Backwater
Red glowing lights blink through a wall of night, painting the hard edges of fresh tire tracks freshly-pressed into the thick snow — the only sign of an otherwise-abandoned road. It's walled on either side by stoic Douglas Firs swaying overhead. Grey-white exhaust chokes up through the neon red hue and headlights poke through the trees like spotlights onto the brown striations of the river. Muffled groaning hums from the trunk of a ‘97 Buick Riviera.
A giant fucking tank of a car — it was their father’s idea of a very cool, very classy car. He’d bought it from an impound lot years ago for their 16th birthday. He had a guy in town — Doug, lived right on the edge, near the creek, used to drive go karts around town while firing off Roman Candles — he got it running, no problem.
Through muffled cries from the trunk, two brothers argue back and forth frantically in the front seat.
The driver, Chris, is sucking on a vape wand, big plumes of white vapor billowing out as his distorted voice rises to a yell.
“I don’t fucking care man. I don’t give a fuck what you're hung up on! We’re dumping it!”
“Well, it's a good question though, right? Why’s the damn thing screaming?
“How in hell would I know?”
He takes another gigantic Blue Strazberry-flavored pull from his giant vape wand and starts to calm himself, sucking at it like a pacifier. The other brother, Paul, takes a slurp from a gigantic gas station cup printed with a jacked-up, smiling pineapple in sunglasses, giving a big thumbs up.
“I mean, how is it screaming? I don't know, I'm sorry. I'm still all fucking screwed up. I'm just glad we got out of there. Did you see Linda’s head?”
“Yeah man, she kinda fell funny, right? I almost laughed, like... I really wanted to laugh, but not so bad I couldn’t stop it. Self-control, man, that's all it is. I felt bad just thinking about laughing though. But yeah, she fell funny, her head was all...”
Chris crosses his eyes, makes a frown, and flops forward onto the steering wheel with his head resting at an awkward angle and he freezes there for a moment. The other one laughs.
“Feels kind of bad though, right? Or, it should, shouldn’t it?”
“Yeah, sure, I mean, I feel terrible.”
Chris takes another giant pull from his device.
“You grabbed that cash, right? Where is it?”
“Back seat. We’ll count it later. Got a jewelry box too but it might just be cheap shit. Fuckin’ Dean.”
Muffled screaming and moans continue from the trunk.
“How many times did we have to sit through steak dinners with them and Mom and Dad?”
“A thousand? Every Thursday, whatever that is.”
“Hated that guy. Barely cooked the damn things. Grey and bloody.”
“Just thinking of his big red face stuffed full of red meat...”
“Always thought he looked like he was going to pop, a blister of a man. Looked even crazier dead. Really thought he was just going to pop, layin' there.”
“God, the way he laughed at everything. So aggressive. And the way he'd bully us — dad would just laugh.”
“Kind of a quiet rage. What kind of adult bullies 12-year-olds? Messed up.”
“Hey, did you ever... you know?" he made a hand cranking motion with a fist, up and down, "while thinking about Linda? Like, after we finished dinner and dishes and Mom sent us to bed?”
“Oh. Uh, yeah," Paul stuttered.
"Me too. Linda was pretty nice to us, right? She was good. I think I remember that."
“Ever think about time?”
“What time?”
“No, like, time. The dimension. Eternity. All of time, beyond this moment or whatever.”
“What? No.”
“Like... we experience it in these little slices, all lined up and stacked up. But that's not reality. It's really just, like, a hallucination, right? It’s just how our brain puts it all together or something?”
“What the fuck are you talking about now?”
“I was watching this thing on History TV the other day. They were talking about it.”
“Okay? Wait, was it that Aliens Engineers thing again? I remember watching one where they said they made the pyramids with sound waves...”
He whistles and raises his eyebrows, fiddling with his little bottle of vape juice.
