The Woods Outside of Tavern: Frank
What just happened?
Frank just stood there…for less time than it took for Dacoda’s body to hit the ground. It would have been almost impossible, in fact, for a casual observer to know which landed first! Frank had vanished from the little clearing before anyone else could formulate a thought, much less words.
Dacoda had been his friend since fourth grade — until recently, that is. Frank had found out that Dacoda was seeing his ex and they’d had words. He only agreed to help trick him into the woods because he thought, maybe, they could bury the hatchet. Frank hadn’t planned on burying Dacoda.
“Where the hell is the truck,” Frank thought.
The trees rushing by ignored his silent question as he thrashed wildly through the limbs tearing at his face. Only after he reached the little road where the truck was parked, did he realize he had gotten off of the path.
He ran the short distance to the truck and yanked on the door. It was at that moment Frank realized he’d made a mistake. The keys! The keys were in Dacoda’s pocket. Dacoda was half a mile into the woods. On the ground. Dead.
When he’d had a few minutes to replenish the oxygen in his lungs, he began to wonder what made him run. He didn’t have anything to do with Dacoda’s death. Except leading him into the woods to the surprise birthday party. With his head covered with Frank’s jacket. Which was on the ground. Half a mile into the woods. Beside Dacoda. Who was dead.
Frank’s mind, screaming with the panic of a few minutes before, raced through scenarios of being on the run from the police. In every case, Frank’s imagination ended with him being arrested or dead.
“No one will believe you,” the voice said.
“Shut up,” Frank exclaimed.
His voice seemed to fall to the ground like leaves from a tree in Autumn. But, they startled him anyway. He didn’t know who he was even talking to. Himself?
“Who are you telling to shut up” asked the voice, angrily.
“You! I’m telling YOU to shut up!!”
“Say that to my face, asshole!”
It took Frank a moment to realize he hadn’t actually said that. He whirled around and saw, to his utter astonishment, Dacoda standing five feet away.
No. Not standing. Floating. Dacoda’s feet, Frank discovered as he looked at the apparition, were a few inches above the ground!
“That ain’t POSSIBLE,” Frank thought and, then, said aloud. “You’re dead!!”
“Yeah. I noticed!”
“Wh- But…HOW!?!?”
“Hell if I know,” Dacoda exclaimed.
Strangely, this was the moment Frank noticed his face was a bloody mess as he stared at his reflection in the glass of the truck door he was using for support. Somehow, Frank managed to wrest control of the emotions overwhelming him and he began to think a little more clearly. He looked to where Dacoda had floated in the air a few seconds before. The space was empty. Nothing but trees. Nice, normal trees.
Maybe he was just a hallucination, Frank thought, hopefully. Strange to think of hallucinations as being better than reality but, in this case, Frank was really hoping for just that.
So focused was Frank on this particular thought, he didn’t realize Dacoda had reappeared directly behind him.
“My spare key is in one of those magnetic boxes in the wheel well,” Dacoda said.
Frank convulsed in fear, somehow levitating into a crouched position at the front of the truck, now, facing Dacoda’s ghost. If anyone had been there to see Frank, they might have laughed at the cartoonish expression on his face.
“Don’t freaking do that!!” Frank’s voice was so shrill with fear that Dacoda winced as if it had hurt his ears to hear it.
“Look, Frank, I really hate to ask you, but seein’ as I’m dead, I’m gonna need your help.”
“My help?!?! What the hell kinda help does a dead man need?”
“You think you’re the only one who ran out of those woods? Nobody, I mean, nobody stayed there to take care of my body! Y’all, literally, left me to the goddamn wolves!!”
“Oh. Uhhh…,” Frank uttered, sheepishly. The fate of Dacoda’s body lying in the woods hadn’t occurred to him. “I – I’m sorry about that, Dacoda. I truly am. But, I can’t drag your body out of the woods by myself and, like you said, everyone else ran away!”
“You freakin’ a-hole!! You trick me into the woods, kill me, then leave my freakin’ body for the scavengers!”
Frank stared into Dacoda’s ghostly orbs deeply sunken into his eye sockets. Anger, a rare emotion for Frank, boiled in his belly.
“We didn’t kill you, ‘Coda! You just fell dead!! There’s forty witnesses who know it, too!!”
“Y’all did kill me! Y’all scared the hell outta me and gave me a heart attack!!”
“We took you out there for your birthday party not to scare you!” Frank screamed at the apparition.
Dacoda floated in silence for a moment. Followed by a sheepish question, “My birthday party?”
“Yes! All of that business about us dragging you into the woods to kill you was just in your head! Believe it or not, asshole, there are some of us who call…I mean, called you a friend!!”
Franka deep breath.
“Umm…,” Dacoda said, weakly. “I had forgotten about it being my birthday.”
“Yeah. Well, now, it’s the day you died, too! But, if you want to know, I’m going to get some help to get your body out of the woods, if nobody else has already done it. You just wait here. I’ll be back as quick as I can.”
With that, Frank jumped into the truck and fired it up with the spare key. Giving the ghost of his friend one last look, he kicked up dirt and rocks as he sped off toward the highway.
