You're Spry. He Said, Without Moving His Mouth

M O C K I N G B I R D

B Y
A L E X
A T C H L E Y

She tried not to look at the river below as she scrambled up the wet rock face. Her numb fingers and toes gripped well enough to carry her to safety, but she didn't know for how long. When she craned her neck in the opposite direction, across the rushing doom, she could see the wolf smiling, mocking her. She knew it, even though his face never changed.

"You're spry." he said, without moving his mouth.

Her bloodied hands and weakening arms were failing her, betraying her as every second passed. The sound of rushing water and the reflections of falling rocks into the river became a music-bed to the horror that she became a part of. Her lips trembled and managed to form into a sneer, and her cold, dry eyes looked dead into the black eyes of the wolf.

"You should fear me," she said.

"Should I?"

"Yes."

"I don't. Though, I admire your tenacity. But, why don't you just give up? You will probably die instantly from crushing your head on the rocks. The water is shallow and the rocks are very very sharp. I would love to hear your brains gush against them."

"Why haven't you killed me yet? Maybe you need me, wolf."

"Spend your energy climbing, Mockingbird. Don't talk anymore."

Slowly, and with great pain, Mockingbird was flat on her belly, cut up, bruised and tired, but on stable ground. The wind whipped her back exposed through her torn, plaid shirt. It gripped her skin with thick layers of sweat and blood. She stood up, her heavy breath visible in the freezing wind. She looked at the wolf, sitting on his hinds, in judgment of her, unflinching—unblinking. He stayed centered on her. But now, the river, several yards below them, separated them.

"I commend your willingness to hunt me without a weapon," he said, "but also foolish. What will you do if you were to catch me? Rip me apart with your hands?"

He laughed.

"Yes," Mockingbird said.

"Now," he said, "I'm going to make it more difficult for you."

The wolf stood up, turned, and ran away, becoming more and more camouflaged by the grey falling snow as he became smaller in her vision. She kicked the ground and walked along the ridge. "Where's the goddamn bridge," she said. For the next few hours, the only sound she heard aside from the constant flow of river water was the sound of her boots crushing the grayed snow beneath her feet. Her body temperature dropped, she could feel her heart slowing down.

It was no use. There was no bridge, not even the kind held together with frayed ropes that wobbled violently while orchestra hits played in the background as brave, but stupid adventurers tried to scale it. She surveyed her surroundings and caught sight of the dirt highway in the distance, uncovered by the high-mountain's endless supply of snow - she headed toward it.

The small A-frame house came into view. The car parked next to it was covered in a thick layer of soot. In the distance from the valley, Mt. Saint Forever continued to emit a steady flow of ash into the gray sky. She came into the house and locked the door behind her. The water was too cold to bathe. She made a small fire in the hearth and wrapped herself in blood-and-dirt-stained rags and blankets and laid down in the warm light on the hard floor. Exhaustion overtook her quickly as she gazed at the stars on the insides her eyelids. She slept in the warmth of the fire while the emulsion eyes of her father watched her from a picture on her bookcase, his old Winchester propped against the wall.

The sun rose the next morning, nearly blinding her through her closed eyelids. Her back was sore and stiff, but she stood, still in the clothes that she nearly lost her life in. She turned the hot water knob all the way to the left, but it was still too cold. She peeled the bloodied clothes off of her, each so firmly clung to her skin, it pulled her flesh, and new blood seeped out. Soon, a haze of steam rolled from the surface of the tub water, and she got in. She didn't scream as her wounds touched the water.

After she dried off, she dressed her wounds with outdated brown bottles of peroxide and bandages that seemed to be left over from the second World War. She put on a fresh set of clothes, her boots managed to hold up, but the jeans and the flannel shirt were ripped and soaked with grime, pus and blood. She looked out her back window to the raging mountain, still spewing black dust.
She looked through her refrigerator and small pantry for something to eat, but they were painfully bare. Her stomach made it way clear that it was tired of her being so negligent. She grabbed the ruined flannel shirt, ripped sheets off of it that were untouched by blood, soaked them in water and walked outside.

