Leviathan.
“C’mon, Dean. you have to see this,” Paul’s small six-year-old voice nagged.
The summer I was nine years old was hot and this day was no exception. Sweat clung to the back of my neck where my hair covered it, which had grown long after months of not being cut.
I pushed my bangs back from my eyes and squinted into the sun. My friends Carl and Paul looked at me anxiously, full of some wonderful secret that would get us in trouble if it ever got out. Being nine meant I was the oldest, Carl was eight and Paul was an irritating six.
The sun made the blades of long grass waver in the heat. Everything was beginning to wilt under that intense sun.
I grinned and let my hair fall back onto my face. “Fine.” I was eager to find out this secret.
Carl smiled and beckoned for me to follow him and Paul into the forbidden meadow, where the long grass made it so you’d get ticks if you weren’t careful. The summer I was nine was also a big summer for lyme disease.
But I was full of bravado and didn’t care about something as imminent as that.
“Shhh,” Carl whispered, and knelt down into the tall grass as if he were diving into the sea. I looked over his shoulder to try and see what he and his brother found so important. They were so far down in the sea of grass that it swallowed them whole.
Paul tugged on my pant leg and I knelt down beside them.
A stench assaulted my nostrils. I gagged, but swallowed it down. I was the oldest and bravest and was going to stay that way.
The raccoon was lying dead in the center of the circle we formed around it. The cadaver looked strangely religious, like it had been placed on an altar in a strange green church and we had gathered around it to pray for salvation from the great sin we were about to commit.
Another wave of nausea hit me. “Well.” I looked through my hair at my friends.
In the eerie, filtered light, even Paul’s face lost all traces of boyishness. Their faces looked washed out, like featureless blurs. The wave washed over me and I was drenched in the cool green light. I blinked and they came back into focus, but the cold that froze the sweat to my forehead and neck chilled me still.
“We should bury it.” The wave broke and I struggled towards the surface.
“Yeah,” Paul murmured. He stroked the trodden grass beneath him.
I stood up, and grabbed a stick that lay not far behind me. Carl and Paul did the same, and as a silent agreement we moved our sticks together.
Instantly, Paul pushed his stick beneath the raccoon and tried to hoist it into the air. Carl glanced toward me and I averted my eyes through the veil of bangs.
Another wave swelled over my head, and I was pulled so far under that I could only see a flimsy shaft of light through the water. Everything clouded. In a panic, I began to thrust the stick blindly in every direction. With a savage scream, I struck downward and pushed towards the first thing that gave.
Something sickly and tepid smeared over my face and arms. My body was covered in a warm, red velvet. the raccoon lay erupted at my feet, with a small, pointed stick stuck through it.
The inside of the cadaver was crawling with small, white bugs. My hands waved in front of my face, putrid green and fetid red, spattered with white.
Maggots. Maggots dancing in front of my eyes. Maggots driving into me, to get at my insides and turn emerge, winged and putrid. My body, lying beside the raccoon’s, maggots breeding in our corpses.
And I ran from there, to last summer and the year before, to the thicket where we used to play King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, safe from the larvae that clung to my skin.
I curled into a small ball and lay on the mossy floor of the cool, shady grove, safe from the small white larvae that clung to my skin.
”Do you think he’ll wake up?”
“I don’t know- do you think he’s okay?”
“Well, he ran away like that… Should we tell?”
“No! You know we can’t tell- we’ll get in trouble, stupid…”
“Carl, we should tell-“
“We can’t!”
Strange shapes floated in my consciousness as I began to open my eyes. I pushed my hair out of my eyes… it was clumped together with mud and clotted blood, congealed pus. The shapes came in to focus… the frames of two small boys, one smaller than the other, stood in the light that spilled in through the front of the thicket.
“Hey Dean…” one of the figures whispered.
The blood had dried brown on my arms. I sat up, idly flicking the dry flakes off my arms.
I spoke. “Hey…” My voice sounded old and rusty, like a door after disuse. “Do you wanna go swim in the creek?”
Carl glanced at Paul and murmured his okay.
The entire time we walked toward the creek, Paul and Carl looked at me like I was an invalid and needed to be monitored closely. I could feel it rushing through me, the same way as the champagne my mom had let me drink on New Year’s Eve had.
I was the first one in the creek, letting the cool water caress my sweaty body. The stains washed off me in thin red streamers. My hair spilled out around my head like a cloud as I floated on the surface of the water, underneath the canopy of trees.
Paul and Carl were still at the bank, flirting with the idea of jumping in, putting a toe into the water, flinching at the blast of cold and pulling back, startled.
The maggots drifted off my bare arms and back. The small needy bugs floated into the water, a white miasma. I knew they would drown.
I dove into the creek to watch them fall to the creek bottom, floating down softly, like snow littering the brown, muddy bottom, unwanted, scorned.
After the last ones fell, I surfaced, and let the water run down my back and off my arms. I ran my hands through my hair and it fell, sluggishly, back into my face as the humidity forced it down.
Leaving the creek bank, I pulled my clothes on and walked back through the woods to home.
I could still hear their laughter as I walked away.
