Last Night I Dressed in Tails Pretending I was on the Town.
a horror story || PARTS 1-4 TOGETHER.
Last Night I Dressed In Tails Pretending I was on the Town || All Parts
A Horror Story || by Dylan Bosworth
The most realistic figurine Edward had found was the figurine of his dead wife. The figurine wasn’t dead, that was just her. Just Myra who died fading down to nothing in the quiet dark of her bed, her light blinking out. Ed held her in his hand spinning the figurine slowly to take in her features. The hair was the right length and color, and the pallor of the skin matched the way she lit the room. Like she was the only white light in a world of blackness.
He wanted to put it in his pocket. Not because he liked to steal, but because the figurine belonged to him. It wasn’t right that someone else might own her. His hand shook when he paid but the cashier didn’t mention it, which made him grateful.
Stuck in the spotlight of small talk and a flickering halogen, only as he thought he got away, she asked Ed, “Who’s this one?”
He would have said Myra and handed her the money if he could have said anything, and then he would have looked down avoiding contact with the young woman’s eyes. Maybe avoided talking, because how far could he really get? Instead, he didn’t say anything at all, and let his lips quiver as he tried.
The steering wheel was light as he drove and the seat next to him heavy. Too quiet but for the drone of the wheels on the road, and Ed had the notion that he was holding his breath, waiting for someone else to speak. He turned the knob on the FM and let the Statler Brothers count him flowers all the way home.
It was dusk when he had the new Myra unpacked and placed in the scene. The lamp made a small hum that made static in his brain if he got too close. Ed heeded it as he tilted around the arm with the magnifying glass, sticking Myra's little feet in the green felt he had teased with a razor blade to look like grass.
It was noon on a warm Sunday after church. It was every summer day when the kids were young. It was her, waiting for Ed’s car to pull in the drive so she could tell him they were pregnant. He pulled away the lamp with the magnifying glass. Dusk fell over the scene and Myra was half in a shadow not even her glow could cut through. And that’s just how it was.
Ed latched the basement door, removed the cigarettes from his shirt pocket, and packed them against his palm. Myra’d been gone for two years, but still, he went outside to light the match.
***
Over the county line, Gil Landers dragged a heavy duffel bag over his shoulder as he trudged through the soft dirt of Brookstow Lean. His breath was heavy in the woods. It misted the air in front of him like a ghost and twirled away as he pushed through it. It stuck to his skin and ran off his chin with the sweat that poured from his hairline.
It wasn’t supposed to happen this way. Yes, this was always the outcome, but the before was wrong. The during was wrong. Only thing right was right now.
The girl talked too much. She was pretty enough that it was all right at first. Just at first. She laughed when Gil told her to shut her mouth, laughed again when he threw her on the bed. Didn’t laugh long after or now at all.
When he tossed the last of the dirt on the hole where he buried her, he wiped the sweat from his brow and said goodbye. If he’d have known her name, he might have called her that, but she never told him. They usually didn’t.
Holes long filled in covered his trek back out of the clearing he’d been using for, how long now? Two years?
Two years longer than he thought he’d have had. Every day for the first year at least, every siren around the Lean made his blood freeze. He had been careful for a long time, and careful now turned to comfort. But comfort hadn’t made him slow.
Gil looked around at his work. Not only tonight’s but all of it. Moonlight pooled in the clearing and lit each of his graves like black wounds. Pocked scars. Scabs, healed over and disappearing.
“Countin’ flowers on the wall…” he sang under his breath. “That don’t bother me at all.”
He dropped it to a whistle as he re-entered the thick woods, something not feeling right. On the low wind coming in from the southwest, Gil smelled a cigarette burn on the wind.
He stood for a minute, sniffing. Making sure.
“…now don’t tell me—” he sang.
Crickets answered, and somewhere long and far away, a cough followed, carried by the wind. He was not alone.
“—I’ve nothing to do.”
Gil changed course and went back to whistling, dropping his pitch low like a common nightingale. This wasn’t how it was supposed to go. But nothing about this night went as planned from the very start.
***
Ed lit a new cigarette from the butt of the last. The day weighed on him like a wet blanket. Nothing different about it, that’s just how it felt. Maybe it was the Myra figure he’d finally found, and maybe it wasn’t, but that wasn’t for him to say.
So he didn’t say anything at all. The rocking chair groaned as he sat, and he leaned back slowly as to not tip over. Out here by himself, he might never get up. She always talked about that, even on her own way out. Lying there with pneumonia finally creeping in before Ed had even known, Myra would say, “Edward, what are you going to do when I’m gone?”