She did her best to wipe the soot off her car windows, but she thought she was making things worse. Now, not only were the windows covered in ash, but wet ash, and if she wasn't thorough, the cold would freeze the gray-black water. An hour later, the windows were good enough to see out of, but still not optimal. The engine finally turned over after four or so tries. She pulled into the dirt highway, and headed west down Mountain Road 28 towards Sherman, away from the dragon's maw of Mt. Saint Forever that always dominated her rear-view mirror.

"Bird," Mr. Finkle said as she walked into his diner, "welcome back."

She took a seat at a booth near a window with a view of the black spires of smoke coming from the mountain.

"Wanted a look at the chaos, huh," Mr. Finkle said approaching with a small tablet and pen in his hand, "what'll it be? Pancakes? Burger? Omelet?"

"Anything not covered in ash."

"Well," Finkle said with a grin, "we'll see what we can do."

Mockingbird looked around the diner, hoping that Judy Bane wouldn't be there. Judy annoyed the fuck out of her. She goes to the antique store just to talk other ladies' ears off, but she never buys anything. She always wanted to have a "girls' talk" with Bird, but she hated it. Her aunt tried that on her as well. She hated it too. To Bird's dismay, as she scanned the small perimeter of the diner, with its' walls stained by years of cigarette smoke, their eyes locked. Judy wore a black sweater with little sparkly trinkets glued to them, with "World's Greatest Grandma" stitched into it. She stood up and waved at Bird excitedly while simultaneously clutching her coffee mug and stumbling towards her.

"Mockingbird, sweetie," Judy Bane said, "so good to see you. Where have you been? I haven't seen you in a while." She didn't have a good answer for her. Please let it end, Bird thought. "There's someone I am dying to set you up with. His name is Jeffery, he's about your age, I think, he's the manager at Super Savers, and I heard he's a writer too, I think you-"

"No, Judy, I'm not interested."

"Well, why the hell not? You're too picky."
"I just want to eat."

"I just want to help. It's not right to be here by yourself."

"What the hell are you talking about? You were here by yourself-"

"-and now you're here with me!"

"You're not making any goddamn sense. Don't you have a book club meeting to go to with the other dying crows?"

Judy's brow formed into the shape of a perfectly crafted Apache arrowhead pointing downwards towards her flared nostrils. She stood up out of the booth.

"Bitch," she said, walking away from Bird. In her great fury, she scrambled for the dollar and change in her purse and slammed it onto the counter and walked out. She dug for her keys, still yelling and cursing to herself, as if she was reading a passage from the Necronomicon.

Finkle came to Bird's table with a waffle and a side of eggs on a brown plate.

"What happened to Judy?"

Finkle looked down and noticed her bandaged left forearm. "What'yda do? Get bit by a dog?"

"A wolf."

Finkle laughed and put her bill next to the plates.

"Thanks," she said, her voice cracking.

On her way out, she bought a pack of cigarettes from the aged bronze vending machine. She walked to the Bag N Save, but it was closed. The sign on the door said:

WE'RE CLOSED FOR CHRISTMAS.

CHRISTMAS, NOT "X-MAS"

GOD BLESS.

"It's fucking Christmas?" she said to no one. "Huh." She lit her cigarette and walked down the street. The little town of Sherman was deserted. Not even J's Video Barn was open, and they stay open on Thanksgiving. Next to J's was The Cool Down, Sherman's only dive. 11AM was too early for it to be open, so she stood and waited. This gave her plenty of time to think about the wolf.

Obviously, she thought, he's an avatar for something else, something without form, or a form too hideous and confusing for the human mind to perceive. That's as far as she ever got to figuring him out. No name, no background. Nothing. She tried researching wolf-lore, wolf in popular culture...anything to give some kind of clue. Again—nothing.There are plenty of wolves in the mountains and outer-lying forests, but only this one spoke to her in that smooth, deep, yet robotic voice that she only heard in her head when they were within each others' sights. There was nothing more to think about than that, other than that he needed to be dead. Sitting on the sidewalk, she burned through half of her soft pack.

