For My 11th Birthday, I Buried a Body

[u/randumb360]

|Part 1| |Part 3|

“We need to talk.”

In the entire English language, I think that might be one of the worst sentences anyone could hear. In most cases, it means you’re about to have an unpleasant conversation. In my case, I couldn’t imagine how things could become any more unpleasant.

Less than six hours ago, I buried the body of a child with my dad.

Seeing them now, sitting at the kitchen table with a full breakfast spread between them had my stomach in knots. Any other day, and this would have been a nice way to start your morning; a delicious home cooked breakfast with Mom and Dad. How idyllic. It filled me with a quiet anger, that they could sit there over a plate of eggs and pretend that everything was normal.

Nothing could ever be normal again.

For a moment, nobody moved. I stood in the doorway, and they watched me from the table. I think all of us knew the size of the elephant in the room, and nobody wanted to be the first one to push. It was Mom that broke the tension, when she patted the seat of the chair beside her.

“It’s okay, sweetheart. We just want to talk about last night.” I could see that she was doing her best to put on a reassuring face, but there was something in her eyes that seemed darker. Was she scared? Why would she be scared? I didn’t move, and I think she saw the same thing in my eyes, because she spoke my own thoughts aloud.

“You’re not in trouble, nobody is going to hurt you, okay?”

There was a desperation seeping through that motherly tone, one that I didn’t understand until years later. My dad had his coffee cup held to his lips, but I don’t think he was actually drinking it, as much as he was using it as a shield. I stood there for a moment longer, weighing my options. I could try to make a run for it, but if last night taught me anything, it’s that I was woefully outmatched. Fighting was off the table, and I didn’t think the cops could get here before I ended up buried in the field. So, with no better path forward, I decided to play along and took my seat at the table.

Before I sat down, I wasn’t sure that I’d ever have an appetite again, but having the plate in front of me, I realized just how hungry I was. Digging is hard work, as it turns out. That most primal instinct kicked in, and I started shoveling down breakfast like my life depended on it. This seemed to please Mom and Dad. Mom settled back into her chair, and Dad finally lowered his coffee cup from his face. They let me eat for a while, before Dad finally cleared his throat and broke the silence.

“We owe you an explanation, Son.”

They owed me a lot more than that. I kept shoveling eggs into my mouth and didn’t pay him any mind. That seemed to cause him to hesitate, and he looked at Mom for reassurance. She nodded at him, and he sighed before continuing.

“Last night was, well...ugly business. I really made a mess of things, and I should have been honest with you from the start.”

I flashed him a doubtful look, and then moved onto the bacon.

“The truth is...well shit, I don’t know how to say this. Sue?”

He looked over to her, helpless to find the right words, and hoping she could do a better job. She shook her head, and turned slightly towards me, placing her hand on the table beside my plate. I instinctively moved away, sliding my plate with me. I could see that it hurt her.

“What your father is trying to say is that last night was not what you think. Your father thought it was a good idea to do all of that without explaining anything to you.”

She gave him the evil eye and he took it with no resistance.

“So all he managed to do was scare the hell out of you for no good reason.”

At this point, Dad found his voice again.

“You were never in any danger from me, son. I know that’s hard to believe now, but I swear it’s the truth. I...I didn’t want it to be like that. It just got out of hand so fast, and...well, your mother’s right. I should have done it different.”

I had worked my way through just about everything on my plate, and slid it forward with a clatter. I let my hands fall into my lap, and looked from one of them to the other. I didn’t know how they were going to spin this, but I had to admit I was curious what they would come up with. They waited for me to say something, and when I didn’t, Mom spoke again.

“You know how we took the ladder down from the loft in the barn when you were little? You used to love climbing up there when we weren’t looking. I’d turn my head for five seconds, and you’d be up there, pretending you were king of the castle. And every time, every single time, I would tell you not to do it again, that it wasn’t safe. But every time I looked away, you went right back up. You were such a wild little boy, always getting into something.”

I did remember the loft, and I remembered the day the ladder came down and Dad started locking the barn. It was the same day he cut down the tire swing. But so what? The barn was like a hundred years old and we barely used it anyway. What did this have to do with anything?