“Yeah. No, it was a different show. Or, I thought it was? Anyway, if time is just a thing our brains do to make sense of whatever this all is, then somewhere in all of that time, you’re out there... you know," he does the hand cranking motion, "laying in bed, thinking about Linda. And Mom and Dad are pouring drinks and Dean is laughing and Linda is just quietly drinking the bag wine."
“Sure.”
"And there you are just laying in your bed."
The screams from the trunk settle into a muffled, intermittent moaning.
He continues, “And me too, in my bed.”
“Yeah, sure, and you too.”
“But also we’re here, talking about it right now. And Linda and Dean are also back at the house and she’s sitting there with her head all funny and he’s sittin' there and his big red shiny balloon is about to pop and we’re driving through Blippies, getting you a soda.”
“Christ, man.”
“And there I am, also, sent to bed like a little kid, you know — thinking — about Linda. And mom and dad are downstairs playing cards with Dean and Linda. And maybe we're also doing something else out there, far ahead, in like 20 years or something.”
“Goddamn what a fucking nightmare.”
“And there's dad, being subtly combative with Dean. And Dean is just cackling, getting his spit everywhere.”
“What an absolute fucking nightmare.”
“Yeah, I guess it was pretty bad. A total fucking mess, this whole thing.”
Chris shakes his head.
“No, I mean this. You. You’re out of your fucking mind, man. Talking about the 4th dimension right now? You're losing it. We're losing it. We need to get rid of the fucking thing in our trunk. What the hell are you talking about?”
“But it’s yelling back there. It’s still alive.”
“I'm sorry, I just refuse to believe that. It’s just not possible.”
“I know, but we both hear that, right?”
The moaning turns back to intermittent muffled screaming.
Paul continues, “See?”
Chris takes a huge pull from his vape wand, filling the car with another Blue Straz scented cloud.
“Look, man — in 3 minutes, I’m going to finish this cigarette, then we’re getting out. We’re opening the trunk, and we’re dumping that body in the river. We got out clean, we got some money, we didn’t leave any traces, we just have to deal with this fucking — whatever it is — and we can get the fuck out of this goddamned town and never come back."
There is a pause, then a long, low moan, building back to a scream.
“Well that’s easy for you to say. Fucking thing doesn’t look exactly like you.”
“How fucking dumb are you? We’re twins. It looks exactly like both of us. Why are you so convinced it’s you and not me? Or both of us? Or, fucking, I don’t know — some other kind of thing.”
“IT HAS THE SAME NOSE MOLE AS ME, THE MOLE YOU DON'T HAVE — why are you acting like you weren’t the one that pointed that out?” Paul is pointing to a prominent mole on his neck.
“Whatever. It doesn’t matter. You’re talking crazy man, you’re all over the place. I think all that shit messed you up, you got ASPD or whatever it's called. And me too, maybe. But I’m steady now, my mind is clear. I’m making the decision. We’re dumping it.”
“But, like, time. Don’t you get it? Maybe he’s here because of a fold in time or something. Maybe it’s important? What if it's from the future or — I don't know — maybe we should take it somewhere and just see...”
“Take it where?”
The moaning and screaming stops and it's totally silent when the trunk suddenly unlatches and pops open a bit. They both jump, startled. Paul, with the mole, spills most of his 40 oz cup of Vanilla Cherry Pineapple Cola Zero. It fills the cupholder and covers the center console, dripping down the pleather seat in both directions, wetting his ass and mixing with the snow-packed floor on the passenger side.
Chris gives a blank stare and slowly closes his eyes, pinching the bridge of his nose between two fingers and shaking his head as Paul lifts himself off of the seat with a sudden gasp at the cold sticky liquid in the ass of his pants. Chris reaches back and grabs a towel from the floor behind them and gives it to Paul who starts patting himself down and wiping the seat.
The screaming starts again, louder now with the trunk cracked.
“Stop fucking around. Grab the window scraper and get out. This is it. We’re dumping it.”
