Devil's Kettle

Empty.

Needy sits on the edge of the vast lake before her. The deep waters shimmer and sparkle under the light of the pastel sun and ripple off into the distance. Small pebbles poke her buttocks as she sits cross legged on the banks of the lake all alone. Hawks cry in the sky above her, circling the lake looking for a feed. 

The air is warm, humid and smells of fresh pine. The setting sun dips just below the horizon and glazes the lakeside in a pink glow. A strong breeze ripples through the surface of the lake and blows Needy's blonde wisps of hair away from her face. She looks at the calm shining waves of water and wishes she could drown herself underneath them. She regrets everything.  She regrets ever having been born, having lived in this cursed town. Ever being friends with Jennifer. Ever going with her to the dive bar to see Low Shoulder. The memories flash before her like a slide of grotesque pictures. She sees flashes of her and Jennifer at the bar. Dancing to that stupid song. The camera in her mind flashes onto a memory of her going to the dance to save Chip before Jennifer killed him. A flash of her holding his bleeding face in her shivering wet hands. 

My sweet Chip.

 The thought rises up in her like the bile of vomit up a sickened throat. She pushes  it back down. She wishes she could cry, she wishes she could mourn him, she never got a proper chance to grieve him, no, every ounce of grief hardened into pure rage when she broke into Jennifer's bedroom and stuck her box cutter into her rotten heart. She remembers how it felt when the blade broke Jennifer's flesh and sunk into her soft breast, it was like sticking a knife into a tub of softened ice cream. She remembers the warm blood welling up the blade and coating Needy's hands in its scarlet coat. It was the only feeling of pure joy she had ever felt ever since Low Shoulder came into Devil's Kettle. As she sits on the warm grey pebbles, the ground seems to breathe up and down with her thoughts. She wishes she had never done it. If she could wish her entire existence away, if she could bring Chip back. 

Oh Chip, a voice inside her cries. 

Her belly lurches and twists with something she can only recognize as the fading echoes of grief, distant and dead, she should grip at its slipping fingers and let it rip apart her insides, but she lets the hand slip away instead into the darkness inside her and her stomach reverts back into its pallid emptiness, she feels once again utterly dead and devoid of anything that has ever mattered. 

I'm dying. 

Yes, I am.

Needy smiles. Soon it will all be over. She closes her eyes and they well with hot tears. Soon she will be able to rest. To be with Chip again. She just has to let the sickness pass and metastasize into death. Soon it will be her fingers that slip into that darkened void along with wherever it is Chip went when he died. She too will become that distant fading echo. She just has to resist her primal urge to go to Jennifer, her body gnaws at her during her sick fits to go to the cemetery, to dig up her maker's body, to revive her again. 

But I don't want to live anymore.

The thought breezes through her mind in a whisper. It was quiet, yet it was deafening. 
No, she doesn't. So she won't go to the cemetery.  She looks up to the sky where pink hues dissolve in the orange lit horizon. She pulls her knees up to her chest and rests her arm on them, her head twists to her left. Her shoulders cover her mouth and a soft wind makes her hair ruffle down her back. The rim of her eyes are the color of glowing cherries. Her vision goes out of focus into a blur. Her eyes gently close shut, then open again. She must remain on the banks of consciousness and not slip into the waters of black. She holds on to the rims of the banks of wakefulness but her grip is loosening. Her vision goes out of focus again, this time her eyes shut entirely. And she lets go and slips into the waters of black down below. The sinking sun seems to explode before her shut eyes. She can still hear the hawks screeching in the sky. 

When she awakes the sky is dark. The air has that familiar, biting deathly chill to it, it feels like the sting of a raw lemon. The chill wafts into her shirt and pierces her skin, it's now prickled with tiny goosebumps. She expects to feel the gravel of the lake bank poke her back and hear the rustling of the water, instead she feels a wet marsh underneath her and she hears the stridulation of crickets. 
The grass is wet. Her left side welts with cold dew from the ground where she lays. 
Needy's eyes are wide awake now, her head rises and shoots from side to side. The air is dense with thick white fog wafting past her to glide forward. Streams of fog trail past her. Between the gaps of clear air she sees uncountable curves of cement planted on the grass. She looks up at the sign to her right diagonal, about five paces from her. A five foot fence of black wrought iron goes down a lane and stands between an asphalt pathway and the grass. Next to the fence stands a thin black iron pole that goes eight feet up to a white rectangle of wood that reads Hollosway Cemetery in black paint. The paint is chipped on the corners and looks like a pale brown halo of wood carrying the words. 

Needy cannot believe it. 

No, a voice inside her pleads to her body. 

NO! 

Her body rises up like a puppet pulled by invisible strings above her. Her gait is twisted and awkward.  Her right foot goes in front of her left and she begins to stride towards the direction of the fog. She tries to stop it, she tries to pull down her muscles from her insides, but it feels like pushing forward a wall of concrete. She at stumbles to her knees. Her palms hit the wet grass with a hard thump and she begins to crawl along with the fog. The pictures flash again, this time the images animate within the frame. A flash of Jennifer and her playing with their dolls in Needy's room, then a flash of them drinking that cool strawberry lemonade from an ice truck on the curbside during hot summer days when they were six. She sees Jennifer's tiny arm stretch out to hers while her black hair flows in the summer breeze. "Come here Needy, I'll never leave you!" Her childish voice echoes in Needy's ears like a ring of doom. 

Her arms push her body forward as she crawls on her knees through the fog, which has grown so dense its now a thick white cotton candy dangling and gliding amidst the cold air. Her knees are welted with cold water from the marsh grass. She can taste the fizz of the strawberry lemonade in her mouth. She sees her child arm clasp Jennifer's.  The timelines seem to melt together, she feels the heat of that summer sun ten years ago in the cold dark cemetery now, she bites the sugar crystals in her mouth to dust as she did when she was a child. The fog before her  face clears the way to a grey curved rectangle of cement with the engravement; Jennifer Check: 1992-2009. A gravitational force pushes her to look down, 

Look down! 

Look down! 

She doesn't want to, so her eyes dart downwards anyways, she sees her child palm clasp Jennifer's hand, running on the hot tarmac in the afternoon sun. 

"I'll never leave you either Jenny!"

Her girlish giggle reverberates in her mind and fades into the chirp of the crickets in the cemetery. Their intertwined fingers disappear before her and she's now back in the present. Needy stares down at a large rectangle of missing earth with a large heap of brown soil on its left. The hole in the ground goes down six feet. A maroon casket lies open inside the earth.

I'll never leave you, Needy. 

The empty casket floats on murky brown marsh water. The inner padding is stained with brownish mud. 

I'll never leave you. 

Needy cups her palms around her mouth and screams, for the first time since she turned, tears stream down her pale cheeks. Her tears are thick, viscous and jet black. The black stains her face. Her muffled screams gurgle into loud cries that heave up her throat from deep inside her belly. The fog grows dense again and clouds Needy's vision in its thick, vaporous white.