Decisions, Decisions

It didn’t matter if you saw him from a distance so far that he looked little more than a spot on the horizon, you always knew it was him. It was his limp. His gate. It was more than both. His twisted body forced his moving legs to shift in such a way he lurched more than he walked. His movements made the myth behind the man even more mysteriously malevolent.

He was the man in every podunk town the kids created spooky stories about. His house was where only the bravest of the brave dared to dash to the door, furiously with the appearance of bravery knock, and run away like hell itself was on their heels.

He was the man whose solitary lifestyle simply added to the sinister aura which surrounded him. Every small town has one. He was theirs.

Aside from his funny walk, he was also an outsider. No one remembered just when he showed up, but they all agreed he wasn’t a lifer like them. He didn’t have generational roots there, making him “the new guy” thirty years later.

So, there he lived. His quiet existence occupied a small space on the outskirts of town. Modest house. Old truck. And an old barn once painted white. That was all that he seemed to have, and that was all he seemed to need.

Though he always tried to take them with a grain of salt, sometimes the looky-loos who couldn’t take their eyes off of him during his monthly trek to the store in town got to him. It wasn’t unusual to see a little dirty face peer around the corner of the canned vegetable aisle, then again around the prominent display of coke cases artfully displayed into a scene from a local football game.

Every now and then, one of them without parental supervision would get a little too close for comfort, and he would abruptly turn to the unexpecting little shit and push the words, “get on,” from between clenched teeth.

Beyond that, he kept to himself, but others didn’t keep from him. Kids and grownups alike would take note of his comings and goings from that barn. While living in a farming community, that should not seem odd to anyone, but it was to them.

Farmers are nothing if ritualistic with their morning routines. The animals needed to be fed and cared for when the sun made its appearance for the day. But that’s not the schedule he kept.

First of all, there were no animals around his place to speak of. And he never made it out to the barn until the sun decided it was done for the day. He was an oddity all around.

The fact that the old barn was always locked up tight was another oddity. There were no animals that needed to be kept locked up for safekeeping. So just what was in there?

Of course, the kids all believed that the barn was full of dead bodies. Or carcasses, at the very least. They were sure he’d go out at night, snatch up a spare cat or a stray dog, and that barn was its final resting place.

They were sure that a town or two over was probably missing an old woman or a kid or two that met their maker locked up inside the walls of that tattered barn. To be honest, their parents were just as convinced as the kids, but they would let it be kids’ ideas.

Summer would turn to fall and winter to spring. Then it would do it again, and again, and all the while, the twisted man would drag his crooked body to the barn. And no one ever got any closer to seeing what mysteries those walls held.

That was until he met her. My God, she was pretty. Hair black as cole and eyes as blue as crystals, she was a woman who made everyone take notice. But why she noticed him, no one could figure.

No one remembers how they met or why she started to take an interest in him. Or they did and just didn’t care. They were more taken with the fact of business surrounding them than the trivialities of how they came about.

She would be in the kitchen making him dinner some nights, and he would catch her sneaking a glance at him. She never seemed disguised by him. In fact, it was quite the opposite. She always looked upon his busted body with something of adoration.

Never one caught up on looks, she was always more concerned with someone’s mind. To her, nothing was more attractive than gray matter.

And though his body broken, he had the most beautiful gray matter she’d ever beheld. It was like being isolated from society allowed his brain an opportunity to develop and grow in a way never seen before. To call his mind “beautiful” wouldn’t be accurate. It was something more than that. Much more.

He spoke with authority on virtually any topic. He knew about ancient and recent history, pop culture, music, theology, psychology, religion. Nothing was outside of the scope of his understanding.

The conversations they had sometimes made her pause mid-sentence or while he was replying to her, and she would marvel at how he touched her soul through his words. It was not just the topics they discussed or the depths of their conversations. It was how he said things. His tongue was a paintbrush, and his words were a beautiful canvas. Simply put, he was remarkable.

And, truth be told, he was a beautiful man. True, his beauty was located behind a layer no one seemed to want to peel back. She felt as if she made some sort of discovery, hidden for thousands of years. SHE uncovered a beauty that no one else in the world knew existed, and that secret drew her even closer to him and pulled him even deeper into the hidden chambers of her heart.

