family of raccoons wrestles in a dumpster. Climbing on each other, chirping stories about the ghosts that haunt this part of Kansas. Weepy, sunburnt phantoms addicted to menthol American Spirits and chew.
I finish peeing and turn around. Sage is nowhere to be seen.
“Sage?”
Too late.
Across the street at the belltower, Sage jumps, grabs a rope, and pulls down hard. Thirty feet up the bell turns sideways before tolling incredibly loud. Raccoons scurry out of the dumpster. They bump into my legs, confused and scared. Twenty, thirty, forty of them. A river of bandits. They flow up the street into the back door of Huff ‘n’ Puff.
I go the opposite way, towards the dirt road that lays beside the funeral home. Sage clears the stairs without shattering his knees and catches up to me easily, scream laughing on my heels. Trees form a canopy over us, blotting out the stars. Not haunted, just creepy. Once the light behind us has shrunk to a reasonable size, I slow down.
“I can’t get in trouble again,” I say.
“You won’t get in trouble.”
“I’ll go to jail.”
“Nobody’s looking for you.”
“Where will I be if I go to jail?”
“You’ll be in jail,” Sage says, smiling.
I step on a stick and it cracks. Slivers of moonlight cut through the dark, illuminating the dust on our shoes but not much else.
“Lately when I pee I start and stop. I can never tell when I’m done,” Sage says.
“I had that forever.”
“Should I do something?”
“Ignore it.”
“I can tell I have more in there.”
“Just ignore it.”
The tree cover breaks up like clouds on a sunny day. In front of us, a set of old apartments that are slowly being torn down and rebuilt cheaper with in-unit washer/dryer/dishwasher combos.
“C’mere. Wanna show you something,” Sage says. I follow him to one of the buildings. We walk up the stairs to the third floor and Sage goes through the only door not latch locked from the outside.
Two bedrooms with grey yellow carpet. A layer of smoke on the walls, years thick. A kitchen with torn up linoleum and a living room that still has couch dents in the carpet. It’s dark but moonlight pools on the ground through curtainless windows.
Sage walks into a bedroom. I open cabinets. I’m hungry, starving really. How old am I again? I feel 17 in my chest but my real age in my legs. God damn my back. I can’t look in the mirror. I got work tomorrow! Sweating out all the southern comfort I choked down with Doctor Pepper. “Like candy, ain’t it?” Sally said in the kitchen. I don’t know, boss. I just don’t know.
I say to Sage, “Do you remember when Ian and Shelby moved into the apartment next to Ian’s dad?”
A fluorescent tube flies out of the bedroom, nearly misses me, and bursts against the front door in a puff of white dust.
I rip a cabinet door off its hinges and sling it toward Sage. He laughs, swinging a splintered board like a sword. We stomp through the apartment for a few minutes, glass crunching under our feet.
Then: pounding beneath us.
An old neighbor locked in forever. Sage looks at me, his face white. I laugh. “What the fuck?” Sage says, but I’m already out the door.
We run out of the apartment complex, past the pond and through the greenway, down trails until we’re hidden in the trees again. It’s getting late. Everything is papier mache. Sage passes me a 750 of whiskey and we drain it in a few hot gulps. Perfect timing, Sage. Thank you brother. We reach a clearing. In the center is a turtle on its back. A baby. A little baby. Shrieking and hissing.
“I think it’s hurt,” I say.
“I think you’re right.”
We approach the animal, whose back legs are twisted up and gross. Like deflated bike tires. What happened to you, friend? What’s wrong? Sage cradles the turtle in his arms. The animal’s eyes go wide, sucking all the light in the clearing. The head twists and clamps on sage’s arms three times. Quick, hard bites that break skin. The last bite takes a hunk of flesh with it. Sage drops the turtle, who scuttles into the bushes.
“Damn, god damn,” Sage says, smiling, shaking his head.
“You good?”
“God damn,” Sage smiles at his arm. “Can’t believe that happened. Ain’t that about a bitch.”
Sage looks at me, pinches shut the skin around the wound. Blood pumps out. Sage opens and closes the wound and makes it talk, says, “God damn, you believe ‘at?”
We wrap my sock around Sage’s wound and we push through the tall grass, bushes, and trees in near total darkness. We dodge spiderwebs, deer and coyotes.