Chris grabs a 19.5” Maglite from the cubby in his door panel — the largest size they make, he’s pretty sure. He opens his door.
The one with the mole grabs the long, sticky, wet window scraper, looking at it doubtfully as brown cola drips off of his hand. He grabs the door handle and gets out.
They look towards the trunk, then at at each other over the hail-dented roof of the car, slowly walking to the back of the car, craning their necks to try to get a glimpse into the trunk as they crunch slowly, cautiously through the snow.
The screaming is polyphonic, deafening. It grows louder as they shuffle to the back. They pause as they get to the back. Suddenly it's totally silent. They look at each other.
A branch cracks somewhere in the woods behind them and they bolt to the front of the car and jump in. Chris locks the doors.
Paul’s head is twisted towards the back seat, looking to find the source of the noise.
After a few seconds of nothing, Chris starts to laugh through panted breath.
“I think it was a branch or something.”
“What? You sure? I swear—”
“Man, what the hell are we doing?”
“You said you wanted to dump it.”
“I know, I just — how did we get here?”
“I don’t know. Last night was a fever dream. All I remember is going to bed at home, waking up somewhere else and walking out to see... whatever that was."
“You ever think about Dad?”
“God, I miss that bastard.”
“Screaming at pancake batter, burning his knuckles on the pan, slamming shit around.”
“Remember when he back-handed you off the stool?”
“One more fucking word and I’ll slap your ass half-way up the river and back around…”
“… silence…”
“*WHAP*”
“But I didn’t say anything! Ah man, you shoulda seen your face climbin’ up off the floor.”
"You were gonna say somethin’, I could tell!"
They're both laughing now.
“Kind of messed up I guess, looking back.”
“What’s really fucked up is he thought I was you.”
“Yeah, he was pretty pissed.”
“Don’t even remember why.”
“I do, but it doesn’t matter.”
“Pff yeah, cause you didn’t get popped off your chair.” Laughs.
"He was mostly good though, right?"
"Yeah, mostly."
They sit in the quiet, warm hum of the hot air blowing from the vents.
“I really think that was just a branch.”
“My nerves are chopped, man.”
Chris nods. He lets out a deep breath and tries to relax his shoulders, but he can’t.
“Just stay in the car. I’ll take care of it. If you don’t see anything it’s like, you’re not on the hook for anything. So I’ll just handle it, alright?”
“I'm not sure that's how that works. I think we cruised past that point when we woke up at Dean and Linda’s.”
“Whatever. I just want to protect you. Always.”
A low, gentle moaning starts from the trunk again, but they keep talking.
“Oh fuck off. You do not. You always get me into trouble.”
“Yeah, that's true. Not always though. Just let me take this one. You got a lot goin' for you. Think about Sandra.”
“I can’t go back home after this. Are you kidding?”
“Come on. The new house? The job? What’s her uh — her fucking adult son — what’s his name? Brenden? Brandon? Brenton? The one that moved into your basement…”
“Braden?”
“Yeah, yes! Him and you — you said you guys are getting along?”
“I guess. I don’t know man it’s just — it’s hard to imagine a world where things could get better from this point. I think this is just how it is. Some kinda impossible crisis hits or something and I shit the bed. Everything's trashed. Repeat and rinse it.”
“You have things going for you. That’s all I’m saying. So just let me take care of this and you try to forget about it. We were careful enough at the house. Just let me get out, I'll take that thing out and you just get out of here. You’ll be clear.”
“What about you? How are you going to get home? You just going to disappear? You have plenty to keep fighting for. Nobody’s telling you what to do. You’re free. You do what you want. You’re not tied down to anything. You're going to throw that away by taking this on? And what if you're wrong?!”
“My life is pure chaos.”
“You have a great life. You've got friends, you're always going out of town. You've got line dancing on Thursdays. They love you there. You come and go when you want. You're doing it right. You have a lot ahead of you. Don't take this on. We can figure this out together.”
