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The ironic thing is the longer he stands here, the more likely he is to die.
It doesn’t increase significantly, nothing noticeable like adding an extra ten percent of water to an already full glass. It’s more like a point-something; point-five or point-two. But it’s there all the same.
If the rain starts to come down harder he could be washed away. Tick.
He adjusts to put relief on his bad hip and slips, head over heels into the void. Tick.
Someone is a bad driver, swerves and doesn’t see him until it’s too late. Tick.
In a way what he had set into motion would still come to pass, exactly as he suspected from the moment he bought a shovel, it’s just that the ending would have to be rewritten as he was going, a hurried highlight and delete. Final paragraph: Boy never found until it was too late. Nobody knows who did it or why it happened at all.
He supposes, in a way, that played into the narrative he’s worked so hard on. He could make anything about the thoughts that had built a sturdy brick home—mortar and glass, burning tar holding the roof together—that lived in his head. It wouldn’t die with him when he goes. The world would. His flesh either somewhere being ripped apart by the current or set ablaze and left behind the house that rage built.
Absently, he touches the lighter tucked away in his pocket (not the gun—he forgets that it’s there, the weight of it not feeling particularly out-of-the-ordinary). He’d bought it for Ellie on her eighteenth birthday; he hadn’t been very thrilled to find out that she smoked but he’d picked it out for her anyway because if she was she should at least have something reliable. (The threads of this story did not escape him.) The object was the only thing of hers that he’d kept. It only made sense that he would use it now for this.
(He closes his eyes and tries to think of anything else but-- He imagines the fields ablaze and standing in the middle of it, flames licking at his clothes, consuming him entirely. Being burned alive is supposedly one of the worst ways to go, or so he's heard. But there will be no justice until he lights himself on fire.)
Someone drives past, tires crunching on the poorly maintained road. The headlights burn his eyes and he thinks he can hear them slowing down. Maybe they’d actually stop. Maybe this person could save him for real.
They keep going. Of course.
He’s been out here for hours. He’d considered dousing himself with kerosene, really doubling down but it all would have washed away by now. It’s no issue: he knows where it is in both his own and his car, made sure to memorize their locations (behind the passenger seat, cap loosened just enough; in the trunk, only half-full, cap wide open).
Another car passes. This time they honk at him, enough to startle, every aching bone and muscle tensing. (Tick.) That’s all they do though and it’s unclear how they thought it could possibly help, if that even was the intention. He wipes water from his eyes, rolling up his soaked sleeves to check his watch. How much longer is he meant to wait? He should have brought music, it’s usually enough to drown out the noise. It’s what he did when he was burying Robbie, the scraps of metal on dirt, metal on wood agonizing. He hadn’t wanted to do it, you have to understand. You, capital ‘y’. It just needed to be like this.
He cracks his neck and the pain—muscles stiff from staring down into the nothingness—almost makes him briefly go blind. (Tick.) He can’t take much more of this. Words said for years but this time he thinks he actually means it.
There’s a lighter in his front pocket. Tick.
There’s a gun in his jeans. Tick.
A car pulls up directly behind him and stops. The voice that sounds exactly the same as the landlord that he pays to maintain the brick house in his head asks him if he’s alright. What’s he doing out here? Does he need help?
“Yes,” he says, the first words he spoken to another soul in weeks. “I think I do.”
Tick.