This greenway is famous for its ghosts. Growing up, my mom called it “suicide park.” Really there’s only been three confirmed self-harm incidents, but many more accidental deaths. Toddlers swept away unexpectedly after big rains, creek jumping kids blunt forcing themselves to the next world. There’s an old twisty highway that runs next to a large part of this wooded area. If you drive it with no headlights you’re supposed to be able to see spirits in the trees, but these apparitions are suspected to be another trick of the spirit hungry greenway.
Sage and I come to the creek, which has shrunk to a trickle in the July heat. The banks are thick, frothy mud.
“Does this mean we’re getting further away or closer to the houses?”
“God knows,” Sage says. He leaps forward, clears the water easily but lands ankle deep in the mud.
“Sally’s gonna kill me. Fuck.”
A cool breeze parts the canopy, moonlight illuminates a fallen tree a few feet to my right. I crawl onto the trunk and walk to the other side past the mud.
“Great technique.” Sage says, “Really good stuff. Flawless. You should do the olympics”
“I couldn’t do it without you, coach.”
“Front page of the paper is me telling everyone, ‘I taught him to eat pussy.’”
“Alright, man”
Sage steps out of the bank with two inches of mud in every direction on his shoes. Every few steps, he stops to scrape his feet on a branch like a dog wearing booties in the snow. After five or so minutes of starting and stopping, Sage takes his shoes off and we escape the greenway and land at the bottom of a gentle hill that slides upward towards a house.
We climb the hill and approach the house. Sage cups his hands around his eyes and presses against the sliding glass door. “Nobody home,” Sage says.
“Could be for sale,” I whisper. I pull the door handle and the glass slides easily. A mix of different kinds of shit smell pours out of the house.
“Great sign” Sage mumbles. He takes off his socks and steps inside the house and I follow.
Sage is under the sink, then next to the sink, then he opens the oven. I feel like someone hooked a finger into my spine and is working me like a puppet. I’m starving. The house reeks. I swear to God I’m going home after this. I wrap my shirt around my face. I don’t touch a fucking thing. The clock on the microwave blinks 2:37 PM. The oven is a solid 1:47 AM. There’s dishes drying in a rack next to the sink.
Off the kitchen there’s a hallway. At the end of the hallway light flickers silently. Someone is home. I creep down the hallway to investigate. There’s a door in the middle right. A bathroom. I step inside the dark and reach around until I find the knob for the medicine cabinet. I feel pliable tubes, a tooth brush and many, many prescription bottles. I open a bottle and pour a few pills into my hands. Circles with round edges. I open another bottle, pour those into my hand. Circles too, but these have a little divet in them. Then there’s a bottle of capsules.
Someone opens the door, I jump, pills clatter on the floor.
“Sweet fuck,” Sage whispers, bouncing backwards against the hallway wall hard.
We freeze. Listen for signs of life in the house. Nothing.
“I found some pills,” I say.
“What kind?”
“Pill kind. It’s dark. Don’t know.”
“Fuck it,” Sage mumbles. He turns on the bathroom light and we finger the pills. There’s little pinks and blues and white dots all over the linoleum.
“What time is it, man?” I say.
Sage has his “thinking hard” face on. His skin is loose. He’s bent at the hip, but he falls to one knee. He sighs. “These are nothing. It’s anti-anxiety meds. Some other stuff.”
I lean against the sink and knock a pill calendar onto the ground, more pills. Yellow triangles and blue diamonds.
Sage picks up a few of these and inspects them.
“Nothing fun. This is ass.” He sighs.
“We’ll see about that.” I say. I shovel pills into my mouth. I get a few of the blue ones and then Sage starts doing it too. We crunch on chalk and hair and dust. I am laughing so hard tears are falling out of my eyes and onto the ground.
Suddenly, from the living room a woman’s voice, thin as tissue paper, “Hello?”
We freeze. A bit of pill falls off my lip and onto the floor.
“Phillip? Carl?” The voice says. She’s old, ancient. Probably a living skeleton. Possibly a ghost. These pills are probably hers. Laxatives to help her shit one last time.
I walk into the living room. On a tilted mechanical bed is an extremely old woman. There’s a tray to the right of the bed with several glasses of water, filled to various depths and straws in each of them. There are flowers and sagging balloons that say “HAPPY BIRTHDAY” on a separate tray on the left. The woman’s arms are skinny. A white chihuahua sleeps on her lap, its tongue hanging loosely from its mouth. There’s an enormous flatscreen TV playing The Twilight Zone brightly, but silent a few feet away from the foot of the bed. The floor is covered in trash. The room smells like the inside of someone’s mouth.