The sun goes down at 3pm in Sherman, and that is precisely when Dolores, the owner of The Cool Down, unlocked the door and let Mockingbird in. The Cool Down was dark, musty, dusty, like any good dive should be. An old 45-player jukebox was shoved in the corner next to a working Ms. Pacman machine next to it that was covered in old grease and grime and bar-mist. When this place closed, a few years later, the man who bought the machine for his game-room would never get the cigarette smell off of it, and eventually, his wife would make him get rid of it. Their marriage fell apart soon after, and he would buy a Galaga machine that always smelled like pizza. His second wife, who was ten years younger than him, really liked it.

Back a few years before, the Cool Down was called Babe's and all the high-school garage bands would play there, each with their own take on the Sonics' cover of "Louie Louie." Their fliers still hung on the wall, aged, decayed and yellowed. Dolores said that Buddy Holly played here the week before he died. No one believed her, but there was no real way to check up on that, and no one tried to argue about it. No need to. What is the point in arguing about trivial bullshit anyways?

"Thank god you're open, Dolores," Bird said.

"I knew you'd be coming in, so I thought I'd come down."

"Won't Hank be upset that you left him alone with Mark and Sue?"

"Honey, Mark and Sue got their own lives now. They don't want to come all the way up to Sherman. Only weirdos come out to drink on Christmas."

"Or people getting away from their families."

"Right."

"Give me a..." Bird said, and she paused trying to remember the name of some drink she might have tasted in a better life, but instead she said, "a Pabst."
"Coming up," Dolores said. She came back with the cold piss-water and a few dimes. She said, "play something for us, Bird." She poured herself something off the import line, while Bird loaded up the jukebox. They clinked their glasses together as "Up on Cripple Creek," came on through the tinny speakers.

"I fucked Levon Helm once," Dolores said, already half in the bag, "or maybe it was the other guy." She slapped her hand on the bar and laughed liked a wicked witch in a movie that was made to cash-in on the popularity of The Wizard of Oz, but not the actual Wicked Witch.

They drank.

And they drank.

8PM came.

"Maybe the wolf," Mockingbird said, "is all in my mind?"

"What wolf?" Dolores said, cackling like a banshee down a tiled hallway.

"Never mind," Bird said, dragging her words. "He's just fucking with me." Dolores was lost. She didn't know what she was trying to tell her, but she pretended to follow anyways.

Still, no one came into the bar. Sherman liked to pretend it kept Christ in their hearts, so on Easter and Christmas Eve, everyone went to church, and they stayed away from the bar for all of two days, and went back to their cloaked small-town debauchery, which amounted to little more than excessive drinking and casual racist jokes. There weren't any black people in Sherman. They think they saw a Mexican working at Juan's Mexican Embassy, and even at that, Juan was really John Faulker, the only Jew in town, and they had something to say about that. They never even heard the word Embassy before, and before someone corrected them, they thought embassy was a Yankee word for restaurant. You can't use college words here.

So yes, Sherman had a 50's diner (built in the 80's), a bar, a grocery store, Juan's Mexican Embassy (where all the men take their wives on their anniversary), Duke McTaco Hut (the fast-food staple of the nation at large), and a donut shop owned by a Korean family, or Vietnamese family—they couldn't tell. The family was tired of telling everyone they were from Thailand. "You're pretty tan for Ko-ree-ans," someone said.

Mockingbird thought of opening up a bookstore, but she traveled too much, and was too physically and mentally beat up most of the time to even get her brain in a retail-oriented mindset. Too much going on in her skull, worrying about a psychotic wolf that has been tormenting her since she was a child, killing family members, getting her wrongfully accused of several gristly murders that forced her to flee to this mountain town in the first place. But the wolf followed her and the mountains barfed black, smoking apocalyptic omens with a frightening, cable-news-network regularity.

"Everyone is going crazy because of the ashes," Dolores said, after sobering up a bit, "they ran out of lawn-mowing masks weeks ago at the hardware store. The snow trucks can't keep up with them. They're not made for it." Bird nodded, wondering if there was a connection - or if the whole town (and then the state, then the country, then the world) would someday be covered in magmic dust. Maybe it didn't matter. "What do you think, Birdy?"