Zhanteimi

I hope he threw up first, or we're gonna have another Jimi on our hands!

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Zhanteimi

LetsTalkMusic

Blarobbarg

Run (Part 2)

The rain was erupting from the black sky as David pleaded with his mother to slow down, but she was buzzed and reckless; she had nothing to lose but a son she hadn’t wanted in the first place. As a man of 17, David more than familiar with her caginess and bouts of fury, but this time was different. Her eyes were glazed, and her mouth was open, like her soul was already halfway to the other side in anticipation of what was to come.
The car flipped seven times and ended up against a beech tree just off the overpass. Sometime later, a rare passerby noticed the smashed husk dangling almost off the mountain, and rushed to a neighbor’s home to call for help. Rural living has many benefits, but the expediency of emergency vehicles is not one of them. When the ambulance finally managed to wind its way up and down the hills to their silent hollow, they found a battered and broken boy, completely unconscious, and what passed for the corpse of a woman. For the next month that he was with them, the doctors at Baptist Health in Lexington called his survival and speedy recovery “unprecedented” and “a miracle.” David did not.

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Blarobbarg

Run (Part 3)

David’s eyes opened. The first thing he noticed was his shoulder, screaming like a dying rabbit. He turned his head from its resting place and groaned in horror. His left shoulder was a decimation of flesh and bone. His plaid shirt and orange vest were soaked with brown and red. It was sticky, but dry. The sun was going down.
As he pulled himself up, his teeth ground together, and a sharp exhalation of breath left his nose. The taste of vomit cloyed his mouth. He reached for his canteen—gone. So were his bow and his arrows.

As if from somewhere far away, alarm bells started ringing in his ears. He remembered his emergency training from his days in Iraq, and he transformed from flabbergasted hunter to battle-tried soldier.

This wasn’t an accident. Hunting accidents happen, of course—but they don’t usually end in a body abandoned with its weapon removed. This dread realization helped him to momentarily forget how much everything hurt.

He rolled into a deeper patch of weeds, and from his new vantage point, scanned the area. All was quiet, the only sounds being the cheerful gurgle of a nearby stream and the crackling of bare branches blowing in the breeze.

Without looking, he reached for the serrated hunting knife tucked into his belt. He wasn’t surprised at this point to find that it, too, was gone—but he was pleased to discover that the smaller knife, his grandfather’s knife, was still there, tucked into his jacket pocket. Thank Christ. He muttered a quick prayer and steeled himself. It was time to move.

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Blarobbarg

“Ya know Davy, you ain’t going to be able to run forever.”

David looked up at the sound of his Papaw’s molasses-thick Appalachian accent. The older man’s gnarled, work-worn hands were gripped around a rake. It was nearly Halloween, and the leaves were thick on the ground in front of his modest home. It wasn’t much—but it was bought with the hard-won earnings of a man who worked for himself. Like every other home here in Hazard, Kentucky it was bought by coal.

“Whatcha mean, Papaw?” David was 19. He was back from basic training for a visit before he headed out to Iraq to fight for his country. His friends told him he was the best shot at Basic—he attributed it to years taking pot shots at squirrels and birds attempting to poach his grandfather’s garden. He was in that very garden right now, pulling up the old plants and working them into the earth while it was still soft. He didn’t fully understand why the old man insisted on doing something like this when you could just wait for the winter to take care of it for you, but Papaw had always been stubborn and particular, and there wasn’t anything to be done about it. So, he dug.

“I mean,” he started, and then took a moment to cough into his shaking fist before spitting on the ground. He tried again.

“I mean you’re young and healthy and you got prospects. You got good grades and a future.” He scratched his protruding stomach with too-long fingernails. “Y’aint like me. No need to throw yourself away. Stay here, Davy. Go to college. Find a gal.”

He paused a moment, face tight and unsure, as if he was wrestling with the words to get them out of his mouth. “Stop beatin’ yourself up over somethin’ that weren’t your fault.”

David, his face still turned towards the earth, stiffened. His grandfather had tried this same conversation at least half a dozen times before.