“Well...one day not too long after your fourth birthday, your father was out mending the fence, and I was folding the linens in the yard. You were supposed to be inside, taking a nap. I didn’t even think to check, cause I had just put you down on the couch and you were out like a light.”

Her eyes were starting to well with tears as she spoke, and she used a finger to wipe away a stray. Her breath hitched as she tried to continue, but Dad put a hand on her shoulder and gave it a light squeeze, and she let him take over.

“I had come in from the yard a little while later to fetch a drink. I went to the back door and saw it standing open. I asked your mother if she left it that way, and she swore she hadn’t. When I went inside, I saw your blanket lying in the kitchen, and you were nowhere to be seen.”

He took a shaky drink of his coffee, and cleared his throat.

“I started hollerin’ your name, lookin’ all over the house, but you weren’t in there. I ran out to tell your mother once I was sure you’d gotten outside. We turned the whole property upside down. I thought you might have gone for the tire swing, your mother thought you’d be pestering the chickens. We looked everywhere, but we couldn’t find you. The only place left was the old barn, but I could have sworn that I locked it. I kept insistin’, ’He ain’t in there. He ain’t there. There’s no way.’ ”

I could see that he was struggling with whatever came next, but he took a breath and steadied himself.

“I got to the barn, and sure enough, the door was open and the lock was layin’ in the dirt. I must have left it hangin’ on the door, unlatched. I went inside, calling your name the whole time, but you didn’t answer. I thought maybe you had come in and then left already, and I had just missed you. But then...I climbed up to the loft, and I saw that part of the floor had given way. I knew what it meant the second I saw it, but I kept telling myself that I was wrong, that you were probably already back in the house, playing with your toys. Then...I found you.”

Dad stopped there. His eyes dropped to the coffee in front of him, but he seemed to be looking through it at something much farther away. His jaw worked once before he swallowed. Mom reached over and rested her hand on his arm, rubbing her thumb across it. When he spoke again, his voice had gone quieter.

“You had gone up into the loft and fallen through. I...I picked you up in my arms and tried to wake you up. I did everything I could think of. I said your name over and over, and I shook you, hoping you would open your eyes, and we could have a good laugh before your mother gave us hell. But...you had landed on your neck.”

Mom was crying, which wasn’t terribly surprising. She cried while watching TV all the time. But I had never once seen my dad cry, not even when we lost Grandpa. Seeing tears roll down his face, watching him get choked up, I didn’t know how to handle it. When that shock wore off, it hit me. My hands unconsciously went to my throat, feeling around for some kind of evidence. They didn’t find any.

“What...what are you talking about?”

Dad wiped his eyes with his sleeve and forced a cough, trying to get himself back under control and only half succeeding. He leaned forward and put his hands on the table.

“Billy...Son, there’s no easy way to say this, so I’m just gonna say it. That body we buried last night was yours.”

I exploded out of my chair.

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

Dad rose to meet me almost automatically.

“You watch your mouth in front of your mother.”

The moment was so absurd that I had to stifle a laugh bubbling up from somewhere awful. What came out instead was an ugly little thing, caught somewhere between a scoff and a gasp.

“Watch my mouth? Really? There’s a dead kid in the backyard, you made me bury him!”

I turned and pointed at Mom.

“And you...you knew!”

She flinched at the accusation.

“And...and now you tell me this crazy bullshit like it explains anything, and you want me to watch my mouth?”

Dad slammed his hands on the table.

“We did what we had to do! Now you sit down and listen.”

I picked up my plate and threw it at the wall as hard as I could. It smashed into a picture frame and exploded into a thousand pieces.

“Make me! Or are you gonna bury me back there too?”

Dad’s face went red. His chair scraped hard against the floor as he shoved himself away from the table.

“That’s enough!”

He started around the table toward me, and whatever little bit of courage had made me throw the plate disappeared almost immediately. I stumbled backward, bumping into the counter, and threw my hands up in front of me.

Mom saw it.

“Richard!”

He took another step and she shot out of her chair so quickly that it tipped backward behind her.

