By Heidi Beierle (1799 words)

Charles was like a bad penny, he kept turning up. And his sense of time was so screwball. Had he been gone a whole 24 hours or only minutes? He hadn’t intended to return to the shed – Jimmy be damned – but he’d felt compelled. He needed to be there. He hadn’t expected to find Peter who seemed strangely back to Peter-normal from the last time he’d been in the story. No lingering physical effects from when Charles had pepper sprayed him nor any surprise at seeing Chuck who’d done the capsicum flip-flop with his co-conspirators and coy concubine. Charles had a sneaking suspicion he might be invisible were it not for the passing acknowledgement from Peter before they gagged him. Or maybe Charles had imagined the whole scene? Or Peter had?

Had Charles lost his marbles? Was his seeming invisibility a literal recognition of his irrelevance? No. That wasn’t true. He’d moved the plot forward. He still had a role to play. Charles knew where Jimmy was. He was the last character to see him.

Charles decided he was both everywhere and nowhere. He imagined himself inside the shed and outside of it. His back still killed though, and he located that source of discomfort outside the shed. 

When Ed darted out, Charles followed, or his attention did. His body was less willing. He stifled a scream of pain and hobbled away from the shed, no match for Ed’s quick steps. 

Just then, twigs snapped behind him. Charles whirled around, and a scream escaped him. A deer or an elk or something huge and menacing was carefully stepping toward him. “Nooooooooooo!” Charles screamed and ran, not downhill but along the path toward the cabin, powered 100% on adrenaline, no back pain. He turned to check his pursuer and tripped. Catching himself, Charles continued running through the forest howling long, piercing vowels. He reached for his pockets and the weapons that had served him well in Chapter 17, but his jacket flapped uncontrollably, and he could not stop the pounding of his feet and heart.

He saw a dark form on the trail ahead and crashed into the woods, his legs sliced by sword ferns. He stumble-ran across the hillside, and that’s when it happened. A sharp, crushing pain in his chest and a momentary, suffocating recognition that his story ended here. His body quit working mid-run, and he collapsed onto the peaty soil. Sword ferns stood tall above him. His breath extinguished. 

A raven, in the trees above where Charles collapsed, rattled its voice in the darkness, signaling the human’s end. 

***

Mowly perched atop the peak of the shed roof. Lucy had stopped singing, and in the hush, Mowly spoke:

In England once there lived a big
A wonderfully clever pig.
To everybody it was plain
That Piggy had a massive brain.
He worked out sums inside his head,
There was no book he hadn’t read.
He knew what made an airplane fly,
He knew how engines worked and why.
He knew all this, but in the end
One question drove him round the bend:
He simply couldn’t puzzle out
What LIFE was really all about.

***

As Ed clipped down the path to the Lodge, he considered what Mavis had shared about writing a story.

She’d asked, “Have you heard about Vivian Gornick’s book, The Situation and the Story?” 

He’d shaken his head.

“The situation is the plot. It’s what happens.” Mavis had spoken with confidence and authority. “Take our current situation.” She’d extended her hand and rotated her body to indicate everything. “A storm causes a power and communication outage. A tree falls across the road, blocking access to the writing retreat venue. There’s an issue with the food. There’s no traditional CENTER to the retreat where participants meet with an advertised writing teacher to learn how to tell a story or restart their writing practice. If the retreat participants learn anything about writing, it isn’t through formal instruction because the headlining writer is a drunk and disappeared.” Mavis had paused to let it sink in. “Does that make sense?”

Ed had nodded. “And the story?”

“The story is about how the character or characters change. Where you start is not where you end. The story takes characters through a point of no return, and the revelation on the other side of that fulcrum or climax is the story. The story answers the question: What does it mean? The story is internal. The situation is external.”

When Mavis had shared this, Ed couldn’t take it all in. He had used his training to sip the information. Now that he was out in the night air by himself, he could see how he was a plot character. He had the physique for it. He was busy going here and there in the story, moving props – Chekhov’s pistols Margaux called them – showing up with coffee, a kind word, a little sanity amid the nonsense, a guitar, music, a dance. And now here he was offering his brawn to subdue two unruly characters in a twisted plot point and play The Protector.

He slowed on the path then stopped.

