Where the Sunflowers End
Within that golden tangle, dreams and myths materialize
Charmaine, dreaming, weightless, sheds a long scaly coat in the clouds revealing glowing golden skin that reflects — no — radiates its own light. Her heart, fit to burst, balloons out of her chest. If Charmaine times it right and grabs hold of it, she’ll ride it up even higher, beyond the heavens and past the stars. Instead, she feels the roughened hand of gravity thump her back into the murky truck cabin with a chorus of dashboard rattle and a rough slap as her temples hit the window.
“Oh, sorry, Charm,” Roy says behind the fire of his Camel Red cigarette, eyes split like a lizard between the road and the passenger seat. “These old roads aren’t much for sleeping,” he drags breath, death, and tar deep into his lungs, and the cigarette’s tip goes supernova.
“Don’t call me that. My name’s Charmaine,” she says, rubbing her forehead where it kissed the window.
“You can have one of these to keep you awake. Just don’t make a habit of it,” Roy says, peeling the cigarette from his mouth and offering it to her between nicotine-stained fingers. In this enclosed space, the smoldering cancer stick volunteers its thin, wispy body to fill the air between them. Barely visible against the waning light of his last pull, Roy’s crocodile smile slithers across thin lips.
“We’re nearly there, aren’t we?” Charmaine’s voice bristles, and she crosses her arms against a chill.
Roy’s smile wanes, but his focus is still trained on Charmaine. He blindly reaches for the thermos in the cupholder between them. “Very nearly,” he grunts, steam dancing off the thermos cap as he downs its contents in a single gulp.
“Why we even out here, Roy?”
“Your first hunt, of course,” he exhales.
“You’ve never taken me before,” Charmaine says.
Before today, she’s only taken potshots at empty beer cans in the open field behind their house. The cans were lined up carefully by Roy’s clumsy, inebriated fingers like a line of captives before a firing squad. The cans were only guilty of being down the gun’s sights, but isn’t that how it goes? Charmaine thinks so. She remembers the click of the trigger, the shotgun butt punching her shoulder, and the pellets. If you look hard enough, you can see the pellets travel mid-air. They look like a swarm of bees setting into a threat to the hive, seeking out the tender, vulnerable parts to plunge their venomous barbs into.
Roy stews in the dark behind the wheel, silent.
“Getting up at four in the morning after no sleep is stupid,” Charmaine says.
“Oh, was it a long night for you?” Roy clucks out a laugh.
“Hard to sleep in the middle of World War Three,” she mumbles.
Roy blinks slowly, and his lips curdle into a wry smile. “Che’nae’s opinions get her into trouble.”
Charmaine flinches. The way Roy refers to her mom by name feels intentional, like he’s distancing himself from the role of stepfather. She notes how Roy manages opinions and remembers how quiet her mother was this morning, dressed in the bathrobe that camouflaged her entire body in majestic purple. A spackling of makeup will do its best to conceal the puffy sheen around both her mother’s eyes.
“You ready to bag your first Snipe?” Roy sighs, clanging the gears of the conversation in a different direction.
“Thought it was dove season?” Charmaine asks.
“Them, too. But you can bag Snipe if your eyes are right and your reaction quick enough,” Roy says, his full attention finally back on the road.
“That’s a bunch of bunk,” Charmaine says, picking at a loose piece of interior paneling that’s losing the fight against gravity.
“You always Snipe hunt on the first day of the season,” Roy chances a look to Charmaine. “Since it’s your first hunt, tradition says you gotta be the one that bags it.”
“Okay, what do they look like, then?” Charmaine huffs.
Another pull from the coffin nail in Roy’s mouth. “Depends.”
“Cuz they don’t exist,” she scoffs.
“They do!” Roy’s voice softens, becoming a secret two people share. “My…uh, Snipe…looked like an old dog of mine, Shadow. Big ol’ dog with a coat like coal powder. I laid eyes on it, and it nodded its head, all polite-like, shrunk down to the size of a deck of playing cards, and into my sack it went.”
