Wound Snakes
Treat your wounds, before witches treat them for you
Gods how I hate having to go into town. It’s difficult to express how much I hate the concentrated scent of humans in close quarters. I’m fairly self-sufficient in terms of food, but I have to pick up my mail at the post office rather than have it delivered as masses of dead postal workers littering my mountain is not a problem I want to deal with. So every two weeks I hike down to my truck and bump my ass two hours down the mountain to town, when the road is clear anyway.
This particular run would be my last until spring. Rain tugged at the sky and the roads were slippery and sloppy, but I had a few essentials to stock up on, and several packages, so the trip had to be made. I could tell by the way the rain slid in snaking rivulets along the road and down the windshield that something was going to happen in town. I would have preferred an uneventful trip, but when you live in these parts, uneventful doesn’t really exist.
I should mention that I use the term “town” loosely. This is more of an accretion on the Earth’s surface. Structures so old they very well may have been laid down by some ancient, giant microbes excreting what could be called wood and concrete, if you’re being generous. There are five buildings: a post office, a mechanic, a general store, a coffee shop (in the loosest sense, they do serve something approximating coffee and legend holds that one day many years ago they served croissants), and a Forest Service station. These serve the approximately sixty residents spread all throughout the nine million acre forest here, not to mention the occasional adventurer. It is beautiful land. Can’t blame folks for wandering this way. That’s not to say I wouldn’t get rid of them all if I could, because I definitely would.
I stopped by the general store first, loaded everything in the truck and then drove down the street two blocks to the post office, a small, squat building painted a weathered blue, it definitely looked like it had been there since the Archean. There were two other pickups parked out front, rotten luck. It was drizzling rain by that time and a fog had settled in, the kind of weather that makes life feel muffled and entombed. My favorite kind of weather, truth be told. Like Mother Earth has wrapped you in a protective shroud.
The Post Master was a guy called Mac, ancient, small, wiry, I’ve always assumed he’d bite if provoked. He stood at the counter, helping a man they called Crisco. Why he was called Crisco I neither knew nor wanted to know. There was one other person in line already, someone I hadn’t met before. He was tall, bearded, and had a heavy, grim brow. I took my place behind him. Mac nodded to me, I nodded back. Best to be polite to the chihuahua guarding your mail. The man in front of me turned.
“You new here?”
“Nope.”
“Never seen ya before.”
I shrugged. I don’t explain myself. “Never seen you before either.”
“Where abouts do you live in the range?”
“West.” The Range, is what we all collectively referred to our little mountain range as. It does have a name, most of us never use it.
“Kinda broad, care to narrow it down?”
“Nope.”
“Huh.” He scratched at his bristly neck as I watched Crisco vacate the counter.
“Next!” Mac barked.
“Huh,” grim brow grunted again. I watched him stalk up to the counter and nod curtly at Mac. I had gleaned a bit about him from his aura as we spoke; he lived in the north part of the range, had definitely written a manifesto, and was hiding from someone. Which explained his curiosity. Must be a little dash of paranoia mixed in with the dandruff on his coat. I stepped forward to the worn duct tape line on the dingy linoleum and glanced at the clock. The fluorescents hummed. I definitely wanted to get back to my cabin before dark. Or before the dread pall of this place seized my heart.
My ears perked up.
“It was supposed to be delivered today,” the bearded man shouted.
“I don’t control the weather!” Mac barked back.
“Not rain or sleet or whatthefuckever. Isn’t that what you say?” The big man leaned over the counter, towering over Mac. The Post Master poked a hand up into his chest.