To Scar and Shatter

When the wind would roll through the mountain's trees, and they would creak and groan like old rocking chairs, he felt the least alone. When he would light the rusted lantern that hung before the threshold of his one-room cabin, and the smoke would flee to the darkening sky, he didn't feel alone. At night when he sat in the silence of his makeshift home, and through the lantern's leaking light, he stared at the chasmic, jagged scars that covered his skin and he would wait for the swirling of broken thoughts in his mind to fade into an uneasy sleep, he didn't feel alone. Yet when Hickory would have to go into the neighboring old coal town, he felt as isolated as he ever could.

    He would enter town as close to sunset as possible, having learned that the company of morning and midday only led to stares and whispers and unmannered children pointing. At the day's twilight, people could at least mistake his scars for a trick of the fading light.

    Like all days he went into town, he spent most of the morning pacing through the birch grove near his cabin, repeating that it would soon be over and he would return to his world. That was, after all, what the mountain was to him. It was all he knew. He knew the names of things, how to eat, how to sleep, how to function. Yet who he was, how he came to be on the mountain, where he was before, why he was the way he was, he didn't know, and that was fine. He knew what he knew and didn't know what he didn't know for reasons he didn't argue. At least, he thought, he would see Dana, the only store clerk who was nice enough to look him  in the eye.

Hickory later found himself at the stream that ran below his ridge and looked down at his reflection, a scarred, dirty thing. Here, the first fragmented thought of the day came, a memory of him laying on a wet, carpeted floor, heat surrounding him, the feeling of burning. A man's voice in the distance. A woman howling with grief. He decided it was not the day for the stream. 

He went back inside and sat on the mattress. He looked down at his disfigured hands and then to the corner of the cabin where he would not go. There, fragmented thoughts flowed like water, its source in a red wooden box that he both feared and respected enough not to destroy. He couldn’t remember what lay inside, or if he was the one who put it there. He then saw daylight was fading and he closed his eyes with a growing panic, knowing he needed to begin his trek. Before he set out, he walked over to a small table, where a roll of cash lay, bound by a green rubber band. Over twenty other loose green bands hung from a nail hammered into the wall above.

Winter was not far off, and the few remaining leaves that survived a recent rainstorm hung from branches like tiny wet rags. Not far off, the forest opened to a crammed street of worn row homes. The closer he got to the road, the steeper the decline of the terrain became. A car drove by on the street below, blasting music loud enough for Hickory to hear, and he shuddered. He passed a deteriorated hockey stick that leaned against an oak, the appointed marker that meant he was entering uncomfortable territory. 

He soon found himself in a vacant and overgrown lot, his usual entrance from the wilds. The bones of a ruined home's foundation lay buried under the high grass. He would often stumble over a fragment of cement slab. Today, though, he tripped over a blackened beam of wood, and his stomach turned, looking down at the ruins. He saw a flash of a screaming baby flailing. The sound of flames nearby. Raw, primal desperation while reaching for her.  

Beyond low clouds, the sun shone amber rays from the west, and the moon was already visible. He wouldn't have long before the task of heading back would become a painful session of stumbling around in the mountain's darkness. He quickened his pace down the empty road, keeping his head down. A television blasted the news from inside a nearby home. Dogs barked from inside another as he passed. A couple fought with a baby crying inside another, and he slowed down to listen. The mental image of a woman with black hair sobbing punched him hard. The sound of slamming doors. The punching of drywall. Two blocks down was the yellowing sign with cursive writing saying Mallo-Mart Convenience. To his relief, there were no cars in the parking lot.

Hickory feared music. Songs often triggered the broken thoughts. When he walked through the convenience store's glass doors, he froze, hearing a slow and whiny country song play from the loudspeaker. He envisioned Christmas lights strung up. A woman dancing to this song while wearing a Santa hat, giddy with laughter. The taste of cold beer and pretzels in his parched mouth.

 He shook off the wave of sensations and rushed to the first aisle, feeling a sense of panic come quick. He grabbed saltine crackers, jerky, and any cans he could grab. He rushed to the next aisle, where he picked up a box of matches, lighter fluid, and two bottles of aspirin. There were also hand mirrors and one caught his face. Beyond the grime and dirt, there were deep, white scars morphing his appearance. His graying hair and beard were disheveled, his eyes were bloodshot, and his teeth were yellowing. He held onto the mirror, grabbed a tube of toothpaste, and went to the checkout counter.

At the register, a teenaged boy stood staring at his cell phone. Hickory dropped the items down in front of him, and the boy started scanning without looking up. As the scanner's beeps mixed with the country music, Hickory looked out over the store. 

