Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS WRITER
The first time I saw his face, I was terrified. It was a twisted maze of scars and stubble.
He leered at me.
I was frightened, more than I have ever been in my life, yet somewhere hidden amongst the fear, tucked away, perhaps between some two frantic beats, my heart had made room for empathy.
Given the situation, I wouldn’t have imagined there would be any room for it, but there it was.
What happened to you, mister? Did somebody hurt you once?
Is that why you are like this?
His yellow eyes never really saw me. They stared through me.
He picked up a stick and cracked it in half, so it had one sharp end. He drew a square in the dirt.
“Dish, esh my plot.” He said, his words slurred from the long scar that cut its way diagonally down his mouth. Perhaps the whiskey had a part to play in it as well.
He leaned closer, so close that I could feel his hot breath on my cheek. I flinched.
“Don be shcared, Don be shcared. Etsh alrye.” He said, his eyes still never really focusing on mine.
He reached under his shirt and withdrew an old tin. It was a dinged up old chocolate box. He cracked the lid. There were photographs that had been stained and weathered by time; an old sepia picture of a house, a young man, resting on a rifle. Beneath the memories, there were bits and pieces of stories that I don’t think I wanted to know, some wire, a gold ring, a pink ribbon.
Then, despite the heat, my body temperature dropped. Something heavy fell into the pit of my stomach. My hands went cold.
I had seen the brown-stained blade of a knife, an old hunting knife with a dried caking on its side that could have only been blood.
Next minute, he had it in his hand. I withdrew as much as I could. He raised it to his face, and began slowly shaving off a patch of hair from his cheek. The lines of hard, white scar-tissue stood out distinctly against the red of his face.
“Don be shcared, Don be shcared.” He repeated in a low gravelly voice, all the while shaving with the blade of the knife. He flicked a photograph on the ground in front of me. There was photo of a Belgian Shepherd sitting in what would have been the passenger seat of an old, burnt out VW Beetle. On the back there was a date and one sentence: “This is not my dog”.
I didn’t know what to make of it.
He went back to scratching around in the dirt. He scratched and scratched a series of straight lines, finishing it all off inside a circle. He was lost in his own dirt-world for a long time, shaking his head and muttering to himself. I prayed he would stay there for a while longer. I struggled in secret, twisting my wrists against the restraints whilst he was preoccupied, until finally he looked up.
“Dish esh my plot”, he said once more. “Dish esh my plot. My home. You come inner my home. I don lie vesetors. I can’ ‘ave yer on my plot.’
He winked, then carried on.
“Yer in my shquare. An my shircle. I can’ ‘ave dah.”
He took out a six-sided die from his top shirt pocket and shook it in his hands.
“We’ll let fate deshide what ‘appens nex.”
He flung it on the ground in front of me.
Six.
“Even Schteevens” He said.
His hand was wrapped around my hair before I knew what was happening. He’d moved much faster than I expected he could.
The back of my neck burned. He held my long hair and pressed my face hard into the dirt. I could taste the grit in my mouth.
Still holding my hair with one strong hand, he raised the hunting knife above me, and brought it down swiftly. My whole body clenched.
The sharpened blade met with the rough of the man’s cheek as he tore one more scar into his collection. He winced, and some saliva rolled out of his mouth onto the dirt. He hunched forward, his back heaving up and down under labouring breath.
Some time passed and he gathered his things, sorting them back into the tin with shaky hands. He stood up without a word and left me, wandering off into the distant trees, out of my field of vision.
I sank into the dirt with exhaustion, still bound by wrist and foot. Darkness began to close in, and I welcomed it. I greeted it calmly and allowed it to sweep me away until there was nothing.
Not a single sound.