Ed put his hand to his cheek, for a second, expecting to find hers cupped there first. Words failed him, so instead he squeezed his lips shut tight. In the silence, he wished for her voice. Lit by the low yellow lantern hanging on the hook, Edward looked down, waited for her shadow. His smoke curled out of his lungs, rolled over itself as it dissipated.
What was it she had whispered? Not the last thing, but the thing right before? He’d tried to piece it together ever since, but the words never came. Never came, because what followed was I love you, and how was he supposed to pay attention to anything else? It was so quite, he had to lean in, and even then—
“Excuse me, friend?”
The voice cut through the dark like an arrow. Ed’s eyes shot to the trees and his hand to his heart.
“Who’s there?!” he said, standing up, using the chair to right himself. His fond grasp on the visage of his dying wife tore free. Gone. Empty, he couldn’t bring it back. Not even her voice. “Come out!” he yelled through the shake in his voice, yelling at the shadows between the trees.
A stocky man in a dark jacket and work trousers stepped from the treeline. He held his hands open, up and out in front of him like he was surrendering to the damn police, and Ed couldn't make heads or tails.
“Hey! What are you—”
The man interrupted him. “I’m so sorry to have disturbed your night.” His hands were still high in the air, but he walked forward.
The light lit his face which showed a bearded man, just like any other Ed had ever seen grow up and out of Brookstow Lean. Nothing unique about him, nothing to say he’d seen him around town any time, now or again. Looked too grown to be lost out here in the woods.
“That’s close enough,” said Edward. He put his hand in his back pocket, acting like he might have a weapon on him. Maybe the young man might think better than to try something funny.
***
“I ain’t looking for trouble, mister,” said Gil. The way the old man sat in the rocker, leaned back all the way, Gil knew the guy didn’t actually have a gun. But he played along.
“What the hell you doing out there, walking out of my woods like that?” The old man walked closer to his porch door. He sure didn’t have a gun in his back pocket, but he very well might inside.
“I’m just turned around, is all. Camping. Lost the sun.”
He dropped his hands, and the old man flinched, but said nothing.
“It’s all right, I’m just tryin’ to figure where I am.” Gil held up two fingers, his pointer and middle. “Scouts honor.”
It took him almost thirty minutes to follow the smell of cigarette smoke to the little hidden home. Tucked away, what felt like miles into the Brookstow woods. Gil didn’t have to step out and reveal himself. But what he saw when he approached made his blood tingle. He got a low feeling in his face, dropped his eyes down like he was looking for something hard, and his mouth began to water.
It didn’t always happen like that, but when it did, he knew he had to listen to his body or something worse was bound to happen. When he got the urge, that lust, he had to take care of it or it would eat away at him.
Now, walking up to the scared geriatric alone on his porch, something felt off. This wasn’t his style, why was he doing this? Where was the man’s wife? Daughters?
That, he could work with.
“Listen,” he said. “If I can find the main road, North 51? I can find my way back around to my site.
North 51 was on the other side of the forest, and Gil knew the woods over there like the back of his hand. There was nothing the old man on the porch could tell him
Still, he stepped forward.
“Buddy,” the old guy relaxed a bit. “You’re one helluva long walk from 51, I’ll tell you that.”
“Am I? Damn phone. These things…the GPS. The thing died on me.” Any idiot could see through the lie if they paid attention, but the old are sympathetic to technological griping. He’d used it before, and now it was working again.
“Name’s Ed,” the guy said. “This is my home you’ve come to.” He sighed, dropped his shoulders a bit and looked over his shoulder through the window.
“I apologize, again,” said Gil. “I’m so embarrassed.” He stepped forward a bit more, testing Ed, testing the boundaries. “If I can just use your phone.”
Ed sighed loudly and shook his head, but Gil interrupted that too. Holding his hands up, walking forward, one foot on the step now, he pushed against the weak point in the man’s sympathies.
“I’ve been walking for hours, mister. My phone is dead, I haven’t had any water in—” Bright colors caught Gil’s eye as he snuck a glance in the window as he ascended the stairs. Finger paintings, crayon drawings of smiling suns and blooming flowers. “My kids must be worried sick,” he said.
Ed, glass lenses of his bifocals cast over in glares of gold stared fire into Gil, but he didn’t waver. He knew behind the glare, something he said wetted those old eyeballs—caused him to feel sorrow. Was that it?