"What happened to Dana?" Hickory said.

"What?" the clerk said.

"Did Dana quit or something?”

The clerk finally looked up and jerked his head back once he finally saw Hickory. His face shifted from shock into a look of disgust. Once he finished scanning, he stared back without saying the total, eyeing him up and down. Hickory pulled out the cash from his filthy olive jacket and peeled off a fifty-dollar bill, averting the boy's face. 

"I need something smaller," the clerk said. 

"Dana had no problem with fifties. Dana was nice."

"Yeah, well, Dana got herself fired."

Hickory stared back with a blank expression. He balled his fist, white-knuckled until he finally thumbed through the cash and found a twenty. He slammed it onto the counter and walked out without waiting for change, rattling the bell and glass door behind him.

    He began to turn back toward the vacant lot, lip quivering, hands trembling, though now laden down by blue plastic bags. He contemplated grabbing a chunk of broken asphalt and chucking it into the store window. He looked further down the road, and in the encroaching darkness, a glowing red horse stood on its hind legs in blazing neon. He drifted toward it, unsure where his legs were taking him. He should be passing the hockey stick by now, he thought.

Under the glowing horse, the sign said "Buck's" in block lettering. Another flash featuring the same woman with the Santa hat on, now gripping his hand as they entered. He saw himself go into the place, drinking at a bar, seeing people laughing. 

Coming back to reality, he realized he was walking in, and as he did so, a plume of cigar smoke hit him, and more thoughts flooded his mind. He found a few patrons sitting at the bar debating politics. He strolled through, unnoticed, like a ghost, like someone who was never there, and never could be there. Yet something pulled him further in, from a forsaken place he locked away. Amongst the fairly empty bar seats, he looked at the array of photographs on the wall, many black and white pictures of miners. Some were of color, though, and one in particular he found a snapshot of a group of friends radiating young life and there in the front stood the woman from the flashes. He balled his fists and winced as if a floodlight blinded him. He then noticed through a window that he would be walking home in total darkness now, and he bolted straight for the door.

"Charlie?" a voice said as he walked to the exit.

Hickory didn't stop. He only focused on leaving.

"Charlie, stop!" the voice said.

Yet Hickory kept moving for the door until a firm hand grabbed his shoulder, and he whipped around to see a man wearing a name tag inscribed with Drew, Owner. As Hickory looked at him, a flash of younger versions of them both came. Images of them running alongside a dirt road with the sun beating down, the two boys grabbing salamanders and toads. School days of years past. Then, an ICU room sitting shoulder to shoulder. Finally, one of Hickory wrenching in tears and agony in this man's arms, covered in warm and wet and pain.

"My God," Drew said.

"I don't know you," Hickory said.

"I believe that, Charlie -- I mean, Hickory. Just please don't run away. It's dark now. You're going to have a hell of a time getting back up there. Sit with me a bit. You can stay at my place tonight."

"I don't know you." 

"Well, you can stay wherever you want. We can close up early, and you can stay here. Wherever you want. Just don't go up that mountain this late.” 

Hickory went for the door, but his feet wouldn't move. His body felt heavy, and he dropped his bags. At this point, the other bar patrons took notice and began whispering.

"Turn around, all of you," Drew said, but now there was defeat in his voice. 

He bent down and helped Hickory pick up his items and said no more. Hickory left and ran for the entrance to the mountain. 

It took twice as long to climb the mountain in the dark. As he trudged up the unforgiving slope, Hickory's mind reeled with images and thoughts and his heart pounded at the sight of this Drew fellow. Amid the darkness and the anxiety, he felt his left foot slip into a crag in the rock below, and before he realized it, he twisted his body the wrong way. Pain shot from his ankle up into his leg, and he heard a crack. His yelp echoed into the dark wood.

When he made it to the cabin, limping in pain and panic, he flung open the door and did not bother to light the lantern. He dropped the bags and collapsed onto the cold floor, and there, through throbbing and torment, he closed his eyes to be greeted by a white noise of dreams.

Hickory woke to a cloudless, colder morning. His body was stiff and frail, but it paled in comparison to the encompassing pain that blossomed from his leg. It took time for him to stand and then pick up the items he brought that lay scattered on the cabin floor. As he did, his mind immediately went back to Drew, the bar, and the picture with the woman from his fragments. 

Tears welled in his eyes, flowing from a place in his mind abandoned as one does a shutdown warehouse. He picked up the mirror he bought the night before and looked at himself. Canyons where tears flowed cut through the dirt on his face and intertwined with the scars that encompassed his body. He looked deep in the bright blue eyes that supposedly were his, and he now saw why Drew affected him so profoundly. His eyes were the same. Somewhere in the life that only now existed in broken pieces, Drew was blood.