“Why catch it?”
Roy shrugs. “Hunting’s about balance. Fairness. You’ve got the gun, sure, but you’re not guaranteed to get the kill. With a Snipe, it’s just you, your skills, and a bag. Shows you know how to play fair. They’re guardians, or some damn thing, I dunno…” his voice trails as the headlights reveal a path off the main road. “This is it.”
Roy lugs two five-gallon buckets filled with ammo out of the truck bed while Charmaine grabs the two shotguns from the backseat. The morning light is maybe thirty minutes off. Their two headlamps and a single, blazing cigarette claw out just enough of a foothold in the world for them to stay on the path. Curious seedpods and fallen twigs venture out to meet them on the trail and are trampled beneath them.
Five minutes later, they arrive at the edge of a grove of shoulder-height stalks topped with the graying heads of sunflowers nodding off to eternal sleep in the pre-dawn hour. Bereft of their usual yellow and orange plumage, they look nothing like their namesake, nor would they ever again chase its light across the sky. The dead field of sunflowers, like underground catacombs, extend out for miles, farther than you can see or imagine, even taking on the earth’s curve in the distance.
“Here’s good,” Roy heaves the buckets down, shaking the feeling back into his hands. “Dove can’t get enough of sunflower seeds. A bounty like this will be crawling with them once the sun starts peeking over. All that’s left now is the waiting.” He peels a lid off a bucket, pulls out a burlap sack that still smells of potatoes, and tosses it to Charmaine.
“A’Snipe hunting, you will go,” Roy sings, marching in place, giving her an exaggerated salute.
Charmaine rubs the rough-hewn fibers with her fingers and looks at the monochrome field. “Can’t I just stay here?”
Half of Roy’s face alights, lips puckering around the butt of a smoke. “Gotta show the Snipe we’re worthy.”
Roy gestures for the shotguns, which Charmaine reluctantly hands over.
“I forgot to put the plugs into the guns,” Roy says, not even trying to hide the smile on his face. “Only supposed to hold three cartridges at a time. Don’t want the law to find us with our pants down, do you?”
The sunflower shoots and stems are knit together in a thick tangle. Charmaine takes two steps in, and all traces of her are gone. Roy notes her path, setting the guns down, and plans to give her a head start of a few seconds before going in after her. An itch surfaces on his belly, and he scratches it, noting the soothing relief it brings. Another itching, a yearning deep within him, he’ll satisfy soon enough.
A depression, notable only for its vacuous emptiness, forms within the depths of the field. There and gone again in a heartbeat. The only evidence of it is the flower heads reanimating, dipping, and springing back to full height.
“What happened, you get scar — ” Roy’s words dissolve to fine dust in his throat, mix with pooling saliva and turn to paste, choking him. Some ways into the meadow, deep enough for the actual dimensions of it to be brought into question, the night peels back and stands upright.
“Shadow?” Roy creaks out.
That’s not right, though. Roy’s unsure why he thought it was Shadow. In his last days, Shadow was an arthritic lab mix that stood at Roy’s twelve-year-old knees, eyes smoky with cataracts. What peers over the sunflowers is too long, standing on its hind legs at twice Roy’s height. Its fur is char, its eyes licking flames.
“Im — impossible,” Roy stammers. “Snipe ain’t real. You ain’t real!” The figure staggers forward at his outburst, imbued with naked electricity, hobbling over on its spindly legs. A crease yawns open beneath its burning coal eyes with glinting skewers of teeth.
There, within the gaps of each gnarled tooth, Roy sees the resemblance to Shadow. On the last day, when Shadow took a mouthful of his father’s .38 revolver, Roy had spent the morning trying to locate him. He found him under the back porch, panting, drooling fat strands of spit from its mouth. Roy’s hand blindly reached underneath the pine boards and was seized by a wet pocket of razors. Cupping his mangled throbbing hand to his chest, Roy saw Shadow’s face, blood dripping down its chin, eyes pulsing fire. Just like the thing hurtling towards him out of the sunflowers.