Sorrow? Is that what people feel when they feel bad for someone else? Gil didn’t have a word for it, but he didn’t need one.
“All right, I suppose,” Ed the gentleman said. “Ain’t no harm ever come from lending a helping hand.”
As Ed opened the door and waved Gil in, the blade on Gil’s hip felt cold as ice. So cold he thought that blood would steam as it flowed over the gleam. It was thirsty.
Sympathy, that was the word.
The springed screen door slammed behind them, and neither man jumped.
***
What would Myra think? If Ed shut the door on a man asking for help, what would she have said? Ed guessed it didn’t much matter now, but that didn’t stop him from thinking about it.
“Water?” he said as they passed the island in the kitchen. Ed stepped to it anyway. Had to wash the stink of the smoke off his knuckles.
“Oh, I suppose I could have a drink,” said the man. “Been walking for a long time.”
Ed only nodded. “Didn’t catch your name if you told me outside. Sorry about that.” He handed the man the glass, quick, hoping he couldn’t see the way his hands shook.
“Gil,” the man said as he took the glass. “Gil Landers.” He put the glass to his lips and quietly drank, keeping his eyes on Ed.
A shiver swept over Ed but he quieted it down. Hoped the man didn’t see that either, but he expected he did. There was something in the way he looked. His eyes, somewhere between angry and hurt. Like an animal running into the bush after someone opens its cage. Free, but with a violent energy, unsure where to put it.
Ed knew men like that.
“Well, Mister Gil,” he said, taking the glass and putting it back in the sink where it clanked against a paring knife. “You said your kids would be worried. I hope they have someone else out there with them.”
Ed worked with them all his life.
“Oh yeah, there’s a bunch of people out there. Dug in pretty good.”
“Glad to hear it,” Ed said. “Don’t want them to worry too much.”
There was a long silence then. The two stared at each other, Ed not sure if he should get a phone for him or drive him around the woods himself. He opened his mouth, but what he was going to say was broken by the sudden taps on the windows as a heavy rain began to fall.
“Well, shit,” he said, and he wasn’t sure just how he meant it.
***
Something was off. The old man was shaken. Gil tried to think of something he did, something that might have tipped him off. There was nothing. Nothing aside from creeping out of the woods the way he did.
Something about his look was familiar. The way he moved maybe—the way he tucked his hip back and reached, like he was grabbing towards his back pocket. For what? Cuffs? A stick?
Nah. It wasn’t likely. Definitely not a cop. There weren’t headshots covering every inch of the walls, group photos like dress-formal gang shit. Folded up flags and badges and antlers on the walls. Maybe it was just the rain getting to him.
“Well shit,” Gil echoed. “I can call my wife to come get me with the kids if you got a phone handy.”
If he had him pegged right, this old man, Edward here, he wasn’t about to let a young woman get her kids up and drive around in a storm to try to find her husband at this little hideaway home.
If he was any kind of decent man at all.
The guy turned like he was reaching for the phone sitting over on the counter—house phone, at that—but something changed his mind. Something, like just the thing Gil thought would change his mind.
“I couldn’t do that, not to your family, mister.” Edward gave a dismissive wave to the dark window, lit in slices of silver-gold as the rain crashed through the rays of the outdoor lantern.
Gil watched it for a while, the rain. How it cut. How it gleamed in the light, and the tap tap tapping of it, sharp on the fragile glass.
“Oh,” he said, turning back to Edward, blinking away the streaks of silver still moving with his eyes. “Really, it’s no bother, not to them.”
Women children piled in bulging holes, holes still settling, full of holes, rotting holes, as he blinked, flashes of his victim’s last moments parsed through his head like a slow roll of film; them, on their knees, begging, tied in sheets and wrapped in plastic, livor fucking mortis, pooling pooling what didn’t drain out in the god, damned, dirt.
He had to squeeze his eyes shut, force ‘em away.
“No, I insist. Stay at least until…you know.” The old man waved him farther into the living room and Gil followed, and Ed kept his shoes on so Gil did too.
When he sat on the chair, the knife hilt from the piece jammed in his belt jabbed him in the ribs and he grunted. He looked back at the fridge, all the pictures, and he couldn't help it. Couldn’t stop what was to come. He stood up.
“Beautiful family,” he said, and pointed back to the kitchen. “I hope I didn’t wake everybody up, barging in like this.”