“You think so? Wouldn’t be so sure about that.”
Chris grabs the bottom of his t-shirt and lifts it above his chest revealing a four inch black hole where his sternum should be. Inside the hole is a perpetual swirling void — no blood, no organs, no body cavity — just an endless un-space.
Paul's mouth keeps opening to say something, but all that comes out are little murmuring grunts of confusion.
“Ah—uh… I… whuh-”
“Last December I thought I had a new mole. Then I thought it was an ingrown hair. Picked at it and it got a little infected. Woke up one day and it was just a pencil-sized black hole. Keeps getting bigger.”
“Oh…”
Paul reaches towards the hole with a finger and Chris slaps it away.
“I thought about that. Almost tried it. Decided to put an M&M in there instead — figured what's the worst that could happen? it ends up in my stomach or something in-between and just melts?”
“What happened?”
“It disappeared.”
“Like it fell down into your body?”
“No, like, it got sucked back into a infinite swirling void and just disappeared.”
“Whoa.”
“Don’t want to think about what happens if I stick my finger in there. Get my ass ripped in half? Collapse in on myself?”
Paul slowly leans in to look closer at the black hole.
“That’s—”
Paul starts gagging at the way the skin folds around the hard edge of the oddity forming in his twin’s chest. He takes a second to gather his breath and takes a drink from a sticky old water bottle rolling around on the floor.
“Is it gonna keep growing?”
“No idea. No fucking idea at all. But something’s wrong. I don’t know. I think maybe I’m dying.”
“Ah, Christ, no. Don't say that. You can’t leave me here.”
“Not sure I have a lot of choice in it. That's why I think you should get out of here. Let me handle this.”
They sit in silence. Everything is totally quiet. The trunk. The trees. The hole in Chris’s chest.
“With Dean and Linda gone, you can go be whoever you want to be. You're free of that nightmare.”
“Who am I without you?”
“I can’t remember anything from when we were kids.”
“What?”
“I can’t remember anything. It all feels like pictures I saw, snapshots and stories somebody told me. You?”
“I guess.”
The car shakes from the trunk. It settles. Groaning. Stopping again.
“I miss Mom and Dad."
“When did they die?”
“I don’t remember anymore. A few years ago I think. Right?”
“We were at the funeral, weren’t we?”
“Yeah, I think you gave a eulogy. Told all kinds of stories about them. Baseball games. Ice cream. Birthday parties. Road trips to Montana. Dad smacking you off the stool.”
“Oh yeah, that’s right. That was kind of uncomfortable I guess.”
“I don’t remember any of it though. Did it happen?”
“I think so. Some of it. Good and bad. Just... it was normal, I guess, right?”
“Was it normal? I wish I could remember.”
“Please don’t leave me, man.”
“I don’t know what else to do. I’m afraid I’ll wake up inside-out. Or swallow the whole town up. Take everything and everyone with me. And all that shit back at the house? Nobody's going to believe any of it anyway.”
"Let's just go to the cops. Just show them your chest. Maybe they'll believe us."
"Okay, sure, so let's say I show the cops that thing and tell them what happened — what does a black hole in my chest have to do with us waking up 600 miles away from our apartment? Or walking out just in time to see a — copy? — of you — but not actually you — killing our parents' old friends? In their house?"
"I don't know, this is all just as insane to me as it is to you. I didn't ask for any of this! But it has to be connected somehow, right? Two crazy impossible things like that, happening at the same time? It can't be some random coincidence, right? It has to mean something. I mean, is any of this real? Are you real? I can't remember anything from before."
"It's too much. This is all too much. Just let me do this and move on."
“It’s gonna be okay. Just wait. We can figure this out. Let’s just see what’s back there. Maybe the answer’s back there?”
“No, man. No. I gotta get rid of it. Just get out of here. Please. Take the car and just go somewhere far away.”
Paul’s eyes are hot and swollen with tears. His chest feels like it's going to cave in like his brother's.