He didn’t realize that she loved him until a few more of those winters and falls passed. It was almost as if the depth of her feelings for him sunk up behind him, jumped out of the deepest, darkest, unnoticed crevice in his brain, and screamed to announce its presence. The realization physically shook him.

She looked at him with an expression of perplexion as he digested the epiphany. She cocked her head and asked what was wrong. He shook his head in a daze, muttered “nothing,” and tried to recover.

She loved him. He wasn’t exactly sure what that feeling entailed, having never fully experienced it himself. But he did realize a tremendous set of complications just presented themselves, and he was completely unsure how to deal with them.

Then, just as suddenly as he realized she loved him, he realized what he had to do about it. The barn. It was his only solution. And as he let the reality of the situation set in, he understood this was to either be the most deplorable or excruciatingly delicious experience of his entire existence.

Best to treat the situation as a proverbial bandaid. Just rip it off. Make quick work of things. He made up his mind to take her to the barn tonight.

He didn’t figure it would take much to get her out there. Even during all of those winters and falls, she had never been inside. Never beheld the wonders and beauties it held. And she never pushed him as to why he didn’t ask her to go with him to his private place. He knew an invitation to walk past its threshold would be so delicious to her, he could count that part of the plan to already be in action.

It was the next part he wasn’t as sure of.

He was a thinker; there is no question about that. With time always on his hands, thoughts were his constant and only companions. His thoughts told him they needed to be left out of this equation, and he was on his own. Fair enough. Better to just DO here, not THINK.

“Hey, I’ve been working on something out in the barn, and I think it’s time to show you.”

Her eyes lit up like a child’s at Christmas, and the prospects of discovering the unknown danced through her head. Her smile was her agreement to the journey. She wiped her hands on the dishtowel next to the sink, tossed it carelessly to the counter, and hurried after his broken body.

Once he unlocked and opened the door, she was immediately taken by the smell. The smell was dank, spicy, and not altogether unpleasant—nothing she’d ever experienced before.

He pulled himself inside the door, and she dutifully followed. The light switch flipped, and fear entered her soul.

The barn’s interior was that of a palace. Ornate furniture lined the floor. Exquisite woven tapestries and paintings that depicted scenes of beauty and horror lined the walls. The door slowly closed behind her as she made her way further into this hall of wonders. His hand guided the door to its final resting place. The corners of his mouth twisted into a smirk to match the twists of his body.

Mouth agape, she let syllables escape. “How… What..Huh?”

He simply continued to smile, allowing her to take in her surroundings.

Finally, she turned to look at him, and the surprise intermingled with fear that shined through her eyes was almost as delicious as a fine, vintage wine.

“Well, I thought it was high time I showed you my hidden talents, dear. You see, I know my body is crooked and twisted, but so is my mind. While I like to pride myself on my intelligence, I have to admit, I’ve been pretty ignorant. I just realized how you felt about me today. And I can’t allow it to go any further.”

She was still not sure what was happening. She just knew it wasn’t good.

He limped to the center of the castle-like interior of the barn, just to the edge of a beautiful rug that covered a large portion of the old wooden-planked floor. He motioned her to come closer. She did as if she was being pulled towards him by an unseen tractor beam.

Twisted body woefully bent towards the ground, he lifted the rug by its corner and exposed a door underneath. When he opened that door, the smell that met her earlier intensified. Now she seemed to pick up a hint of something else. Sulfer? And what was that burning glow coming from the depth of the pit that was no exposed?

As she bent over slightly to see if she could garner some sort of understanding as to what was going on, he lovingly placed a hand on her back and caressed her.

From caress to shove, she didn’t know she was gone from the world above until the horrors of the one below enveloped her.

“See, Dear, me and the old man have a deal. I can live as long as I want to. The deal obviously didn’t include physical beauty or riches. Just longevity. Until someone loved me, then I had to decide if I wanted beauty, like what you saw when you walked inside, or if I wanted love. I could never have both because that would void the contract. You ARE a lovely woman, Dear. But you aren’t THAT beautiful.”

The door in the floor closed. He smoothed the rug back into place. Then he pulled himself towards the barn door. Even if someone were looking at him, they would have difficulty telling which was more twisted: his body or his smile.