#davywrites

SNP Westerhout is a thousand feet long, steely grey with a red belly. She’s been at this for almost twenty years by the time you join her skeleton crew.

One of the young seamen, Buchanan, doesn’t like you much. From the time you joined the crew he’s doubted your age out loud in front of everybody. He says shit like, “You don’t look nineteen. Do you think he looks nineteen, Cillian? He can’t be.”

You turn seventeen in a few days, but that’s besides the point. It’s right there on your fake ID: nineteen. 

You’re a real pussy about it, too;  prideless, cowardly, invisible. But not to Buchanan; to him you must be some threat.

You are, in the end. At his end.

🤠 PRETZELS AND VIOLENCE BELOW THE CUT 🤠

Shiloh did not think this was a tenable option, so he spun the freshly lubricated balisong into his grip and stood, then grabbed his Billy mask off the edge of the bed. He knocked his hat off with the back of his wrist, then yanked his big rubber goat mask down over his head.

It was an awful looking thing, with the lower teeth bared and the eyes pink and devilish. Big rubbery goat horns jutted off the top of its head, and a fray of nappy white hair stuck out like a mane from the neck. But it wasn’t so much terrifying as it was dopey, and Shiloh spent a few moments tucking it down into the neck of his commemorative t-shirt and raising the collar of his jacket up around it.

Then he said in his Billy Goat voice,

“Come on, Shay. Shy’s not so baaaaad. He blew a hitman’s brains out up in Canada, just for you! Staked out at Isla O’Rinn’s place, just for you!”

It was kinda hard to see out of this thing. He struggled a little awkwardly past Kincaid if he didn’t clear out of the way in time, then tilted Shay in his chair and stepped on the toilet seat in an effort to get behind him.

“You fuckin’ psychopath,” Shay Ferrick snarled, but of course he was belted to a chair and couldn’t do shit about it.

‘Billy’ grabbed Ferrick by the luscious black curls and yanked his head back, exposing plenty of neck to press the edge of the butterfly knife against.

“Laaaaanguange!” the coyote-turned-billygoat bleated, then pressed down enough to spring a little bloody leak in Shay’s neck so he’d know he meant business. “Now, you tell the sexy PI where you hid the money, or Billy’s gonna saw your head off and trade it to the mob to keep your kid alive.”

A teenage Appalachian runs away from home after getting into trouble.

Aren’t you a sad sight?

You don’t have anyplace to go, so you ride the shuttle into Asheville, where you’ll get on a real bus then head someplace else. There’s a folded map in your pocket and a bruise around your right eye. Your skinny arms fold across your belly because it hurts, and your elbows and knees and the joints in your fingers do, too.

By your estimation, you don’t have much time left.

An intermittent fever kept you longer in Clyde than you wanted, then you started pissing sweet tea amber. There’s no question where it came from, whatever it is, but it’s not like there’s money to see a doctor. Sure, you could go home, but your momma can’t afford it, either, and what if it comes out how you got sick in the first place? And what you did about it? The only option is to run off and die. This is what old dogs do. This must be how they guard their dignity, because dying is an awful vulnerable thing.

Reverend Brown would say you oughta repent before the mighty angels in flaming fire take vengeance on you. Then you won’t burn in hell after this body dies. You don’t, though, because even though you figure you’re dying, mortality is still incomprehensible to a fourteen year old boy. It was your brother who always seemed he was at death’s door. If your momma would’ve said one morning, “Oh, look, Ryan’s died in his sleep,” probably nobody would be surprised. He sure had it rough, bless his heart. Funny how he’s gonna grow up, and you won’t. You never thought you’d be the one jealous of him.

The shuttle’s not the place for redemption, anyway.

A few bills burn a hole in your pocket and your resolve. You never wanted to spend so bad in your life. His blood’s seeped into the corner of the ten. It’s seeped into the cracks in the concrete and into the drainage ditch and deep in the earth where it can permeate all things that walk or dig or grow.

How are you supposed to sleep at night?