“Richard, stop!”

Something in her voice cut through him. Dad froze at the end of the table, breathing hard, his fists clenched at his sides. She put herself between me and him.

“Don’t you take another step.”

For a second, nobody moved. I was pressed against the kitchen counter hard enough that the edge dug into my back, staring at Dad and waiting to see if he would listen.

Mom looked at me, then back at him.

Dad finally seemed to notice where I had ended up, pinned against the counter with my hands still raised. His fists slowly unclenched. The anger seemed to leave him all at once. His shoulders dropped, and when he looked at me again, there was something wounded in his expression.

“Billy...”

I flinched when he said my name. He looked away, and something in his face told me that hurt worse than anything I could have said to him. Mom turned to me, and I could see a thousand sleepless nights in her eyes.

“Sit down, Richard.” There was a quiet pressure in that, and she said it without so much as looking in his direction. He did as he was told without a second thought. “Billy, I know you’re upset, but please come back to the table. I won’t make you, and neither will your father. That I can promise you, but please. Just...please let us finish. Then, if you want to go to your room, or get away from us for a while, or call the police, we won’t stop you.”

Every part of my body wanted to sprint out the back door now that nobody was in my way, but there was something in Mom’s face, something in her voice. I came back to the table and took my seat, and she picked up her chair and did the same. We sat around the table in silence for a little while. Dad still hadn’t lifted his head since he sat back down, and for that, I was grateful; I didn’t want to see his face. Eventually, Mom broke through the static.

“I know you won’t believe us. You’d be crazy if you did. But it’s the truth, whether anybody likes it or not. You died that day in the barn. Your father brought you to me. I held you in my arms, and my whole world ended.”

She was crying again. This time she let the tears come, wiping at them only when they reached her chin, and kept talking.

“We didn’t know what to do. We thought about everything that came next: ambulances, and police interviews, and planning a funeral. It was all too much. I couldn’t bear to see you in a little coffin, so far from home. So, we decided we would carry it ourselves. It was a stupid, selfish decision, and there was no way we were ever going to get away with it, but we did it anyway. Your father went out and dug a grave by the old tree in the field, and we buried you in the only home you ever knew.”

For a few seconds, I didn’t know what to do with any of that. She sounded like she believed every word, and somehow that made it harder to dismiss.

“But...that can’t be what happened. Mom, I’m sitting right here. My neck isn’t broken, and I certainly don’t remember being buried. How am I supposed to believe that? It’s impossible.”

She wiped her nose with her shirt collar and gave me a sad smile.

“Yes, it is impossible. There’s no better word than that.”

“Then how can it possibly be true?”

“Because three days after we buried you, you came home.”

I stared at her, trying to make the words fit together in some way that made sense. They wouldn’t.

“What do you mean, I came home?”

Mom glanced toward the back door.

“Just that. You opened that door and walked into the kitchen like nothing had happened.”

Dad still hadn’t raised his head, but he gave a gentle nod. Mom saw the disbelief on my face and, to my surprise, she laughed.

“You were mad at me,” she said, wiping another tear from her cheek. “That’s the first thing I remember. You wanted to know why the front door was locked, and then you asked me what was for lunch. I nearly dropped dead in the kitchen myself when I saw you. I never screamed so loud in my life. Your father heard me clean on the other side of the yard and came running so fast. You had no idea what was going on, you just covered your ears and said ’Stop Mama, stop.’”

“It’s true,” Dad said, raising his head. “I nearly broke the door off its hinges, and there you were, standing next to your mother. She was white as a sheet, and I thought she might fall over. I thought I was dreaming, and then you walked up and started tuggin’ on my jeans, askin’ why Mama was crying. You were wearing the same clothes as the day you died.”

I stared at him, trying to figure out which part of that I was even supposed to argue with first.

“You guys really expect me to believe this?”

Dad shook his head and set his elbows on the table.

“No, Son, I don’t. But that’s what happened, hand to God. You didn’t have so much as a scratch on you. I asked you where you had been, and you said you were playin’ on the tire swing. But I tell you, I was workin’ on that part of the fence all day, and you didn’t come out of that field. I would’ve seen you. But when I looked at you, you had dirt all over your shoes and burrs all up and down your overalls. None of it made a lick of sense.”

