---

The men returned to the house early the next morning, cold and unrested. Sarrah was in the kitchen brewing a pot of coffee and cooking eggs and bacon. The house was filled with the smell of it, like a greasy café on a busy Sunday morning in a lost western town in Idaho.

Sarrah turned her head and looked at her husband and the reverend when they came to the table, roughshod, expecting to be served. Serena came in through the back door and went to wash her hands at the sink with tomato vine scented soap. She reeked of cigarettes.

The reverend spoke up. “You’re going to stunt your growth if you keep smoking those,” he said to the girl.

She was visibly upset when she turned. “It doesn’t matter,” Serena snapped. “I’m unlovable.” She glanced at her mother, threw down the towel she was drying her hands with, and charged off.

“What the hell was that about?” Josiah asked his wife as she came to the table with three cups and the coffee.

“She’s getting to that age when she starts hating everything, even herself,” Sarrah said. She brought over a platter of eggs and bacon, cold toast, plates and silverware. She plopped down a butter dish and a jar of huckleberry jam. “I suppose it won’t do any good to fix her a place.”

Josiah studied his wife as she moved around the kitchen and talked. He knew something was different, wrong. “What’s going on with you?” he finally asked.

Sarrah looked at him with frustration plastered to her face. He was bothering her. She hated when he bothered her. “Nothing. Nothing at all.”

She sat down at the table with displeasure, purposely banging the legs of her chair on the floor of green-speckled linoleum. She bowed her head and silently prayed. She reached for the coffee pot and poured herself a cup. She was there, but also somewhere else. Her mind was split in two. Her heart and soul were split in two. Her whole life was split in two but still connected by sinewy threads. She needed something very sharp to complete the division and escape. Sarrah began to ferociously eat her breakfast. Like a wild animal tearing at a fresh kill.

Josiah and Reverend Savior watched with disbelief as Sarrah shoveled the food into her mouth and mashed at it with her teeth. She started to choke, coughing out bits of food. She wiped at her mouth with her sleeve and then kept eating.

“What the hell are you doing!?” Josiah yelled, slapping his hand down on the table. “You’re acting like a pig, Sarrah. Now stop it!”

She let the huge wad of half-chewed food in her mouth plop out back onto her plate. It was a sloppy mess, disgusting. She grinned at him with her crazy face. “Fuck off, Josiah,” she said, bits of food shooting out of her mouth. “I’m trying to eat my breakfast.”

Josiah’s entire face widened and flared.

Sarrah watched as Josiah rose from the table just like the underrated Super Friends team member Apache Chief. And as if in slow, ferocious motion, he became large like some diligent monster. His hand held high in the air, his teeth tight together and grinding, his face red as a poisonous mushroom. She saw it coming down at her; that big, vicious paw. The reverend leaped up to stop him, but it was too late. Josiah’s hand struck her face so hard that she was knocked from her chair. Food and teeth shot out of her mouth as she fell to the floor. Sarrah didn’t move much after that. She just moaned and cried as Josiah stomped on her with his soiled boot.

---

The ambulance raced up the long dirt drive that ran between the golden and green farmstead and the old highway. The siren pierced the air like a war warning. Josiah was sitting on the worn couch in the living room with his head in his hands, sobbing, as the deputy questioned him. He was eventually led to the car and placed in the back seat, handcuffed. The deputy told Josiah he was being arrested for domestic assault. He looked out the window as Sarrah was taken from the house on a stretcher and loaded into the back of the ambulance. Josiah put his face against the warm spring glass. “Oh, God,” he groaned. “What have I done?” He turned his attention to the deputy climbing into the front seat. The door slammed with damnation. “But that wasn’t me,” Josiah pleaded, his face horribly pained, warm tears streaming down the rough skin. “I’m not that kind of a person.” The deputy glanced at him in the rear-view mirror. A pathetic creature, he thought. The tires ground into the gravel as the car lurched off. Josiah watched as his homestead slowly became smaller and smaller until it all disappeared completely, and the long, aching drive commenced.

---

Reverend Savior and Serena sat on chairs in the dim hospital room. Serena only glanced at her mother briefly. The face was too much for her. The damage, the swelling, the unnatural color of the skin. She was resting. Eyes closed, and mouth with a busted lip slightly parted.