You figure you’re not.

Content warning for a short aside about oral sex. After an uncomfortable phone conversation with his father a year into his incarceration, Ruck eats paper and makes nice with his cellmate.

RJ was moved to the annex, and Ruck briefly had the cell to himself. Even the quiet and the freedom to choose the television station, however, was not enough to stitch together the wound that had been tearing itself incrementally wider since his conversation with Donovan Rucker.

During leisure hours, Coy liked to visit. He’d let Ruck fuck him for nothing, or next to it. You got my back, right? and once for a Time Out bar he’d saved from the cafeteria. Sometimes they’d hang a sheet over the cell door and Coy would sit on the cold concrete between his thighs and suck him off. Ruck didn’t know if he hated him more for acting as if he liked it, or because he was so damn good at it.

He knew he hated himself more than he hated Coy.

The visits stopped when Roland Fairfax was assigned to the cell with him. The man was dark-headed, with eyes far too kind for prison. Ruck, who had moved his things down to the bottom bunk, asked him what he’d done.

Roland wouldn’t answer the question.

“Nothin’ with kids?” Ruck asked, the same as RJ had asked him when he was new. “You ain’t killed no dog, didja?”

Roland said it was neither of those, but he was aloof, and Ruck wasn’t interested in knowing him better, or in much of anything. He spent his free time in his bunk, and counted down the days without anything to look forward to.

For his good behavior, he was permitted to add a few touches to the cell. First and foremost he wanted his guitar — but also a pen and notebook.

Bess and Nattie brought both of these the next time they visited, and he drew crude tattoo ideas in the notebook and practiced his guitar out in the yard. It was harder now. The finger he had broken didn’t move as easily as it had, and he’d been a year without practice. It was unsatisfying, too, to play an electric guitar without an amp.

It soon collected dust in the corner — though Roland started to mess with it — and Ruck worked at penning letters.

One was for Lou. It was short, and he thanked him for his friendship and patience, and all the weed. He asked about Angie and her big tits. The letter ended with an offer for Lou and Angie to send him photos of the latter — bra optional — if they so desired.

Another was for Nicely. He was like a father — kind of — and had always done right by Ruck. He was mostly sorry for all the times he’d smoked in the cars instead of working, but instead made his apology about letting the old man down by getting locked up and leaving him without a gopher. (He figured that was an easily replaceable position, but sent the letter anyway.)

Last, he penned the one he'd wanted a pen for in the first place.

i’m sorry for how i acted. you were the only real freind i had and i always had a good time when i was with you. i should’ve said fuck whatever anybody else thinks, i should’ve stood by you. you’ll probally be glad to know my dad found out everything anyways so trying to act like you didn’t mean nothing to me didn’t do me any good. i still think about you and wish we’d got to go to all those places we said we was going to. i wish we was still freinds and sometimes i think i’m never gonna know anybody again how i knew you. i hope you’re doing good wherever you are & that you have good people. i miss you man, i wish things was diffrent.

He leaned over the notebook in his bunk and reread the sentimental slop over again. His heart twisted up in his chest, and he tore the shred of paper in half to save the lower section of the page and methodically fed it into his mouth.

Roland listened to the sound of chewing and paper crinkling for a long while from the top bunk, then asked, “You wanna take a walk?”

They took a few slow laps around the yard. Roland didn’t ask him anything, didn’t tell him anything. They talked about prison lunches instead, and the strange cartoons on television these days. MTV and working at the plant (which Roland was still trying to swing).

They didn’t talk about anything important, but it was an easy conversation, and Ruck felt a little lighter when they made it back to the cell for the night.

I saw you before I ever saw you. Dreamed you up.

Everything I was ever hungry for. It was you, just as you stand before me. The way you are. Like you were made for me, conceived from my own wanting, put together part by part every time I got knocked down or talked to myself at night or laid alone under ceilings under stars under the weight of knowing nobody knew me.

I didn’t recognize you when we first met. Not by the sight or the smell or the taste of you. I didn’t then, but now I know. It was you. It was always you.

