Lee Klein - Jrzdvlz

All he wanted was to relive that moment with blades out, oh such confidence and control, lives at the mercy of a flick of the wrist. He must have realized a blade was still lodged in Leeds’s chest. “Let it stay,” he said, “so they know who slayed the dragon.” He said this loud enough for it to be heard.

The bartender seemed like years of ales and porters and sausages, as well as the small, repetitive movements of service, had stuffed a much larger man inside a smaller one’s skin. He watched Branley fiddle with the handle of a blade impaling an old book. Branley often seemed agitated and his knives often held everything from partridges to snakes to cobs of corn. That he now had a book seemed like progress.

“What’d you spear there? Something dangerous?”

“Better to see yourselves tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow then,” the bartender said.

Jukes muttered something so animalistic the barkeeper thought it best to turn his back and polish glasses. Branley muttered more. The exact stream of vehemence, the specific words, did not matter. They were less words than sounds that represented his thoughts more closely than he ever could communicate. His usual slurred speech was a concession to society. His true speech slithered, hissed, a sinuous, twining, toxic cord that forced him to hold his mouth tight.

The smoke in the Bucket never cleared. Whites of eyes reddened so the average unsquinting patron seemed to weep. A startling sight if one were to push open the heavy door and see the pink flesh, like the exposed upper gums of a demented smile, around Branley’s eyes. The sockets of his skull made him seem more skeletal than ever. His cheeks were sunken and ashen and rough with stubble, unshaven since he began his hunt. His mouth was twisted in unintelligible, nearly inaudible speech.

That suspicious pair of travelers on the way to Umbria. If he’d ended their lives, everyone would be in paradise now. Drink did not still the memory of what he’d done. He decided against another and left without goodbyes.

His home was less a cottage than a shack, the roof high and arched, like some underskilled carpenter’s attempt at a turret. Hunters found it, peeked inside thinking it abandoned, and ran when they encountered Jukes’ wife and three children wearing squirrel, raccoon, and rabbit pelts caked with mud. A dirt floor was covered in fresh pine needles, straw, leaves. A refuge from Umbria, from what’s civilized. They did not starve or overly want, protected by innocence.

He could make it back with eyes closed. No trouble under a full moon. The shadows of the trees were no more demonic than how he moved among them.

Home sweet home, he found his family asleep on beds of straw, covered by sheets that looked like shredded flags.

He sat on the ground with his back to a wall as his family slept. He lit the nub of a candle and saw the rafters from which his father had hanged himself, the rafters from which he had hung himself by his wrists. He felt the bruises. Now that the beast was slaughtered he would trim the discolored skin. He removed the blade from the almanac. This book in which everything he needed to know might be learned. He stopped on the picture of William Leeds. The bearded head emerged from the starburst crater the knife had made in the pages. The drawing was faded, pale, almost disappeared with time. What good was this punctured book if the spirit of the beast were not sucked back through this hole, ending its hold over the region so pines untwisted and stood tall and trunks thickened and limbs elongated, fanning wide, bursting to shade the area until sand became soil and everyone lived off mushrooms and moss and mammalian delicacies protected from winged predators?

He woke before his children, before his wife, this woman he had made suffer for years. She could have found some troll beneath a bridge, an ogre who had stowed away on a plagued vessel, and done better. Without her, he would not have made it too far past seventeen, when overrunning energy had endangered him. She had stilled him, harnessed him, optimistic, a woman he never would have been able to secure if he hadn’t set himself across her spirit, like algae on a summer pond, until she became uninhabitable.

Georgia slept next to three children in a corner. Two boys in their early teens and a younger girl. Branley had been the only son of his family, his sisters taken once they reached fourteen, available to anyone who needed a wife. Only Branley was left to see, at age six, his father hang from the rafters. Branley’s two sons seemed as though whatever genealogical affliction inside them was dormant, or at most building pressure, preparing to erupt with the end of adolescence.

He looked at them as they slept, straw in tangled hair, and he had hope. A sense that they might not die before he did, at the minimum, and more so that once he stepped outside that morning the world would be renewed. Eternal paradise. Their father crowned King of Umbria, a country onto itself, and from that morning on the Jukes would be first in a long line of royals, immune to the surge of hereditary insult.

He stepped outside. The sun was not all the way up. He could see his breath. He held his fists tucked in the sleeves of his tight black jacket. One ear he raised toward town. He had eradicated the region of the beast and brought about eternal paradise.

The breath that emerged from his mouth was not what he expected to see. As he wandered from his home and into the woods a hundred yards off, the morning was cool and easy thanks to mist, the woods patterned in traditional autumn hues, branches not any more monstrous than the limbs of trees at dawn.

From where he stood, his house looked like an outhouse. If paradise did not fall from the sky or emerge from the earth, he would soon be wanted for murder. It might be better to run.

He wandered from the house and then returned. The underbrush was covered in foliage, the earth insulating itself for a long cold winter he would not see. He entered the house. Where he had slept on the floor he saw almanac and knife. Only one blade. It was like he’d lost a limb.

“You’re back,” Georgia said.

“Tell them I’m off for Manhattan Island. Tell them I left three days ago.”

“Tell who?” said Jermaine. His boys and daughter sat around a cauldron Georgia had heated for a breakfast of reheated tea.

“Who comes looking, tell them I’m gone three days.”

“And when will you return?” said Georgia. She was dressed in rough wool rags that had never been any color other than gray. Her hair was streaked around her temples as though pressure there had aged her most.

“If summer comes and never leaves you’ll see me again.”

Georgia shifted a log beneath the cauldron. Her own family hadn’t slept on straw mattresses or survived on sick chicken eggs and the milk of a recalcitrant goat. Her family had died around the time she met Branley, and soon after she replaced mother and father and sister with children of her own. She had thought herself chosen to save this man. But it had long been clear that whatever force existed within him was far too strong.

“Good then, good,” she said.

“Good,” her eldest son echoed.

“Good,” the younger son said, echoing his brother.

Their sister kept quiet. Her ten years had been darkest night. Her brothers looked to her, expecting her to speak, to side with them, to join the revolt. More than her brothers, she had inherited her father’s open eyes and mouth shut tight. Her straight black hair was roughly cut at the shoulders, and her skin seemed as though she rubbed her cheeks each morning with dust that made light eyes stand out all the more. She turned them on her father. In them he saw that no matter what happened that day or the next or in the coming years, whatever it was that lived within him would find expression in this girl.