The room where they kept the dead boy smelled of flowers.
It was a large, well-appointed room stuffed with plush furniture and knickknacks and looking in almost every detail like what I’d now imagine an old-fashioned parlor to look like. Clustered at different points around the room were various explosions of color—flowers of red and white, purple and orange, they looked like fireworks in the backdrop of what had sounded to the ten year old version of me like a pretty macabre display.
I’d heard them talking about taking me to see the dead boy, after all.
When you’re sick—really, deathly sick—there comes a point where people stop seeing you as much. It doesn’t mean they don’t take care of you or still love you. That they wouldn’t give just about anything to make you well. But that’s just it. Because they don’t want to lose you, and because they’re tired of worrying and feeling scared, they want to fix you. And it doesn’t take too long before you become less of a person and more of a problem to be solved.
So when we’d finished with all the doctors and moved on to the medicine men and faith healers to heal my defective heart, I’d grown used to being the ghost in the room. A year earlier my mother would never have said “dead boy” in front of me at all, but riding with me and my aunt over there that day, she’d said it without flinching because, in part of her mind at least, I wasn’t really there anymore.
So I went into that room terrified—I probably would have fought them if I hadn’t already crossed that precipice where I now understood I was close to dying. That knowledge had infected me with a kind of desperation, and even as a pale and frightened child of ten, I found I was willing to meet the dead if it might keep me among the living.
But the boy wasn’t actually dead, or at least he didn’t look to be. His dark eyes followed me when I entered the room—I’d wanted my mother or aunt to come with me, but that apparently wasn’t allowed. So I’d shuffled into that ancient parlor and sat down across from the small boy that was watching me silently. It didn’t take long before I had to break the awkward silence.
“Hey there.”
The boy nodded slightly. “Hello.”
I felt my stomach twisting, but I tried to force a smile. “Um, I heard my mom call you a dead boy. But you look okay. Why did they call you that?” He looked to be a couple of years younger than me, and yet I found myself intimidated by him. Worried that he wouldn’t answer or that he’d get mad and hurt me somehow.
Instead he just shrugged. “Last year my poppa took me off. They say he went crazy. He took me down into a cave up north. Threw me down a water hole down deep in that black.”
I stared at him, transfixed. His voice was soft and rough, but he did sound kind of like a little boy, except he didn’t. The tone and words were wrong, and as strange as this may sound, it didn’t “feel” like I was sitting across from a boy a little younger than me. It felt like…
“Then he kilt himself. Right at the spot he cast me down. My Ma and people had been after us from the start. Had dogs in the cave hunting for us. So close they heard the gun go off when he shot himself. They figured out to check the water, and three men dove in to try and find me.”
He shook his head slightly. “One of them drowned. The other two got me up, but I wasn’t breathing or nothing. Had to do that CPA on me. Said I died for a couple of minutes at least.”
Swallowing, I realized he was staring at me, waiting for some reaction or response. “That…I’m sorry that happened, I guess. But they got you back.”
His black eyes rolled toward the corner of the room behind me. “Yeah, they got me. And now I can see more things. Understand more things.” His gaze swung back to me. “And give people another chance to live.”
My pulse began to quicken with a mixture of fear and hope. “Can you really? No bullshit?”
A flicker of a smile crossed his face. “No bullshit. You want that? You want the things I can give?”
I was already nodding. “If you can save me, yes.”
The next moment he was kneeling in front of me, his hand on my breastbone, a bitter, painful cold radiating from his small palm into my chest and filling my entire body with a numbing frost. He stared into my eyes as he made a small circle with his hand, his gaze or movements never faltering. It felt like I was staring down into deep, subterranean pools, falling into their darkness and being overtaken by their invading c…
“There.”
I blinked and the boy was back over on his sofa, looking at me mildly as I gasped like a drowning victim reaching sweet air. “What…what did you…”
He shrugged again. “I pictured you without a dying heart. So now you’re okay.” Just then his expression hardened. “But that’s only half of it. I also have to tell you what I saw.”
I was so happy and confused and dizzyingly excited that I barely heard the last, but the next words he spoke caught my attention well enough.
