Night's Approach in Willow Gulch

By Jem Morgenstern

            Under Broken Bow Arch, there’s a creek that falls into a muddy pond. A muddy pond with crawdaddies paddling their way across the floor, pushing their ancient bodies under rocks to hide from my eyes peering down at them. I could crush them like the 13 Boy Scouts who were crushed by a rolling truck 20 miles and 55 years back at Carcass Wash, but I am much kinder than the God they prayed to. I drop a couple spinach leaves into their water – just enough for me to feel like I might be feeding them but not enough for me to feel like I’m polluting. I don’t know if they eat spinach, but I like feeling like I might be making their lives easier for one moment.
            Aside from the crawfish and the ghosts of western tragedies, there are only two others in the gulch with me. Right now, they’re back at our camp that’s nestled in the dunes of an alcove directly across from the arch. Their feet rest in the cold red sand while they share a portion of the one bottle of liquor we managed to fit in our packs. The echoes of their conversation breaks the perfect silence, but I don’t mind the noise because I like listening to them talk.
            I hike back up the dunes to join them and share their dry spit and booze from that same bottle of liquor. The night slowly drips into the sky as the burning dusk falls below the desert walls of the gulch. The black birds swimming in the darkening sky look like they’re knit from their own shadows.  We talk about those birds and the stars that speck their shadow figures, because the moonlit sky is all we can see in the blackness that reigns over desert floors at night.

Erase

By Jem Morgenstern

The wood burned. Fire tainted every color its wrathing arms could reach. Bright embers and dark ashes slowly fell onto the white floors, painting it black and spotted red. Blue wallpaper disintegrated: curling downwards, crumbling, fading to brown. Blinding yellow flames rose into the sky and bled into the blue horizon dyed orange by the rising sun. The blinding light would wave and the smoke would peer over the hills, but no eyes would look in its direction. None were near enough to witness the building’s excruciating mutation. Nobody would hear the aching wooden skeleton crack and fall apart. Nobody would smell the distinct, uniquely putrid scent of the burning evidence: the sulfurous stench of keratin, nauseating odor of heated bacteria, or fumes from unused chemicals.

No roads led here. Nobody ever wandered here. Discovery of what happened here was unlikely. If anyone did happen to find this ruin, every question they could have would forever be unanswered. The specifics of the crimes committed would never be uncovered. The identities of those involved would always be a mystery. Their stories would never be told, shared, reported. Nobody would hear about the cold nights they spent in that building - body shivering, teeth chattering, hands shaking - waiting. Waiting for the breathing to stop. Watching a body laboriously force itself to continue living until it lost the strength to keep itself running. Sometimes, it would take minutes. Sometimes, so much time would pass by that they felt their own bodies might give up before the one collapsed on the floor would finally croak out its final breath. They wanted it to last, so they could savor the intensity of seeing life inch itself out of a body with every shaking moan, every quiver of the body, every exhalation. So they wouldn’t have to clean up after themselves. So they wouldn’t have to begin the tedious process of finding another again so soon. They always wondered if anyone would notice these people were missing. They always did their best to choose lonely people. Quiet people who nobody noticed. Ones that were almost expected to disappear someday anyway.

It was when they noticed somebody had begun looking for one of their people that they fretfully decided to burn the building down. Tears rolled from their eyes, as they set their place of ritualistic pleasure ablaze. They watched the walls that housed so many memories of joy crumble to the ground. They burned their souvenirs along with it. Erased any proof of their dark avocation. Though they didn’t intend for the loss of their house of memories to put an end to their past-time. So they set out to find a place to begin again. One as hidden, as disposable, as perfect as this one. Where, even now, they continue to derive joy from watching their victims struggle to stay alive. Where, even now, there is no trail that leads to them - to their discovery, guilt, or conviction.