A (Backwoods) Noir Moral Parable About Death

You catch yourself staring at the clock waiting for 5, the start of your 4HL. “Don’t look at the clock!” Your elementary school wrestling coaches’ raspy voice rings out from the catacombs of your memories. You think back to a blogpost you read by some New York huckster lawyer about how your personal time doesn’t really start until after your commute ends. But, how serious can you take that? He’s blocked you on twitter anyway, why are you even thinking about him? The internet has poisoned you. Poisoned everyone. You wonder what Skallas would be like in a fight. You know you could take him, sure. You just want to know if he knows how to scrap. “Skallas wouldn’t make it long enough to look at the clock. He’d be looking at the lights.” You chuckle to yourself heartily.

Hell, anytime you’re arguing with anyone on twitter and they block you all you want is to fight them. Reach through the screen and crack their nose for what you perceive as a cowardly act. Usually, they block you because you push it but why accept the responsibility? That’s what violence is for. With a little more violence than the other guy you can pretty much get away with anything. Not that you apply this knowledge to your daily life. You don’t. The hours you spend in the gym isn’t so you can impose your will on another man but to stop him from imposing his will on yours and your loved ones. Plus, you just like to fight. The satisfaction that comes from breaking the will of a man and having him turn into putty in your arms. A malleable mess. Or coming back from breaking yourself only to return the favor the next day. Testing your masculinity against that of another’s in hopes iron sharpens iron.

The prospect of going over to your girlfriend’s house when you get off has you all hot. It’s the only excuse for mulling over mauling some stranger from the internet. Or it’s the sun beating down on you as if some invisible giant held a magnifying glass in the sky over your head focusing the rays on the nape of your neck as you work outside doing backbreaking manual labor. “Mammon can have my body but he will never have my mind.” Though, when you really think about your life you feel like a some kind of prostitute selling your body for money. You must be really hot. Feverish even for your mind to wonder like this so close to days end. You hurry up and text your girlfriend to open the pool top at her house, your hot, sweaty, had a long day, and want to take a swim to cool off.

As you open your driver’s side car door to start your commute, you empty out your pockets checking your phone in the process. Your girlfriend replied. Two pictures. One of her pool with the top off. One of her in her bikini bottoms with the top off. The flash hides her amber brown eyes and fake, bleach blonde hair which you assume has been put up in a ponytail in preparation for you coming over to swim because you didn’t see any of her hair flowing over or behind her dainty shoulders. What a beautiful rack! Every time you see those two tits of hers you feel like the luckiest man alive. Lurking /s/ for hours wouldn’t find a pair that could hold up to hers. Her arm is resting on her side. Wide birthing hips arched just slightly to accentuate her already curvy waste. You zoom in on her crotch to try and make out the outline of those puffy little lips of hers. Closer. There! Fuck. “Look at that little slit.” One more look at the full thing. You think it’s a damn shame you can’t see her feet. That’s what you text her. And you’re leaving for hers now.

Next thing you know you’re turning into her road; your mind occupied by the picture still open on your phone in order for you to sneak little glimpses of her during the brief and other times not so brief lulls in traffic. You pull down her road, into her driveway, and park. That’s when you first notice something amiss. The front door is hanging wide open. You don’t see your girlfriend outside anywhere. Last you heard from her she was getting in the pool to wait for your arrival. You can think of no reasons as to why the door is sprawled open. You start to get a queasy feeling in the bit of your stomach. As you get out of your car you’re listening. Not entirely sure what you’re listening for, you still listen. Nothing. The hopes hearing anything or a lack thereof would soothe the nerves starting to make the hairs on your arms stand at attention was dashed quickly. Just as you slam the door you hear a screech. It rings out of the house like a banshee whistle. You pause momentarily listening for another. One second. Two seconds. Fuck it. You decide. And take off at full sprint into the house.