Roy swivels and grabs a shotgun but can’t get the cartridge to load. Still, Shadow’s fury is bearing down on him. Refusing to let go of his only means of defense, Roy sprints towards the truck. Several paces later, he raises a hand to shield his face from the oncoming…sunflower stalks.
He stops, sure he set off in the opposite direction of the sunflower patch, that the fright has cut a few wires loose in his reasoning. Roy looks over his shoulder and finds he’s alone. No Snipe. No Shadow. But there is also no path, and no stars to guide him or light his way — only more sunflowers, their heads warping into the sneering, agonized faces of the damned. Light from his headlamp breathes a final, tremorous breath before abandoning Roy as well.
“Charmaine!” the words shrivel as they leave his mouth. Roy fiddles with the shotgun rounds again, which still won’t chamber.
“Charmaine, get back here, girl!” not a command, but a plea, the sniveling groan that precedes full-on bawling. Roy runs, making little progress in the thicket. The sunflowers impose themselves over him, refusing to yield, the stalks swelling as thick as pillars as he passes. Panting, drooling from the effort, he stumbles into a section of sunflowers so dense that he can progress no further. The tips of each plant head loom over him like skyscrapers.
Footsteps, frantic and irregular, rise out of his sunflower prison, from which direction Roy can’t decide. Tears are flowing now, hot and fast, a current threatening to sweep him away. Pointed triangles congeal out of the darkness, tethered to red-hot furnaces that singe the sunflowers beneath them, and out comes the Snipe. It slowly morphs from Shadow into Roy’s mirror image, and he can see the color drain from his face, as does his hair, which becomes a shock of white.
Roy can’t look away because it’s him, what he’s done. Arguments he ended with his fists. All the times he took what he wanted and dealt with the consequences later, if ever. His mouth spreads wide. The scream that leaves him catches the wind and is carried through the sunflowers like wind chimes.
Charmaine hears yelling and returns to the buckets after walking in a circle for a few minutes. “Roy?” she asks, relieved at his absence.
“Snipe my ass,” she spits, grabbing the shotgun he told her to leave behind. She makes as if to feed a cartridge into it but finds it already loaded. Throughout the drive over, up to now, really, she’s felt a prickling in the back of her neck. Now, she feels calm and ready.
She had plenty better to do on a Saturday morning. Shooting at unsuspecting birds for a tiny sliver of meat was not high on her list on any day. Then there was Roy, who she considered a disease, something tolerated just long enough until you could eliminate it or it killed you. Her mother, Che’nae, couldn’t see that. Or, maybe she could, but she stayed with Roy for reasons unknown even to her.
Sunrise, red-tinged like an open wound, comes spilling out the east. There is movement, the sound of fluttering of wings. Mourning doves, plum-chested with chestnut wings dappled in black spots, take flight. Charmaine doesn’t even bother raising the barrel of the shotgun, thinking of how it must feel to be able to fly, to be weightless. Another sound, the heaving sobs of the mourning dove call, and a bouncing patch of white bursts from the field.
This time, Charmaine doesn’t hesitate. She levels the gun, releasing a crack of gunpowder and a sound like splitting wood. The hive of pellets is sent flying, and she sees them pierce flesh on the receiving end of the blast. A strip of sunlight, new and dim, reveals Roy’s head; the skin peeled back like a banana, hair so white it catches every particle of light and shines. Charmaine looks at the twisted form that used to be Roy beneath the sunflowers and feels, for the first time since he entered her life, that he’s finally stopped watching her.
Something rises beyond Roy’s cooling body, its coat steeped in luscious, midnight velvet. It watches her with silver dollar pupils, nodding its head as she searches Roy’s pockets for his truck keys and the cash he never allowed her mother to handle.
“Found you,” Charmaine says before the Snipe drags Roy’s body out to where the sunflowers end.
