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Jenora Rock is not a small town. The blood of humanity moves through it. You are accustomed to seeing strangers; to taking in and ignoring their eccentricities; to serving them something in a cold glass and turning away your face; to moving on from them.
Noting this, still, it would be a lie to say you are not utterly distracted by him.
Let us observe three points:
For one, his hair is fucking blue. Blue like the hair of one of those plastic-limbed dolls you saw in a museum once in July when you were twelve; slightly worse for wear, scuffed, their rubbery clothes melting upon them in the display from the passage of time. They were carried in ice from another world nested within the hands of children. His blood was carried in ice from another world to die before you in bursts of blue.
It’s not like you’ve never seen it happen elsewhere. Green, crimson, lilac. Still, it turns your head, like a rude neon sign he was born with. Like his hair says, “My blood is more interesting than yours, and older, and prone to decay.” Like you are watching his genome unravel into a fireworks show, and you know you shouldn’t watch out of respect for the currently transpiring train-wreck extinction of the human race but you love color and sound and flame.
Now, you? Your blood is not interesting. You should know.
Secondly, he came in, sat down, and with soft politeness he ordered an entire cheesecake. Not, like, “One slice of cheesecake, please,” but “One cheesecake, please.” To this, you, resisting the urge to chew on the end of the pencil in order to look at him, reply, “Alright, slice of cheesecake, anything else?” and he says, “One cheesecake.” No added inflection, no urgency, no frustration, just an irritating press of patience.
So you have to roll the interaction around in your mouth until you decide this isn’t worth fucking with and he can have the whole damn cheesecake if he wants.
You present it with a fork and a flourish. He thanks you more formally than seems appropriate, leaves the tab open, and pushes the menu towards you with his fingernail. His fingernail, putting distance between the paper and his skin.
Taking the menu in your hands after this, it feels dirty. The whole bar feels like it has a layer of grime you never noticed, paired with a light dusting of his disinterested, unspoken disdain. Lovely.
Now, finally, the thing that holds your interest above all else. Let us address it (and in the process, call into question everything about you—your propriety, your humanity, your fitness for polite society. Whatever). It is secured to his shoulder, sewn and soldered into the construction of his overcoat. It took you longer than it should have to identify it, a stretching span of seconds where you stared unbelievingly at the shape of it, but, once you had, you were utterly fixated.
A human skull.
It is a more sickly yellow than the bone keys of the upright piano on the far wall. If it is anywhere near as old, it is buffed by years of sand carried across it over the wind, by the brush of fabric and fingers. It has most of its teeth, still, glimmery and slightly translucent in the lamplight.
Every thread of your being aches to reach over and rap your fingernails against it in rippling succession. To push the pads of your fingertips along the forehead and test your hypothesis; to know if it is solid and smooth and oiled with time or if it is still fresh enough to be a little rough and foamy to the touch.
You are not stupid. You do not reach out but with your eyes.
The stranger, for his part, does not much acknowledge your existence after ordering. That’s great. There’s no point to this kind of thing, anyway, to indulging the screaming siren of your interest. You need to leave alone the man dressed like a time bomb and focus on whatever the hell has adhered to the counter here with a vengeance. Scrub it until it relents. Focus your fingers on something tangible instead of the imagined texture of bone.
This is when the evening turns to shit.
You hear the bell, so you look up when they come in, and they just keep coming in. Shoes following shoes, filth following filth. Strangers that laugh too loudly, like they want you to notice. Guns at their sides. Women in chains. Blood icing inside you, a punch of nausea, recognition that is properly instant. Sweat and bile and a heartbeat so striking it might kill you now, before you even do anything to them.
You will do something to them.
Dropping behind the counter like a stone, you slide cold-damp palms to the safe and tick through the dial.
The rifle.
Almost as old as those museum dolls, but made for better reasons, it serves you better. It does not decay as beauty does. It is warm, utilitarian, violent power in your hands (and this is why you love to hold it).