“Let’s just drive out of here now. You and me, together. We'll find some other way.”
“No. I'm telling you, go get Sandra. Look after her. Give her and Braden a future. Forget about all of this. If it comes back to you, just say I did it. Go back home, you were never here. You woke up and I was gone. Go start a new life.”
“Braden is 24, he’s fine. He has a job doing something with social media, I think. I don't know what it is, but he'll be fine. He's making more money than I've ever made in 15 years at Basil Bistro.”
“I don’t care what you do, it's just — this isn’t your problem. When I’m gone, when that thing is gone, it’s just you and them. Go. Start over.”
Paul sits quietly, looking at the way his brother’s shirt lays differently over the black hole underneath his shirt. He hadn't noticed that before. He thinks maybe he should have noticed. He wishes he had. Not like he could have done anything, but still, he wishes he'd noticed, paid closer attention.
He feels so alone now. His chest keeps tightening. He brings a hand to it, but it's still solid. He fears he might float off. Or deflate. Turn inside out. Dissolve and collapse into salt.
He feels a tingling on his skin. His ear rings for a few seconds.
Then nothing again. Just the sound of hot air from the vents. Some cubes of ice settle in what remains of the watered-down fountain drink. The sticky bottled water sits there in a pool of soda on the floor. The swirling, voidal black hole is silently resting just a few feet away.
“It’s time. I’ll get out, I’ll open the trunk, when you hear it shut you just get out of here.”
“No man, no. Please. I want to open it with you. I need to do that with you. Then I swear I’ll do what you want me to do. I’ll go, I'll find Sandra.”
“Okay.”
They nod.
“Okay.”
"Then you go?"
Paul nods. The groaning from the trunk starts again.
“I’m sorry all this happened.”
“I am too.”
“I don’t remember how it started.”
“I wish I could remember.”
“I love you.”
“Always, brother. I love you always.”
The groaning grows louder again and the car starts heaving from the back as they quickly open their doors and round the back of the car, lifting the trunk as it builds to a scream…
And suddenly, as it opens, there's silence again. Total stillness.
Just as it had been when they put the body in the trunk back at Dean and Linda’s — an identical copy of
Paul, down to the clothes he was wearing. It lays on its back with one leg bent at the knee, folded under the other, and one arm across the stomach. The left arm is bent with the elbow out and the fist at its waist, like a teapot handle pointed towards them. Inside the crook of the elbow rests a severed head, just as they’d left it before they closed the trunk earlier.
They stand there quietly for a minute, three identical faces just blankly staring, motionless.
“Huh. Weird.”
“Right? It didn’t even move around on the drive, just from jostling? How did that happen?”
“Just weird.”
“Weirder than if it was somehow still alive, right?”
“For sure. After all the sounds we heard? Like, what the hell was that?”
There's silence again as they stand, staring. They both start laughing at their impossible reality.
He continues, “This fucking night man. A black hole in your chest? Then this thing screaming from the trunk the whole way here. And here it is now, dead as it was when it fell apart right in front of us?"
They're still laughing, but they stop suddenly, realizing the severed head is laughing now too. It continues after the two brothers stop, mouths open, frozen.
“Oh, we’re done laughing? Okay, well, I guess this is it, then? What are you guys gonna do? Put me in the river?” the talking head pauses.
Chris tries to talk but nothing comes out. Paul stands frozen.
“Look, sorry for shouting and making all that noise. I know you guys made up your minds, but I really think you should hear me out here…”
"How are you —"
"You have a black hole in your chest, you wake up on the other side of the country just in time to see me finally confront that piece-of-shit Dean, just in time to see my head fall off, and this is what freaks you out? Me, talking?"
"I think we're losing it. This isn't real. This can't be real."
The head raises its eyebrows and looks back and forth between the two brothers.
