A Sneak Peak into "The Dead Grass Grows"

As May turns into June, I’ll be turning all of my focus towards my horror epic titled “The Dead Grass Grows”. A three part standalone, it will follow the trials and tribulations of a boy, a teen, and then a man as he faces not only the ghosts of his past but those that seem to be so very alive in his present. What is real and what is true are questions that will be answered in pages saturated with nightmares and blood, buoyed like a raft by the rising bubbles of a drowning man. This novel will be titanic, it will be cruel, and it will be unforgiving.

Live in fear of the barking dogs that are not there.

PROLOGUE

I was sixteen when my mother stitched her mouth shut with fishing line and a needle from an old sewing kit that used to sit on her bedside table. 

I was another day older than that when she bit off her tongue after waking in the ICU to find that her stitches had been removed. I didn't talk to her much after that and she didn't talk to me at all. She lived for another nine years, her time spent spread across several different mental hospitals across the states, and I never got around to visiting her. I feel bad about that sometimes. They found her in her room on her fifty-seventh birthday. She was surrounded by papers and notepads filled with sketches and unreadable words that ran in constant circles. She'd choked to death on a brand new collection of colored pencils that hadn't been broken or dulled. 

I didn't ask them how it happened. I didn't want to know. 

That's not to say we didn't have a good run of it, because we did. We owned a little liquor store in town that we rarely opened but was always there. I had a father once, and she'd had a husband, but he'd run far away to a place we wouldn't go, so I'd never really known him at all. She and I played games and laughed and sometimes we'd play hide and seek and she'd never find me. But we still had fun. It's nice to remember her smile the way it used to be before the needle had poked it bleeding holes. She never told me in those early years what she wrote about or what drove my father away and that ignorance was bliss. For those couple years before the walls started knocking, she was just a mother. She was my mother. And she was great at it. 

But those did knock and everything changed. She never stopped writing after that and we didn't play together nearly as much. When we did, the games were different. 

We lived in a clearing just north of a little town in Kentucky. We weren't too far from Lexington but that didn't matter much because we never really traveled. It just mattered because it was my job to go to the little drug store that sat smack dab in the middle of a row of empty shops and buy pens and pencils every other day. I'd walk there in the morning on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Friday, and sometimes more than that, because when the only thing that stopped the bleeding of ink through is sleep, you wind up running low pretty often. Ms. Harlow would always smile and say we were keeping her in business every time I came around,  but I never said anything because it wasn't a joke. 

My life wasn't a joke and neither was what my mother did. 

When the eyes in the darkness started glowing, she was there. When the men started coming for me, she was there. And when the emptiness threatened to swallow everything we'd held aloft for so long, she was there. There was always a pen in her hand. There were always symbols and words no one could read written into the floorboard and panelling so many times over that they were carved grooves rather than wet ink. She said that as long as she wrote the things that had to be said, they could only get so far. One day I'd write them too, just like her mother had written them and her mother's father before her. It was just something we had to do, she'd say. 

There used to be more of us, she said. But good things go away all the time and they did too, sometimes to the sound of a whistle, sometimes to the snap of a rope. But they all went and eventually she did to. It wasn't their fault. It wasn't anyone's, really. For all that they were trying to do and all that they tried to keep in the dark, there was never enough ink. There was never enough paper. No matter what you did, even if they'd demolished every forest and every protected state park, there'd never be enough trees. 

I stayed with a family we used to know once she got committed and I was there until I turned eighteeen. I saw my doctors pretty regularly and didn’t give much thought to anything other than that. I was just a kid and no matter what everyone said, I remembered the faces in the past and the voices that came with them. I remembered everything about those nights even when I was sure I was insane and sometimes I'd wonder. I'd wonder what would've happened if our life could've kept going in that little house in the clearing. I'd wonder what she would've taught me and what I would've known. The more she drank, and she always drank, it was harder and harder to learn what she was trying to teach, but I tried. I was a good son. I was her boy and all I wanted was for it to stay that way. 

We kept boxes of saltine crackers in every room of the house in case the urge to whistle ever came knocking. We didn't own any plates or forks or things like that unless they were plastic or paper because we couldn't run water any more than we had to. I drank bottled water and mom drank whatever other bottles happened to be in the room; she wasn't picky. No one in the town seemed to care that my childhood was made up of long walks down the main road with bags of pencils, pens, and whiskey bottles in my arms and filling the wagon I pulled behind me. They were good people and they knew I was just trying to help my family. So we did our thing, we kept our traditions, and she'd sleep from midnight to six every night, writing as soon as she woke and until her hands were trailing blood along the splintering wood floors. 

I like to think I did well. When things got bad and she found the fishing line in the cabinet under the sink, I like to think she was still proud of me. But that doesn't mean I don't wish I'd been better. It doesn't mean I didn't wish I'd kept her writing. Or that I could've stopped crying so she'd stay asleep. A good son would've done those things. When the dread shadows came walking through our world, the better version of me would've stood strong so my mother wouldn't have to. She would never have done anything other than what she was supposed to do, maintain the balance and protect her son. She was strong like that even if she didn't look it.

That's what family is for. That's what I was supposed to do. But the bridge runs both ways and all her work didn' t matter when it stood guard against gates I'd left open and swinging in an invisible breeze. It might as well have been a tissue land in a land of concrete tigers for all the good it did and I'll never forget the look in her eyes when I told her about the man in the kitchen and the stack of bottle caps I kept in my pocket. It's the sort of thing that never goes away, that sunshine glimmer of hysteria and pain, and it was there when she threaded the needle all the way through, when the blood started running free and she started to cry. 

I'd never seen my mother cry before, not even after all we'd been through or when we'd found my father in a garage filled with running cars. That scared me more than any visitor ever could have, but a good son would've held her hair while she worked. He would've said kind things in her ear and told her how much he loved her as the stitches formed and she gagged and whimpered on blood running free. A good son wouldn't have run away when she beckoned him with a newly threaded needle and line. He would've known it was for the good of all things and the end of all bad, but the good son wasn't me. I thought I could be, I really did, but I wasn't. 

When she needed me most, I wasn't enough. 

I still remember what it felt like when my fingers dialed 911, the motion so foreign and disconnected that I swear it wasn't really me. The numbers felt like ragged sandstone that ripped and tore at delicate skin. I still remember hiding under the sink, the phone held close to my chest and surrounded by bloody bottle caps. I remember everything. 

And I remember when they took my mother away. 

Now and then I'll see her standing in the corner of my room and it's always late in the middle of the night. Colored pencil shavings spill out of her mouth whenever she opens it to scream and they hit the floor with the force of leaves soaked through by red rain. But I don't see her every night. I don't always have to see the pain in her eyes or the fishing line that dangles from torn lips and sways as if there's a cold wind coming that I can't feel. Sometimes it's just a shadow or a draped coat that looks so terribly wrong. Sometimes the screaming and the whimpers are just the results of bad insulation in a house too old and rotten and dead. 

Sometimes. 

But not always.