Someone must hear your footsteps coming because you hear another screech although, this one sounds as if it’s muffled, like someone doing a bad job at whispering to you while their mouth was pointed anywhere but your ear. You don’t know how you know where the sound is coming from but you know. Your feet do a good job carrying you there. They ran faster than your mind could for the sight which opened up before your eyes when you entered the room was that of a monstrous perverse beast, and hulking mass of flailing limbs and gnashing teeth, some grotesque fleshy creature which if existed, would only life a life of great physical pain due to the physiognomy of it’s twisted and ever contorting body.

Your body springs into action before you are able to process anything. Before the shame of seeing the woman you love, the woman who you find most beautiful in this world, your Venus, the woman who you hope to marry and foster a family with one day being forcibly and viciously savaged before your eyes. You are the sole audience to your most precious treasure being violated and debased by a warped man in barbarous lust yet all you see is a fleshy kaleidoscope moving closer to you, no wait, you’re moving close to it. You jump on the guy as the realization sets in that at the top of this heap of writhing appendages is a person. That it’s a man; and this man is fucking your girlfriend as she is struggling beneath him against her will. You get your wits together as first contact with the assailant is being made only to panic as you’re landing on the man because, as any martial artists will tell you, when you get into intense situations your muscles respond on their own and your thoughts accelerate to Suprahuman levels of cognition and you realize while in the air without being fully conscious of it the man on top of your girlfriend is Holding a flathead screwdriver in the one hand he is using to pin her arms down above her head with. she gives you this look that says at the same time “Thank you.” “Save me.” And “Please, don’t die here on top of me it would be too much after what’s happened.”

And all of Those expressions she held in her eyes, as well as the realization the man on top of her was armed, and your hand, without conscious willing on your end, lands directly on the finger tips of the man’s hand holding the screwdriver all before your body even lands on his at just the right angle And velocity to knock him out of her and off of her. before you know it you had already worked the screwdriver out of his hand and was wrenching on his fingers until you felt them snap under the pressure. then having the composure and fortitude to not continue your onslaught Of violence so as not to push yourself to the point of no return, to the point where you turn yourself into a killer, a murderer, and even if you can justify that to yourself you still can’t bring yourself to let your better half watch a man they have great love for take the life of Another human in a violent lust of rage. so, you just lay there on top of him while he struggles for what seems like an hour while you wait for the police to show up only to have your muscles scream at you even though you know they shouldn’t because you exert yourself training daily at higher Intensities and against better men than him.

But, it doesn’t matter. None of those situations would cost your life and the life of a loved one if you lost so the gravity of your mortality and hers hangs heavy in your muscles, exhausting them and removing the last little bits of oxygen they store. they scream at you. the man you’re pinning down beneath you is screaming at you about how he is going to fucking kill you when he gets out from under you but not before he rapes that little fucking slut over there again who is now crying on the phone with the police and your muscles Are screaming louder than either of them. the only thought that’s running through your mind is “is this rage that’s welling up inside me worth forfeiting my humanity over? Should I succumb to the urge I have to stick my thumbs in his eyes and push, just fucking push, until his threats stop. Kill him. Kill him. He deserves it. KILL HIM BEFORE HE KILLS BOTH OF YOU.” And the little voice in your head that’s supposed to be the one of reason plays off that of the man beneath you who has now started ranting about how much your girlfriend liked it when he pinned her down and how much you’re going to like watching her get fucked after he gets out from under you and beats your ass. The man stops screaming for a moment to try and gleam your reaction which gives you your first real moment of clarity during the struggle and you think to yourself, “is this what madness feels like? Could I truly kill this man? Am I a murdered?”

no. You can’t bring yourself to do it which makes you feel like a coward and then he finally stops struggling when adrenaline from the rape and fight wear off and the pain from his broken twisted fingers catches up to him. Finally, you Think to yourself, the realization he has been outmatched has sunk in and you are able to push the thought of murder out of your head and break down into sobbing convulsions which trigger your girlfriends sobbing and also the sobbing and apologizing of the man beneath you Because he knows now, there’s no getting out of this situation and the Stoney lonesome is the only thing left for him now the man who stopped him refused to grant him a violent death as a means of escape.

