Nourish

I. Steam

This dream is always the same, because it’s also a memory. She sits near the end of the dock, her delicate frame perched on a small black cooler, her back to him, her face to the sun. The day is brilliant, early summer light off the water nearly blinding. Charlotte isn’t fishing, but the tackle box rests near her feet, well-used and unlatched. Her chestnut hair, wavy, idles on one shoulder before flowing softly its last several inches. Her head is lowered and Carl sees as he approaches, her elbows on her thighs and her hands in front of her, hidden. Hiding.

Carl glides closer, cautiously, not wanting to startle her but aching to know what secret she cradles. Some deeper part of him, the part that remembers dreaming this dream before, whispers to him that he knows what she holds, that he doesn’t need to see it, but Carl’s feet continue down the length of the creaking, ancient dock, worn and sagging planks struggling against the urge to give up, splinter and sink. He smells her, that scent of the last summer flower fading and bowing to the coming season of decay.

He just begins to see over her shoulder. The side of Charlotte’s face is indistinct, a faded blur, like a memory just out of reach – amorphous but obviously there. But her hands, cupped together, are clear and detailed and keeping safe something terrible. Something incredible. Something only Carl would understand. Her breathing slows as Carl eases behind her, his right hand grasping her sagging left shoulder, squeezing gently in a request – a plea – to share with him her gift.

Charlotte holds her breath as time is held by a filament as thin as spider’s silk. Carl’s own breath catches in his chest as Charlotte begins to open her hands, with intent but desperately slow. Carl’s hand strays to the nape of her neck. From that deeper part of him that always remembers rises first a tremble, growing to a curse then a scream that this time he must see what she holds, that he cannot be denied again but knows he will awaken now, against his will, without discovering his sister’s secret. Carl can nearly see it, something familiar, a thing he once held also or will yet hold. He tries to will himself forward in time but is pushing against an unseen force he cannot budge.

And he wakes.

II. Rising

Charlotte loved to fish off their dock. Strange because fishing was for boys and for men. But Carl humored his little sister. Helped her, even. Sometimes. But as much as she looked up to him, Carl was estranged, detached from her. She would find her big brother in a stare at her, breathing through his mouth, head slightly to one side, and she would wonder what he saw when he looked at her. Did he see the small girl who needed him? Did he see the pleading in her eyes? Did he hear the frantic, silent scream to help her? To protect her? When she would whisper for him to hold her, to wrap her in warm security, he would pretend not to hear. Carl had his bruises too, wore them inside and out. Charlotte’s were mostly inside.

Their father, that thing with fists, brought either feast or famine, turning, it seemed, on nothing. As fickle as the weather. His constant was his bottle. It appeared as if from vapor, full and fully formed in his hand, to his lips, out his piss and back to vapor again. A nearly empty bottle was ever-present in their father’s clawed paw, and Carl often wondered if he filled them from a hidden faucet somewhere in the cabin, a spigot that gushed a torrent of ceaseless pain.

After food and the occasional used rags he passed as clothes, the mass of their father’s meager income from odd jobs in the nearby town went to the cabin. The cabin seemed forever in need, and he attended to it assiduously, almost obsessively. Their father cared for it and spoke to it. Carl could almost hear their conversations. Some nights when Carl’s stomach clung to his ribcage, empty and dry, Charlotte’s whimper strained to be heard over their father’s hammering on a new shutter for the front window or a new patch of shingles on the roof. Both children were gaunt, whittled down to their essentials, but their father never seemed too thin and always had energy enough for a repair or a backhand.

He seemed to take nourishment from the cabin.

In time, their small one-bedroom house became the children’s dark mother and dreaded guardian that brought them torment and torture, wedded to their warlock father. It became the propulsive force that animated their abject fears. Its black magic gave Carl his bruises, and Charlotte her monster.

Carl was twelve, his sister seven, the first time the monster came for Charlotte. Carl closed his eyes and listened, face without expression, shoulders slumped, body relaxed and numbing. He licked his lower lip. He didn’t try to stop it – he wasn’t moved to interfere. Charlotte’s sobbing came through the bedroom wall and into the living room where Carl sat. Her cries soothed him. Carl was afraid and exhilarated. And guiltless.

Months washed by, gauzy motion at a distance. Charlotte suffered almost daily. The monster was brute carnality made flesh, and the cabin was complicit. Charlotte escaped into herself and her cries to Carl for help diminished. Some part of her knew her big brother had abandoned her long ago. If he had ever been there at all.