He didn’t like being the situation guy. That was his other life. His Navy SEAL life. The life he lived when emotions were a liability.

***

Wilbur’s cousin startled awake. He took a breath and held it. His consciousness had heard something important. He exhaled gently. Waiting.

He’d been dreaming of a farm competition featuring pigs who renovated deteriorated farms and trained humans to grow and forage the foods and herbs that were most beneficial for the environment and the wild and domesticated creatures in the area.

Raven.

Ah! He had work to do.

The pig gently rose to his feet and stretched, careful not to disturb the sleeping Lucy who snuggled sweetly against a sleep-whistling Wilbur. He shoved a mound of warm straw next to Lucy so the side of her that’d been pressed against him wouldn’t get cold. The revolver Ed had given her was in the straw under her legs.

Jen was asleep in a chair with a shotgun across her lap. The two tied-up men in the other corner were also asleep. The pig considered that there might be some kind of poison, sleeping potion, or enchantment in the air around the shed, in it, or both. He noiselessly approached the dark-haired man and sniffed his breath. Something smelled of subterfuge. He gently pinched the bandana in the man’s mouth with his teeth and pulled it out, dropping it to the ground. Something in addition to scotch was on the cloth – he could smell it.

The pig had a gut feeling that this dark-haired man had something important to say to Lucy. The way he and the bald man had behaved in front of her had seemed staged, theatrics intended to provoke her emotions. Perhaps when Lucy and the dark-haired man woke up they’d be more able to listen to each other.

The pig brushed up against Jen. She opened her eyes a crack. The pig smiled at her. The corners of her mouth lifted, and she closed her eyes again. The pig softly grunted with contentment. He knew Jen wasn’t drugged, just sleeping like Lucy and Wilbur.

With that, he stole outside and followed his nose.

From the shed roof, Mowly watched the pig disappear into the darkness toward the cabin and said:

Now comes the rather grizzly bit
So let’s not make too much of it,
Except that you must understand
That Piggy did eat Farmer Bland,
He ate him up from head to toe,
Chewing the pieces nice and slow.
It took an hour to reach the feet,
Because there was so much to eat,
And when he finished, Pig, of course,
Felt absolutely no remorse.

***

Ed could feel Heidi with him, touching him, a slight warmth in his left hand, on the right side of his back, and on the upper part of his outer left thigh. He closed his eyes and remembered how freeing it was to dance with her. He opened his eyes and twirled in the middle of the path. When they were really in tune with each other, they moved as one, each anticipating the other. 

With his left hand held up, his right arm cocked in front of him with the palm flat, and his gaze down to the right, Ed walked in long, measured strides back up the path. At a flat spot by the equipment shed, Ed gave himself fully to the dance with Heidi. He locked eyes with her, pressed her out for a twirl, drew her back for a thigh against thigh rotation. Her heat touched his softness. Tears slid out of his eyes and down his cheeks.

This was why he wanted to write historical fiction, to get close to this feeling he thought he could never have again. Heidi was in the past, in history, but here she was, filling him up.

“My god, Heidi,” he whispered, “I’ve missed you so much.”

He followed her eyes as she marched around him, and with a flick of his wrist, pulled her in for a smoldering end to the dance where he gathered her tight in his arms, held her gaze for two intense beats, and pressed the softness of his lips into hers until they dissolved.

His legs buckled, and he kneeled on the hard ground with his face in his hands crying harder than he’d ever cried before.

He looked to the sky and wailed a long “Why?” into the heat of the night, and a quiet, tender voice replied:

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.

Ed let his body fall forward over his knees and surrendered to his loss and sorrow. He had the sensation of swimming. He felt warm and buoyant in a light atmosphere and opened his eyes to an orange glow. 

He sat up slowly unsure where he was. Nothing looked familiar. Something crackled, and sparks flew above the glow.

He stood. Behind him in the dark was the path to the lodge. Up to his right was where he’d left Jen and Lucy. And in front of him?

WOOF

The brightness of fire exploding surprised, terrified, and transfixed him. How beautiful. He watched it grow. The parhelion, but at night. The play of opposites. His dance with Heidi. He watched the flames reach higher. The fire’s core seemed to be inside a building or shed. Had he started it?

A pig squealed. A gun fired.