Show Them You’re Tough

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The thick blackness of the Georgia night swathed his cringing body like a blanket. Rain needled steadily in his narrow, haggard face, stringing his limp sandy hair down upon his forehead. His ears ached trying to find alien sound in the patter of chill rain on the leaves overhead; his eyes ached with the strain of trying to see things in the mucky loneliness of the countryside, things that weren’t there.

He mumbled bolstering words of courage to himself, his breath knotting from the living shadows that his mind created. He clutched his shredding sanity and courage with the frantic fingers of his mind; he clutched the gun in his pocket with the thin, quivering fingers of his hand.

He was thinking of murder.

It showed in his eyes, in the twitching of his face. He was also thinking of escape. Murder and escape — he was going to commit murder to escape a murder he had not committed.

It struck him as humorous; or perhaps he merely needed the shaky sound of his laugh. So he laughed. “I done killed old Gar,” he told himself. “I done planned it all, and in my mind the old fool is already dead. That’s what counts. He’s done dead. All I got to do now is just pull the trigger.”

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