Late on a spring morning I stand over the body of acclaimed author Robert Barclay in the kitchen of his ranch style home in southern Virginia. I couldn't tell you how long I’ve been doing this — only that the sun has climbed higher and the shadows have been stretched long across the linoleum floor. His little dog has come by to sniff at him a few times, but mostly stands near its food dish whining at me.

I’m late again.

I'm late to most everything. I was meant to arrive at eight o'clock sharp, for starters, but didn't pull into the driveway until twenty after. When he didn’t come to the door, I figured he must have taken offense.

Judging by the bruises pooling in his skin, though, I would’ve needed to be pretty early to catch him alive.

But I'm weeks late. I was supposed to schedule this appointment last month so his article would appear in the June issue of The Hammond. It's his birthday month, and he's just turned ninety.

I've never seen a dead body before.

I never have, but I know beyond the shadow of a doubt that he’s dead. I am too late, and the assigning editor of the lit magazine I'm working for is never going to give me another job.

It's not that I want to write for The Hammond; no one cares about literary mags. It's this misguided ambition that made me put this interview off in the first place; I wanted to grab an one with an up and coming blues rock musician while we were in the same state instead. It didn't pan out, and here I am standing in the kitchen with the corpse of R. Barclay.

And, given the propensity things have not to pan out for me, The Hammond is the best I'm going to do. I can hear Jason, the editor, now: I stick my neck out for you, Franky. I extend deadlines for you, and it bites me in the ass. Everything always bites me in the ass with you.

He already advertised the interview, too — that's the thing. R. Barclay is a big name, always relevant in The Hammond’s unbearably dull world. This is an interview folks were looking forward to, and Jason made it out like it already took place. But I was late.

And now what the fuck do I do, Franky? 'Well, folks, bad news: Old Barclay kicked it before our no account journalist got his shit together.’

I might as well put down my recorder and find an office job, or go work in a factory somewhere. At this rate, I'm never going to get this career off the ground.

I realize I need to call somebody.

It’s impossible to discern one bleak parcel of land from the next in this place. You pass cornfield after wheatfield, driving into the blaze of sunset posited at the far edge of the earth. 

How can it be this is the place Shay Ferrick comes from? You look at his scabbed knuckles on the steering wheel, the blue veins on his wrist, his forearm with its own field of coarse dark hair across it. A tiny scratch on the surface like it came from a skipping record’s needle.

Then you skip straight to staring at his face, at how his wiry stubble follows the angle of his jaw. Imperfections register as perfections; even the patchy, shitty shave-job — even the tiny flake of dry skin left after he scraped a blemish off under his nail. His nose seems sweetly short on his face and that makes the corner of your mouth hook halfway into a smile. 

Under his aviator shades, his eyes are the best part of all. You can’t see them just now, but you can picture them crystal clear all the same: they’re dark. Almost black. And they sit under his bushy eyebrows and he gets two distinct wrinkles between those eyebrows right before he grins whenever you’ve just said something funny, and shoot, you wish you could come up with something, now. You make an idiot out of yourself all the time trying. You’re so resolutely in love with this guy — in love! Who knew you’d ever get to feel like this. It’s the sweetest thing you’ve ever felt in your whole life.

“The fuck’re you lookin’ at?” he asks.

“You,” you say, earnest.

Collaborative writing character intro. Silas, the "cabbie," is a witch who can enter people's dreams. He works as a private investigator, and has been hired by Dalton's wife to confirm her suspicions.

Oh, Dally-Wally. What a mess you’ve made of things.

Dalton Waller was prone to false awakening dreams. He’d always been, ever since he was a kid growing up in Bumfuck, North Dakota. He’d go through the whole process: hear the rooster crow, rise from bed, brush his teeth, inhale some lukewarm oats, wait for his bus in the biting cold, hit the same pothole day in and day out, get to class, listen to the demonic snickering roll like a wave through homeroom: the classic Forgot to Wear Pants to School nightmare. He stopped falling for it, after a while. Learned to pinch himself, and eventually just to sit up; then he was awake in earnest.