“I saw a certain fire. There was a big metal barrel with green trees painted on it, and in it, a giant orange fire is burning. You have a lot of living to do before that, but I could see that barrel burning, and I knew that you were in it. I knew that I had found you, and chopped you up small, and put you in that fire to burn.”
His voice remained even throughout all of this, and his expression barely changed either. Just his eyes seemed to sparkle a bit when he talked about what he would do to me.
In most situations, 10 year old me would have made a joke or just laughed at something I didn’t understand because I was nervous. But something in the core of me knew this wasn’t someone being weird or funny. I was staring into the face of something that I didn’t understand but that a part of me still knew to fear.
When I stood up, a distant part of me realized I had started wetting myself, but there was no room for embarrassment, only fear and the drive to get out of this terrible, sickly sweet room with this wrong thing that looked like a little boy coiled at its center. I ran to the door and began screaming and crying while yanking on the knob—I don’t think it was even locked but I couldn’t get it open until my aunt opened it from the other side and swept me into her arms. To their credit, when I told my family I wanted to go, they didn’t hesitate. It wasn’t until later, when I was home and bathed and safe in my bed, my mother asked me what had happened in that room.
I looked at her, tears in my eyes, and said just three words before falling silent again.
“He healed me.”
That was twenty-six years ago. Since then, I’ve always had that afternoon lurking in the back of my mind, coloring my thoughts and putting a small thumb on the scales of every decision. If I asked eighteen year old me if he went to college out of state because of it, he’d have said no. Twenty-three year old me would have laughed at the idea that he took a job across the country because of some prophecy he’d received years earlier from a creepy little boy. And when thirty-two year old me was going through a divorce and moving even further away from my old hometown, he would have said he didn’t even remember being that sick when he was little.
But none of them would have met my eyes when they said it.
Because the deepest part of me has always known that I’ve always been running. Always telling myself that I make my own path and choose my own fate while looking behind me for the train I’m afraid is coming.
No, that’s not quite right. Not a train. A fire.
A certain fire that will appear one night, burning in the dark like a beacon, guiding me back to the thing I’ve been trying to escape since that afternoon when I was so scared I pissed my pants.
It wasn’t until I was carrying Hailey back to the car yesterday that I realized how close it was. Our girl was the one that saw it. She was laughing and talking about how my neighborhood was so fancy we were decorating for Christmas way early. I looked where she was pointing and I saw it too.
A new burn barrel in the middle of the grassy courtyard between all the buildings in the apartment complex. A thirty gallon metal drum with alternating horizontal bands of white and red, and in the middle of the white, smaller specks of green.
A tiny row of stenciled on Christmas trees.
My hands were shaking as I drove her to the airport. She knew something was wrong, but I just told her that it was my ulcer acting up and I’d be okay. She offered to stay another couple of days, but I told her I’d be fine and that you’d be missing her. When she called me later, after you picked her up and brought her home, I let her go to voicemail. I…I didn’t want to…I didn’t want her to hear me like that. Like this. I’m recording this now because I want you to know what happened. How much you tell her…well, you were always a better judge of stuff than I was anyway.
When she called, I was standing out on the balcony. Looking down at the orange flame burning in that barrel, trying to make out the features of the man standing beside it. Not that it matters. I know who it is down there waiting for me.
I wonder how he’ll do it. I think I’m done with the idea of running, and strange as it seems, I don’t know if I’ll even fight when the time comes, though maybe instinct will kick in. But I’m more focused on how he’ll do it. Does he have a knife or a gun? A hammer? Will he literally dismember my body and burn me in that barrel? What if someone sees? What if he gets caught?
I don’t think any of that matters. I think he does what he sees. Maybe he’s trapped just like I am. Maybe he’s been trapped since they pulled him from that dark water in his father’s suicide cave.
But looking down at him, I find that none of that really matters. I’m ten years old again, standing at the edge of some unknowable darkness, feeling the cool air as it yawns wide and gets ready to swallow me whole.
It’s time for me to go. I always loved you. I love our baby girl. And I’m sorry that I never told you any of this be…
I can feel him staring up at me. Oh God, I can feel him from here.
I’m climbing the railing, but it’s not me! It’s not me doing it! I don’t want to die! I’m not killing myself! I’m not ki
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