Necropotence

V.


For such a long time, it was a smooth, hard stone, not unlike something you’d pick up out of a creek and throw through Jana’s front windshield. It’s been that way since I was ten.

When I was young, this town wasn’t much more than a church, a gas station, and a diner. I rode my Schwinn to service on a normal Sunday morning.

He wandered in after the offering prayer, and I know most of the Methodists thought he was a homeless vagrant, sliding from town to town with three handles of whiskey inbetween. He wasn’t.

He pulled me aside behind the cemetery graveyard in broad daylight before I went home because my folks weren’t at the service that day. Everyone talked and gossiped and I got plenty of warnings about talking to strangers afterward, but he was different than anyone I’d ever met. He didn’t have much to say, and he had to be at least a hundred years old, but one thing sticks in my mind, seventy one years later.

“You’ve got the blood to use it, boy. I have none left. It’s someone else’s turn.” he said with dry, cracked lips.
I wasn’t interested in his gift at first. Here’s an old man waving a rock in front of me and gibbering on about some lost art called “necromancy.” I told him I wasn’t interested in any work that was not of the good Lord’s. I was brainwashed.
To persuade me to take the rock, he used it on my bike. As of right now, you’re the third person to know about this.

I watched a clumsy, rusty contraption that had been handed down from poor kid to junk yard to dirt poor kid transform before my eyes. The stone glowed almost digital green, like the display you’d get on a high tech wilderness watch or something.

The problem is, back then, digital didn’t exist. Neither did color television.

I watched rust melt away in liquid red flakes, and dents faded like the metal was made of silk. In a few seconds, my bike was brand new.

“I’ll be dead soon, boy. Use it on something that breathes.” he said. He looked to be in such ill health that I was scared by the prospect of his death. He dropped the stone in my pocket, and I fled.

Back then, I thought honesty was the best policy. I told my parents an old man fixed up my bike for free in the graveyard with a rock. They kept me locked in the house for the next three months and told me it’s not nice to lie. I never told them about the stone. I kept it hidden in a safe place. It stayed in the back of my mind, but I ignored it for a long time.

When I was fifteen, my dog Becky got caught in the wheels of the neighboring farm’s tractor because she liked to chase things. It was an accident, but she lost an eye, broke both her back legs, and she was on her way out. It was horrible.

Of course, my father wanted to spare me the pain and grief with a blast of buckshot. Everyone told me it was the easiest way — that Becky would die an agonizing, slow death if my father didn’t end her life now.

An hour before he got home from work to put an end to it, I took the stone and wrapped Becky in a blanket. I still remember her crying from the shifts in weight as I carried her broken body to the graveyard. Every footstep was painful to her.

It took me six hours to figure out how the thing worked. I had to cut myself and give it some blood. As soon as my blood touched the surface, it opened up and became soft, like a fleshy sponge opening its mouth. The more droplets I gave it, the more it glowed, and the more frozen it became in my hand. My skin was numb with the cold — I couldn’t even feel my pocket knife.

I know I didn’t do it the way he did, because I ended up with a puppy with both eyes, but two broken legs.I couldn’t bring Becky back to my family as a pup without them asking questions, so I gave her to a gypsy trying to hitch out by main street.

My father tanned the living shit out of my backside when I got home, but luckily, he was the type of man who would beat you and stop asking questions afterward. He considered the matter finished, and I was grateful for that.

After feeding my blood to the stone, I felt a few years older, and my body showed the signs of it. I shot up to six foot three, got hairier, and started looking at girls more often. I can never say for sure, but I think giving that time back to Becky cost me most of my adolescent years. I went through high school as a twenty year old pretending to be a teenager. My birth certificate said otherwise, but for all intensive purposes, I was older than everyone around me.

I’m not asking for sympathy. I just want to pull you in to the sad affair that has become my life. My past is interesting. The present? Not so much. If I don’t explain all of this, then you’ll think I’m a horrible person for what I’m about to do. The future holds the most potential of the three.

Maybe these words can put you on my side. The only explanation I owe the world is “why.”

I don’t want sympathy or forgiveness; I only want you to understand.


(This is part 5 of a series of journal entries for this story, written by Violent Harvest)