“I’m done,” he said.
In the fifteen minutes we’d been talking, nearly half the people had left the park. The necking couple had been amongst them, departing hand in hand. The nearest person was now about sixty yards away. I stood up, reached in my jacket.
“Anything you want to say?” I asked, looking down at his mild, rosy face. “People do, sometimes.”
“Not to you,” he said.
I pulled out the gun and placed the silenced end in the middle of his forehead. He didn’t try to move. I took hold of his right shoulder with my other hand, and pulled the trigger once.
With all the traffic around the square, I barely even heard the sound. His head jerked back.
I let go of his shoulder and he sagged slowly around the waist, until the weight of his big, barrel chest pulled his body down off the chair to slump heavily onto the path, nearly face-first.
A portion of the back of his head was gone, but his eyes were still open. His beard scratched against the pavement as he tried to say something. After a couple of times I realised it was not words he was forcing out, but a series of sounds. I put the barrel to his temple and pulled the trigger again. A portion of the opposite temple splatted out onto the stones.
Yet still he was trying to push out those three short syllables, each the same.
I pulled the trigger a final time, and he was quiet. I bent down close to make sure, and to whisper in the remains of his ear.
“Check it twice, right, ass**le?”
Then I walked out of the park. A few blocks away I found a cab, and started the long, slow journey home to New Jersey.
I WOKE EARLY THE next morning, like most fathers, to the sound of my son hurrying past our bedroom and down the stairs. On his way to the fireplace, no doubt.
Good luck with that, I thought, though I knew his stocking would be full nonetheless.
A few minutes later Lauren levered herself into a sitting position. She pulled on her robe and went to the window, yanking aside the drapes.
She smiled at something she saw out there, then turned and quickly left the room.
By the time I’d got my own robe on and gone down to the kitchen to make coffee, I knew what she’d seen through the window. It had snowed overnight, covering the yard and hanging off the trees. The whole nine yards of Winter Wonderland set dressing. Probably I would have to help build a snowman later, whether I felt like it or not.
In the living room my wife and child were sitting together Indian style in the middle of the floor, cooing over the stockings they’d already taken down from the fireplace. Candy, little gifts, pieces of junk that were supposed to mean something just because they’d been found in a sock. I noticed that the cookie left on the table near the hearth had a large bite taken out of it. Lauren has always been good with detail.
“Happy Christmas, guys,” I said, but neither of them seemed to hear.
I stepped around them and went to the fireplace. I took down the remaining stocking. I knew something was different before it was even in my hand.
It was empty.
“Lauren?”
She looked up at me. “Ho ho, ho,” she said. There was nothing in her face.
Then she smiled, briefly, before going back to chattering with our son, watching for the third or fifth time as he excitedly repacked and then unpacked his stocking. Her smile went straight through me. But then they always have.
I left the stocking on the arm of one of the chairs and walked out into the kitchen.
I opened the back door, and went to stand outside in the snow.
It was very quiet, and it was nothing but cold.
THE STARS ARE FALLING
Joe R. Lansdale
BEFORE DEEL ARROWSMITH CAME BACK from the dead, he was crossing a field by late moonlight in search of his home. His surroundings were familiar, but at the same time different. It was as if he had left as a child and returned as an adult to examine old property only to find the tree swing gone, the apple tree cut down, the grass grown high, and an outhouse erected over the mound where his best dog was buried.
As he crossed, the dropping moon turned thin, like cheap candy licked too long, and the sun bled through the trees. There were spots of frost on the drooping green grass and on the taller weeds, yellow as ripe corn. In his mind’s eye he saw not the East Texas field before him or the dark rows of oaks and pines beyond it, or even the clay path that twisted across the field toward the trees like a ribbon of blood.
He saw a field in France where there was a long, deep trench, and in the trench were bloodied bodies, some of them missing limbs and with bits of brains scattered about like spilled oatmeal. The air filled with the stinging stench of rotting meat and wafting gun smoke, the residue of poison gas, and the buzz of flies. The back of his throat tasted of burning copper. His stomach was a knot. The trees were like the shadowy shades of soldiers charging toward him, and for a moment, he thought to meet their charge, even though he no longer carried a gun.
He closed his eyes, breathed deeply, shook his head. When he opened them the stench had passed and his nostrils filled with the nip of early morning. The last of the moon faded like a melting snowflake. Puffy white clouds sailed along the heavens and light tripped across the tops of the trees, fell between them, made shadows run low along the trunks and across the ground. The sky turned light blue and the frost dried off the drooping grass and it sprang to attention. Birds began to sing. Grasshoppers began to jump.
He continued down the path that crossed the field and split the trees. As he went, he tried to remember exactly where his house was and how it looked and how it smelled, and most important, how he felt when he was inside it. He tried to remember his wife and how she looked and how he felt when he was inside her, and all he could find in the back of his mind was a cipher of a woman younger than he was in a long, colorless dress in a house with three rooms. He couldn’t even remember her nakedness, the shape of her br**sts and the length of her legs. It was as if they had met only once, and in passing.
When he came through the trees and out on the other side, the field was there as it should be, and it was full of bright blue and yellow flowers. Once it had been filled with tall corn and green bursts of beans and peas. It hadn’t been plowed now in years, most likely since he left. He followed the trail and trudged toward his house. It stood where he had left it. It had not improved with age. The chimney was black at the top and the unpainted lumber was stripping like shedding snakeskin. He had cut the trees and split them and made the lumber for the house, and like everything else he had seen since he had returned, it was smaller than he remembered. Behind it was the smokehouse he had made of logs, and far out to the left was the outhouse he had built. He had read many a magazine there while having his morning constitutional.