August

Two things were always the same, we had to kill something, and we were paid for it.

Hello there - I’ve decided to post what I think is one of my best short stories, possibly the best one. It’s never been published, not even been submitted anywhere. TBH, I’ve been sitting on this one, not sure what to do with it.

So I’ve decided to put it up here, and for the first time this full story is available to paid subscribers. (Please don’t throw tomatoes at me, or really any fruit.) This is a special one.
Here it is… August.

August

I was called into my grandfather’s room while my older brother slumped in an armchair. I’d asked Sam why he thought we were here.

“He’s dying, stupid.”

The room smelled of his pipe tobacco and Pine Sol. Gramp’s voice was quieter than I’d ever heard it, as he explained why he wanted to talk with me.

I couldn’t make sense of the thing he gave me, or what turned out to be his last words.

“Take care of your brother.”

Sam went in after me, but didn’t say much when he came out.

It was a month after the funeral before I showed him the book.

“Gramps gave you that? Lemme see.” He grabbed it out of my hand and riffled through it.

“The pages are all blank, what gives?”

“He said they won’t always be,” I said.

Sam sat with that one. We both knew Gramps was a prankster and a storyteller, mom said of tall tales. Dad said it was called bullcrap.

I didn’t tell Sam all what Gramps told in the bedroom. But on the day Gramps said, I flipped open the book and read the first page. Then I took it to my brother.

“You wrote in that, Eli.”

“You know my writing and that isn’t it.”

Sam let out a low whistle.

“So what now?”

“We go to the place and see what happens.”

Sam and I rode our bikes out to the rock quarry on the edge of town, and like it said in the book we found a greenish rock that was rounder than all the others, towards the back of the yard.

“What are we supposed to--”

My brother slammed his mouth shut when the orange spider appeared. I took off my sneaker and slammed its guts on the rock.

“That’s what it said in the book!”

I didn’t say anything. I felt bad for the spider. Sam spied a green leaf under the rock. It turned out to be a twenty-dollar bill.

“This is freaking me out,” he said.

“Uh-huh.”

That’s how it began. Over the years, always on the same day, August ninth, we opened the book to find a new location and a new set of instructions. One time we went to a factory and had to kill a rat, another time it was a baseball diamond where Sam snared a gopher and then broke its neck. It was pretty brutal, him swinging it by the neck into the backstop.