Hammers

short fiction

To my beloved, bewitching, bedazzled Aquarians:

Last week, Bridget Riley and I released Diary of a Murder, a brand new murder mystery short, available exclusively as a gorgeous digital zine. Paid subscribers, you can find a discount code for 60% off at the bottom of this email (or message me).

Can two amateur detectives solve a cold case that everyone else has given up on? Drew and Jane are writers, but when they find the diary of a murdered woman, they’re suddenly inside the story.

You don’t want to miss this one!

Now, on with today’s show.

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Photo by Adam Sherez on Unsplash

Alfred’s face looked like it had been smashed with hammers, because it had.

The entire left side was lower than the right, the bridge of his nose a topography of hills and valleys. A wide scar flattened his cheekbone where it should have rounded.

“Jane sometimes has an aspirin to give. Usually expired,” he said. With two fingers, he touched his temple, as if remembering his own ordeal. “But most make do with willow tea. River water is ice cold this time of year. That helps.”

They sat on two stumps in a clearing. Corinne’s was a dead thing, perfect for sitting, smooth and worn shiny with use. Alfred’s was overgrown with lichen, piled with leaf litter and pine needles. She noticed he made no effort to brush it off before sitting, his wiry body settling with a soft crunch. As he spoke, his fingers stroked a fleshy shelf fungus growing off the stump, as if it were a dog between his legs.

“We’ll give you another day to decide,” he continued. “But you can only decide once. If you come back here with a known face they’ll kill you.”

He paused, staring at her until she lifted her brown eyes to meet his green ones. “I will kill you.”

Corinne pursed her lips, holding his gaze. If his tough guy threats were supposed to scare her, it wasn’t working.

“Ridiculous,” she said. “There can’t be cameras out here. It’s the middle of fucking nowhere and they don’t even know where we are. Who’s going to see my face?”

“There are cameras everywhere,” he said sharply. “If you think you’re safe— if you think you’re away from the drones and the biometrics you should leave now— you’re putting us all at risk.”

Corinne studied the stump, her bandaged fingers worrying the bark under her legs. An iridescent-shelled insect trundled across the earth between them. She wondered if one day she would know the name of that insect, some arcane use for its body. She wondered if she could ever be useful to Alfred and his people, chopping wood or hauling water someday, her face broken and remade.

“Your face doesn’t belong to you,” he continued. “It’s on a dozen ID cards, starting when you’re a child. It’s in a million pictures online, most of which you don’t control. It’s in yearbooks and photo albums and airport security files. It’s on the Jumbotron and it’s all over that phone you left behind. Right now, your face belongs to Them, and I’m giving you a chance to take it back. Remake it. Move through the world as a newborn.”

She opened her mouth and then shut it.

“Go ahead. Whatever it is. Better to say it now.”

She pulled in a breath, her hand finding her lips as if she could hold in the words. They tumbled out.

“Why does it have to be so savage? You people are fucking sick about this, you know that? I mean, did you ever hear of plastic surgery? I’ll get plastic surgery, that’s fine. I’ll change everything about myself! Sign me up.” Corinne began to realize she was begging but she couldn’t stop. There had to be another way.

“I want to be here. But I don’t want willow tea! I want a doctor, a scalpel, stitches and medicine. We can do this in a normal way. Let one thing be easy.”

Alfred suddenly straightened, looking past her at something in the distance. Corinne turned around but saw nothing.

“The point is to go through something tough,” he said, his eyes locked on the trees. “And to get through it. To come out the other side stronger. Surgery doesn’t make you tough.”

A breath of wood smoke pushed through the clearing, and then there was a man, not ten feet away, tall and broad-shouldered, dressed in dark camouflage. He wore the scent of a bonfire on his clothes. In his hands he carried small animal bodies, fur and feathers dripping blood on the forest floor.

Corinne startled. The man had moved through the trees as silent as a ghost. She hadn’t noticed him until he was almost on top of her.

“Walt,” Alfred said, nodding.

He moved past the stumps, walking with purpose, his bloodshot eyes watching Corinne like a snake in the grass. A long, crooked scar cut a pink stripe from his eyebrow to the corner of his lip, where it pulled his face into a permanent sneer.