now you feel your body shaking in a twisted rhythm with his, both hearts racing Against the other and when the police finally arrive you think you can breathe a sigh of relief but you only see her uncle in his plain clothes without his uniform and then you realize she called her uncle first and never called 911 and the police she said were coming over was actually her off duty uncle with his .357 snub nose revolver drawn and pointed at both you and the man you have pinned down. He rushes over to the group of you and starts tending to his niece who is still crying naked in a ball in the corner of the room which she managed to scoot to during the struggle. Her uncle does all of this while keeping the fire arm trained on you both. you can’t help but thinking this girls uncle, in his rage and confusion at what has transpired, might indiscriminately shoot you and the man beneath you. Then the off duty cop thanks you for stopping the rape of his niece and subduing the man who did it; reassuring you now he’s here things are going to be better. you get off the guy without fully realizing just what you’re about to do. But, the man realizes what is going on because the thing that pulls you out of your head which has gone all fuzzy and scattered, an overload of stimuli you weren’t prepared for when you left to come here thinking about spending the evening swimming in her pool, is his begging and pleading for his life.

You and your girlfriend don’t exist to the man anymore whose only focus is saving himself from a round out of the barrel of the .357 snub nose pointed at his chest. He has entirely forgot about what has happened, what he did, how he led all of us into this fucked up situation, and he makes continued pleas to the morality of the uncle in order to save his life. But, you realize before the man does no matter the protest he puts up her uncle has already made up his mind in how he will handle this, outside the law, and just as this fully sinks in it dawns on you as well there is no one else here to help him do what he feels must be done besides you so you, no matter how much you fought the urge welling up within you while you were on top of this man raining down a volley of strikes, tonight you will help kill a man and dispose of his body.

The next thing you know there’s a pair of opened handcuffs in your possession and you’re behind the man cuffing his hands together around his back. Now you’re driving the uncle’s truck on backroads only familiar to you because of burn cruises you took with your friends in high school while he sits beside you in the passenger seat pointing his .357 snub nose revolver at the sobbing ball of human waste tied up in the back seat. You drive and you drive then her uncle tells you to make a few turns down roads you’ve never explored before. You pull over at his command unsure exactly how you got here so quickly. You try to remember the drive but you can’t. You only see the twisted mass of flesh which greeted you upon your entrance into the house playing over and over again superimposed on top of itself in an infinite loop of mournful rage. The feeling of finger bones cracking in your hand lingers on your skin like a phantom.

Past the point of fatigue now you operate in a delirious haze. The sound of the passenger side door opens so you follow suit and get out of the truck yourself. Turning around to the other side of the vehicle you hear the begging start again and see a .357 pointed into the back seat. You’re given an order to drag the man out of the vehicle by his feet and you comply, there’s no thinking about it anymore. The moment you stepped foot in the truck, no, the moment her uncle stepped foot in her house, fuck, no, fuck, the moment that man decided to rape the woman who has captured your heart and spirit the course of events were set. What was to happen might as well already have happened. This is a current you cannot swim against, you just float along with it until it finally drags you down and drowns you. “Should I really ride the tiger if it’s going to eat me?” But, you know how pointless that thought is. You’re already on the tigers back. If you get off now he’s going to eat you anyway.

You feel a heavy “thwack” against your face as your nose starts gushing blood and at that moment you finally let go of your humanity for the first time all night. After an initial shock due to the unexpected blow, which, seeing as the man was in the very last moments of his life facing the black void shown in its simulacra through the hole in the barrel of the .357 snub nose revolver, should not have been unexpected, you grab the the legs of the man in the back seat yanking him with animalistic force out of the truck onto the ground. You feel the soft ripple of flesh on his body give way before you realize you have started to repeatedly kick him over and over in complete silence.