This is what the rifle says: I will reach out, and with the finger of my gaze, I will obliterate you.
Still, trying to intimidate them with it is stupid. There are many of them; one of you. They have many guns; you, one. Nevertheless, you cannot let them rot on the furniture and floor. You cannot let them spit and soak into the wood like piss. They will eat your heart out with their presence.
They should know you would not welcome them. The whole world should unwelcome them, should snarl and snap and draw away from them, closed teeth bared like a burned mouth is barred to the embered end of a charred stick. But they are built with endless confidence. They know you should not welcome them; they expect you will.
The world does not live by your laws.
Squatting in the shadow, with your sticky palms and unschooled face, you look up at your only observer like an animal under headlights. He looks at you like an oncoming accident.
He does not give you away to your unwelcome visitors.
With your stare, you wrap theoretical fingers around his theoretical hands, and your eyes say, “Don’t you dare.” Through your open pupils you spill your blood into his, into him, and your blood says, “Don’t you dare.” You bind him into conspiracy, into intent to slice open and splatter.
Don’t you dare.
In the end, here is the deepest truth; you do not have it in you to roll over. If you were to serve those men, you would have to walk over there. If you were to walk over there, and your leg were to brush the shoulder of one of those women or your gaze were to brush her eye, a dog would rip out of your ribcage, wild and broken, and the men would shoot you anyway. Better to try and kill them from here, with patience and bullets, than from the heart of them with your teeth and nails and the whites of your eyes.
You will stand up, you will say “Gentlemen, I’m afraid I have to ask you to leave,” and whatever happens next is up to god or the devil.
Fuck.
You register too late the shouting (because there is almost always shouting), only understanding the implications when the first round of gunfire deafens you and the useful end of a fork skitters across the floor at your feet. Bullets intended for the man above you destroy the plaster wall behind the bar, embedding in the backboards.
Any belief in temporary alliance is dashed when he turns to you—you, crouched in shadow and teetering anticipation behind the counter—and says “May I have another fork, please?” Like anyone else knows that you’re there. Like he doesn’t know you are vulnerable. Like a good joke.
Look at him and try to burn him from the inside out. You are the sun and you can cook the inside of his head through the concentrating power of the lenses in his eyes. Think about dropping the rifle, throwing your body over the counter in a mess of limbs and fury and tearing the flesh from his face with your teeth.
However, you frequently think about throwing your body over the counter and tearing the flesh from customer’s faces, so this is normal. You can handle this.
Besides–this isn’t happening, not now, not to you.
Your denial is interrupted by a second round of shots, bullets scattering splinters across the bar and into your hair. One of those bullets goes straight through his palm, a slick little hole punch, and a thin arc of his blood laces across your cheek. You feel this happen rather than see it. The blood is at first hot, but quickly cools.
It makes you newly aware of the shape of your skin on your face.
The stranger, for his part, reaches the end of some invisible rope he’s been unspooling, patiently, politely, to the slavers’ benefit. Now he turns and raises that bloody hand high, so the light can make a play at shining right through it.
After that, it happens quickly.
Something carnivorous rips out of his chest and tears into the men. Say–where did he get your dog? Where did he get your broken fury? Maybe you should get to know each other better, swap numbers so you can take the things that live inside you on playdates to the park.
He has stolen even your idea of burning their minds through their eyes, of reaching out with the finger of your gaze and obliterating them.
Alone, behind the bar, seeing the shadow of movement on the floor; how were you to parse the raw sound? How were you to understand the shape of perfect violence?
First, you crept your eyes over the counter. As soon as you saw what you saw, you stood, stunned, slack-limbed and awed, bloody-faced, in performance; role of the witness.
