Sep
22
the cornfield
She never saw the shovel coming.
It didn’t kill her and it wasn’t much of an escape plan after all.
I met her husband at the swinging door that separated the living room from the kitchen, before he could see her sprawled out and bleeding on the tile floor.
“Let’s get this done” I muttered and pushed him towards the front door.
The truck started the first time he turned the key which must have been some sort of record. I didn’t know who we were setting out to kill and neither did he. We had one stop to make before doing the deed and that was to find out who it was we’d be killing.
One day, long ago, he’d made a similar stop and was told to kill me. As far as anyone knew he had.
In a way he did.
Him and his ugly wife.
I was young and nobody really cared if I was alive or dead so they kept me around, mostly alive but a little dead.
If you’re a man reading this you’ll assume I am a man and if you’re a girl you’ll assume I am a girl because we all project everything into things we can identify with, except the man who treated me like a girl and his ugly wife who treated me like a man.
The truck had one headlight out and I sat praying that a cop would pull us over to give us a ticket and I could grab him and hold on tight and tell him everything but around here there are never any cops around.
Just cornfields.
So we drove through a big one. It swallowed up everything that wasn’t directly above us and the clouds were doing a good job of swallowing that up. Eventually the dirt road offered up a driveway and we turned down it. Up ahead stood a house, I’d been here a few times before, and around that house were parked a half dozen beat up cars or more. A few people milled around the porch.
The man pulled up, turned off the truck’s engine and got out. He strode up to the house, nodding to a few of the men loitering around like sheep, and disappeared into the house.
Just then his phone began to buzz on the seat. He had left it behind and it made a short series of beeps.
She was awake.
I read her messages that were obviously meant to have been read discretely by her husband.
“Kill that little fuck.”
“Now.”
“No questions.”
I turned the volume off on the phone, erased her messages and blocked her number but I still felt like a countdown had begun.
I watched the man walk up and get back into the truck.
Silently he slid the key into the ignition and turned it. It took about a dozen tries before it started.
Usually we had quite a drive before we arrived at the door of the person whom we were going to kill but tonight it was a local. We never left the cornfields. One just blended into the next.
The man knocked on the door and when the person answered the man pulled his gun and shot him. It wasn’t as nonchalant as I make it out, the sound of the gun firing always makes me jump a little and the sound of the last groan is always bad and the sound of the body collapsing to the ground is always worse.
I got out of the truck to help move the body.
“Shit” I said. “I forgot the shovel.”
“You have one fucking job” he snarled.
“That’s because I hit your pig wife over the head with it asshole. I probably knocked out a few of her teeth” I thought to myself and came as close to smiling as was possible for me.
“See if you can find one in the house. Or the garage” the man said flatly.
“Will do” I said.
I walked through the house then walked out the back door and ran into the cornfield.
Like I said… it wasn’t much of an escape plan.
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