From Clearing to Clearing

Houses seem far and lonely enough on agricultural flatlands, and some are even separated by the woods. This area was once a forest, then nothing, then a more orderly forest with spots of clearings lived in by people who tend their soil and animals for food and money and the respect of their own selves. Here, two neighbors are literally distant, and each is confined within their own pack of people—be it their family or employees or both—living in their bubble of chores inflated by necessity and pride. Some of them have been around forever, and some are just visitors fleeing from a different life. A lonely man can—if there’s nothing more to do that day—stand under the skies of August and yell something like “I’ll find you! I’ll kill you!” with all the pressure his tobacco-ridden lungs can produce, shooting his voice into the neatly planted lines of trees, and can throw stones and cry at the woods and demand its perpetrator step up for what happened last night.

This old man buried his wife yesterday, so he’s understandably sad and erratic, but the reason for his anger is not related to his wife being dead. Not directly. The woman died of a sickness mainly caused by the husband’s personality. He wasn’t aware of this, of course, but none of his children accompanied him on his way back from the funeral, which he felt said something bad about him. He drove home, noticing the empty space on the passenger side, and thought of nothing but the day’s last task—feeding the pigeons. It used to be the two of them tending to the pigeons, up until a week ago, when he became the sole keeper of them. So yesterday, when he got home from his wife’s departure to the hole, he had the urge to feed and let out the pigeons to fly graceful circles—as if there was a new way of living to be worked out with a deadline he’s already out of.

Upon arrival, his land seemed as if they had both been dead for quite some time. The scattered bits of his life’s work got lost in the overwhelming calm, which is nature’s acceptance of the upcoming fall. He felt like an intruder. He was looking at the isolating woods and stopped his mind from going further. He took his long, hook-ended wooden handle and opened the cage extending from the side of the roof that serves as a kind of balcony for the pigeons. They got out and were flying in graceful circles.

He got inside the whitewashed adobe house and climbed the ladder at the end of the narrow pantry and opened the trapdoor to the attic. The floor was covered in feces—he could’ve told this with his eyes closed—and the whole loft seemed neglected to him, so in a hasty attempt to set the new routine for the rest of his days, he scraped off the guano and poured seeds into dispensers, still in his black suit.

By the time they returned from the sky, the rectangular headspace of his house was cleaner and more orderly, and he felt a sour satisfaction, for this was proof of him managing alone. The birds kept hopping in on their door—his window—and the attic started to get crowded, and his old suit had become a damp blanket, sucking on his skin. After a hopeful gaze at his remaining company, he was about to go and close the divider between wild and domesticated on the roof outside. He was careful with the ladder, slowly sinking into the floor, one step at a time. The trapdoor stood vertical; he unhooked the support. The flowing of birds looked strange from his perspective—chin up over the attic’s floor—like when you lie on the ground looking around and you’re suddenly 10 again. They were swooshing and swirling, trying to settle, and the more arrived, the more it seemed he was one of them—an unconscious animal that’s being taken care of. One of the birds landed on the standing, supportless trapdoor, and another flew over there as well to join or claim the place, and they ended up jumping and flapping at each other, pushing the thick piece of wood out of balance. He was unaware and then unconscious.

Waking up with a head injury is like waking up from a violent dream with a mind-shattering hangover. He had to pry his eyes open because the map-like rivers of blood on his face dried over the lids. It took him a good hour to get up and clean himself, with every movement of the head driving a bottle opener into his brain. “Fuck,” he thought many times, but the most dreadful realization came to him when he got outside and heard the squeaking of rusty hinges and the clapping of pinewood. The cage was left open for the night.

At the fastest pace his condition allowed, he climbed the ladder and pushed the door with a nosebleed and saw a scene of violence: blood, feathers, and bits of birds all around. Shortly after, he hysterically confronted the surrounding forest under the August skies, and revenge was cooking. “I’ll find you! I’ll kill you!”

With nothing in his stomach, he walked into the woods. Heavy iron teeth were dangling shut from his shoulder, trying to balance them with holding a rifle at arm's length on the other side. He stopped to retch many times, but nothing would come out; his lips cut long stretches of saliva, and he kept going with fearsome muttering. Anger, he knew well; the fact that he was alone now made it even more stinging. He couldn’t admit it, of course, but it’s because there was no lightning rod—i.e., his wife—around anymore, and the truth was that it granted a certain freedom of expression—i.e., killing—he never had before, so he went on curious about himself and the depths of his rage and planted seven traps.

A heavy storm came down on that night. He sat in the attic amongst the remains of birds, waiting. He was silent, but the crashing water on the tiles above was loud, and so was the thunder, and so was his heart. With every pulse circulating his body, a painful jab landed on the top of his head, but the only thing he was focusing on was the sound of the cage opening and shutting outside on the roof. Through the tiny window, flashes of lightning illuminated the dark triangular prism he was facing to the point he wasn’t sure if it was the light or the darkness that was flashing. His rage was feeding off the excitement of the storm, and his patience got reinforced by his rage, which proved to be rewarding when he finally heard a long skip in the beating of the cage and the steps of something on the tiles. He aimed at the window and steadied his posture. He wasn’t sure how long it would take until that something noticed him, so the moment its head got through, he pulled the trigger, and the fox died.