"Listen, you're not exactly wrong. I'm not real. I'm, like, a dream. Your dream. You thought about me for so long, you wanted me to be here... and so here I am. I don't know what else to tell you. Aim higher next time?"
"That's it? That's all you have to say?"
Chris is angry. He feels like he's going to explode out of his body.
The head continues, "What do you want me to say? I don't know any more than that. Dean was a piece of shit. They both were, honestly. I did what I was here to do and now it's done. Can't change that. I'll be gone soon anyway. But I'm begging you guys, for your sake, don't put me in the river."
"After all of this... that's it? What about my chest?"
Paul is still speechless.
"I don't know anything about your chest. One second I was a dream, then I was in Dean and Linda's living room, doing the thing. Then you guys were there, just in time to see me fall apart. I didn't ask for this any more than you guys. I've been alive for, what, 3 or 4 hours? It's a little disorienting in here."
"I'm doing it. I'm taking you and we're walking into the river."
"You really shouldn't. Just — hear me out. I know how to get you out of this —"
Chris reaches down and stuffs his glove in the head's mouth, covers it with a pillowcase, and lifts the body and head with the blue quilt they're wrapped in.
"Don't you think we should hear him out?"
"No, I'm done. This is too much. I don't have long, I can feel this thing growing in my chest, faster and faster. I need to go into the river."
Paul looks and sees that the hole has spread almost to the edges of his brother's chest and down to his belly button. His shirt is pulling awkwardly into the negative space now.
Paul reaches over and hugs his brother with the body between them. They both have hot tears running down their cheeks. Chris pulls away and walks through the beam of the headlights, casting a silhouette on the surface of the wide, churning river.
He walks past the end of the road, through the treeline, and wades out into the shallow water. He continues slowly into the current, deeper now, up to his waist. He continues to walk until the water is past his chest and finally above his head.
They're gone now. Like they both melted straight into the dark brown water. The water swirls around the spot where they submerged, creating an eddy in the backwater closer to the shore. It grows into a whirlpool the size of the car and then remains there.
Paul falls to his knees and sobs in the snow by the car, staring at the spotlit swirling water. He cries until he can't anymore. He falls asleep for a while. When he wakes, soft whispers of blue morning light are just peeking over the horizon. The whirlpool is still there, churning in a circle, kept in place by hundreds of thousands of gallons of water per second.
He watches for a bit and stands up quietly.
"I love you."
He gets in the car, and drives straight home. When he gets home, Sandra is waiting outside. The police come shortly after to take him in for questioning.
At the suggestion of his lawyer, Paul takes a plea deal for manslaughter. They argue some type of imperfect self-defense against Dean, something about how Paul was trying to protect Linda from one of Dean's rage benders. They say she was an old family friend who had always been kind to him as a kid. Paul had come through town to reconnect with family friends and things got out of hand over steak dinner. They say Dean was jealous, that he believed that Linda and Paul had — you know — the night before.
The lawyer thinks it will work. She thinks it makes more sense than Paul's story about a mysterious third "twin" born from a dream or teleportation, or, in her opinion, even crazier, a twin brother with a black hole in his chest who the wife Sandra has somehow never heard of, or, as she said "can't remember, now."
She thinks insanity might have worked, but Paul seemed too normal. And the doctors said so too. So a plea deal it was.
Paul is fine with all of that. After what he went through, he'd just as soon sit in a cell for now. Or forever. He enjoys his time however he can. Braden even came to visit last week. He mostly talked about social media trends and his favorite influencers, but it was nice to talk to someone since Sandra hasn't come by much.
But mostly he lays on his bed and wonders about the river, if it was real. He wonders if it's still out there or if it got swallowed up into eternity, and all of the rest of them with it, compacted in an infinite black hole, squished into infinity, repurposed and recycled over and over again in the heart of his brother's chest, forever.
Every night as he replays it all, as he lays wondering what's real and what's not, he falls asleep knowing one thing with certainty: he misses his brother every day.