item post [for Bill and Sharon]
[from here]
It's like cleaning up a mess--enter the room, walk the perimeter, stoop to pick up this and that, waiting to tackle the stain in the middle, all in complete silence. His breath comes out white and disappears on the light wind, drawing the cold around him and he's glad to see his jacket sitting there on the snow, where Gene left it. He smiles, to see that Gene is just as stubborn as he is. It wasn't attractive, his mother would say, but too late to change him. "Nah," he'd answered, "It drives you wild," if not the way it drove the other girls.
A frown follows though, to see it settled on another stain, apropos the red and pink where Bill appeared. It didn't seem like Gene to leave it sitting on someone's blood, and Joe snatches it up, shakes it out, finds--
--more than snow. He doesn't drop the jacket, seeing the long stain on its lining, broken as if by teeth.
Then he drops it, seeing the teeth bloody and coming out of the snow and the handle of the thing pointed at him like a finger.
He should be more surprised, but after the film and Bill, it isn't news that the island knows how to fuck with him, knows when to pile it on and it's not like he ever caught a break back home, either. He should've been prepared, he thinks, when he was helping them get Bill to the clinic--the second he started to feel like it was going to be okay, he should've known it wouldn't be. That isn't how messes work--enter the room, walk the perimeter, spiral in silently until it was done, and the next time you went into the room, it was a mess again.
"Fuck," a whisper, a shout, it didn't really matter and he didn't say anything else, hooking a finger through the first loop and pulling until the second followed, out of the snow and some of the blood came off with it, but not all, and it made his stomach roll over because this was the third time he'd seen this fucking thing, and there were only two people on the island that blood could belong to. His, for all that he cared, Bill's helmet under one arm and he set the saw on his jacket, wrapped it back up and stuffed it under the other, because even if it wasn't his, he wasn't about to let Bill see it.
It's like cleaning up a mess--enter the room, walk the perimeter, stoop to pick up this and that, waiting to tackle the stain in the middle, all in complete silence. His breath comes out white and disappears on the light wind, drawing the cold around him and he's glad to see his jacket sitting there on the snow, where Gene left it. He smiles, to see that Gene is just as stubborn as he is. It wasn't attractive, his mother would say, but too late to change him. "Nah," he'd answered, "It drives you wild," if not the way it drove the other girls.
A frown follows though, to see it settled on another stain, apropos the red and pink where Bill appeared. It didn't seem like Gene to leave it sitting on someone's blood, and Joe snatches it up, shakes it out, finds--
--more than snow. He doesn't drop the jacket, seeing the long stain on its lining, broken as if by teeth.
Then he drops it, seeing the teeth bloody and coming out of the snow and the handle of the thing pointed at him like a finger.
He should be more surprised, but after the film and Bill, it isn't news that the island knows how to fuck with him, knows when to pile it on and it's not like he ever caught a break back home, either. He should've been prepared, he thinks, when he was helping them get Bill to the clinic--the second he started to feel like it was going to be okay, he should've known it wouldn't be. That isn't how messes work--enter the room, walk the perimeter, spiral in silently until it was done, and the next time you went into the room, it was a mess again.
"Fuck," a whisper, a shout, it didn't really matter and he didn't say anything else, hooking a finger through the first loop and pulling until the second followed, out of the snow and some of the blood came off with it, but not all, and it made his stomach roll over because this was the third time he'd seen this fucking thing, and there were only two people on the island that blood could belong to. His, for all that he cared, Bill's helmet under one arm and he set the saw on his jacket, wrapped it back up and stuffed it under the other, because even if it wasn't his, he wasn't about to let Bill see it.