Spit it out
12 Kilos
The ancient woman is there, slowly cutting up the carrots and mealy potatoes that Garrett had gleaned from the garden earlier. She doesn’t jump or startle when Garrett comes awake howling like a vivisected animal. She doesn’t even stop her slow and deliberate cutting as she clears her throat.
“You do that a lot.”
Garrett isn’t even fully aware of who is speaking, not at first, nor is he fully sure of who the stranger sitting on the porch nearby even is, not until he gets a few shallow breaths between him and the mother of awful wake up calls.
“Sorry. The past has a way of coming for me in my dreams.”
Apologizing comes easy for Garrett, always has, but the ancient only shrugs as she grunts and reaches across to collect her sack of beachcomber finds. “Been there. You want peace? Amends?”
Given his time among people and knowing their terrible little ideocracies, Garrett figures he’s wasting time but he slowly nods and whispers out a “yes.”
“Stop trying to change things now, and stop worrying about all the shit you couldn’t change then.”
If only.
“I’m pretty sure it’s just my brain working through trauma, that or I’m losing what marbles I ever had to begin with.”
The ancient doesn’t skip a beat as she shucks clams into the pot. She waves her knife out at the beach in the distance. “See that yellow carcass yonder, skin all withered and wrinkled? See those big old ribs popped out and snapped off by all the weight of the big animal?”
Garrett is still foggy from the nightmare but he’s piqued by the ancients sudden need to speak in any amount or volume. “Yes, and I am happy to report that for the first time in days, I only see one of it instead of two or three.”
“That whale didn’t just appear. It beached. Thing sat out there huffing and wheezing for a whole day before it finally died. That animal had places to go, things to do. It wasn’t paying attention, too busy worrying and fussing over crap. You see how all that worry worked out for that whale?”
There was something in the moment, Garrett is sure he saw the ancient woman’s eye grow bright with purpose and emotion, if for only that moment. Telling most folk that it’s easy for them to move on, or seek serenity, comes easy for Garrett. Most folk haven’t lived his kind of life; not that it makes them less, or privileged, far from it. Most folk aren’t lucky or luckier, trauma isn’t a race, being a survivor of desperate misfortune isn’t a competitive sport. There are those experiences, most of them tragic, that single a person out in life. Decisions or circumstances that break the back of a lifetime, leaving its spine bent like a storm tortured tree.
The ancient’s back is surely crooked.
Without the usual defense for why he can’t possibly live in the moment or forgive himself for everything, Garrett has very little to argue with, until he remembers the girl.
“I…”
The ancient gets to the partially sun-dried fish portion of her cutting duties and actually stops when the dead air seems to drag on forever.
“You? You what?”
Garrett coughs and reaches for the bottle of bitter water only to remember that it isn’t on the porch anymore, hadn’t been for a few days now. He makes due with running his tongue around the inside of his mouth, wincing when it grazes the side of his left check.
“I abandoned someone. A girl. She was just cargo at first, but then she became more. I left her injured and drugged in the desert so that I could go die. That’s all I wanted to do, just kill them all until they finally got me.”
It sounds so much worse out loud. Garrett had thought it and said it in his head time and time again but he had never said it out loud until now.
I’m a monster, I’m the bad guy. I wasn’t doing the right thing or the right thing for her.
The first tear forms and runs down his face and Garrett starts hitching and wheezing, he hasn’t cried in years other than in hysterics, down in the Tumor Queen’s dungeons, maybe a few times as a child. The strangers killed his aunt, that was the last time he bothered to cry.
Something cold and slimy lands on Garrett’s face and neck. The smell takes a few seconds to register before Garrett stops the water works and begins wiping the fish guts off of himself.
“So what! This world is shit, we’re just turds splashing in the bucket. You hurt a girl; more than one I’d bet. You killed some people, well boo hoo for you.”
Garrett finishes wiping the filth off of himself and he stands up slowly, using the splintered and wobbly porch rails to steady himself. He walks over to the ancient as she finishes dumping fish into the dinner pot.
“I gathered some herbs; I’ll go get them ready to add to the pot.”
The ancient stands slowly as well, using the old lawn chair armrests to steady herself.
“I’m saying, the past is the past and the future is pointless to even think about. All anyone is, is who they are right here and now. You live now, you do now, anything else is wasted time.”