Bones
There is a crossroads in town, one mile west of the 7-Eleven and two blocks away from High Shine Nail Salon on Fifth. Micah stands on the sidewalk with a bag of groceries and a cheap cell phone.
He bites his lip. Once, when he was seventeen, he tried to pierce that lip, and ever since he’s felt a raw slice of tissue missing from the inside, an aversion to needles growing into a panicked phobia he found difficult to control. Micah grips the groceries tighter, and the cool bite of air on his neck is comforting.
He read something about a crossroads once. In the old church, after hours, when his parents had left him with old Father Gregory while they were at work. A book on demons.
Micah can’t quite recall the contents of the book. He finds often that he can’t remember a lot of things, the past becoming a wash of unintelligible colors, unidentifiable shapes, faces he couldn’t place and places he couldn’t ever remember seeing. Micah supposes, then, he should be worried. But he isn’t.
He does, however, recall a picture, done in ink.
If you want a favor, bury a box. The picture showed a careful “X” of criss-crossed dirt roads, a single black square in the center. And bury in the box three items.
Micah blinks. The crossroads is just an intersection, not at all resembling the delicate calligraphy of lines and pebbles and tumble-grass the drawing had shown. There was nothing remotely religious about the quiet grey of cement, the crushed can of Diet Pepsi and THANK YOU COME AGAIN written twice on plastic, in red.
Whether what he has done will come to pass is an excellent open ended question, we don't know what it is he has asked for or whether he really believes in it himself. Perhaps, like the placebo effect, the mere act of doing it brought him some sort of peace? You have captured suspense perfectly in this!
Cool story, really well written and constructed. Nice job.
Mysterious and alluring, this torrid tale drew me in right from the very beginning. If written words were abstract art, then this would be a masterpiece. It's not what you explained about poor, damned Micah that made this story so eerie to me. It's what you didn't reveal, what you left to our imaginations. That is the most horrifying part of all...
Everyone, thank you for all your support! I appreciate what you've done for me and my writing.
I enjoyed this a lot, it's well written and suspenseful and kept me interested from beginning to end.
The Faustian deal is a wonderful archetypal story. Obviously with TV shows like Supernatural raking over Robert Johnson mythology and what have you, it's tough to bring an original slant to this, but I thought you did an excellent job of making this story yours. I think this story really underlines the point, that it's not so much the story, as the telling of it that makes a writer great.
That was meant to say 'intrinsically wrong'!
This is a strongly written story, Ernie, and I enjoyed it a lot. I don't think it matters what it is that Micah desires from the demon. To me, he's a disconnected individual who's willing to sacrifice his soul (and most of his life) for ten years of what he wants most. He also doesn't seem to care that in a decade he will lose his 'body, heart, and final breath' to a hound of hell. That would scare the bejeezus out of me, and shows there's something intrinsically with Micah that he's not terribly concerned by this. I love the way the tale ended - the final words are just right, leaving the reader with a sense of trepidation and anticipation of what will happen next.
By the way, congrats Emie Townsend! This is going up on staff picks next week. Thanks to Leah Gray for recommending.
But what does he bargain for? I get that he sells his soul but I just don't understand what he wants in return.
I'd like to recommend this story for the Staff Picks section. I loved it.
Leah, the ID is a "depiction of the mortal wishing to bargain a debt" - suggesting that he has decided that he desires the demonic "favor" mentioned on the first page. The denouement indicates that he would welcome anything that offered him a respite from his bleak existence, even if it results in everlasting damnation. I like this a lot, Ernie.
I loved this, but I know I didn't understand it completely. I just didn't get why he left his ID there, which makes me think there's something else I'm missing. But I still loved this. From the beginning I was hooked, mainly actually because of the writing style. It just kept me reading and reading, and I wish there was more to read. It was like everything was so casual and unimportant, that it gave it all impact.