The man holding the gun beside you doesn’t stop you, he lets you go, and go, and go, until you’re not even kicking anymore just barely tapping the man on the ground in the head with your foot. Then the tears start again. You truly feel the cold icy embrace of death surround all of you here on this mountainside and it makes you shudder with fear for what’s about to come, what you have implicated yourself in. you think to yourself, “I’m about to become a murderer. This isn’t killing in self defense or in defense of a loved one anymore, no. When you and her uncle loaded this man into his truck this was planned out. An orchestrated plot not for the honor of your girlfriends sanctity and fidelity anymore but to satisfy the rage of you and her uncle due to what you perceive as a crime committed against you due to her violation. You stand here now willingly doing this when you don’t have to. This is what you’ve become: a murderer.”

Then you look down at your feet, at the bloody shaking thing below you looking for any kind of human form as a last ditch effort on your end to stop yourself. But, what you see doesn’t look human to you anymore. doesn’t feel human. The contempt you have for this man has transformed him into something entirely inhuman before your eyes and the guilt of the act which has been weighing heavy on your heart disappears completely. You look over at the man holding the revolver and when your eyes meet unspoken words of violence are shared between you. In perfect unison both of you wrap your arms up under the armpits of the broken hunk of inhumanity now almost unrecognizable as any form of living being and start dragging him without protest at this point a hundred or so yards down the mountain.

“On your knees.” You can’t look away. You won’t let yourself. You have to watch this. You have to. You watch as the man slowly gets to his knees.

“Coward.” You think to yourself. “Fucking coward. Where’s the fight in you? This is the last moments of your life and you are fine with ending it like this? Passively. Fucking coward.” But, you know in the back of your mind you’re a coward too, that if it wasn’t for her uncle being here, his presence pushing you to do this, you wouldn’t have it in you to take this mans life. But, you push that thought out of your mind because what you see before you isn’t a man anymore. It’s a being who might have at one time been human but decisions and actions on his end have caused his devolution into nothing more than an animal to you. A life form of the lowest order. Then you remember the feeling of letting go of your humanity yourself, the one you felt when kicking him, and just for the briefest moment a connection between you and this soon to be deadman forms in your psyche. You know now what it’s like to go beyond this point and understand there is no going back. In a way you and this man before you are the same. Inhuman. And as soon as this connection is formed in your head you see a bright flash from out the muzzle of the .357 snub nose and a loud “POP.” followed up by another flash and another “POP.” though this one sounds like it was fired off from one of the other mountains out in the distance and that connection you had a moment ago which just fully formed in your head was severed just as quickly as the life of the man who fell limp before you, dead.

Immediately you feel like vomiting but you can’t. Your stomach feels empty. Sick. A flood of pain washes over you and your entire body screams. Your muscles in unison take one big breath of air and you catch yourself on the branch of a tree while walking back to the truck stopping yourself from falling down.

“You did good.” Are the only words her uncle says to you while you walk back in eerie silence to the truck. The gun shots must have frightened the wild life. You can’t even hear crickets chirping anymore. There is only the silence one hears when they are deep in the woods being stalked by a predator though you feel no predatory presence around you. The feeling of flesh and bone giving way beneath your feet replaces the slight impact you would otherwise experience shooting up your heel with each step and you black out.