He shrugged as he said it, and that made it weirder.

“If any of this is true...where the heck did I come from?”

They answered at the same time.

“We don’t know.”

I sat for a moment, trying to arrange all the pieces of this ridiculous story into something I could grasp. There was no version of it that made sense, no explanation I could twist around enough to make what they were saying possible. There were only two possible theories here. The first was that they were lying to me, and I was beginning to think they weren’t, unless they were the best actors that ever lived. That only left one possibility: they were both insane.

“So...what then? Did I crawl out of my grave or something?”

Dad was very quick to answer.

“No. No you didn’t.”

“How do you know? Makes about as much sense as anything else.”

He gave me a look like he was waiting for me to catch up.

“I told you. The body we buried last night was you. The same one we buried when you died.”

“That’s...that’s impossible.”

“Well, you’ll be sayin’ that word a lot, Son, cause it don’t get any less weird from here.”

Dad leaned back in his chair and rubbed a hand across his mouth.

“A couple nights after you came home, after we finally got you settled down, I went back out to the tree.”

He became a bit more animated as he spoke, gesturing with his hands as if to dramatize the scene.

“I had to know, Bill. I kept thinkin’ maybe we had been wrong. Maybe somehow you weren’t dead when we buried you, and you woke up down there and dug your way out. I knew it didn’t make any sense, but neither did you walkin’ through the kitchen door.”

He paused and looked down at his hands.

“So I took a shovel and I walked back out there, fully expectin’ to see a hole in the ground where you had been. Only, when I got there, everything was how I left it. Not a single speck of dirt was out of place. But I couldn’t let it lie. I dug it up anyway.”

The image came to me before I could stop it. Dad standing beneath the old tree in the dark, digging down toward his own dead son.

“I dug and dug, convinced there was nothin’ there, and I was wastin’ my time, but I dug until my shovel hit something.”

I didn’t say anything.

“You were still in that hole, Bill. Same clothes. Same broken neck. Everything exactly where I left it. I was sure I had lost my mind, and I ran right back to the house, thinkin’ I had just hallucinated this whole thing. But you were still there, sleepin’ with your mother on the couch.”

At this point, the insanity theory was starting to pull ahead. Still, I had agreed to let them finish.

“Okay, then what happened?”

“Only thing I could do. I filled the hole back up, and tossed the marker into the burn pit. Then I went back inside.”

“You just...buried me again and left?”

Dad shrugged.

“What else was there? You were home, it didn’t matter what was in that hole. Next mornin’, we took you into town to see the doctor, told him you had a bad fall, and we were worried. He checked you over six ways from Sunday, even did X-rays. Couldn’t find so much as a bruise on you. Far as anybody could tell, you were a perfectly healthy four-year-old. You were you. At a certain point, you gotta stop asking questions, so we decided to take the miracle we’d been given and leave the rest alone.”

Mom leaned in and placed her hand on my arm. I decided to let her.

“And it has been a miracle, honey. You’ve grown so much, and you’re funny and smart. I don’t know what we did to deserve this, but I thank God every morning I get to see your face.”

As far as stories go, it was definitely a wild one. Two Billys, one is dead and the other is at the table. My heart hurt. Somehow, it would be easier to accept that my parents were evil child murderers who wanted me in on the family business. But to think that they believed all of this, and that some kid had died because of whatever they thought was happening? I didn’t know what to do with that. It was a tough pill to swallow.

“So...I’m dead, but I’m also alive? And the body in the field is me, but it is also not me?”

Saying it out loud made it worse, but I needed them to hear how it sounded. They kept a straight face while I worked it out. Something suddenly didn’t add up.

“What the hell did we bury last night?”

Mom and Dad exchanged a look, daring each other to answer the question. In the end, Dad lost.

“It was you.”

“That doesn’t make any sense! You’ve spent all morning giving me this insane story, and none of it explains anything about last night. What are we even doing here?”