“Mom ain’t coming back, Papaw!” David’s voice cracked in a semblance of the puberty that he had so recently gone through. He paused to gather himself and said with finality and venom, “I ain’t either, so stop tryin’.”

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Blarobbarg

David’s movements were quick for a man whose left arm was useless and who had lost a considerable amount of blood. He wasn’t quite running, but he was moving expertly forward in a deep crouch, on towards his jeep at the edge of the hills. He assumed he would be by himself, this deep in Daniel Boone National Forest. Sure, his family lived a little east of here, closer to Williamsburg—but aside from a few neighbors, there ain’t too many in these parts—at least, that’s what he had thought before heading into the hills. Obviously incorrect, his shoulder reminded him, as it snagged on a low branch and forced him to his knees.

He recalled, with grim sense of irony, a similar experience with roles reversed.

The .50 caliber sniper rifle in his hands.

The shot that blew the goddamn arm off an unsuspecting towel head who was working diligently in the distance, planting a land mine on the edge of a ravaged town.

The young man—couldn’t have been older than 16 or 17—dropping to the ground, flailing in agony, trying to escape whatever dark god was smiting him from the sky.

The flower of viscera that bloomed after he tripped over his own trap.

The laughter and jeers he shared with his friends.

Who was laughing at David now, somewhere out there in the woods?

At this miserable thought, he stopped for a moment to consider his now-black surroundings. It was freezing, and he could see his breath in front of his face by what little light the moon provided. He gripped his grandpa’s knife in one hand. The small blade offered little comfort.

Suddenly, there was a crack somewhere behind him and to his right. It was the sound of a foot breaking a twig on the ground, and he dropped without hesitation.

Straining his eyes, he peered into the pitch, all looming shadows swaying against solid gloom. He saw nothing. He held his breath, listening, but heard as much as he saw. After a few tense moments, he released a breath and started to pick himself up.

A thwip sounded and he felt what could only be an arrow whir past his ear and into the thicket, and he took off into the brush.

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Blarobbarg

David lay in his bunk in the mostly-empty barracks. He was still pretty new to life in Iraq, but he was smart enough to take downtime seriously when he got it. He chewed the wad of tobacco that was stuffed into the side of his mouth as he watched his new roommate, Luis, who was bent over, pulling a shoebox out from under his bed.

David propped himself up on one arm. “Whatcha got there, Luis?”

Luis looked up, at David and smiled. Back home, David had only met a handful of non-white folks. They were always around, but his people didn’t typically make friends with theirs—and the feeling was generally mutual. But as they’d gotten to know one another over the previous few weeks, David had come to truly respect, even love, Luis and the other brothers-in-arms that he worked with. Despite Luis’s brown skin, he was a standup guy.

Luis opened his shoebox, revealing a large black candle, rosary beads, a box of matches, and a small framed portrait of a skeleton wearing nun’s robes. The skeleton held a scythe in one hand and a globe in the other.

Luis pulled the objects out, methodically, one after another. He first propped the portrait up so the undead nun stared at him. He then set the black candle down next to it, lighting it with a match. Finally, taking the rosary, he began flipping through them, one by one. Glancing up at David, Luis explained: “This is Santa Muerte. Back home, my tía would sometimes perform little services for folks who had been hurt by someone. She would pray to Santa Muerte for them, they would light a candle, and then...”

Luis trailed off. He looked at the painting of Holy Death, and in the flickering of the black candle, she looked back. “Well,” he said with a chuckle, “I don’t really know what would happen then. But I was always told that Santa Muerte would get revenge for those treated badly, sinned against. She would protect them from harm.”

David cocked a dubious eyebrow, but before he could say anything, Luis waved him off. “Listen man,” he said, “I know it sounds like bull****, and it probably is. But we’re out here fighting for our lives. It can’t hurt anything.” With that, Luis turned his back on David, picked up his rosary, and began muttering under his breath, down on his knees, looking intently to the lighted, robed skeleton.

Santa Muerte, gripping her scythe and her globe, looked right back.

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