more life

More Life

Stepping out of the police precinct, Darren Garrett felt the cool California air on his overheated and overexposed arms and calves.

Checking his newly returned phone, he saw that his uber driver Rashad was still 6 minutes away. The perfect amount of time for a cheeky menthol cigarette to sober him up.

Darren sat on the stone steps of the building smoking his cigarette, hungry and 500 dollars lighter. But he didn’t care, he had 20,000 more where that came from and another bottle of rum waiting to fill his belly.

***

The blue sedan slowed to a stop in front of the grand, wooden cabin surrounded by fern trees. Its build was simple but familiar, a home Darren had spent many summers in. This time, however, the traditionally warm house looked cold, like an empty husk, devoid of the heartbeat that gave it its life.

Darren was dejectedly happy that his key to the house still worked. Kicking off his shoes and ignoring the overflow of unread mail and impending medical bills, Darren cut through the sparsely furnished living room to the mini-bar built into the back. Rummaging through the pantry, Darren found exactly what he was looking for. The prized bottle of white rum his grandfather Neal had brought back from his last trip to the motherland.

Before opening the cap, he quickly checked his cell phone for a text that would never come. His last 10 messages were still on read.

Drinking from the bottle, Darren stumbled through a personalized tour of family history. The coffee table he had slammed his shin escaping an ass whopping from his mom. The medal of honor belonging to his Grandfather that knew one in the entire family knew why or when he received. The small hole in the wall where his Aunt Lisa tried and failed to teach his sister Stacy Bachata.

With his pain reflected on the glass coverings of his families’ memories and accomplishments hanging around him, the long hallway leading to his grandfather’s room felt like a liminal walk through the world’s saddest funhouse.

To the lonely man standing in the doorway, the shadowy room existed as a dark mirror. During his youth, he spent his time in this room being raised by the man he so greatly revered. However, in his adulthood, he became the caregiver to the frail man that once took a dream from Jamaica and turned it into a reality in America.

Collapsing onto the bed still dressed for the dead man who slept in it, Derrick took a hearty gulp of the exotic rum. The sheets still smelling of the cologne his grandfather so proudly boasted convinced his grandmother to give him her number all those years ago. Pulling himself to the edge of the bed, Darren addresses the rocking chair with two oxygen tanks on either side of it.

“Cheers grandpa Neal, I’m sure I’ll be seeing you in no time”, Darren raises his shaky hand holding the bottle, and clinks against an imaginary glass.

“You know in a way, it is your fault your dead. You told me to put myself out there!”

Darren wipes his chin as he continues a conversation in the vacuum his grandfather left.

“How was I supposed to know she had COVID? Chick never even called me back”, Darren takes another swig of the almost finished bottle.

“I was lonely and selfish. A dog just like my old man right?”, with tears in his eyes, Darren smiles to himself.

“Everyone fucking hates me, and they should. I deserve it. I deserve it all. I, I just wish it was me instead of you”. Darren looks up to the chair like he always did, but this time there was no wise and kind old man to tell him it was going to be okay. It was just him.

Alone in agony, Darren stands and slams the bottle on the ground, but to his drunken surprise, it doesn’t shatter.

When he looks down, he sees the bottle of rum standing crooked, nestled into a little groove underneath the rug by his grandfather’s bed. Stumbling down to the floor, Darren pulls the old shag carpet with the bottle still on top sending it tumbling beneath the bed.

Where the bottle once stood, is a small divet in the multiple, identical wooden panels comprising the floor. “What the hell?”, Darren asks to no one but himself and the universe. With a curious hand, Darren pulls on the opening like a door handle. With a creak and groan, the floorboard attached to it lifts out of place revealing a cold, black hole in its place.

With his anxiety nullified by the alcohol coursing through his veins, Darren reaches into the abyss and searches blindly. With his hand as his guide, he touches a cool and leathery surface. Thinking it a snake, he snaps his hand back before remembering snakes aren’t flat and worn out. Reaching back in, Darren pulls out a small black book.

Darren sits back against the bed and opens this new discovery. Flipping eagerly through the faded cream-colored pages, he finds nothing. Each page just as blank and boring as the one before it. Drunk and disappointed, Darren gets ready to chuck it and find another bottle when something finally catches his eye. On the very last page of the notebook, is a striking symbol Darren has never seen in this home or in his life. In bright red ink, two sickles cross between a white and black semi-circle.

Written underneath it in his grandfather’s flowing cursive, “At the end of the path, remember your first step”.

Darren stares transfixed on the mystifying mark on the page. The simple strokes comprising it resonating in alchemical power. Like the long-forgotten markings of an ancient empire. Trapped in a loop of perpetual processing, Darren’s hypnotic gaze is only broken by the sound of a car door slamming just outside the house.

Puzzled, Darren rises to his feet with the notebook still in hand. He glides through the hallway and back to the living room to see who could possibly be visiting his dead grandfather’s home at 3 in the morning. Half-hoping to see his ex’s pick-up parked out front, Darren’s blood runs cold at the sight outside the window.

