In Our Little Corner of the World
TW: death
The four of us were playing, rushing down the street on our bicycles. We moved from side to side, competing in a game of chicken with the cars. They moved in our direction, not caring for the law, and we would attempt to move just as fast, trying to cross before they came in contact with us. The game was simple. You crossed, you got a point. You were hit, or the car was forced to stop to avoid hitting you, and you lost a point. If they screamed or honked at you you’d get deducted another point. So far I was winning.
After a while we noticed the sun, settling behind the boxed roofs of the houses surrounding us. The lights within were going up, one after the other, almost as if synchronised. We stopped and counted our points. Alejandro with 10, Edgar with -5, Carlos with 4 and, the winner, I with 12. As we argued over our final scores the sun moved, taking away with it the bright blue sky and leaving behind traces of orange that shifted into a deep navy.
We began to search for stars, counting them as they appeared and holding our fingers up to trace their place above our heads, so that we wouldn’t come across them again. And then it was too dark to continue playing our game so we talked, picking up the rocks on the side of the road and tossing them onto the charcoal-coloured street, seeing if we could reach any of the bright lines dotting their path along it.
“This is stupid. Let’s go home,” I muttered, looking at the way the sun whispered its final breaths, the lamps above our heads not bright enough to make up for its departure. “I’ve gotta get back for dinner.” They ignored me, stepping off the bikes and choosing instead to follow an unfortunate beetle that crawled beneath our feet.
“It’s massive,” Edgar giggled, poking at it with the tip of his toe. He lifted his foot, allowing it to linger a few inches from the creature.
“Don’t,” Alejandro complained, using his own foot to push away Edgar’s, stumbling off his bike as he lost balance and fell forwards. He landed awkwardly on his leg, the other tangled in the metal and a hand holding onto Edgar’s shirt, pulling at the sleeve. He stood still for a moment before letting go, moving away from the bike in a series of jumps that made it seem as though his feet were set aflame.
He clicked his tongue, his eyes quickly looking us over and settling down when we didn’t comment on him. He turned to the ground and reached into his pocket, taking out his phone so that he could use the light to find the bug once more. It was there, right by the wheel of the bike he’d abandoned on the edge of the street.
“Do you have a piece of paper?” he asked, kneeling above the beetle, following its every move with the torch on his phone.
They picked up the beetle with a piece of paper that Edgar offered, a receipt for the corner shop he had found in the pocket of his jacket. He moved it to the side, out of the section of the road we were in, where cars mostly parked and rarely crossed, and past the sidewalk, where no one ever walked, and on towards the grass and the dirt.
He stopped for a second, eyes set on something in the horizon. The beetle tumbled off the paper, which was abandoned as soon as Alejandro moved forward, rushing towards whatever had caught his eye.
“Wait! Wait!” Alejandro yelled once he stood a few feet away from a strangely shaped bundle lying amongst other dead things in the empty lot. It’d been like that ever since I could remember – the only thing in the neighbourhood that seemed to be as constant as the weather. The lot had a belly filled with weeds and dead grass, bodies of rats torn apart by the nearby cats. Some even said that there was treasure, buried beneath all the rubble that had once been the beginnings of a building back when my mother was a few years younger than me.
“Ey! Listen to me. You gotta look.”
We did look. We looked up from our bicycles and the rocks pressed against the soles of our feet, turning to find what he was pointing out. And all we could see was a strange bundle of misshapen things. The shadows the light of his phone cast upon it were of no help, simply stretching it out and across. And when he switched the light to his other hand, placing the previous one on his nose and taking a loud exaggerated sigh as he did, the light merely twisted the shapes, forcing him to call us over once more.
Our bikes were abandoned in the street and we moved, pushing each other and joking, using the light of our phones in order to avoid stepping on any corpses. “Don’t want rat guts on my shoe.”
Then we saw it.
“Fuck.”
“That’s –”
“Yes.”
“You can’t say the F-word,” Carlos chimed in.
“Fuck!”
I let a breath escape from my lips, forcing down the vomit that trickled up my throat. I caught a glimpse of the body’s jaw; the bone shone against our light.
“What do you think–” someone said, their voice trailing off as I turned away. The smell curled up and through my nose. My feet moved, trapped between running and staying. The eyebrow above my left eye groaned, stretching itself out in pain and pulling at my skin as it did.
“Fucker doesn’t have an eye,” Alejandro said, speaking in a strange high voice.
“No, it’s probably still there,” Carlos muttered, looming over from afar and yet moving in when he wished to get a better look. “Bet the back of the head is shattered.”
“I gotta go home,” I spat, as my eyes closed and my feet continued to rock me.
Alejandro frowned, blinding me for a moment with the light before he settled with letting it shine upon a crooked branch, missing pieces of bark revealing rosy-coloured flesh underneath.
“What? No. You can’t go home.” He seemed confused, his expression somewhat concealed within the shadows, his fingers pinching at the bridge of his nose.
I didn’t bother to give an explanation, moving towards my bicycle and planning my route back home. “I gotta. Dad’s going to be furious and Mom –” Mother would be a mystery, unraveled only once I made it through the door. “I gotta.” I could hear the rush of footsteps, the soles of their feet slipping against the rocks.
“Wait, wait.” A hand caught my wrist. “You can’t go. What are we going to do?”
“Call the cops,” I said, prying their fingers from my wrist and shrugging my shoulders. “It’s dark. I have to get home.”
Further attempts to capture me were in vain, my fingers quivering and my legs beginning to race. I picked up my bike immediately, stopping only to turn to look at Alejandro, whose eyes were wide, eating away at most of his eyelids, and whose mouth was unable to find a proper way to settle in its place. “Cops,” I repeated.
“Shit, this might be in the newspaper.”
“Don’t say shit.”
“Shit.”
I placed my foot on the pedal, holding onto the handle of the bike and stopping my gaze from turning to the rest of them, piled around the body like moths drawn to a flame. They kept their distance but still were there, right there.
“Fuck,” Alejandro said, his gaze intent on mine.
“Yeah, fuck,” I said, my shoulders falling and my breath escaping my chest. “See ya.”
“Ok. See ya,” he muttered, then stopped me once more. My eyes narrowed, glaring at the hand now tugging at the handle of my bike, nearly forcing me to fall forward. “What do you think happened?” I took a deep breath, allowing my eyes to close and roll once around inside their sockets. I shook my head, shrugging my shoulders and kicking his leg. “Aren’t you curious?” I was. Immensely. But then I began to think of the eyes and the hands and the legs and the mouth all slightly wrong, unnatural and strange.
“Not really, no,” I replied, a weight lifting off my shoulders and my head rolling side to side on my neck. “Gotta go.”
I didn’t wait for his response. Didn’t hear them call out their goodbyes and wave their hands as I rushed off. My feet moved forward, slowly at first before gaining more speed as I went. I moved, aware of the cars passing me by. My heart crawled into my throat. The wind howled against my ears and my heart beat against my throat, and only when I emptied the contents of my stomach on my front porch, and wiped the saliva from my chin, did I stop to think– Fuck. Is that what death looks like?