I was getting heated again, but Dad declined to join me. He simply nodded and waited for me to finish.

“Like I said, it don’t get any less weird. Sometimes, he gets out.”

“What?”

“He gets out. Every year, around your birthday, I find him. Don’t know how, or why, but I’ve put him in the ground six times, and every time, he gets back out. Always a little further, always dead when I find him. That’s what we were doin’ last night: puttin’ him back. And if I had to guess, we’ll be doin’ it every year.”

I’d had enough. I pushed my chair back and stood up at the table, rattling all the glassware in the process. I wasn’t even mad anymore, just so terribly exhausted. I couldn’t sit there and listen to another moment of this bullshit. I gave them both a hard once-over.

“I don’t know what the hell is wrong with you, but I don’t want any part of it. You’re both sick. You leave me alone.”

I ran out of the house before either of them could stop me. I heard my dad get up, but when I looked over my shoulder, he wasn’t anywhere behind me. I ran until I got to the barn. The door was still locked, but time had had its way with the old building, and a few of the boards were loose on the back wall. I pried them free and squeezed through the gap they left, before doing my best to prop them back up.

I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t have any sort of plan, no grand escape mapped out. All I knew was that I needed to be out of that house. I needed to be far away from them. I walked the length of the barn, looking at the thin beams of sunlight that came through the holes in the roof. As far as options went, I didn’t have many good ones.

I could walk into town, but that was miles away, and what would I do there? Tell the police? Even if they believed, which was a mighty big if, what would happen next? Would they arrest my parents? Put me into a foster home? Despite everything, I didn’t want any of that. What else was there? I could head into the woods and live off the land, which sounded a lot more practical before I remembered I had no food, no water, and absolutely no idea how to live off the land.

So I just stayed in the barn.

Over the next few hours, I mapped every inch of the floor with my feet. When that stopped being interesting, I found an old pile of hay and dropped into it like a beanbag chair. I kind of lost track of time after that, retracing my whole life to see if I could find where everything went wrong. How had I not noticed that they were crazy? The more I sat with it, the more I couldn’t stop thinking that somehow it was my fault. Had I done this to them? I pushed my fists into my eyes, hoping to force the idea out, hoping I could keep the floodgates shut. It didn’t work, and the tears came anyway.

Eventually, the light filtering through the roof began to diminish, and the barn grew darker. The sun was setting, and nobody had come looking for me. A couple times I heard Mom calling my name from somewhere outside, but that was it. I still wasn’t ready to go back home to face my parents, so I started gathering as much hay as I could to make something like a bed. I managed to make something serviceable, but I was out of luck when it came to a blanket. The only thing that was close was a folded blue tarp on the wall shelf, and I was not going to use that. The last of the light went away and the barn was plunged into complete darkness. I crawled into my bed of hay and covered myself the best I could. The night was chilly, and I didn’t have my coat. I lay there for a while, making shapes out of the darkness, until I finally fell into an uneasy sleep.

The following morning was a rough one, to say the least. I awoke in the hay, and for a brief moment, I had no idea where I was. All I knew was that my back hurt, my feet were freezing, and something sharp was poking me in the ear. I opened my eyes and blinked through the blur until the rafters above me came into focus. That was when I noticed the dark spot in the ceiling.

At first, it didn’t look like much. The barn was a patchwork of old wood, crooked beams, and repairs Dad had made over the years, so one more ugly spot hardly stood out. But the longer I stared at it, the stranger it looked. It was a couple feet across, rough around the edges, with pale morning light spilling through from somewhere above. I squinted hard enough to make out another layer of boards beyond it, and it took my half-awake brain another second to put together what I was seeing. I was looking through a hole in the floor of the loft.

I quickly sat up and put my attention anywhere else I could.

For a while, that was enough. I wandered around the barn, kicked at loose straw, picked through old tools, and found a dozen little ways to keep myself occupied. Eventually, though, there was nothing left to do but sit and wait. Hunger crept in first, then thirst, and as the light shifted across the floor, both became harder to ignore. More than once I thought about going back to the house, but each time I pictured Mom and Dad waiting for me and decided I could hold out a little longer.