Edward kept a blank face and didn’t follow to where Gil pointed. He stared him down, like eyes dead, deader even than looking in the mirror, and for a moment even Gil’s heartbeat may have spiked. His hand crept toward his knife, his eyes everwatching, hoping Ed wouldn't lunge.
Just as his hand about reached the blade, Ed interrupted every bleeding, every dripping thought. “I’m sorry, what?” he said. “What was it you just asked?”
Gil relaxed a bit. Geezer was just geezing, that’s all. Losing his mind. “Oh, it’s nothing,” he said. “Just asked about the family—sorry if I woke any of ‘em by coming up in here.”
“Hey,” said Ed, ignoring Gil, skimping out on an answer. “You want a drink?” He threw his thumb over his shoulder, pointed it at what must be the basement door. “At least ‘till the rain slows, is all.”
It was raining like a sonofabitch. And he didn’t know how many people he’d be dragging out the front door. The glass, that was the only thing he touched. He’d have to remember on the way out, but if he kept it smooth—quick, clean—he didn’t need to leave any more evidence. He went to the sink, grabbed the same glass he’d chugged the tapwater, and he met the old man at the open door of the dark basement stairs.
“I suppose there’s no harm in a drink,” he said, and tipped his glass up. And, really, it’d be easier this way. His nerves we already spent from the girl, from the dirt and the burying and the crying and the fucking hatred, and the—
“After you,” said Edward as he flipped on the light, bringing Gil back.
He saw old shag carpet, not great, but it grounded him, and part of a long table—model houses and rooms set up over every inch—took up the rest of the view.
All right, I’ve got to see this, he thought to himself. Suddenly, remembering the photos, the pictures painted hanging on the fridge, his other part that slipped over himself, guided his blood, his hands, guided his rage—he remembered his purpose.
“Mister,” he said. “I’m not waking any of your family up heading down here to drink with you now, am I? Really don’t want to wake your wife, or your kids.”
Edward stopped, halfway up the stairs, his feet about eye level with Gil as he turned around. “Oh, there’s nobody here, buddy,” Edward said. “Just my friends and us.” He clicked on another light at the base of the steps, busting on two more bulbs far back into the cement rectangle.
The whole basement was miniatures. Figurines set in scenes, different places in time, all places—mostly—Gil had seen around town. “Your friends?” he said.
“Oh, you’d be surprised,” said the old man. He moved to the edge of one of the tables and beckoned Gil to come see. “This,” he said, pointing. “This is my family.”
Gil’s veins flooded with adrenaline, and he took a breath big enough he had to hide it behind a cough. His hand itched for his knife.
The scene Edward showed was his family in the yard, his young wife standing in the grass by a bed of flowers, and a man, must be Edward himself, climbing out of a car. Yes, Edward himself, black shoes and head to toe in blue, tiny little plastic baton hanging off his hip.
The men turned to each other and locked eyes for a moment, neither flinching, neither blinking. Do it, thought Gil. Try something, old man.
“It’s just me here now,” Ed said. “Just me.”
He swallowed hard while Gil glared. The night had gone interesting. Barrel fishing to game hunting. Do it do it do it—
“Now, how about that drink?”
***
The two men sat drinking bourbon aged in barrels and they didn’t talk, but rather listened to the rain. It went on like that until Gil thought it probably couldn’t go on like that no more.
The radio hit static as Ed turned the dial, then landed on the Monkees, Steppin’ Stone. If anything could be said about old men, their proclivities all around, Gil would say their taste in music was generally better than the general crowd.
Comfort for the killing, caramel in his throat. His veins tingled with anticipation, but his hackles quivered for something more. He drank deeply.
“This tastes like what the old man used to drink,” he said. He stuck his nose in the glass. “Smells about right, too.”
“Your old man had good taste. This is a Weller. From ‘02.” Edward tilted it to his lips, barely tasted it. Rolled it around in his mouth like he was scared of it going down.
“It all tastes the same,” Gil said. “Don’t pretend that it doesn’t.” He tilted the glass back and downed the whole drink, which set the man to laughing.
When he was done, he said, “Yeah, I suppose it does, doesn’t it?” and took another sip.
Gil’s smile faded down to a sliver and he nodded to himself about something. Something unsaid or something only he heard, Gil guessed it didn’t matter either way, so he didn’t mention it.
“Old man had shit taste.” He finally said.
Ed got up with the bottle and looked at it in the yellow light of the basement, and then he asked if Gil wanted something else. The liquor cabinet was stacked full of wine bottles behind the sectioned glass doors, and the top had various bottles of various heights and colors, and Gil wasn’t a big drinker, so he said to surprise him.