Serena turned her attention to the square window. She looked out at the trees and the grass and the flowers. Cars were pulling into parking places. People were moving on walkways. Doctors and nurses and pharmacy technicians were coming to and going from work. Life was still growing and active, she thought. Life goes on despite how many people die. She wondered if anyone would miss her when she left this Earth. Serena got up and walked toward the open doorway.

The reverend’s eyes followed her. “Where are you going?” he asked in an authoritarian tone, as if he was now her sole guardian and in charge of her existence.

“None of your beeswax,” she said, and Serena walked out. She went outside to smoke a cigarette and thought about all the things rotating through her mind. She felt the browning sun on her unmuddied white skin and tasted the soiled air left behind after the corrupt government of Immoral New America auctioned off the environment to the highest corporate bidder with unbridled polluting on their wish list.

She felt alone and wanted to cry, but she was a tough girl, and she didn’t. She longed for a future of hope, but in Immoral New America, hope was dissipating by the day. She longed to sail off to Scandinavia for a better life. She had read about those places in books and how all the people who resided there had much better lives. Serena looked up at the sky and watched an airliner sputter across the bluish-brown background specked with a few listless clouds. She wondered where they were flying off to. Omaha or Okinawa? What if the plane crashed and everyone died? she thought, and she felt morbid. What if some survived, but then ended up eating each other?

She watched the cigarette smoke slowly swirl around in front of her, directionless and unsure. Serena suddenly realized how much she missed Paul. Her soul was basking in pure sunlight thinking about him taking her away from this horrible country and all that sordid life she was drowning in.

And strangely enough, like in a fever dream, when she went back inside the hospital and was walking down a long sterile hallway that smelled like clean death, she saw him.

Was this even real? Serena thought. She squeezed her eyelids tightly shut, then opened them again. How could it be? she wondered. Serena suddenly ran to him. He was wearing a white doctor’s coat and holding a computerized tablet and tapping on it with a straight finger as he stood by a window. He would momentarily look up and out the polished glass and then back down to his… work?

“Paul!” Serena called out as she got closer. He quickly turned and saw her. He smiled as she pressed herself against him and hugged his waist. “Paul. What are you doing here?”

He pried her off, but not rudely. He wasn’t sure what to say at first, but then he knew. “I’ve come to check on your mother,” he said. “I heard she had been violently attacked.”

“It was my horrible father,” she said. “He’s in jail now. But how did you find out?”

He looked up at the bright hospital lights in the hallway. “I just knew,” he said. “I have a very, very strong intuition about things in this world.”

“And you’re a doctor?” Serena asked.

He turned toward the window again. “Yes, I suppose I am.”

“You work here, or are you just pretending?”

“Both,” he answered with a strange smile. “Are you hungry, Serena? Would you like to go to the cafeteria with me and get something to eat?”

She couldn’t refuse. “Yes. I would love that.”

---

Josiah sat in a solitary cell because he had blurted out that he wanted to kill himself when they first dragged him into the Chandelier County Jail on the desolate outskirts of Chandelier, Idaho.

The walls inside the cell were a dingy tan and soft so he couldn’t smash his head open. His bed was a simple shelf-like platform that stuck out from one of the walls. Smooth. No edges or sharp corners. He wasn’t allowed to have a blanket or a pillow. He wore a white smock, something akin to a hospital gown even though he wasn’t in a hospital. A grated, nasty opening on the floor served as a toilet. There was one black security camera high up in a corner of the cell. A light flashed. They were watching. The door to the cell was big and heavy, like the door to a commercial freezer in a restaurant. There was one window in the door. It was a small portal of thick, cloudy glass where the face of a guard would occasionally show itself. Josiah would watch with a sense of fear and sometimes even hope as a pair of eyes snapped quickly back and forth then disappeared.

Josiah would stand by the portal and look out. It was his only connection to the other side of the cell. He only saw bright lights and a barred door. But the noises were the worst. The screams and howls of other inmates. They never seemed to shut up. They were the sounds of torture releasing from the guts of very wounded men, Josiah thought. Animals in cages were coming out of their skins. Josiah felt hopeless as he slid down the wall to the floor. He could not stand what he felt. Freedom had never been taken from him like this. For the first time in his life, he felt that there was absolutely nothing he could do to ease his uncomfortable situation. He was truly trapped in a nuthouse.