One day Carl found her fishing off the dock, her line in the brown, still water, eyes closed to the world. She wore pink flip-flops, her heels half covering a portrait of Wonder Woman ringed with double red lines. Carl stepped behind her. He reached for her chestnut tangles and began rubbing them between his thumb and first finger.

“Help me.” It was the last time she asked.

“I can’t.”

“You could.” Her tone didn’t suggest, just softly stated.

A heavy silence.

“I won’t.” He turned and walked back to the cabin.

Charlotte vanished the next day, fishing from the dock. Carl found her worm struggling on the dock, writhing around the tiny harpoon, tipping a line never cast.

That was the day the cabin began talking to Carl.

He listened.

III. Strike

It had been in his family for generations, Carl said. Their grandfather had built it after the war. Carl didn’t remember which war. Or which grandfather. He told interested parties the cabin was like family to him. For twenty-two years he had cared for it and lived in it (lived with it). The cabin wore its clichéd “one-bed, one-bath” description on the booking app with unembarrassed pride, never trying to be more than it was, but striving to live up to some unwritten cabin-in-the-woods standard: rustic, cozy and best enjoyed in the throes of autumn maroons and oranges burned. It succeeded and served Carl a living. He didn’t make much by it; he didn’t need to. The work was Carl’s reward.

Carl also owned a smaller cabin, more akin to a shack, one mile up the winding and wooded dirt road that fed his cabin and a few others scattered haphazardly around Lake Nowhere. He built it himself, to stay close to his cabin while enjoyed by renters. He only rented his cabin to guests for weekends, long or short, and checkout was always on Sunday.

His cleaning ritual hews to a line but flexes with the needs of the cabin. He will start in the bathroom, work outward from there, take his time, never hurry. Carl loves to clean, to relive. He loves Sundays and loves his cabin. And his cabin loves him.

Carl remembered that irksome rotten plank in the dock as he closed the trunk of his hatchback with his elbow, arms crooked around the green plastic tub of cleaning supplies. He needed to fix that plank before someone put their foot through it and hurt themselves. That just wouldn’t do. No, no. He eyed it briefly from a distance as he strode to the front door, his head turned slightly, and clicked his tongue in chiding reminder: next time. Goosebumps tickled his arms as he reached for the door handle, throttled by a wind that hissed across the water before licking his neck. Carl loved the anticipation of what came next.

He steps inside and closes the door. That familiar metallic smell (ferrous iron) lights up his greedy olfactory bulbs. He is mindful; for this moment he is in this moment; he is present. Just him. And the now.

Anne had messaged him through the app with a question about the grill. Gas or charcoal? She asked about the security deposit. Isn’t that a bit high for a one-bed, one-bath? He explained how the cabin was dear to him, had been in his family for many moons. She and her beau would get back their deposit within three days of checkout and besides, once they saw the morning light shimmering off the lake and the trees endlessly shading red, quiet for miles and the smell of damp earth, nothing else would matter. Deal sealed, they booked for a long weekend.

Ginger steps on the entry rug; disturb not lest ye be disturbed. Make for the bathroom with nary a glance to the cracked bedroom door. Not yet. Routine is the watchword and the deliverer of peace: always save the best for last. Yes, yes. Objective reached. Supplies down. Don’t slip. Gloves on.

Carl smirks. Begins.

IV. Prepare

They met Thursday at the cabin. Classic yippy yuppies from the city ­­– a power couple in an empty room. Anne with the perky tits and pert little ass, on the early side of thirty, head like a bubble and eyes hung with vacancy signs. Carl couldn’t recall hubby’s name, but his head and face were hard to forget: asymmetric, elongated, squinched from both sides as if his face, once round, had been mashed in a vice. He imagined Moe cranking the vice handle through popping jaw and a woo-woo-woo until Mr. Fishhead, eyes bulging, nearly lost his third dimension. After showing them around the cabin and grounds, explaining the dos and don’ts, the local must-sees and don’t-bothers, Carl said he would see them again at checkout time on Sunday. He told them that together they would toast to the cabin.

Bleach is applied, sponges soaked and wrung. The going is smooth, expected. Calming.

Carl grins. Continues.

Carl was fourteen the day the bird fell. Late afternoon, typical October day, Carl sat nursing his left temple and ear with a cold can of Coke, in the dry grass a few feet from the water. He turned when he heard the soft fluff. He found the fledgling struggling for the fading daylight beneath the leaves, merlot of maple and sienna of oak. Lifting its almost weightless life to his eyes, Carl narrowed his focus on the helpless form. No childhood admonishments like never pick up a baby bird that’s fallen from the nest because the mother won’t take it back wandered into the blackness between his ears, for there had been no such warning, no teaching. He had never held such a thing, never taken into himself the soft smell of a fresh life and was unsure of his feelings. An excited tingle crawled from Carl’s hands and moved to his spine as he cradled the frightened creature. There was something else, another feeling just below the excitement that was like a push and a pull in the same direction. He was being urged. Carl loved this feeling, and greeted it like an old friend.