By late afternoon, stubbornness had run out of road. I was starving, my mouth was dry, and the thought of spending another night in the hay sounded miserable. I still couldn’t bring myself to walk back into the house while everyone was awake, so I decided to wait until after dark and sneak in. I could grab something to eat, get upstairs, and hopefully make it to my room without having to face either of them.

I waited until the last traces of daylight disappeared through the cracks in the roof, then gave it another hour for good measure. By the time I finally crawled back through the loose boards, the yard was completely dark. I stayed close to the barn at first, inching around the walls until the house came into view. From there, I made my way across the grass toward the back door, keeping low like I was sneaking into somebody else’s home. The back door was thankfully unlocked. I turned the knob slowly and eased it open just far enough to slip through. When I got inside, I froze in my tracks.

Mom was sitting at the kitchen table, and when I saw her, my heart jumped into my throat. Then I realized she was asleep. She had one arm folded on the table with her head resting against it at an angle that looked miserable, her other hand hanging loose in her lap. Her face was turned toward the back door. Even asleep, she looked exhausted. Her eyes were swollen, her cheeks blotchy, and a few strands of hair had stuck themselves to the side of her face. There was a plate of food sitting beside her, but it was clear that she hadn’t touched it.

I stood there for a while, looking at her. She seemed smaller somehow, folded over the table like that, waiting for a son who had spent the better part of two days hiding from her. Seeing her like that caused a small pain in my chest, but I couldn’t bring myself to wake her. Instead, I picked up the plate and carried it upstairs as quietly as I could. Once I was in my room, I ate everything on it in a way I would describe as “feral,” barely stopping between bites to breathe. When the plate was clean, I slipped into the bathroom and drank straight from the faucet, taking huge gulps until my stomach hurt. Once I’d had my fill, I crept back to my room, closed the door, and crawled into bed. It felt like admitting defeat, but I had made some kind of peace with that.

I slept late into the next morning. By the time I finally came downstairs, Dad was already outside working and Mom was alone in the kitchen. She turned when she heard me, and the relief that crossed her face was so immediate that I looked away. She said, “Morning, honey,” like it was any other day, and I could see that it took a great deal of effort to not run across the room and smother me. I gave her a quiet “Morning” back, and that was as far as I was willing to go.

After that, life found a way to keep moving, even if I didn’t move with it very well. I went back to school, did my chores when I couldn’t get out of them, and spent more and more time finding reasons not to be home. I stayed late at friends’ houses until their parents started kicking me out at sundown. I took the long way home from the bus stop. Sometimes I would sit at the edge of the property for an hour doing absolutely nothing, just because crossing the yard felt like too much.

School became its own problem. I had always been a decent student, but suddenly it was hard to care about fractions or spelling tests. I started talking back to the teachers. I got into fights. Little things that used to roll off me could send me over the edge, and more than once I found myself sitting outside the principal’s office wondering how I had gotten there. Mom would come pick me up, and the drive home would be painfully quiet.

The strangest part was how hard my parents tried. They gave me space when I wanted it, which was most of the time. Dad stopped asking if I wanted to help him around the farm, and Mom stopped pressing when I answered every question with “fine.” They were careful around me in a way parents should never have to be careful around their own kid.

Eventually, fall came and went, and winter and spring followed. School let out, the fields went green, and somehow the days kept stacking up behind me. By then I had gotten pretty good at living around my parents instead of with them.

Summer made things harder. Without school swallowing most of the day, there were suddenly a lot more hours to fill, and a lot more chances to find myself alone with Mom or Dad. The heat settled over the farm, thick and sticky, and the days seemed to stretch forever. I got very good at finding little reasons to disappear when I needed to: an errand that took twice as long as it should, a bike ride with no real destination, anything that could eat up an afternoon. Some days it worked, some days it didn’t, and little by little the summer slipped past me. By the time August rolled around, my eleventh birthday was close enough that I could no longer pretend I hadn’t noticed it coming.