You. You are clever, yes, and strong enough, and capable with your hands. Yet what are you to do before the supernatural but sit in envy of the shadow of god? Perhaps it is better you do not get to know him. Maybe the animals of your fury wouldn’t get along. After all, he feeds his. Yours rises shakily from its rot to look on in starving anticipation of the strike.
He strikes. He strikes over and over, each time more slowly, each with new sounds uncovered and extracted from beneath flesh and bone, vocal or visceral. He strikes until the other patrons have fled, until he is looming over one man left in blood on the floor, writhing in it, killing himself with his own body.
You had never seen a beating heart; you have. You had never tasted the air of death; you have. You have everything, now. You have consumed the deconstruction of evil.
What had the stranger even said? What curses had he laid before your feet, yours and theirs, before the whole entire world? You cannot recall the words. Only the ragged harshness of his voice, the spitting fury, the heat of it. Like how the inside of muscle must be hot; rawly.
The hinged counter makes a horrible noise as you lift it to slip out and towards the carnage, but the stranger doesn’t startle. The rifle’s wooden stock in your hands, its sling waving loose and useless before you, boards complaining as you cross them (usually comfortable sound swaddled by the noise of laughter and talking, but now stark and vulnerable in how the creaks sequentially betray your movement), you step to the edge of the gore and look down at it. In the corner of your eye the stranger breathes a deep, shuddering breath. Not into silence; into the now-background-noise of labored and agonized death produced by the man under your gaze.
You should take the rifle, now, and put this gasping straggler out of his misery.
Gently, slowly, and with deliberation, you click the safety on and kick the bullet back out of the chamber.
Oh, but the fact that the man has to wait for it to be over must be the best part. And who are you to take that away? The stranger doesn’t make him wait too long, anyway.
Then it is just the two of you and three women. He gives them a handful of words you do not hear, too distracted by the artful way the gore clings to the fibers of the rug and catches the light, delicately, the way it smears over floorboards and tells a story like signs of a scuffle in sand.
Here, there were footprints and then there were none. Here, a snake ate a rat. Et cetera.
You have nothing to offer the women yourself, anyway. Nothing but alcohol and the inability to look other people in the eye.
The alliance is real now, you decide, because you are making it real. When he finishes with them and glances over at you, you flip out your fingers in a gesture of surrender, the bullet you disengaged from the gun sparkling in the light between them.
Just like that, he gives his back to you, as if pantomimed intention truly renders you and your gun a toothless threat. As if you really mean it—and, of course, you do, but he doesn’t know that. He returns to his seat at the bar, like none of it happened. You return to the scene before you.
They’re bad for business, you know. Corpses. Not ghost stories. Not a hint of blood between the floorboards. Those are conversation starters.
But these are corpses, fresh and awful, and they will have to go.
Nothing to it but a bit of elbow grease, in the end. Lift with your legs, consider the strain, feel the burn in your thighs, move the body to the door in a neat and orderly fashion. Get it outside, where it’s someone else’s problem—where customers do not have to look at the twisted remains of former limbs and the raw caverns of chests. It’s not really your job, but you’re not really here, not really, and this isn’t really happening to you. So it might as well get done.
Kneeling down, you slip your hands between what’s left of the man’s arms and twine them around his gory front. Here, bone you could run the tips of your fingers over, should you not mind a bit of blood. You wipe something cool and itching from the corner of your mouth with your tongue. You realize too late what it was. Ah, did he see you?
Whether or not he saw that, he’s seen you again. You and your corpse-chore.
“Oh,“ he calls, dully, as if noticing a dish he left absentmindedly by the sink. “I’ve made a mess of your workplace. Allow me.”
The muscles cradled in your arms kick twitchily to life against you. Creaking, the body hauls itself onto its own legs and wobbles into movement, towards the door, followed by its comrades. Shoes after shoes. Corpse after corpse.
You can’t help it. You let out a high, disbelieving laugh, almost unvocal, just wheezing breaths punching from your chest and into the rancid air.
A puppet show. That’s what it is.
