A white man comes in the room.
He wears a black tie with a gold clip. He holds a coffee in a styrofoam cup and he sets it on the table and I realize that my hands are cuffed and the cuffs are attached to a chain that runs down between my legs and loops through a ring in the floor.
“How are we doing today, chief,” the man says, and he offers me a cigarette, which is already lit, so the smoke wafts along his extended arm.
It seems like a long while since I smoked a cigarette. I suck on it greedily and eye the room. It’s lit by a single bare bulb and its yellow light throws the white man’s shadow on green walls. The table is a heavy wood one, and there’s nothing on it except a single sheet of paper next to the styrofoam cup. It’s like a police interrogation room, and I guess that could be where we are.
I try to think of the last thing that I remember. All I see is the camp by the river next to the priest’s cabin, and how the priest used to hit us kids with the flat of a book when we forgot the school lesson. I never did learn to read. The black marks on that sheet of paper mean nothing to me.
The white man sits down in a chair on the other side of the table. I shift in my seat, and the chains rattle and I realize just how heavy they are.
“Tell me about the girl,” the white man says.
A shock takes my breath away, the same as that one time on a sunny February day when my friends dared me to jump from the camp’s big rock into the river. I can see the sunlight sparkling through the splash that arced up around my tightly curled body, before the water fell back and devoured me.
I don’t want to remember the girl. I splay my fingers and pull my hands apart as far as the cuffs will allow. There’s no give in those cuffs. The metal just cuts into my wrists. I think of how I stood shivering in the river that day, palming the water out of my eyes so I could see my friends on the rock all pointing and laughing at me, and I move to rub my eyes the same way now, but the chain stops them halfway to my face.
“We know that you picked her up at Charlie’s around midnight on the third,” the man goes on. “We’ve got half a dozen guys that saw her leaving on the back of your bike. That makes you the last person to see her alive. But what then? Where did you take her? Did you go straight to the river?”
I don’t want to remember the girl, but I can see Charlie’s, the gravel lot awash in neon and arc lighting, the Harley’s lined on their kickstands along the wall. I can hear the roar and pop of engines, the laughter and shouts taken by the night. I don’t want to, but I remember the laughter and shouts turning to catcalls and whistles when she bounced out the door to meet me, her black hair pulled forward and falling over her shoulders and breasts all the way to her waist. Her eyes shone even in the dark.
I can feel her body against my back and her arms encircling my waist and the wind in my face as my headlight cut the dark highway between the pines. But I fight the memory, screeching my chair back with both legs. The chain pulls my hands up. There’s no give in it, but I lean and make slack and jerk on it until my shoulders and hands scream with pain.
When I stop and sit there heaving, the white man smiles. “You aren’t gonna break free,” he says, and he uncaps a pen and pushes the paper with the lines I can’t read in my direction. “But if you sign this we can get those chains off and set you up in a comfy little cell.”
My shoulders and hands are burning, but I’m still pulling against the chain, feeling how solid that ring in the floor is, like it’s bolted to an immovable rock, and I’m about to pull myself off the chair. I can hear my father telling the old story in his tipi at the river camp, where he lived without ever going to visit the priest. Over and over he would tell of how the remnants of the starving and defeated tribe had signed away its homeland and lost its freedom.
“But I did not sign the white man’s paper,” he would say, and he would stare at me with eyes like bright knives.
The white man is staring at me too, but his eyes are gleeful, like he’s thrilled at how they have me there, chained to the floor. He can’t wait to let that paper put me in a cell. But I think he knows that I won’t sign it.
“You can just tell me what happened,” he says. “Just tell me what you did.”
I don’t want to remember what happened after we parked just off the road and walked down the bank to the river, the trees and rocks tinted blue-white by the strawberry moon. It feels like my heart blood pooling into my chest. I don’t want to remember anything beyond the moment her fragile hand gripped mine as we navigated the steep drop.
Instead I think of that day on the river with my friends, when they pointed and laughed after my freezing jump, and I waded over to the rock they stood on until I could grab Wolf and pull him in. The others soon followed, like they were bound with rope to Wolf and me, and then we were all together in the icy flow.
I can smell the water like metal, taste the sun drops in the splashes, touch the love in Wolf’s shoulders when I dunk him and hold him under, until he breaks free and trips me. Under the water, I’m actually there in my innocence, eyes smarting, and I see bubbles swirling and boys’ legs roughhousing, and then the legs become salmon running upriver to spawn.