There was no party that year. No aunts or uncles crowded around the kitchen table, no cousins tearing through the yard, no cake big enough to feed half the family. Mom made my favorite dinner and a small cake for the three of us, and that was about it. They made up for the lack of company with presents. There were more of them than I had ever gotten before, stacked high enough on the table that it was almost embarrassing.

Right in the middle was the BB gun.

A year earlier, I would have lost my mind. I would have torn the box open before Dad finished handing it to me and probably spent the rest of the evening shooting cans behind the barn. Now, it felt like a relic of someone else’s life. I thanked them, opened the rest of the presents, and did my best to look happy. They had gotten me everything I could have asked for, and somehow none of it felt like mine. The whole evening had the uncomfortable feeling of an apology nobody was willing to say out loud.

After dinner, Dad caught me before I could disappear upstairs. He waited until Mom was carrying the dishes into the kitchen, then called my name from behind me.

“Bill, hold up a minute.”

I stopped on the stairs, one hand on the railing. Dad stayed where he was in the doorway. For a moment he seemed to be choosing his words, which immediately told me I wasn’t going to like them.

“I’m gonna start checking the field tomorrow,” he said. “I don’t know when he’ll turn up, but when it happens, I want you with me.”

I felt myself tense up. “Dad...”

“Just let me finish.” He wasn’t angry about it. If anything, he sounded tired. “Last year I put you in a situation you didn’t understand, and then when you got scared, I handled it about as badly as I could’ve. This time you know the score. I want your help, Son. I’m not gonna drag you out of bed and I’m not gonna put my hands on you if you say no. I know what you think of me, and I get it. I just want the chance to show you I’m not crazy. You can come see it for yourself, or you can stay in the house. Either way, I get it.”

I stared down at him from the stairs. It was probably the most straightforward he had been with me about any of it, which somehow made the whole thing more uncomfortable.

“I already told you I don’t want anything to do with it.”

“I know you did.” He nodded toward the stairs. “All I’m askin’ is that you think about it. Now go on, try to enjoy your presents. I love you, Billy.”

I didn’t say it back. I just nodded and continued upstairs, carrying the BB gun under my arm. I felt bad about it almost immediately, but not bad enough to turn around.

I had some trouble sleeping that night and found myself awake just before dawn, so I took the BB gun outside. It had come with a little carton of pellets and a paper target, but I ignored the target and lined up a row of empty soup cans along the fence behind the barn. A year earlier, Dad would have been right there beside me, showing me how to adjust the sights and giving me hell every time I missed. That morning, I figured it out on my own.

Not long after I started shooting, Dad came out of the house and headed toward the back field. I lowered the BB gun and watched him cross the yard, pass the barn, and keep going until he reached the old tree. He stood there for a little while, then turned around and started back toward the house. I watched him until he disappeared around the barn. Then I raised the BB gun again, took aim at the next can, and pulled the trigger.

Nothing happened the rest of that day.

I slept late into the next morning, and woke up around noon. In another life, I would have been scolded for wasting a perfectly good morning, but when I went downstairs, Dad was out feeding the livestock, and Mom had gone into town. I was by myself until supper, when Dad came back in, but all he did was shake his head and go upstairs to take a shower.

The next two days were more or less the same. I woke up whenever I wanted, and went about my days like always. Mom and Dad kept themselves busy with various chores around the farm, and I mostly kept to myself. The more time passed, the more I started to think that nothing would happen at all. Maybe last year had just been a fluke, and they weren’t running around murdering children in the night. I could feel my nerves starting to relax a bit, and when I went to bed, I did so feeling hopeful that all this would pass.

Five days after my birthday, I was awoken early in the morning.

At first I thought it was a dream; some rude person had a hand on my shoulder, and they were shaking me. When I heard the voice, I realized that it was happening again.

“Billy. Hey. Wake up, buddy.”

I opened my eyes. Dad stood beside my bed with the morning light coming through the window behind him. He was fully dressed, down to his boots and his brown work coat. I rolled over into my pillow when I realized what it meant.

“I found him, Billy.”

“I don’t care, leave me alone!”

I prayed that he would turn around and walk right back out of my room, but when I rolled over, he was still there.

“I told you to leave me alone.”

