The Guilty

Chapter 1: When writing fails. When long walks and sunsets no longer calm my spirit. When prayers seem to go unheard, though I know He’s always listening. When people fail, and they are guaranteed to always fail, and you seem the most alone, that’s the time. The time when decisions must be made.

Loss will do it. Losing someone from your life who was a huge part of your life can leave a hole that frankly cannot be filled. No amount of drugs or alcohol, cigarettes or dangerous living can release enough dopamine to quell that empty feeling; that nagging regret that you might’ve done this or you might’ve done that.

You’re shame spiraling into a place where you can’t look at yourself in the mirror anymore without thinking of some wrong turn you took that led you to knowing this person, who introduced you to that person, and you married him, and you guys got into a fight one night and you killed him by complete accident. It wasn’t even an important issue, you were just arguing over which way the toilet paper should roll on the holder and the next thing you know, when you come to your senses, there’s a body on the ground that isn’t moving. Just moments before you’d been listening to him scream at you about how your family must’ve been living in some kind of cave somewhere and they were all insane, and if he had known who you all really were before he married you he never would have done it. Just an hour before you’d been in the tent talking about what you were going to do when you got back to the house because the living room wallpaper was atrocious and even though it was a rent house it really could use some touchups. You argued about that, too, because you wanted to just paint over it and hope for the best and he wanted to rent a steamer and take it down properly. Always the perfectionist, this one.

Hell, he even died well. One shot and not another sound came out of his mouth. Just a single shot to the top of his head with the hatchet he brought to chop up firewood, and he never moved again. The hatched stayed buried in his skull, the pink and grey innards glistening in the firelight from the open wound in the top of his head, but he wasn’t moving. His eyes were frozen in that expression for eternity. You didn’t mean to let go of it. You were just holding it and shaking it in the air like a judge’s gavel and as you came down with the swing it just slipped out of your hand. He said he was going to rewrap that handle, but he never did. He didn’t have time to duck or move, and your accident had deadly aim.

Just the day before you’d been driving all day to get to this perfect site, four hours from home, two hours from a phone, no cell service and no park rangers for miles. You wanted to get away and just chill and now you were looking at his body next to your campfire. Everything else was silence. You were alone with that, the silence of the forest, the crackling of the fire, your own breath as you couldn’t even muster a tear because you were still in disbelief.

If you left him there, one of the lovely woodland creatures you’d both been warned about would surely make a meal of his decomposing corpse. Nobody wants a closed casket but that head wound, surely that head wound would be a challenge for the funeral parlor. Meh, they’ve seen worse. You thought of dragging him into the tent but that would be a dreadful sight for someone to walk up on first thing in the morning. What if some hikers came through and needed help and opened the tent? There he’d be, all gross and dead and nobody around.

If you stayed there until someone came to rescue you then you might be the next one on the menu for the local bears and mountain lions.

Alone in the silence, your regrets filled your mind, clouded your judgment. You just couldn’t think of a positive outcome for this. You were going to prison for murder. This was murder after all. A person’s life is over. It was an accident but what were you doing with the hatchet in YOUR hand? Well, you could put it in his hand and make it look like he’d accidentally....no that’s just stupid. Forensics know to look for that sort of thing. They will see it was thrown at him. Dammit. Alone out here with a dead boyfriend and no way to get him back to civilization.

Let’s walk. Yes, the air will do us good, we will take a walk. Then you spotted the fallen tree. That thing must have been 300 years old. The roots descended directly into a sinkhole leading to hellfire and damnation itself it seemed. You kicked rocks down into the precipice to see if you could hear them strike something like water or a bottom but there was nothing.

Well, animals surely wouldn’t get to him down there! You could tie a rope around him and drop him down this hole and tie the other end off to the fallen tree and he could stay there until you got someone to come haul his ass out of the woods. Yes! That is a perfect plan.

So you went to get the body. Flies were already circling. With a slurp sound the hatchet came out of his flesh, and an ooze of blood trickled out from the gaping axe wound onto the ground. Hm, you thought, that’s going to draw critters. So you wrapped a tshirt around his head and a piece of foam from the mattress you were sleeping on into the wound to soak up the blood. After assessing the situation one more time and securing the rope under his arms and across his chest, you dragged him back to the spot where the tree had fallen.

He easily outweighed you by 100 pounds so this was going to be daunting but not impossible. You tied off the end of the rope and then began slipping his legs over the side, using one of the larger roots for leverage. Gently, easily, but clumsily his dead body descended into darkness until there was no more slack in the rope. Exhausted from the ordeal and feeling the adrenaline surge finally waning, you wandered back to the campsite.

You remembered the hatchet and felt a sudden fury toward the hatchet. You blamed the hatchet and the slick handle. You blamed the toilet paper and the stupid argument that you’d been acting as judge and jury of the bathroom to smack your gavel down once and for all that the tissue rolls toward you! Yes, it was the hatchet’s fault. You would never hurt him. You loved him. Well, you loved him most of the time. The other part of the time you really wanted to strangle him. Okay, so not really strangle but just like smack him around or something because he was annoying and he argued a lot about petty trivial things.

So now he’s dead. Now his lifeless body is hanging by a rope in the middle of the woods an hour hike from the car, several hours home and heaven only knows where the ranger station is from here.

The fire was so warm, you laid down next to it to collect your thoughts. You needed to get the tent taken down and get the hell out of here now, but you were so tired. It’s hard to kill someone, concoct a scheme to hide the body and then carry it out, but that’s exactly what you’d just done.