52stories

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My mother always told me, when I was a child, never to talk to strangers. She never told me what age I would be allowed to start.

I mean, she also told me to never cross the street. I think the statute of limitations is up on that one. She told me not to cross my eyes, or they would get stuck that way, she told me not to smoke drugs, and to go to a policeman if I got in trouble. I’ve ignored her, to no great injury, on the first two, and I only wish I could follow her wishes on the last one.

Other homespun bits of wisdom of my mother’s floated through my head; chew with your mouth closed, don’t put your elbows on the table, you are what you eat. I laughed, incongruously, startling Beth. Sparks from the bonfire rocketed towards the stars, making her eyes dance. She turned to me, and said, “What are you laughing at?”

This night had started off normally enough. I had woken on the motel’s industrial strength carpet at noon, tangled in the crappy motel-thin blanket I had pulled over myself. On the bed, my buddy Trav had lay, shivering in the full blast of the window AC unit that we had cranked to drown out the blares of car horns from the nearby state route. From the bathroom came the groans of a straining Carl. As I lay blinking away the crusted eyes of a six-pack sleep, he strolled out into the bedroom, grinning widely. “Dude. Do me a favor. Don’t go in there for a while.”

We had hit the beach by one, running down the flight of stairs down the cliff overlooking the beach, three guys- men, really, cruising for the hot chicks that we felt were our due. We played a little Frisbee, we laughed too loudly and let our errant shots land near some likely looking beach bunnies. Nothing. In a break around two, lounging on the motel’s bath towels, Carl telling Trav that it was high time he took off his class ring. “Dude, only high schoolers wear those. And dude, we are no longer high schoolers, dude!”

“Lay off, dude, it’s just a ring.”

“Hear that, Mark? This dude is why we’re not,” Carl drew in a breath and let out a loud shout, “getting LAID right now!”

After a dinner at Taco Bell, we had dressed in our finest, and hit the clubs. And that’s where the night stopped being normal.

For once, when we hit the dance floor, there were girls that were interested in dancing with us. Three girls, one for each of us, no need to fight with each other for attention. We got to know them for a few songs, their bodies writhing and grinding against ours, names shouted over the bass beat. “Beth!” “Mark!” And then after another song, Carl had gone missing, and was just me and Beth, Trav and his girl. Then Trav was gone, and so was his girl.

Dancing close, Beth slipped a leg between mine, and hooked the other behind my back. My hands clumsily on her back, she pulled my ear to her mouth, putting my cheek against her chest. “Let’s go!” she shouted. I looked around, through the writing bodies of the other dancers on the floor. Trav and Carl were nowhere to be found.
I thought about my options, I didn’t want to appear too eager- plus there had been a cover charge, I didn’t want to have to pay another one somewhere else, and just where were Trav and Carl, anyway? Beth slid a hand far down my back. “Where?” I shouted into her ear.

“Beach!” she yelled, and disengaged from me, grabbing my wrist in her hand and pulling me to the door.

The door of the club closed behind us, muffling the higher register of the music, leaving the bass notes to thump through the ground, up through our sandals into our groins. My ears were ringing. Beth dropped my wrist and ran across the two lane beach road without checking for traffic, her miniskirt flapping in the wind just slightly, revealing the hint of the top of her leg, and started down the stairs leading to the beach thirty feet below.

I drew in a deep breath, and plunged after her. When I reached the top of the steps, she was down on the beach, running towards a huge bonfire. I galloped down the stairs, two at a time. The sand at the bottom was still warm from the day’s sun, and kicked up in great clouds as I raced to the fire.

When I got there, gasping slightly, I saw that Carl and Trav were laying on the other side of the fire, wrapped with the two other girls from the club. Beth grabbed my head and turned it to her, and kissed me violently, biting my tongue hard. After a second she stopped, and I tasted copper. My head spun a little, and I sat on the ground, six feet back from the flames, which already were beginning to bake my legs, even through my khakis.

Beth flopped beside me. She looked at me from between strands of her shoulder length brown hair. I noticed her eyes were green.