I grab on to one of the shimmery tails, and I am transformed to run wild and free with ice water coursing through my gills. I flop through shallow rapids, thrust through still pools, and leap white falls until, around a bend, as the river narrows to a quiet stream, I see myself as a man on the bank in moonlight.
I watch myself, and it looks like I am fucking the girl. She doesn’t want it, so I am strangling her, and my hands locked around her throat are like my hands locked in cuffs and chained to that immovable rock.
Wow!!! I got lost incessantly in that series of images that you transmitted in my head. Excellent narrative, it seems that the protagonist if he was the guilty one but he was trying to deny it with that series of memories until the fact touched his mind.
It was an excellent read, with that spice of mystery and well described photographic sequences.
Yes, you got it. Thank you. That's exactly the story I tried to tell, and it's great to have feedback that affirms it was done!
It is a reading that grabs you from the first line, it is disturbing and you try to keep reading fast to move forward and find out what else happened.
Thanks! Glad to hear the suspense kept you reading.
Ah... another cracker from you @cliffagreen ... the pace was fantastic... creating the perfect level of suspense too! I felt sure he would be innocent, given his own apparent perception of his situation... but perhaps the only potential giveaway was his lack of outrage at his predicament. It is more of a calm cold defiance... and this line...
(although it is only in hindsight that I see this... as I was thinking at the time that he simply refused to be tricked into an admission of unfounded guilt; that he did not want to remember potentially what others may have done to the girl)
I think you handled the reveal brilliantly - a very poetic imagining of cognition finally hitting... the use of exceptional imagery brings the reader to the moment where the accused has to face up to what he has done after burying every thought of it beneath layers of associated memories... which ultimately lead back to the truth of his unconscionable actions.
I dropped in from #dreemport this evening. And pretty pleased that I did. It is always a treat to read you!
!LUV !ALIVE !PIMP
Great analysis and comment. Thank you. The 'lack of outrage at his predicament' that you point to is something for me to consider if I revise more. There is backstory here that explains it, but that doesn't really get dealt with in this piece of his story. Good feedback, thank you.
You must be killin' it out here!
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They're getting a workout and slapped 1/1 possible people today.
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What an amazing style of writing @cliffagreen
The piece stuck me to it since the beginning. I had no choice but to read it without skipping a single word.
The mystery in the story kept raising questions in my mind while the outstanding description of scenes built clear imagery.
I am happy to come across this piece via #dreemport.
Have a nice day 😊
Thank you. I'm glad you did not skip a single word ... I spent time choosing each one! :)
Your selection of words speaks for itself
Hmmm!! This is so damn gripping! Jeez!
This is me so glued to the screen, reading carefully without missing a word! At first, I perceive a trick to trap the victim in prison for what he didn't commit but since he was still hallucinating, I think he might have done something to the girl in question. Probably he went into unconsciousness after an impact, who knows right? My peturbed mind is roaming with crazy thoughts! I see
a meetup gone wrong. I am halfway certain that something negative happened to that lady since he is the major suspect that was seen with her last cause why is he under lock and key?
But why violence and abuse? Did he hurt her? Is she still alive? Why wasn't she found at the end of this story? Is the victim traumatized from the river experience? Or do you have another part coming up sooner?? Gosh! Why the susupense?? Haha this is so cool! Bravo Cliffagreen!
The final paragraph is meant to show that he raped and murdered the girl, but that he is unable to admit it, even to himself. He has to disassociate (think of himself as a fish watching himself) to even remember it. Thank you for the read!
Hi @cliffagreen
I was just notified that you mentioned dreemport in a comment - so of course, I came to see your post after seeing it was rejected by a screener.
This is a brilliant post, and I'm not sure why the screener rejected it. But I'd be happy to put it back into DreemPort for you on Monday?
Excellent writing, by the way. Haunting - but done eloquently and just edging our PG-13 standards - haha but it does fit within our standards!
Let me know if you'd like it put back in on Monday!
by the way - I don't always see notifications or mentions of dreemport - if you ever have any issues and want to check on something - feel free to come into the discord or try to tag me here! I'm glad I saw your notification tonight, but I was just about to head to bed and would have most likely missed it. We are human and we do make mistakes lol - so please do reach out in the future :)
Yes, please do include it on Monday. Thank you. Some of my best readers come to me through DreemPort, so I'd be glad to have it included.
As far as standards go: I chafe at the idea of any kind of restrictions on creative expression, especially for a site geared to serious writers and readers. I think such a group should be able to handle tough/ugly subjects treated honestly and seriously, and simply reject and ignore gratuitous violence, etc.
I really appreciate that you were willing to give my story a second look. And I've joined the Discord. :)
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