“Oh Phillip, it’s so good to see you,” the woman says. She smiles. She’s missing her front four teeth and her canines are hanging on by a thread.
“It’s a pleasure to be back,” I say. I burp into my mouth and my nostrils burn.
The woman furrows her brow. “Where’s Carl? You brought Carl, right? I heard Carl.”
“Carl’s just being shy is all,” I say. “Carl’s right here, ain’t you Carl?”
Sage walks into the room and looks around.
“Christ,” he says.
“Carl, I missed you my sweet boy,” The woman opens her arms out for a hug. I look at Sage and nod towards the woman.
Sage says, “I am sick, I don’t want to get you sick. It’s really nasty.”
The woman smiles and nods with her eyes closed. “You know, Phillip, Carl and I have lived here our entire lives. We were here when they built the Price Chopper,” she says. The woman looks extremely proud.
“I love Price Chopper,” I say.
“I planted the first tree in the greenway and I protested the intermodal. I came up with ‘Where The Trails Divide’ for the first city motto, isn’t that something?”
“It sure is,” Sage says, sitting down on the ground in front of the muted TV.
The woman pats the dog on her lap. “Dogs used to run free in the greenway, did you know that? That’s why we made it. For dogs to run around in and, when they needed it, to die in. It was such a nice place for dogs to die.” The woman’s eyes become wet. I can’t believe she has this much moisture in her body. “Say,” she says, looking towards Sage, “would you do me a favor?”
“Of course,” Sage says, smiling.
The woman smiles, “Could you get me another nicotine patch?” She gestures to a box nestled between the glasses of water on her right. “I’m really trying to stop smoking and these are the only things that seem to work. I’d get it myself but you know,” the woman gestures to the toothless, sleeping dog.
Sage steps carefully to the tray and picks up a box. His eyes go wide and he smiles bigger than I’ve ever seen. My stomach feels heavy and gurgley. It feels like there’s air between my muscles and skin. Like I’m lighter than everything around me. I think I need to shit.
Sage picks a patch out of the pack and sticks one on the old woman’s wrist. “Thank you sweetie,” she sighs, “I feel better already.”
“No, Thank YOU,” Sage says. He unsticks a patch, and slaps it onto his chest. He exhales heavily. In the light of the TV I see a tear run down his face.
“This is the best day of my entire life,” Sage says.
“You don’t smoke.”
“These ain’t nicotine.”
Sage walks around the bed, unsticks a patch and slaps my chest over my heart.
“Fucker,” I say. He leaves a handprint. The patch tingles. It’s blueish and smells foul. Exhaustion hits me like a train.
“Can you tell me what’s happening on the screen? If I wake up my Jackie she’ll kill me. You can whisper it. Can you just tell me?” the woman says.
“A man is eating crackers on some steps around some rubble, the words say, “‘I can eat whatever I want now,’” Sage says. “He’s sitting down on a step and smiling. He’s opening a book and, oh, his glasses just broke”
“That sucks” I say. I sit down at the foot of the woman’s bed on the floor and push trash away with my feet.
“He’s saying, ‘there was time, there was finally time, it isn’t fair!’”
The old woman in a honeyed voice says, “oh I love this one.” I look at Sage, who’s also sitting and falling asleep. It’s time to go. We really should be off. My limbs are a thousand pounds each. Sleep feels like a heavy backpack that unfurls into a blanket and wraps me up warmly.
I wake up with a splitting headache and a dry mouth. My limbs are wet ziplocks. My face is in a puddle of throw up that the chihuahua is lapping up. I gag, look around. Everything blurs. The Twilight Zone is still on. The woman lays on the bed still sleeping. Paler than I remember. Her blue patch is stuck square in the middle of her forehead. Sage is on his back but his belly is blocking my view on his face. I poke at the flesh of his feet. He doesn’t move.
I crawl out the back door, into the grass. Fresh air flows into my lungs for the first time in hours. I drag myself across the concrete patio and into the grass. The sky is a bleeding tangerine pit. On the wind I hear a thousand dogs barking, then nothing.
Jacob Patrick Brooks’s work has appeared in Stimulant Magazine and Bizarre Publishing House.