ย ย ย It was a humid July evening and I was taking the long way home from work through the woods just north of town. After another difficult day in the office I was grateful for the relative quiet, happy to be alone under the protective shade of the trees that arched over the steep, potholed road. For quite a while all I could hear was the sound of my own laboured breaths and the occasional unseen bird relaying some indecipherable message to one of its avian friends. But as I approached the point where the road levelled out, I heard what sounded like someone reciting a prayer under their breath. Peering through a gap in the trees, I saw a boy standing in a clearing, near one of the grey concrete outhouses that had once belonged to a long-disused infirmary. Sweat darkened his loose-fitting t-shirt as he shoveled dirt out of a fast-emerging hole in the ground. He was maybe fourteen or fifteen, verging on obese, with a weird-looking left eyeball which seemed permanently fixed upon the top of his prematurely reddened nose. A little further up the road, I noticed, was his small red bike, lying on its side beside a gap in the bushes.
ย ย ย A moment or two passed before the kid noticed me. I searched his face for any sign of anger or surprise, but there was nothing. Feeling a little embarrassed, I raised my hand as though greeting an old friend, but the gesture was not reciprocated. I tried to think if I knew him, whether I’d ever seen him around, but I had not. It occurred to me, though only briefly, that he might be some kind of chemically-induced figment of my imagination. Only a week earlier, my office had merged with another and I’d been forced to ingratiate myself with yet more people I’d sooner have avoided. As a means of calming my manifold social anxieties, I’d taken to mixing my medication and drinking in my lunch hour. For a while it helped, allowing me to get through each long and arduous day in a kind of impenetrable bubble. But soon my colleagues, both old and new, started to comment on my appearance, talking behind my back, making jokes at my expense. Worse still, I was pretty sure my boss had noticed the downturn in my productivity and I arrived at work every morning convinced that I would be fired by lunchtime.
ย ย ย Apparently untroubled by my presence, the boy continued digging. I couldn’t help but think that there was something a little sinister about him, something a little off, but I wasn’t able to put my finger on exactly what. I began to wonder who or what was intended for the hole, what crime or misdeed I was in the process of witnessing. In the end I decided that it was none of my business and I continued down the road, hoping to arrive home before Gary and Marlene, the unhappy middle-aged couple from whom I’d been renting a dark and aesthetically displeasing room since my divorce nine months earlier. I did not enjoy their company and they did not enjoy mine, but I had become a useful buffer between them and their problems, and if I wasn’t careful they would try to extend their tedious small talk long into the night.
ย ย ย I found the kid in the same spot a few days later. His cold, piercing gaze had never been far from my mind, and for reasons I could not explain, it had drawn me back to him like some kind of masochistic compulsion I was not strong enough to resist. This time I was careful to stand a little way back from the trees so that he would not catch me staring at him. But I needn’t have bothered. Standing beside what was now a deep hole, roughly the size of a grave, he laid down his spade, looked up at me as though he’d been expecting me, and addressed me by my full name.
ย ย ย It was then that my heart started to beat somewhat erratically, just as it’d done when Caitlin sat me down to tell me she was leaving me. I stepped back from the trees as zigzags appeared in front of my eyes and sharp stabbing pains attacked my temples. Forward momentum carried me a short way back down the road before I slipped on a patch of wet leaves and fell, with a dull thud, onto my back. The next thing I remember, the kid was standing over me, his spade held high above his head, an unsettling grin spreading across his face.
ย ย ย Many weeks have passed since then, and things are far less complicated now. Now I am able go about my business unhindered and unmolested by the world. And although my desk has been given to some other pale, unhappy-looking guy of about my age, talk of my impending dismissal has stopped. I know this because I make a point of turning up to the office each day to listen-in on the inane conversations of my colleagues. My hours, it seems, are pretty flexible and I’m free to come and go as I please. Sometimes I joke to unresponsive strangers that this is the death I’ve always dreamed of living: no more drink or drugs or crippling hang-ups; no more lying awake at night wondering where I went wrong. Thanks to the kid, I have transcended it all. And sometimes, when the mood takes me, I head back to the woods and gaze through the trees at the gradually flattening mound of earth he left behind, and I thank him from the bottom of my no-longer-beating heart for everything he has done for me.
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Nick Ryle Wright is a writer of short fiction and poetry, currently based in the New Forest, England. He has had stories published in a few magazines and journals here and there and is a fiction reader for The Nottingham Review. He can be found on Twitter @nickrylew.
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