After this display concludes, a few bold souls are already trickling back in. What’s a little blood, you suppose, when there is liquor to be drunk? For his part, the stranger begins scraping plaster dust and blood from his food with his knife, unearthing subterranean edible sections. You step over to him. You overstep.
“What are you doing?” you ask, like it isn’t obvious.
He looks at you flatly, which means, “Isn’t it obvious?“
“Nonsense,” you say, in response to silence as if to words. “Let me get you something that isn’t all fucked up.”
This means, “Thank you,” or “I owe you,” or “I’m going to spit in this one because how dare you nod at me behind the counter like you want them to shoot me and then tear them to pieces and not tell me how you did it? How dare you? How dare you give me something new to want?”
All you have left is a slice of sponge cake.
Your fingers brush his when you push the fresh plate to him (why now, and not the first time?) and you know that you should let them linger. This is how animals indicate interest in animals; this is how humanity signals desire. Still you shrink from him. Not out of fear (you think so little of me? You think I can’t handle this? You think I haven’t seen worse?), but out of habit.
Nothing is going to happen.
It doesn’t matter. That is a face you will never see again, surely, and one you don’t know how to remember. You’ll remember his hair, though. You will put him in the museum of your mind. You will not allow this day to decay through neglect. You are a mindful caretaker.
Out of respect, you look at him—for real this time. Full experience. Commitment to the face.
The hot gold of his eyes cuts into you like an ornamental knife; dull, crushing, just enough edge to draw blood. The quiet fury of them. The hidden blade. How you envy him, suddenly and overwhelmingly, and the hunger of it eats your organs and tries to climb out your mouth. How you envy whatever power he keeps sleeping between his flesh and his bones.
You want to take the burning coins of his irises and place them on your tongue like hot pennies. This thought sears you, as if something material, and you shake it from yourself.
Let it all fall away like so much ruined plaster. Onwards to the unrelenting night, and the departure of strangers, and the blood staining the floor, and the great yawning maw of days that stretches infinitely before you. So you envy him. What does it matter? Be satisfied with your uninteresting blood, your unconcealing flesh, your worn rifle; or don’t. It doesn’t matter. It is all you get.
You want more. You always want more. You always have wanted something impossible and bloody.
“You’re injured,” you observe, uninventively.
“Not consequentially,” he replies, whatever that means. He puts a forkful of sponge cake in his mouth even as blood slips from the palm of his glove along the stem of the fork, spattering prettily on the white china below. Eyes closed, contemplative. Appreciative, even. Ghost, demon, or monster, at peace in the wreckage of your life.
Make peace with it, and you will have just that: peace in the eye of violence.
While you are watching him, he doesn’t look up at you again. Still, when you turn away and slip into the kitchen, his eyes follow you. You’re sure of it. They burn like two yellow lamplights hanging in the back of your head; like you can hear them on you, singing. Singeing. Maybe tomorrow you will run your hands through the back of your hair and find it melted together in two awful circles.
When you return with the first aid kit, he is gone. An empty, bloody plate and a neat pile of far too much cash have taken his place at the counter. You allow yourself to sink unsteadily to the floor. You allow yourself to twist into a nest around yourself, to breathe too quickly, to collapse your lungs into hysterics and back. To shed your hot and useless tears against the grimy floor you will not be cleaning tonight.
He is gone, and so are your worn-thin reserves of whatever keeps you from screaming at people regularly, whatever keeps you from turning your body against itself and sinking your teeth into your arms.
Fuck everybody else with their empty glasses and their soon-to-come questions about the order of gore and witchcraft. You are worn through.
You are not gone; you stay. That is what you do. You stay, and you feel something canine pace tightly within your ribs, panting hotly between the bars of your bone.
It smells blood.
It is only hours later, when it is dark and you are alone in bed, that you process the words he spit to those men in fury.
He said the world was going to end.
Oh, do you promise? Do you promise?