“Alrighty, then,” said Ed and he poured a few things and stirred and walked over to hand it to Gil. When he got close, the knife against Gil’s hip sang to him. He could feel it vibrate against his leg, telling him, I want a drink, too.
“Thanks,” said Gil, and he didn’t stand up.
“Gin and tonic. My favorite. You’re right—the bourbon tastes like all the others I’ve had, and—” He stopped for a second. Laughed and rubbed the corner of his eye. “It was my dad’s favorite, that two-thousand-and-two, Weller.” He held the new glass up, the clear liquid bubbling, hissing against the ice. “This is mine.”
Gil took a sip, let it fade down his throat. Tasted like the woods. Like the pines he trudged through to get to his beloveds, the sap that clings to his clothes. Tasted like the earth under his nails.
“It’s good,” said Gil.
“It’s the cheapest shit there is,” the old man laughed and sat back in his chair. His teeth had that faint yellow hue old men get where you can tell their breath smells like dust and mothballs before you get close enough to shake their hand.
Gil looked in his glass, suddenly self-conscious, but he didn’t know why. The radio switched songs. Some girl jockey quietly segueing into the next piece, barely whispering the name, but Gil knew it by heart.
The rain blasted the windows like blown sand, and the thunder made the glasses tinkle ever slightly, but it was the bass from the song that vibrated gently through the room. Gil could feel it in his teeth; and that snap—it made him blink each time like a spark, like a match against a flint, setting him alight.
Peggy Lee, breathy, whispering in his ear, Never know how much I love you.
And Gil clenched his teeth.
Never know how much I care.
“You remind me of someone,” Ed blurted out, snatching Gil from the grip of the song. “I can’t quite think of who. Maybe it’s a lot of people.”
Gil thought on that for a minute. Then got bothered by it. “How do you mean, old man?” The knife on him was cold, cold and crying for warmth. A warm wet home, wasn’t that the key to happiness for everything? For his knife? His other one, too? Hell, even all his playthings, that’s where they liked to be. When they were finally at home, warm in the wet earth, they told him thank you. They said, “Thank you for cutting into me and removing all the things that made me bad.” They said, “We don’t know what we would do without you. Thank you for your love, your tender seed,” they’d say, and they’d smile when they said it, and sometimes their teeth clacked and fell out, tipped right forward like dominoes, no, like little tictacs, plinko at the county fair and a BB-gun, tink, goodbye.
Ed was still talking, and Gil was looking down at the ice swirling in his glass, listening to it twinkle like glittering stars.
“…didn’t mean to get into corrections, you know—but my eyes kept me off the force. Not that my eyes are bad,” Ed said. “I’m just mixed up on colors is all.”
“Hmphh.” Gil laughed, hid it under his breath.
“Laugh all you want,” Ed said. “But, corrections was no picnic. No sir. And mixing up colors didn’t make me weak, I’ll tell you that.”
“Didn’t say you was weak, old timer.”
He was getting to him. That, or the drink was. Gil was going to have to end things here sooner or later, end ‘em before Edward decided he was uncomfortable enough to brave being brave.
“Yeah, well…” Edward took off his cap, Gil noticing said US Navy or something. Didn’t matter. “Like I was saying,” Ed said. “Corrections was no picnic. I saw your face back there when you looked at my pieces. When you saw my set with the miniatures, saw me down there as an officer of the state. I’d say I recognized you then, but that’s not true.”
Hmm. Gil’d never been locked up, so the guy was mistaken. But, something about him said for sure that that wasn’t entirely what he was talking about. Yeah, he recognized him, but it wasn’t him he recognized. It was what was inside him.
Gil met the old man’s eyes, his blue, Ed’s somewhere green, somewhere distant and wild.
“Yeah, I knew what you were when you walked on up out of the woods. Saw plenty of your kind working the row. The guys there, set in place, some for as long as I was employed by the state of Tennessee, they all had that same look about ‘em. Lookin’ like they done a whole lot they felt something about, but that something they felt wasn’t exactly right. Wasn’t what God intended it to be.”
“That so?” said Gil.