It was too late for fledglings.

Carl crunched the bird’s neck, rolled it between his thumb and forefinger, as its last sound came in his ears. He dropped the thing, stared briefly and then went inside the cabin to change his shorts.

Bathroom complete, supplies stowed in green plastic tub, towels in garbage bag, now outside, back, to the spigot. To cleanse and attend to the living room.

The night after Carl’s eighteenth birthday (a no-key affair), his father failed to return from a liquor run. A farmer found his earthly remains the next afternoon, ejected from the car in a ditch not far. Carl could smell the whiskey wafting from the broken corpse in the morgue before the medical examiner folded down the white sheet. No investigation. No look at the car, or the brake line. Three more days and Carl was knew with clarity his purpose, blinding in its darkness. The cabin was finally his. The cabin would nourish him. And he would return the kindness.

Carl learned the cabin’s tastes over time, through many conversations, and was delighted but not surprised by their concord with his own. He and the cabin were family, after all. His attention to its needs was proactive, preventive, never letting a crack spread or a roach skitter to safety. Trim and shutters touched up with paint each spring, while each fall Carl stretched on the ladder to excavate the summer debris and the squirrels’ buried treasure. What the cabin needed, Carl provided.

Over the years, there were many Mr. Fishheads and their plus ones, looking to reconnect with nature (can you be disconnected?) and claim their illusory status as woodsy MacGyvers, impressive enough at least to get them laid, laid again beneath the pine boughs of the one-bed, one-bath. Or to escape the hubbub of the city life, to rollick in the lakeside communal hum. Whatever their reason, they were commonly fated to no uncertain end. The world teamed with Fishheads. Carl would cast the line, but the cabin was the baited hook.

Living room complete. Satisfaction. But nothing like what is to come. To cleanse again and prepare for the denouement.

In the bedroom. It always ends there.

V. Feast

The bedroom door opens full - a dank, sated maw ready to disgorge its recent morsels. Carl steps to the threshold and begins to melt with the room. He’s pulsed with an instant symphony, a single strident chord of Gothic volume smashing on a cosmic organ, its sheering blast penetrates and pulls him closer. A soundtrack to accompany the retelling of the climax. Of their end.

The corner lamp comes on bright. Like a canvas unfurling, the glorious vision fulfills the sacred need of his quintessence, a universal orgasm bleeding in Planck time, stretching around an infinite frame. Carl’s eyes slow dance with the scene, savoring every vignette of the languid panorama: the knotty pine rafters ooze like aging candles, dripping tendrils of sinew that waver, tremulous, above the bed; bones opened, their sweet, crackling echo draws taut, escaping marrow deep vermilion; walls of light-brown pine reflect a masterpiece of abstract release, black tension resolving in scarlet horror, an uncommon spray of cerise dapples and gleams; bedsheets to windowsill made gorgeous with violent consummation. No surface escaped the artist’s savage brush.

Entranced but alert, Carl floats to the nightstand. He traces grooves wrenched by clawing fingers (oh yes, Little Miss Perky Tits, how you did struggle), two pink nails, wet, mark the end of that brief, beautiful terror. Carl works a tooth from the soft wood headboard and pops it into him mouth, its pulpy tuft a plaything for his tongue.

His smile is never wider, never more sincere. As before and always, the scene is cruel, sensual, and he is taken in, one with it.

As they were unmade, Carl is made whole.

VI. Rest

Carl is wet with blood, despite his vinyl gloves and apron. Stripping bare, he ambles to the shower. His ritual is complete, again. He is exhausted.

He climbs into the change of clothes he brought and sinks into the living room couch, content and smiling. More than content, Carl is happy. Happy and tired. He checks his phone and the rental app as an angler might examine a deep pool several yards upstream. Two new inquiries. He swipes by the first, a single man, late ‘40s, wanting to get out of town and fish for the weekend. His right eyebrow ticks up as he reads the next query. A couple from the city, the woman thin but supple, her beau a bristled pine cone. Another Fishhead plus one. Perfect.

Carl smiles and cocks his head to the side.

In his ear, Charlotte whispers her approval.

About the Author

When not immersed in the biotech industry, AJ Ryland is with his family in northern New Jersey. He enjoys reading everything, staring at aquariums and laughing with his wife and children.