Hickory hobbled to the front door and looked out. On the ground was another wad of cash, this one triple the size of his current. He put the money in his jacket that he still wore and sat down where his foodstuffs were now on a small fold-out table. He decided on jerky over a can of beans for his breakfast.

As he chewed the dry meat, fragments flowed through his mind. The typical. Fires. Screaming. Being burned. Being stabbed. Men laughing. The woman. The child. Whatever happened, it was too painful to acknowledge, and he, at one point, accepted that. But he there was truth to the thoughts, and today he couldn't hold the ruse that nothing wrong ever happened. The life that was the identity of Hickory. 

The pain in his ankle was getting worse. He popped some of the aspirin, knowing it wasn't going to help. He could feel his heartbeat through the pain. Even as he chewed the jerky, he could feel both body and mind screaming. His clouded satisfaction was tainted. For so long, he refused to pay it any mind. For so long, he was able to concede to the fact that whatever it all was, it was too painful, and the shattered state, scars and all, was how he was supposed to be because anything closer to the truth, any closer to the heat of the light, and he would melt in the boiling hot pain in an instant.

He limped to the corner he would never go, where a red-painted wooden chest waited like a sleeping serpent. Hands trembling, he reached for the unlocked lid and opened it. Inside there was a yellow envelope with a brass fixture. Inside there rested a photograph of him, the woman, and the baby on the day of the baby's birth. She was red-faced yet serene. The woman was both haggard and beaming. Hickory, or whoever he was, was there, clean-cut and ecstatic. Then, there was another thing that came out of the envelope. A torn receipt from Mallo-Mart dated four years prior. On the back, a shaking hand wrote, "We were too happy, and the world couldn't take that."

The return to town was grueling. Hickory had taken a tree limb and fashioned it into a shoddy crutch, yet abandoned it a half-mile down. With each step, a stab of pain roared through his leg, and soon enough, it caused him to trip and land hard on the same bad leg, causing a new eruption of pain and damage. With this something snapped inside his mind. Fragmented thoughts came rushing in. A house on fire, his wife crying for him, calling for their daughter. Something else was there too, darker and more cruel. And there was a word on his lips, and he didn't want to say it. He didn't know what would happen if it came out of his mouth. But it was there, he planted the seed or perhaps re-planted, and it was growing. The peace that blanketed him in this scarred form was becoming undone with every painful step.

When he made it to the lot, he looked down at his leg. Blood was seeping out of his pants in multiple spots. Now, it was midday, and several cars and trucks sped through the street. Children were out playing, and they stopped in their tracks, gawking. He soon saw the colorless, sleeping neon horse that rested above Buck's. He pounded on the door and soon slumped over as his energy gave way to vain hope. Soon enough, the door opened, and Drew opened the door to see Hickory.

"Charlie, my God," he said as he pulled him into the bar. Inside he propped him up on a chair.  "You stay there. I'm going to call an ambulance." 

"No. I know you," Hickory said. "Don't I?" 

Drew stopped pacing and looked at him. "You know me very well. I'm your twin brother."

Tears escaped Hickory's eyes in pain and affirmation and relief. "But I don't know you."

"You've been dealing with a problem, Hickory."

"Why do I call myself Hickory if I'm Charlie?"

"It was the name you chose after everything happened."

The picture of him and his family blazed in his mind now, and the words that a shaking hand wrote. "They're dead? The woman. The child," Hickory said.

Drew's face grew surprised and then sober. "Yes. They're dead."

 Pain blossomed throughout his whole body as a fire erupted all over again inside.

"What happened?" Hickory asked.

"It's a lot to say. There was a fire. An invasion. Cruel, jealous people we both once knew. They're dead too." 

Charlie wailed as the fragments in his mind grew and thickened and merged. There were things too horrible to put into words, pains too potent to name out loud. Even Drew now began to cry. The name that hung heavy on his lips broke free. 

"Who was Lilly?" Charlie said.

"Your daughter. And your wife was Rachel." 

The sound of the names echoed into the draining shell of his being. "Are you the one leaving me all this money?" 

Drew wiped his tears and moved away.  "Just because you closed off everything didn't mean I closed off you. I had to take care of my brother."

That was the last question he had. The answers were there, heavy in his mind, a new albatross in his soul, too heavy to carry in his weakened state. Though he was inside a bar, and his body was now subsiding to pain, he felt a wind, the groaning of trees, the laughter of a child, the touch of a love, the warmth of a brother. He didn't feel alone, and he closed his eyes as he let go of everything.