He woke up feeling better. He cleaned the attic once again and closed the cage for good. The storm tore through his land; the ripped covers of plastic greenhouses revealed rib-like frames that looked like skeletons of half-buried dinosaurs. He took solace in the amount of repairing ahead of him, but first he was to collect the traps that had become needless over the last night.

The mud was sucking him in; each step in the woods said stop, but he wouldn’t listen. He was sweating and slipping and falling and limping to each trap he placed out the day before, and even though he felt much better than yesterday, it was infinitely more tiring with the mud and without the drive to kill. The sun was low by the time he got to the sixth, and as he dragged himself to the last one, he was thinking about the woman who used to walk these woods with him. His mind wandered toward the reunion in a better place, where he could look at her again and she would be there. This was the whole fantasy.

As he got lost in his thoughts and futile desires, he felt out of place outside; he longed for home and a bit of comfort to properly mourn. He wasn’t sure where the seventh was exactly, and at this point he was willing to come back for it another day. In his last, half-hearted attempt, he turned around and looked in each direction when, in a ray of sunshine, he spotted a cloud of flies. He walked over and found himself on the edge of a ditch, looking through the buzzing insects at an unknown boy lying still with his leg caught in the rusty iron fangs of the bear trap—knee disappeared, nearly dismembered, dead. Next to him was a younger boy, squatting and waiting for something he had less and less hope of happening. He looked puzzled and afraid, and when the old man opened his mouth, he got up and ran.

He wasn’t sure what he was going to do, but he followed the boy throughout the forest to another clearing. The house there stood higher than his, which made him feel smaller than the boy out of breath with the sluggish little legs running through its door. He waited for whoever the child was running to, hiding in the forest’s frontline behind a trunk he didn’t realize he was hugging. He was thinking maybe if he can get rid of the traps fast enough, there’s no way to connect him to the death of the infant. Except the other boy saw him with traps like that dangling on his side, and if someone were to examine the case thoroughly, it would become clear that he’s responsible. He figured his best chance was fleeing, but then the boy came back outside, silent and alone. In the rush of opportunity, he got up and hurried in the boy’s way, calling him in the least threatening voice his personality was capable of, but it came out as a sort of cover for bad intentions. The kid disappeared in the building, which made him stop once more, but he heard nothing and saw no one else coming out, and it just occurred to him that no one was repairing the damages from last night’s storm. He became certain the child was alone.

Despite his belief, he snuck up to the porch carefully and alert, looking for something he could use in case self-defense was needed against whatever was waiting inside, and he was soon choking the wooden handle of a metal-headed rake. His emergence on the steps was accompanied by hollow thuds and creaks and the sandpapery sound of dry dirt under wet soles. For a moment, he took cover beside the doorframe and tried to decide ahead what to do when he finds him. He’ll probably kill. He’ll kill—or at least try to kill—everything alive he finds inside, and that’s enough for now.

He stepped inside the doorframe searching for movement, so it took him a while to notice the body of a middle-aged man with a stab wound on his inner thigh lying on a dark blanket of clotted blood. The old man’s hand started to shake, but on further inspection, he noticed that the puddle the victim finally bled out upon dying continued in a trail leading out of the room through the same door the tiny footprints were leading to. He wasn’t sure about killing anymore, but stepped inside to find his witness.

A man who considers himself rational is hardly taken aback, that is, if someone’s watching. Everything he saw suggested that the boy was in there, but when he opened the door, he found the blood and footprints getting lost in the dirty grey carpet of a long room with shelves from floor to ceiling and stacks of non-perishables overflowing. His mind was playing games, he thought. He was, for a brief moment, also thinking about taking some of this home with him. His legs started stomping in disbelief, trying to find a secret hatch or something that could explain the whereabouts of his witness. His feet were sore, and the stomping hurt so much he couldn’t feel anything wrong, but his eyes caught how the carpet loosely lifted at the base of the innermost wall. He peeled it back and found himself a trapdoor.

He slowly descended the staircase towards the light coming from an open room at the bottom, reflecting on the ripples of water that flooded the floor. Getting closer to the entrance, he held the rake up to his waist to protect his thighs, but before stepping into the water, he dipped its handle to make sure just how deep the bottom was: it was waist-deep. The water was cold, and it made his shaking even worse as he waded inside the concrete cube underground, where he found the boy sitting on the top of a bunk bed gripping bloody scissors.

In the room were also a television, a single bed, a fridge, a corkboard with drawings and cutouts, toys and notebooks adrift, a dripping ventilation unit, and a lifeless woman floating in a strange, tilted way. He told the boy to stay where he was while he checked the body. The woman looked as if she was reaching for her jewelry she had lost at the edge of the pool. He tried to pull her from the wall, but she was stuck. He started to feel out where her arm went, trying to keep his chin above the water around the corpse. He felt metal encircling her wrist; his fingers glided over the small links of a short chain and found out she was handcuffed to a pipe so low on the wall she didn’t have enough reach to come up for air when the basement got flooded. The boy remained still and said nothing.

He wasn’t sure he made the right decision leaving the boy down there, but out here—breathing the end of summer, bearing the weight of the cool air thickened by the moisture of dusk, contemplating nature and watching its darkening lushness from a stranger’s porch—the approaching sound of sirens seemed out of place to him.