the creak of the pines
It was soporific.
The creak of the pines.
The creak of the pines, the scuff and scoot of her shoes over cracked blacktop, and pencil-thin shadows over the backs of her hands drawn in ballpoint — tracing veins, bored, pen stuck to her skin over the course of the two-hour lecture.
She was out now, traipsing and slipping over fissured sidewalk — putting as much space between herself and the sleepy, dull, monotonous lisp of Professor Brian as possible.
The creak of the pines shivered over the late-night air. Monotonous…
… like that shade of lipstick her mother wore. Always the same — too pink. Too glossy. Too everything, smudging on their cups and silverware, leaving sticky remnants on the cigarettes crushed outside in the crack between the driveway and the sidewalk.
It wasn’t only the lipstick.
These Friday nights were static. That classroom was stuck in place, lost in time.
All of it came together — stuck, glued, buried — like the hum of interference over a phone line. The pause before a word passed from between trembling lips. The dip in gravity before a fall.
The nasally breathing of Professor Brian. In and out, constant, never-changing.
God. She hated him.
She hated this time of night, when the streetlights flickered and bled and spilled yolk-yellow over the lines drawn on the backs of her hands… turned them dark and deep.
Roots spreading from the pines to her skin.
She hated having to take summer courses at the dinky community college out in the middle of nowhere. Hated returning home to the acridity of smoke, the loneliness of cold cigarettes stomped out on the driveway and saran-wrapped dinner in the fridge. Hated seeing the same faces, night after night, year after year since she had worn pigtails and cried over stupid things like spilt milk, a scraped knee, a lost doll.
Same seats, same eyes, same names, night after night, filed like records forgotten in a cabinet (by row, alphabetical, don’t forget the ones in the back). Twenty-six in total.
Except…
Tonight was the first time in a while that it had been twenty-five and the empty desk two rows up and one row over hadn’t escaped her attention. Little differences, insignificant, still caught her eye — a moth to a flame.
Not for long though. Inevitably it would be twenty-six again and that empty singularity would flicker and die and fall, paper-thin wings too close to the burning and then to the ground to dissolve into dust to make room for conformity and a twenty-sixth face once more.
Somniferous.
This town was killing her, putting her to sleep — burying her under the creak of the pines that never left, the sting of a pen dug too deep into the flex and pull of her fingers, the wheeze of a lisp and God she couldn’t breathe, not here under it all, not knowing what she was going back to, a smudge of pink to remind her of what she had but couldn’t touch, couldn’t see or hear or have, not truly and her backpack was so heavy between her shoulders, dragging her down farther until she was sure she’d disappear, a girl lost to the emptiness, the static, the hum and the creak and the distant sound of her mother’s voice between walls, behind doors.
She couldn’t escape it in the dark. The creak of the pines.
Her keys slipped in her fingers the way they always did, catching on her thumb, jangling and bouncing as she shoved one into the lock on the car. Her phone buzzed in her pocket at the same time that the door swung open, groaning, sticky hinges in the humidity.
She crawled in, tossed her backpack to the rear and it made a thump.
She paused.
It was different. Little and insignificant but… louder, that noise. An extra textbook then, shoved down into the pocket and zipped up and forgotten.
She jammed the seatbelt into place, turned the key.
Then she was sitting still on tattered upholstery, inhaling sugared perfume and hairspray left on the particles of air trapped within these windows. The stain on the passenger seat that caught on her peripheral was stashed away in her head like everything else in this town.
A filing system in the wrinkled creases of her brain — red wine, dry, spilt one year/six months/two days ago, result of a hard brake at the stop sign on 20th and 6th, tipped at 90 degrees from Ms. Amalia Flores’ hands (nails manicured with Beaty School Dropout pink, bandage wrapped around right index finger), spilled right between her legs (wearing lace stockings, Adidas sneakers, black skirt, blouse: color unknown), Driver’s Name: Nisha Peters *See Page 11 of report
God, she was such a cliche.
It was all so antiquated, the mere idea of it. Funny, almost. Something she may have laughed at playing on the screen at the drive-in when she was thirteen and so, so painfully aware of her body, the changes, the desperate scratch to grow up, grow up, come on, fit in.
She was that cliche. Now she saw it in the shape of her thighs and the damp of her lipstick and those damned, lace panties she had bought last week.
Now she knew and laughing had turned into an endless shriek trapped down in her lungs, clawing and begging and weeping, desperate to be let out but trapped behind the perfect smile.
Cliche.
Cliche and popular with a side of shitty home life, stuck in a small town and looking for that big break amongst the layers and layers of her life — deadbeat mom, parties on the weekend, summer school and fake nails and smoking amongst the cracks of the abandoned parking lot behind the Thai restaurant downtown.
