To Martin’s Farm by Travis Flatt

Hell is a frozen lake.

Crashing from the far end of the house. It’s my wife, Anna, dragging the boy inside from the garage. She’s plucked him up from school on her rush home from work. They’re shouting at each other, arguing, both near tears it sounds like. I reach over and slap the bedroom door shut. On the bedside table, my phone screeches the alert siren again. Any minute now, my wife will appear at the door and tell me to get up.  The siren alert wouldn’t let me sleep, so while she was gone, I hopped up and packed–or, hit, that is, the things I need to keep here, be sure she doesn’t take: a kitchen knife and an extension cord. Anna flings open the bedroom door;  the knob spikes sharply against the wall. “Lee, get up. We have to get ready.”

I’ve got the blankets and sheets pulled up over my head.

“How’s traffic?” I say from under my fortress.

“Get up, babe,” Anna shouts down the hall to the boy. “Dalton, put pants and shirts in the suitcase. And underwear.”

The room gets lighter against my blankets as Anna flicks the lights on. 

“Lee, we’ve got to pack.” She’s rushing around the room. Drawers are flying open, thuds.

“Leave me,” I say.

Stillness.

“Lee, get up, babe. We’ve got to go. The streets are already–”

The siren on the phone goes off again. Anna curses and shouts over the screech. “–the highway will be backed up by now. Please.”

“I’m not going.”

She sits down on the bed, hard. She doesn’t mean to clip my hip with her butt and mutters an automatic apology. “Babe, we’ve got to go.”

Hell is a frozen lake. I’ve seen it.

The covers pull back from my face, and I wince away from the light. Anna buzzed her hair off last Friday, said the stress from work was driving her crazy and she had to do something. She looks a little like the militia women you see on TV. When I see how close her face is to breaking, I roll away, pull a pillow over my face. The pillow smells like Anna’s skin cream.

“Where are your pills, Lee?”

My voice is muffled; I shout. “I’ve only got enough for four days.”

She pulls out my bedside drawer, shuffling through pill bottles. “We’ll go straight to Walgreens”

“It will be overrun by now. First thing people’d do.”

She lays a hand on my forearm. It’s hot. “You don’t have extras anywhere? Can you break them up?”

“Just leave me.”

Hell is a frozen lake. When the car skidded off the road, my mom stayed all locked up, clenching the steering wheel and saying, “No no no no,” the entire time–I’ll never forget that. As the car went banging down the hill, I unbuckled my seatbelt. In my dreams, I never think to do that. The ice on the lake was thin and we went right through.          

“Martin’s got things on the farm; he might have pills. He could have something you could take. You’ve got to get up, Lee. She’s squeezing my arm.”

Her brother, Martin, has guns on his farm. Motorcycles. A broken down single engine plane. Maybe opioids.

 The boy appears in the doorway. “Dad, Mom says we’re going to Martin’s up the mountain. I said we should stay here with the gun.”

Somewhere out in the shed is a pistol, a .22 locked away in a case Anna’s father left her. If I knew where the key was, I’d have gotten it already.

“Dalton, dammit, go pack your clothes,” Anna screams.

The phone goes off again, repeating the same message from 9 a.m.: “Stay inside. Turn out the lights. Close all windows and doors.”

Before the TV went blank, there was a few minutes of news footage. The bombs went off sometime this morning, starting in Kansas City, they thought, moving outward like waves or dominos and leveling cities as it spread east and west.

I hear something smack against the wall hard.

“Mom threw your phone,” the boy says. He’s got that habit, even when he’s calm. Saying the obvious. My brother did that, before he drowned.

Hell is a frozen lake. Mom stayed still, grasping the steering wheel, bubbles spewing from her lips and nose. I couldn’t get to her seat belt and she wouldn’t help. I tried to turn and reach the backseat for my brother, but he was already limp.. The front windshield burst when we hit the ice.

“We need your help, babe,” Anna is saying.

“Why’s dad in bed? Get up, Dad. We’ve got to go.” I hear the boy walking around the foot of the bed to my side–he’s a heavy walker–and now he’s shaking my knee. “We’ve got to go, Dad. Mom says we’re going to Martin’s up the mountain.”

I throw the pillow off, up toward the ceiling fan. “Get out of here. Leave me. Turn the lights out and leave me.”

The boy, grinning, looks at Anna.

“Dalton, please go pack your clothes,” she says.

The boy stays standing there between the wall and my bed. “Get up, Dad.”

I shove him in the chest, harder than I mean to, bounce him off the wall; the back of his head knocks, padded by his hair. “Get out of here.”

He can’t miss me; I cannot allow that. He raises his fists like he’s going to play fight, smiling.

Anna shrieks, “Dalton, go–go get your clothes!” He looks back and forth between us, the edges of his eyes turn wet, and he rushes from the room.

“What are you doing, Lee? Are you crazy?”

“You still have a chance–take him and leave. Forget the clothes,” I say.

“Please come with us, Lee.”

I sit up, my back to her. “I will run out of pills in four days. I will seize to death. I will die on the floor, in the bathtub, in the car, or in a ditch, and you all will watch me–I will piss myself and my lips will turn blue, and that’s the last thing you’ll see. Just leave me.”

She stands. “Dalton, go to the car!”

Hell is a frozen lake. I made it to shore. How long I laid there, I don’t know.. It couldn’t have been long. I was soaking wet in the snow. Two men in a white car found me, saw my yellow jacket from the road. One of them was a high school teacher. He knew mouth-to-mouth. 

Several minutes have passed when I get up from the bed, go to the kitchen, and make a peanut butter sandwich. I hear them; they’re still in the garage. I keep forgetting to call someone, so there’s a grinding, crunching sound when the door out raises. I peek out and watch Anna’s SUV pull down the driveway. They don’t see me, but I wave. 

Anna’s SUV has vanished down the street when a truck passes the house with three men sitting in the bed, one holding a rifle, another holding a light blue flag with a symbol I’ve never seen: a spiral surrounded by dots, spray-painted in black.

Hell is a frozen lake. I dream it most nights. You’re chained at the ankle. Around you struggle hundreds of others, thousands, chained and drowning, some thrashing, some frozen, some limp. You drown until your lungs pop and refill and pop again.

I finish my sandwich, lay my pill bottles out on the kitchen counter, and set my knife and extension cord beside them. In the bedroom, I fish through our catalog of DVDs. From the top of the closet, I hunt out my secret stash of weed, which must be ten years old now; it’s turned brown. I draw all the blinds down and turn out the lights.

Travis Flatt  

Image: Pixabay.com – Pink bottle of white pills tipped over and spilling the contents onto a white surface.