They wouldn’t turn the lights all the way off at night, just dim them. Josiah figured it was a way to keep insane people from going more insane. He couldn’t stand the thought of being in complete darkness, not in there. It would be exactly like death. He wanted to throw up as he tried to sleep on the protruding shelf. It was miserable. He was cold.

After a long while of just staring at the ceiling, there came a light knocking on the solid door. There was a voice coming from the other side. “Hello?”

Josiah shot straight up and went to the window and looked out. “Yes. I’m here. Can you help me get out? I’ve got to get out!”

“Stand back,” the voice ordered.

There was a clinking, clunking sound and the door slowly opened. A guard made his way into the cell forcing Josiah to move back to his sleeping platform and sit down. Then the door closed and locked without force.

“I know you,” Josiah said.

The guard looked around at Josiah’s situation and grinned. “How’s it been going for you,” he said. “Maybe not too well?” He prodded at him with a nightstick, gesturing for him to slide over. “Mind if I sit with you for a bit?”

“You’re that Paul fellow. You were at my house, and you did magic.”

“Right, right, Josiah.”

“What are you doing here? Do you really work as a guard, or are you just pretending?”

Paul smiled. “Everyone keeps asking me that.”

“Can you help me?” Josiah pleaded. “I can’t stand being locked up like this anymore!”

Paul chuckled. “That’s what they all say. I suppose you are innocent, too?”

“Of course I am!” Josiah snapped. “It was an accident. She slipped and fell, hit her head.”

“I saw her earlier today, Josiah, at the hospital. Your wife was pretty badly beaten up. Like a farm-fresh egg. Cracked open with all her magma spilling out.”

“Why are you talking like that?”

“You mean truthfully?”

Josiah turned away. “I never put a hand on her.”

“The reverend was there. He saw everything. And you didn’t know it at the time, but I was there, lurking in the crevices. And I saw everything, too.”

Josiah looked terrified and he went to the door and started pounding on it. “Help!” he screamed. “Someone, help me!”

“It won’t do you any good,” Paul said. “No one will hear you. Everyone is asleep, even the other guards. I made that happen because I can.”

Josiah turned to face him. “What the hell are you?”

Paul shrugged the question off. “I’m a person just like you.”

Josiah moved closer. “No, you’re not. You’re a demon who fooled my innocent, God-fearing daughter out in the woods. You came into our home and infected us with evil trickery.”

Paul laughed out loud. “A demon? Oh, please. You’re reading too much of that Bible of yours. And even if demons were real, I would never be a demon. I despise the lore of demons. They’re just so horrid and gross and hateful. Just like your people.”

“You’re not going to help me, are you,” Josiah said.

Paul shook his head. “No.”

“Then why did you come?”

“I just wanted to let you know that I’m in love with your wife.”

“What!?”

“That’s right, and she loves me, too, passionately.”

“Impossible. She does not.”

“Yes, she does.”

“But she’s my wife!”

Paul grew angry. “And you beat her! You nearly killed her today and you sit in here acting like you did nothing wrong and whining like a little schoolgirl to get out. But here’s a news flash, holy diver. No one will ever believe you. People around here know your temperament and your history. You’ll never get a fair trial, on Earth or in heaven. You will be found guilty because you are guilty! You are doomed to rot in prison.”

Josiah slid to the floor and started to weep in his hands. “Why did you have to tell me?” Josiah groaned. “Why?”

Paul stood over him like a Greek god with that hair the color of burnt rust flowing. “I told you because I want you to feel the pain of knowing another man is fucking your wife and there’s not a single thing you can do about it. You’re going to be locked in a box for a very long time. And now every day you will think about her and me together. I’ll live in your house. I’ll eat your food. I’ll work on your farm. I’ll use your favorite toilet and sleep in your bed beside your naked wife.” Paul kicked at him. “Think about it! Not only the horrible guilt over what you did to her, but now the added pain and misery that will invade your head, heart, and soul when you think about how deeply I will taste her and how deeply I will penetrate her. You’ll ache far down in your guts when you realize what a failure at love you are. You’ll ache knowing that I will love her far better and will never hurt her like you did. This is all the price of your sins, not mine.”

“Stop!” Josiah screamed. “Please, stop.”

Paul stepped away and went to the door.

“Wait!” Josiah begged him.

“What is it?”

“Will you please just kill me. Murder me now. I won’t be able to live like this.”

Paul turned and looked at him without pity. “I already did.”

Will there be more?

Subscribe for free to receive notifications.