Emerging from a fleet of all-black Suburbans is a squadron of armed-special forces, adjusting their gear and checking their weapons. At the helm of this formidable hit squad is a tall and pale woman with a jet-black pony-tail pulled tight against her skull. Down to his cells and up to his soul, everything in Darren told him to get as far away from this skeletal woman as he can. But his feet were rooted in fear as his heart prepared to mercy-kill him and burst out of his chest.

“Find the book and bring it to me”, her voice as icy as her gaze surveying the old cabin in the woods.

“Right away Mistress”, a commanding officer of the group signals deployment, as the rest of the squadron spreads out around the perimeter.

With certain death spreading like quicksand around him and the house, Darren snaps sober, his body primally launching him into fight or flight. Without a second thought, he rushes back into his grandfather’s room and opens the window behind the rocking chair. Pushing himself through the small window frame, Darren knocks over one of the oxygen tanks as he throws himself up and out of the condemned house.

“I hear something in the back!”

Darren rises to his feet and shoots down the wooded slope descending to the shadowy lake below. Behind him, bright beams of light dance around the woods in front and around him, jittering with the rushed movement of the guns they’re attached to.

“There’s someone in the forest!”, shouts a husky voice from the dark woods now at Darren’s back. His rapid and heavy breathing punctuated by the snapping of twigs and crunches of leaves underneath his bare and by now bloodied feet.

With each labored stride, Darren sees the tree line thin. His heart lightens upon seeing the murky waters ahead of him. Leaping from the soil to the wooden dock jetting out into the grand lake it’s attached to, Darren rushes to the end where his grandfather’s old paddleboat waits for him below.

Darren gets to the post tethering the boat and begins madly untying the double not when the symphony of cocked assault rifles sings out behind him. Soon the barrage of blinding flashlights steadily converges on every vital part of his body.

“FREEZE!”

The trained killers aim their weapons and bloodthirsty gaze on the drunk and terrified young man in front of them. Waiting on the signal of their master, who soon approaches.

Still blinded, Darren sees a part form in the sea of lights. Soon, the incongruous tap of expensive high heels on wooden planks. Stepping through the light, the woman in black stops a few feet from Darren. Her cold, emotionless gaze resting on the little man in front of her.

“You have something I want”, says the woman in black.

Darren steadies himself and takes a deep breath before responding.

“I appreciate the offer lady, but I’m not exactly dating right now”, says Darren, donning his best Bruce Wayne.

“I’m not here for laughs boy, give me the book. I know you have it, I can feel it”, her eyes flash inhumanely. Like a lizard under bright lights.

Even on the precipice of death, hearing her vilely spit “boy” at him flares a wave of indignation in him.

“Well bitch, you’re not getting it. Matter of fact-

Darren whips around and chucks the notebook as hard as he can into the dark depths of the lake behind him. He turns back and faces the firing squad.

“My bad it slipped- I’m still a little drunk”. Darren stares into the face of the gothic woman looking down on him. Stone-faced, a small crease in the shape of a smirk forms on her chiseled lips.

“Valiant, but foolish just like your grandfather. A little water can’t wash away what’s on that page Darren”.

“How do you-“

“-And now you can join him”. In one fluid movement, the woman in black pulls a pistol from underneath her heavy woolen coat and fires three times into Darren’s neck and chest.

Carried by the momentum of the bullets, Darren falls back into the waters below. Beneath the surface, Darren’s eyes grow faint surrounded by the dark waves swirling around him, and the shroud of death now thrown over his sinking body.

In the stillness of despair, Darren’s eyes instinctively linger on the light of the starry night above his watery grave.

As the last flickers of consciousness sputter and flare, Darren can’t help but acknowledge the shapes and beauty and patterns and power of the cosmos above. In fact one of those patterns in the divine light of the stars growing farther and farther from him looks exactly like-

The light of the sun just above the water.

Swimming to the surface, Darren breaks through looking around blindly. His eyes readjusting to the light of the surface and the world of the living.

“What the fuck what is..what the fuck is going on-“, between gulps of water Darren struggles to think and breath and float.

“There you are, I thought I lost you down there son”.

A voice from beyond the grave calls out to Darren lost at sea. Soon an old hand with a familiar gold watch reaches out by his head bobbing in the water. Darren looks up into the face of the man he killed just 2 days ago.

“Grandpa?”

“Who else?”

Framed by the golden light around him, Grandpa Neal helps Darren up and into the paddleboat, he’s sitting in. On his way up, Darren notices he’s much lighter and smaller than he remembered.

Stammering and blinking wildly, Darren’s head turns on a swivel from his now-small hands and body to the man sitting across from him to the lake and back in neurotic, never-ending cycles.

“But how? You were and now I am? And this is the lake still but you’re here and we-“ Darren tries his best to make sense, but he only sputters unintelligible and inquisitive gibberish.

Grandpa Neal smiles at his young grandson sitting and losing his mind in the little boat with him. But soon his eyes drop, heavy with the burden of a painful truth.

“So I guess you found the notebook huh?”

The End.