He wondered what the insides of the guy’s lungs looked like. He watched him smoke those cigarettes outside, lit one right after the other. Airsacs probably full of black, he could open ‘em up and smear ‘em down his face like war paint. He wanted to ask how pocked the guy thought his liver was. If maybe he wanted to look at it before he died, because Gil wasn’t all bad. Could make that happen for him if he wanted. Feed it to him, maybe. Show him how his family felt about him, let him root around in their insides. See the veins and how they grow on their heart, that’ll tell him what they truly think, the heart never lies, even when you rip it free, it tells you in its beats.
Where is your family?
“Where is your family,” Gil asked. “The pictures on the fridge. I like… I’m good with kids,” he said.
That stopped Ed for a second, made him stare.
“I told you we were alone,” he said. “Just us and my friends.” He pointed over to the tables of figurines—the tables piled with scenes of miniature memories, and there, he could see the houses, the neighborhoods, Gil could see the prison, the cells.
He could see this whole man’s life, what it meant. How important it would be to bleed him out over the whole set. String him up, let his life flow over his fake life like rain.
Ed was talking again.
“…some of them, these guys, they went to the chair quietly, you know. Resigned like. Like they accepted what they done, and they were accepting what they gotta do for it.” He took his hat off again. Ran his fingers through his hair. “Others though, they never changed their faces, not from the day they came in, to the day they went out. Nothing there, you understand?”
He snapped his fingers, and Gil blinked. When he blinked, he saw the hooker and the blood spurting from her throat, pooling back down in the bowl of her neck, flowing back into her mouth, spurting back out in hacking spits—her eyes as big as ghostflowers. Begging, gurgling but begging and the quiet gasps that made him shudder, made him hard as stone.
He blinked again, saw the others. Knew that Edward always knew. It was a shame he was alone and there wouldn’t be more fun in this lonely little hideaway home. The pictures on the fridge how he could play house, how his blade could dance in the crimson rain. He could have had a weekend, but now it was just a body in the way. Not what he wanted, not what he meant to do.
Still, his knife longed for blood, and his teeth ached for flesh, and sometimes a warm, wet body was just a warm, wet body, and looking at Edward, he for sure knew that, too.
“So,” he asked the old man. “Why did you let me in?”
He laughed. Edward, the old man laughed, bowing his head back, clucking out his open mouth at the woodslat ceiling. “Because…” he started, couldn’t finish. “Because none of you ever got what you truly deserved.”
The radio changed as Gil stood, and he wished he could have stopped to listen.
I keep hearin’ you’re concerned about my happiness.
He smiled anyway and flicked the latch that sheathed his blade, closed his eyes and mouthed along:
But all your thought you’re given me is conscience, I guess…
***
The next morning, late, almost noon, the front door to the house up the long drive in the woods opened and Edward walked in and dropped his bags on the floor. One contained bleach, and a big roll of plastic, another garden sheers and mason jars, and a two gallon jug of sulfuric acid from the Farmer’s Supply. The other bag he stuffed in his back pocket.
He walked over to the sink and washed the blood off the paring knife, thankful his instincts told him to tuck it somewhere on him before he went downstairs. He couldn’t remember taking it, not really, but when he tried, it was Myra’s voice he heard. You’re not wrong about him, she said, and maybe it was a dream, and maybe he was just going crazy.
His hands shook as he dried the knife, set it beside the freshly washed glass on the towel by the sink, and he made his way down the stairs. The wrapping peeled off his new figurine too slowly, like a gift, like he was a kid again, and when he freed the miniature, it was too good to be true.
He found him right in the place he found his Myra. Back at the store, standing in front of all the lifelike figurines—exactly in the place he plucked his wife before, there sat an average man in a dark coat and dark pants, even had a knife painted on his belt.
He didn’t want him in the scene. He wanted him under it.
Ed dug up a part of the green felt he teezed with a razor to look like grass, and he dug into his table a bit until the body of the dark-coated figurine would fit, and then he slapped the felt back over it. He took his corrections officer miniature, and he stood it over the man who threatened his family, and that was enough.
He could call it finished.
He gently laid his fingers over the Myra figurine, his wife, running them along her fake hair. The night before fresh in his mind, Edward blinked away the thoughts of blood. He saw a splash on his table, black on the green felt, but already he was whistling. In his head, he was singing as he tried to wipe away the stain:
If I were walkin’ in your shoes, I wouldn’t worry none.
While you ‘n your friends’re worried ‘bout me, I’m havin’ lots of fun.
When he looked back at the table, the little house, miniature on the green felt in the fake trees, the Myra he bought, the spitting image, she stood at the head of the yard over the hidden grave of the dead body, and a wink was painted on her face.