Carol GoldenEagle - Bone Black

“I only live a couple of blocks away,” he mumbles almost incoherently.

Wren notices a wet spot on Myron’s pants. Holy shit , she thinks, he’s pissed himself .

“I say you come home with me and we choke the chicken together,” he suggests, unable to stand without swaying in place.

Wren laughs but feels like scratching his eyes out. “Sounds good,” she says. “But instead of going to your place, I think you should come home with me. I’ll cook you breakfast in the morning.”

“Well now that there is a plan,” he agrees, trying to light a cigarette.

He’s having problems with the childproof lighter. Not surprising , Wren thinks to herself as she grabs the lighter from his hands and flicks it to spark.

She has to hold him up as they walk to her car. Wren opens her car door and helps her drunken victim into the passenger seat, thinking only about purging the world of filth. Like getting rid of aphids or slugs, she muses, looking at his glassy eyes and swollen mouth. And wet pants. Wren suddenly stops assisting him into the vehicle. “I have a dog who sheds a lot and I don’t want you to get covered with fur,” she lies. “So just a second. I’ll grab a blanket and put it over your seat as a cover.” She carries a blanket in her car because Lord insists, just in case she finds herself stuck sometime.

“Oh, sure, thanks,” Myron replies.

Wren isn’t sure he even knows what she just said. Once he’s in and buckled up, she offers him some Gatorade.

“You’ll want to drink this. It’ll help you not have a hangover in the morning.”

“Oh, okay,” Myron says, taking the drink. He takes down the liquid, laced with several crushed-up blue pills, in one big gulp. He is passed out by the time Wren pulls into her long, dark driveway.

Wren uses all her strength to pull Myron’s body from the passenger seat of her car. He lands with a thud, hitting his head on the cobblestone walkway to the house. Wren curses at herself for being so careless. She remembers the time when Mooshum helped young Wren and her sister plant lollipops in the cracks. Wren shudders at the thought that Myron’s body has touched these stones.

From somewhere deep inside her, a most violent creature that Wren doesn’t even recognize emerges and it is enraged. She is disgusted at having to handle this worthless piece of skin and feels compelled to kick Myron in the head. She puts her boot to his temple, not once or twice, but five times. Myron’s nose begins to bleed, and she kicks him again, even harder along his torso. Wren hears his ribs breaking under the coat he’s wearing. She is sickened by the sight of his stinking, bleeding body splayed out on the ground, drunk and unconscious.

Whatever force has overtaken her is still strong and in control. There are still a couple of vials of insulin hidden in her art supplies, but this time she elects not to make the trip to get them. Instead, she stops in the bathroom and grabs a full bottle of household bleach and a new syringe. She cannot lose the image of that young girl terrorized and slashed before being shoved under a bale of hay. Wren decides she will inflict the same level of anguish upon Myron. She decides he needs to feel pain and suffering for what he’s done. He deserves to shudder in agony as the bleach burns his veins and breaks arteries.

“No forensic evidence,” she mutters.

Wren’s hand is steady as she fills the syringe with the potent liquid. She heads back outdoors where she hears only the sound of wind. Wren knows that Myron’s body is likely to convulse as she slowly injects the bleach into his neck, the same part of Mavis’s body that he slashed. In her frenzied anger, Wren decides she’d also like this fucker to know what not being able to breathe feels like.

She returns to her car and reaches into her glove box where she keeps a can of pepper spray. Wren sometimes carries it with her when walking by herself, something Lord insists on even though coyotes have never come close enough to her to cause concern. Wren sprays the noxious mist directly up Myron’s nostrils and is startled when he opens his bloodshot eyes. He claws at his nose, gasping and scratching.

“You will harm no more,” Wren says aloud before injecting him again with a second dose of bleach. He flops on the ground for about a minute and then his body goes limp.

Once more, she remembers the butcher knife that she saw in her vision. The one he used to slash the girl’s throat. Wren goes back into the farmhouse to retrieve her sharpest knife, the one she’s used so many times to prepare a family meal. By the time she returns, Myron is dead. He has no pulse and there is a white froth coming from his nose and mouth. Wren pulls off the Nike running shoes from his feet.

“Stupid ass, don’t even dress properly for the cold,” she hisses.

Another trophy. She cuts off the blue jeans he’s wearing, not caring if the cutting means slashing his foul legs.

Wren had fed kindling and several small logs of wood into the outdoor kiln before she went stalking. Now, standing here under the bright light of a full moon, she says a prayer—not for Myron, but to Grandmother Moon. She asks her to care for the soul of the young girl who was murdered, just as Wren will take care of Myron, ridding him from the Earth so he can never cause harm again.

Wren throws more logs into the kiln before shoving Myron’s body in. In this moment, something snaps within her again. She looks at the snow. Red with hate. She urgently wants to drain more of his blood. Wren finds herself going for the axe leaning against the side of the farmhouse. She will dismember this foul body and feed it to the fire. Allowing rigor mortis to set in this time seems too kind for what he’s done, for how he has violated and sinned.

As she hacks, hearing bones split, she wonders if burning the remains of this poisoned soul might have the same effect as burning poison ivy. Plant experts advise never to do it. The toxic spores of the weed are just as dangerous if they become airborne, as they would be with direct contact on the skin. And , Wren wonders, can a poison be planted within a person’s mind? Again, she prays to Grandmother Moon that Myron’s kind of poison will be eliminated here and now, once and for all, airborne or otherwise.

Wren angrily tosses the piss-stained blanket from her passenger seat into the kiln. Next, she hurls leg parts, arms and a head into the hearth. Looking into the darkness of night, she notices the coyote. He is witness again to things unspoken. He keeps his distance, but she can see his luminous eyes reflect the moonlight. And those eyes are hungry.

“I will create some more pottery,” she says. “More gargoyles, with a prayer to ward off the evil that is you. Invasive and poisonous species, you shall cause harm no more.”

The fouled snow will have to be disposed. Wren’s first thought is to go to her studio and grab a couple of gunny sacks and a shovel. The forensic evidence can be dumped in the gully. It will be further covered by flurries, which are sure to fall as the winter progresses. It will disappear, seeping into the ground come springtime.

But her tirade has left Wren exhausted. She figures she can wait until morning to take care of this cumbersome detail. She lights the flame and waits for a spark before picking up her Ginsu and slowly heading back toward the farmhouse. As she walks, she can hear the wood spit and crackle.

By the next morning, not even small whiffs of smoke drift anymore from the small chimney of the outdoor kiln. She’ll have to go out and stoke the fire repeatedly over the next forty-eight hours, but in these silent moments of early morning, that detail can wait a little bit longer.