Looking at him, Corinne realized some people were good looking despite their broken faces. Maybe some were good looking because of them, fortunate enough to wear a scar well. Alfred was not one of those, and she doubted she would be either.

“I’m Mary,” she said, using her code name. He looked away when she spoke, as if it confirmed something, then kept on his path until he disappeared into the woods.

“They’ll be suspicious of you ’til you’ve gone through it,” Alfred said. “Sometimes even after. We’ve been burned.”

“Are you fucking kidding me? We’ve all been burned!” Corinne heard her voice rise on a crest of fury. She hoped Walt could hear it too. “The whole world is burning! Jesus, I made it all the way here for a Goddamn purity test? What is this, high school?”

Alfred gave her a stony look. She lowered her voice.

“I went through so much to get here. I crawled through Hell. I left everything behind. I’ve done enough.”

The night she left, protestors had blocked the main bridge into the city, causing a standoff with police and border guards. The smuggler Corinne hired— using every penny she could wring from three maxed out credit cards— had told her to wait for this exact circumstance. Demonstrations were frequent, but only a few were big enough to distract the guards.

The police fired tear gas canisters into the crowd, and protestors threw them back. Corinne had tied a bandana across her face, but there wasn’t time to get goggles, and the sticky cloud seared her eyes and lungs. She struggled to take pictures and videos of the action, filling her albums with records of her being there, as instructed. The bridge was a battlefield, dark and smoky, and Corinne watched silhouetted soldiers toss limp bodies into waiting trucks.

Someone threw a Molotov cocktail and it burst on the street. There was a roar as protestors surged forward and something hit Corinne hard in the temple, knocking her to the ground. Black spots crowded her sight but she knew she couldn’t stop.

Glass shards pressed into her palms, and she focused on the pain to keep herself awake. Through acid tears she crawled to the back of the frothing crowd, her hands becoming sticky with blood and debris. Her head felt heavy and the asphalt rolled under her like a wave.

She managed to dump her phone into the dark water, so far below she didn’t even hear it splash, then dragged herself to the back of the bridge, where the smuggler shoved her in the trunk of his car. The trunk’s thin liner was damp with someone else’s blood. There, in a cloud of exhaust, gasoline and sweat, she gave in to the pressure in her skull, wondering if she would ever wake up again.

When They tracked her phone later, after she missed enough work, her trail would end at the protest. She hoped that would be enough— They could assume she was arrested or killed. And if her phone was found in the river, with any luck They would think she drowned.

When her brother tried to find her, he would too. He would call the jail, the detention centers and emergency rooms, searching for his only living family member. He would worry and panic and eventually he would grieve her, alone.

There was no way to say goodbye.

“My brother—” she said, her voice cracking.

Alfred raised a hand to stop her, a halfhearted gesture that made him look so tired. She understood right away. Everyone had the same story— he had his own, of course— of shredding their past and torching their present for a chance at a future.

“Getting out shows a certain kind of courage, Mary. It’s a courage born of desperation. Making your way here,” he paused and looked up at the sky, thinking of his words. “Finding us is another kind of courage. Instinct. Tenacity. But giving up your face for us—with us— shows me something else. You seal off the exits, you give us everything. And we make you whole again. ”

“You make it sound like poetry, but it’s smashing my face with hammers. Let’s just say it, ok? You and that creep Walt and whoever else is out here are going to attack me with fucking hammers, Alfred.”

Something about the way she said this cracked him open. His eyes wrinkled at the corners and they both began to laugh. The sound was outrageous in the quiet woods, free, unburdened and deeply human, surprising both of them with its sweet ferocity. It bubbled up from a place she had forgotten, pushing against her ribs and collarbones, demanding to be heard. This was a laughter that refused to be caged, and it brought tears streaming down her face.

When Alfred smiled, he revealed gorgeous teeth, perfectly white and straight. The teeth of a game show host, not the leader of a survivalist cult.

For a moment, Corinne wished her teeth were white and straight like his, then she shook the thought out of her head. Come tomorrow, she might not even have all her teeth. She wiped the tears from her cheeks as their laughter evaporated into the air. Her smile turned soft.

“You’re right,” he said, a crooked, devilish grin on his crooked, devilish face. His bristle of red hair caught a beam of sunlight, and it made him look like a man on fire.

“We’re going to smash your face with hammers. And you’ll be the most free you’ve ever been.”