It didn’t stop the dreams from happening. When he met the future Mrs. Waller in physics class in Oregon, he once dreamed he woke and sneaked into her dorm room. A few years later, he dreamed he rose from bed and immediately spoiled the proposal he’d planned for their California trip the following week.

But tonight, Dalton wasn’t dreaming about Ava Waller. He was dreaming about Sierra — oh, what was her last name, again? — and a taxi ride over to her place for an early morning romp. Part of him knew it was one of Those Dreams. They couldn’t do this — they had jobs; they’d met at work! She’d catered an event at his firm. Hit it off, exchanged social media under innocuous pretense. Exchanged likes, comments. Private messages. Life stories.

Since it was a dream, he didn’t mind swatting the usual nagging thoughts about his two kids out of his head.

Dalton had never actually hooked up with Sierra, but it did occupy his every waking (and sleeping, but we’ll get to that) thought. He spent his free time messaging her, grinning at his phone. All the while he became increasingly distant from Ava. Stayed later at work for the privacy it afforded. Told himself he was just working harder for his family. The usual song and dance; the emotional affair preceding a physical one.

He didn’t realize Ava was onto him. She didn’t know the details, of course, but she had her suspicions, and she’d be damned if she was going to let Dalton keep pulling the wool over her eyes.

Anyway, the taxi ride: Dalton felt vaguely lucid and wanted to fast-forward through it, but traffic seemed pretty congested in the dreamscape, this morning.

The cabbie fucked with the radio dials, changing from a station that apparently aired nothing but the nonsensical babbling of an infant to a laugh track.

“Can ya turn that down?” Dalton asked.

The cabbie grinned back at him. A Cheshire grin. Dalton found his driver's sleepy blue eyes ominous. He willed himself to wake up again, but the eyes pulled him back in, holding him as if underwater.

“Sorry, boss,” the driver replied, and turned down the laugh-track station. “Hey, it’s a right up here, yeah?”

Dalton squinted, then said, “No, not this next one. Field House, a couple blocks down.” He pulled a double take at the tall yellow grass passing by the windows. “…Where are we, again?”

“Where are we?” the black-haired cabbie echoed.

“Devil’s Lake.” Dalton furrowed his eyebrows. “North Dakota.”

“Is this where Sierra lives?”

“Sierra lives offa Field House. On Third.”

The cab-driver gave a little hyena chuckle, then pulled over onto a busted curb. Dalton hurried to let himself out, and looked over the roof of the taxi at the cabbie as he too climbed out of the car.

They were in a North Dakota field, alright, except Sierra’s semi-high-rise apartment building stood in the middle of it, and the sidewalks were in apocalyptic disrepair, and while familiar, nothing was right.

And his cab driver was wearing the kinda hat a ship captain might wear paired with a Hawaiian button-down.

“My fare,” the cabbie prompted.

Dalton passed him a handful of oxidized pennies, which the young man palmed into his mouth.

“Alright, champ.” The cabbie slapped him hard between his shoulders. “You have fun, now.” Something in his voice — his voice itself — it had the cadence of Dalton’s father, and the moment was almost precisely the same as one in which he was dropped off for a middle school baseball practice. Late March, unseasonably warm. He could feel the baseball mitt in his hand, but when he looked down, it was just his hand, and the cabbie wasn’t his father but a stranger with eyes he couldn’t stand to look into. They seared his retinas like he'd stared into the sun.

He turned and strode away toward Sierra’s apartment building, and the cab driver sat on the hood of the taxi, apparently to wait.

As Dalton put distance between them, the gravitational pull of his body dragged the edges of his dream until the cab and the driver sat at the fringes. Time and space grew tenuous here, and from his perch on the hood the driver felt content to wait on this precarious ledge with yellow prairie grass swaying on his right, a surreal swirl of cloud and celestial dust encroaching on his left.