“Where are you-” I started, but she put a finger to my lips. The slight pressure knocked me off balance, and I fell to my back, my head rolling to one side. Out of focus, I saw one of the girls dragging Carl close to the fire- she was struggling to move his linebacker mass, which seemed to be dead weight. Then Beth and the third girl went to help her, and together they got their shoulders underneath his armpits, and tipped Carl into the bonfire. A mass of sparks kicked up, and a burning log rolled towards me, stopping close enough to see individual ants scurrying out of their roasting home, only to crackle and die in the naked flame. Carl’s eyes tracked the log to its resting place, but the only other motion from him was his hair curling as it singed, then burst into flames.

Beth’s face dropped between my eyes and the bonfire. She said, “Follow my finger with your eyes,” and suddenly her face retreated, and a finger filled my vision. It moved left and right, and I followed it. My neck wouldn’t move. It disappeared. A rustling noise, and Beth’s face was back in front of mine. “Why don’t you punks carry more cash?” Suddenly my world was spinning around, and then I had a view of Trav and his girl. A warm breath was whistling by my ear as I watched the girl take Trav’s wallet out of his back pocket.

“We’re not just robbing you,” the breath voiced. It was Beth, her voice husky from the smoke at the club, shouting over the music. The girl frisking Trav took his money, and put his wallet back into this pocket. She started searching his front pockets. “We’re not even just robbing then killing you.” The voice stopped, then teeth bit my ear, hard. I felt the teeth meet each other, felt a warm flow down my neck, felt the lobe rip away with a pain like being hit with a spiked club, a pain that shot into my throat and caught in my Adam’s apple. I couldn’t cry out.

Beth’s face was in front of mine again, her eyes searching deeply in mine. “I wish I could tell if that hurt you,” she said, dark blood dribbling over her chin. “Do me a favor. Look left if you could feel that.”

I looked to the right. She grinned, the gaps between her teeth dark, her teeth smeared red, her mouth like the garbage catch of a meat grinder. “I don’t beliiiiiieve you,” she whispered in a half-song.

“Little help here?” asked the girl fiddling with Trav. She had stripped him bare, thrown his clothes into the bonfire, and was pulling him towards it by his ankle.

Beth turned back to me. “You be a good boy. You stay here. I’m going to help Amy cook- she doesn’t like her food rare, like I do.”

Together the girls dragged Trav to the fire, and held his left leg over an outer peninsula of flame. After about five minutes, he started grunting. Five more minutes, however, and they had sliced a steak off his thigh and tipped him into the fire entirely. The grunts raised in volume only minimally.

It was at this point that I remembered my mother’s advice about strangers. And about table manners, as Amy picked her meat up with her fingers and tore into it with her teeth. Despite being well done, bloody juice ran down her chest, staining her tube top. “You are what you eat” my mother had said. Trav had been a bit of a pig, too. I laughed.

Beth, startled, turned to me. “What are you laughing at?” she asked, eyes wild. I only grunted. She calmed a bit, but came to me anyway, carrying a steak knife. She rested it over the log that had escaped the fire when Carl entered it, and pulled off my sandals, then shucked my pants from me.

She looked down at me, and said, “If you had answered my question honestly before, I would probably use the knife to do this. I might even have cut your throat for you. But since you didn’t… I’m going to claim my delicacy with my teeth. Be honest, though, that’s basically what you had in mind in the club, right? Maybe you wouldn’t have thought about it literally, though.” Her head sank out of my field of view, and I felt my underwear slide down, sand pressing into my bare body. The flames leapt high in my eyes, and I waited.

Then I jerked a knee up, hard as I could. I think I got a lucky shot in, but I felt the snap as Beth’s head was forced backwards quickly. Her neck might have been snapped, but more likely it was the same effect as a knockout punch in boxing- traumatic neck movement renders a person unconscious. In any case, I saw her body roll slowly into the shallow scooped out for the bonfire. I rolled over before it reached the flames, but her hair had been kinking up and smoking- and her eyes weren’t moving at all.

I discovered that I could only crawl- no matter. I would crawl to the highway and collapse- surely someone could help me. Hand over hand, I pulled myself up the beach, leaving the bonfire, a pillar of greasy gray smoke rising from it. The sand ran through my fingers, affording only a marginal purchase. Each pull of my arms advanced me maybe three inches.

The stairs swam into view, at first blurred by distance. But, as my eyes adjusted to the dark, away from the bonfire, I saw them, my freedom, my escape. And upon them I saw Amy and the third girl, waiting, grinning. And behind me, catching up slowly but surely, I heard someone stumbling, as if on partially cooked legs.