You don’t remember getting into the truck or taking off but now you’re on the road listening to a commercial for Matt Mertz plumbing before her uncle next to you hits a button on a wheel and shuts the radio off. Trying to remember how you got in the truck or which road you had just turned off of you look over at her uncle driving and he looks back at you. You hold his eye contact for a few seconds for the first time since getting in the truck and try to divine from the lack of light in his eyes what your fate is going to be. Surely, you’re not going to wind up dead now. You were the savior of the day after all. Can you call yourself a savior and a murderer? It doesn’t sit well with you. Maybe if her uncle killed you too you’d be less at fault for your involvement. Maybe you’d even plead with God Himself saying you had to choose! He coerced you with an unspoken threat of violence which he then later acted upon which is why you’re dead. If he were going to kill you it would have happened before you got back into the truck. Now what? You didn’t know nor do you have it in you to ask, “what now?” So, you just stare at him looking like a fucking imbecile trying to work up the courage to ask, “WHAT THE FUCK AM I SUPPOSED TO DO NOW?!” But, it never comes out.

It doesn’t need to. He understands where your heads are. He assures you it’s over now and you won’t need to worry about it. You did a good job. You saved her life. You should be proud of acting when most men would have run away or stood there stone. He assures you of a lot of things. The foremost of which being you’ll never have to take responsibility for your crime. He tells you that whatever investigation were to happen it would yield no results. As long as you kept your mouth shut and told no one, he drilled this into you, NO ONE, then you will be alright. If you ran your mouth off to the wrong person you’d be here again. He didn’t inform you which side of things you’d be on, just that you’d be back here in this exact situation again. The rest was up to your own interpretation.

You wanted to say to yourself if you ever wound up back in this situation again you’d rather be the deadman, at least that would mean you held on to your morality in the end of it all or maybe you are just a bigger coward than you thought and the guilt eats away at you until you have to turn yourself in. Or maybe even still you could hold onto your pride in the last few seconds of your life that way. As soon as you try exploring this thought you know it’s nothing more than a pleasant lie. A lie you try to tell yourself to abdicate a little bit, if not all of, the responsibility for the act of murder which you just played a crucial role in. But, you’ve crossed that line now. You looked back and it disappeared. There’s no return. As much as you try to lie to yourself, to hold on to that lie tight like you did with all the lies of your childhood that painted the world in a rose colored light you can’t. You know you’d rather be the man holding the gun than before it. That now, as compared to earlier in the night, you feel you have it in you to take a life.

You get back to your girlfriend’s house. She is dressed, wrapped up tight in a blanket—her favorite blanket and one you bought her on some holiday in the past—and sitting in the couch sipping at some dark liquid in a class you assume is some kind of liquor, the fifth of Proper 12 you left half empty in her freezer the previous weekend if you had to guess. You exchange an awkward greeting. Silence follows. She tells you that you should go. That she wants to be alone now. That she wants to be alone for a while. You want to object to this. you think it’s best for her, best for you, to stay with her that night. She declines. Says she wants to be alone. You push her but she won’t budge. You try to convince her someone should stay the night here, if not you then her uncle. But, that doesn’t work either. She insists you both leave her in solitude. You don’t have the energy to fight. All you see when you look at her is her shame. You give up trying and look to see if her uncle comes in. He hasn’t left his truck which is idling in the driveway so you begrudgingly agree to her demands and walk out the front door with barely a goodbye.

Her uncle sees you walking over to your car. He understands. His truck turns on. The headlights illuminate the pool. You think to yourself how simple things would have been if your friend had only just gotten out of the pool in order to greet you on your arrival here. He pulls away. You walk over to your car. Hesitate. Get in. And then do the same.

100 mph down the highway. You’re screaming tongues with your head hanging low out the window. The road opens up before you like one giant gaping maw. You take your hands off the wheel and stamp the vinyl pedal down to the floor mat driving straight into the opening of the mouth. You curse yourself. You curse the man. You curse her uncle. You even curse your girlfriend. How could you curse your girlfriend? The love of you life! Your warm shelter! Your softness in a hard world! What fault in this did she have to play? None! And you know this but, you curse her anyway. You hate yourself for cursing her. You curse yourself again. Beg for perdition. For damnation. You drive down. Straight down. No u-turns. No pit stops. You drive right into the fiery pits of hell not stopping until you finally reach your destination.