Looking at the weeds in those cracks, wondering if that was what it felt like, growing up like that, choking.
Wine stains on the passenger seat.
The creak of the pines.
The car gear shifted to drive. Her hands wrapped around the wheel. The weight of the endless loop of infinity sat in the backseat, slowing her down, drip drip dripping with the hum of the engine, bleeding into the more to her backpack, such a little difference, insignificant…
Headlights flicked on, piercing and sharp and cutting through the shadows. It was a knife shaving through the thick trunks in front of the car, slicing the pines to ribbons. Ribbons and ribs and slivers of the moon — black and white, fuzzy gray in between.Green needles, lit up, each of them swaying in the sticky air.
The pines felt alive.
She stared at them and they seemed to tremble, shake, shiver and breathe up from their roots to the unfathomable tops, peaks lost in the dark where the headlights didn’t reach. Her heart shuddered in her chest in reply, answering with a spike of adrenaline, cortisol, glucose. Fight or flight.
Fly, the pines answered.
They creaked, groaned, whispered, told her to drive, drive home and then past that, keep going, past the ranch-style home/dead cigarettes/saran-wrap/pink lipstick and tv static at two in the morning, go home and keep going, go go go, don’t stop, just keep driving down that interstate, disappear, leave, run, go go go go go go -
Stop. What is that there, beneath the pine-
A hand.
A hand, so simple. So human.
So normal… like the anatomy diagrams in Professor Brian’s four-walled, yellowing, dullsville classroom. A hand… linked to the pronator quadratus… and then to the flexor digitorum, the flexor pollicis, the flexor carpi radialis and five fingers outstretched, below the pines…
Run, the pines offered up one more time.
So normal, her brain tried again, flat and shocked and numb and struggling to catch up. Human and flesh and bones and - and - wrong. Wrong wrong wrong wr ong wro ng w r o n g…
Suddenly her seatbelt was a noose around her neck. Adrenaline, cortisol, pumped through her veins. Fingertips went cold, mouth hung open in a silent scream.
Wrong.
Wrong place (in the dark, stretched and reaching out over a bed of pine needles) and wrong color (pale, bloodless, limp) and -
Dead.
Even from here — through a thick pane of glass, headlights scattering amongst the trees — she could tell.
The pines laughed.
Oh, they said, we told you to go. We told you, didn’t we? We told you to run. Then you wouldn’t have seen. You wouldn’t have seen. But you wanted different, right? You wanted your world to explode, shake, didn’t you? We told you to leave. We told you, we told you, we told -
It was too late now.
The air conditioning hummed and the car stayed in drive, stuck in place, and she was paralyzed and the weight in her chest, her stomach, her backpack kept her that way…
… until the nerve endings in her body popped and cracked, snapped like static, jolting her into a flurry of movement.
Flight, only backwards.
Curiosity killed the cat, the pines sang…
… but she couldn’t care. She was moving. Moving because that empty space — that singularity from that classroom stuck so still and perfect in space night after night — was back in her head. Two rows up, one row over.
Two rows up. One row over.
Two rows up…
… one row over… empty desk. Empty phone. No answer to the calls last night, at 10:26. No answer to the texts this afternoon, at 8:26.
She saw those messages she had typed written out behind her eyelids, written out in the dark ribcage hollows between the trees.
hey where are u?? srsly come on Lia.. you cant leave me alone with him. if u’re
skipping just bc I -
okay, Lia, you have officially lost all Best Friend rights to the snack drawer at
my place for leaving me alone with -
Amalia, just text me when you get this, okay? I’m worried and if you’re sick I’ll
come over with your favorite from -
She moved in snapshots.
Seatbelt off. Fingers scrabbling at the handle. Rusty hinges creaking, creaking. Then dark asphalt under her shoes… then pine needles… her knees were weak, knocking together… and then that hand - that hand - that hand was -
Beauty School Dropout pink.
A new file to add to her head — manicured nails (chipped on the right), bracelet around left wrist (sterling silver), two beauty marks an inch up from bracelet, Subject’s Name: Unknown *See Page 26 of report for possible victim profiles
She rounded the sliver of the pine blocking her view.
She stepped — one, two, three, inhale — out of the headlights, deeper into the creak of the pines…
… and the singularity from earlier didn’t die, didn’t crumble to dust. It expanded, a puzzle piece jammed into the wrong empty place.
It was the scream that left her throat, cutting through the mundane silence of a Friday night in that parking lot.
It was the empty desk two rows up, one row over.
It was the weight -
The creak of the pines continued on (despite it all, the blood and the slashes and the milky eyes and the rawness of her wail and the empty chair, that extra weight in her backpack in the backseat, different, significant)…
… and inescapable, infinite, soporific they whispered…
Run.