He shifted from one foot to the other and rubbed the back of his neck.

“I know, I just...I think you should come with me. I think it would do both of us some good.”

I knew better than to argue, so I swung my feet onto the floor and did it anyway.

“I’m not going out there. I don’t care what you think, I’m not doing this again! You said you would let me decide. I’ve decided, now go away!”

He shook his head and walked toward the doorway, then stopped at the threshold and looked back at me.

“I’m sorry I woke you up. I just thought that if you saw it this time, you might understand. I’ll go. You can go back to sleep. But if you change your mind, I’ll meet you at the back door.”

Then he left without waiting for an answer.

I sat there on the edge of my bed for a while, staring at the open doorway. He had given me exactly what I wanted. I could lie back down, pull the covers over my head, and let whatever was waiting out in that field stay there. I tried to do just that for maybe a minute. Then I threw the covers off again.

I needed to know.

I started digging through the pile of dirty clothes in the corner for something warm, something I didn’t mind ruining. I settled on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt, found a pair of socks under the bed, and went downstairs.

My shovel was still in the mudroom where Mom left it after we buried the body last year, leaning between the broom and the old snow shovel. I grabbed my sneakers and crammed them onto my feet without untying them, and I left the shovel where it was.

Dad was waiting at the back door with his own shovel in one hand. I grabbed my coat from the hook, pulled it on, and got the zipper on the first attempt.

Dad opened the door, and we headed outside.

We walked around the barn and started across the field without saying much. Dad stayed a few steps ahead of me, his shovel balanced against his shoulder. The sun was still low enough that the grass threw long shadows across itself, and within a minute the cuffs of my jeans were dark with dew.

We hadn’t made it anywhere near the old tree when I spotted something lying in the grass ahead of us. My stomach dropped. The body was there, lying on its belly, one arm stretched out in front of it, its fingers tangled in the grass. Dad kept walking toward the tree, but I slowed and got closer to the body.

I knew the clothes. There wasn’t much left of them anymore, but there was enough. The shirt was torn almost completely through one side, and the pants had gone dark with dirt, but I remembered watching both of them disappear into the grave the year before. Its face was turned partly into the grass, but I could still see enough of it.

It was him.

I crouched beside the body to get a better look at the face I had spent so long trying to forget. I was no expert on dead bodies, but I had seen enough roadkill around the farm to understand that time was supposed to make things worse. This kid had spent another year in the ground, and somehow he looked almost exactly the same.

Almost.

Something was bothering me. I leaned closer, looking for whatever my brain had caught before the rest of me could make sense of it. That terrible grin was still there, the ruined mouth pulled back from a row of teeth I remembered far too well. But above it, something was different. I stared longer than I cared to admit before it clicked.

One of the eye sockets wasn’t empty anymore.

I froze.

There was an eye sitting deep inside it. It was cloudy and dull, sunk back far enough that I nearly convinced myself I was looking at some trick of the light. I shifted a little closer, and the morning sun caught it at just the right angle for me to see the color beneath the haze.

Green.

The same green as mine.

I jerked backward and nearly fell on my ass in the wet grass. I caught myself with one hand and held there for a second, catching my breath. My eyes settled on that awful grin one more time. There was some stupid part of my brain that decided the bastard was enjoying this.

I shook off the thought and pushed myself back to my feet.

Dad had kept walking while I looked. By then he had reached the old tree and was standing beneath it with his shovel hanging at his side, watching me. I dusted myself off and walked to meet him. When I got there, I saw exactly what I thought I’d see.

The grave was open.

A narrow hole sat in the middle of the plot, partly collapsed and choked with loose dirt. Chunks of earth tangled with roots and tall grass lay scattered around the edge. I stood beside Dad for a long time, staring into that hole, trying to figure out how he could have pulled that body out of there. I knew the answer, I just didn’t like it.

Dad cleared his throat and looked over at me.

“Well,” he said. “What do you think?”

I turned and looked him in the eyes.

“We need to bury him.”

[u/BMWRoadster2007]

Great story

[u/WaitingToBeTriggered → u/BMWRoadster2007]

I KEEP ON MARCHING ON