The Dachasoocha Ghost-Light

A piece of lettuce, a few strands of sawdust cheese and a glob of silt infused beef dropped into Duke's lap.

"My mom won't let us eat from Taco Slop anymore." Cooper cautioned.

"Why?" Asked Easton.

"Didn't you hear about their review? They barely passed the health inspection." Scarlett informed with an eye roll which was accompanied by the smack of her incessant gum chewing.

"Yea, there was rat feces in the ground beef, and the health inspector walked in on the manager and another man having sex in the freezer on top of the lettuce." Informed the dark haired cooper.

"That last part was a rumor." Muttered Duke through a mouthful of taco.

"No it wasn't." insisted Cooper.

"You keep lettuce in your freezer?" Duke jeered.

"You know what I meant." Cooper muttered.

Duke stuffed the rest of the taco in his mouth. Cheese and taco shell cascaded down his chest as his fat hand searched the box for another.

Faye reached from the back seat, intercepting him and placed a taco in his meaty hand, even removing half the paper wrapper for him.

By the time he was a sophomore in high school, Duke had topped three hundred pounds. By the winter of his junior year, his weight had continued to climb, but no one knew precisely how high. Duke might not have even known.

The chances that he could see the scale was... slim.

His obesity was considered a contribution to their football team. Duke's enormous stature acted as an unmovable giant wall on the field. All he had to do most nights was stand, stand, and sometimes push back a little.

Duke looked in the rearview mirror. "Ya see that Scarlett? Ya see how attentive Faye is? Ya see how much initiative she shows? That's how ya become someone's number one gal." He teased.

Scarlett rolled her eyes as she chewed her gum, never looking away from the back passenger side truck window.

Faye blushed. A petite, shy, little, blonde thing, there were plenty of jokes thrown constantly around concerning her being crushed during sex.

Faye believed Duke was bound for the NFL. No one had bothered to explain to her that the NFL was never going to draft a guy who could barely jog, no matter how 'immovable' he was.

"Do you think we're going to see the light?" Asked Easton as he adjusted his glasses and peered out the front window. Skinny, with zero fat reserves, more of a mess of lashed-together twigs than a human, Easton sat in the back between the two girls. He didn't play sports like Duke and Cooper, but the three had been friends since early childhood.

They had been the only neighbors any of them had had their entire lives. Even though their interests had headed in opposite directions, away from toy cars, video games, homemade forts in the woods, and fashioning weapons from rocks, sticks and twine, that hadn't been enough to pull them apart.

"Who knows." Muttered Cooper, as he caught Scarlett’s reflection in the truck's side mirror. She slowed her chewing and narrowed her eyes as she noticed Cooper staring.

"Just a little bit further lil buddy." Duke said affectionately as he reached back to pat Easton on the head, only managing to smear a bit of cheese and grease on his friends cheeks and glasses.

Easton was busy wiping his glasses off on his shirt when the truck lurched hard enough to whip his neck a little.

"Old ass dirt road." Duke muttered as he let off the gas pedal a bit.

Cooper stared out the window. The forest and his eyes fought a battle for which was darker, endlessly reflecting each other back into the other.

"Heard someone got raped down here." Cooper muttered out of nowhere.

"Really?” Easton asked.

"No." Duke interjected as he crunched into another taco. "That's nonsense."

"No, I think I know what he's talking about." Easton argued. "But no one was raped. These seniors were driving down the drag road, and some meth head just ran out in front of the truck naked. They almost hit ‘em."

"That's fine." Cooper began. "Y'all can tell me about how wrong I am when some hillbilly is playing banjo with your assholes."

Duke looked around the truck, catching Faye's eye. "Like my uncle used to say. Don't tempt me with a good time." He started to laugh, but ended up choking on cheese.

Easton leaned up and grabbed the steering wheel as Duke finished his coughing fit.

After the truck went silent, except for the sound of a concerned Faye gently patting his massive back, Duke looked around the truck with a red face and bleary eyes.

"But ya know, my uncle was kind of a weird guy." Duke began, "Liked to smoke a bunch of meth and come down to drag road and run around naked, rapin’ people."

Easton snorted and Faye snickered. Even the corners of Scarlett's mouth turned up a little as she rolled her eyes. Only Cooper continued to glower out the window with a stony face.

"Come on, quit being such a little bitch Cooper." Duke teased as he pressed a Taco at the corner of Cooper's mouth. "Have a Taco, it will make you feel better!"

Cooper slapped Duke's hand and the taco slopped against the front windshield. "You're going to eat that!" Duke exclaimed.

Cooper opened the truck door and slammed behind him.

The truck was silent.

"I'll eat the taco." Easton offered.

"Will get on up here little buddy!" Duke congratulated as he slapped Easton on the back. "You've been promoted to co-pilot." He admonished as he set an invisible co-pilot hat upon Easton's head.

Easton gingerly peeled the taco from the window and took a bite.

Duke rolled down both the front windows as the truck slowly began to crawl down the dirt road once again.

"Coooooopppeeerrrrr!!" He called out both sides of the truck as they rolled down the dark path. "Come back or my meth-head uncle will play guitar inside your asshole!"

Duke's calls echoed through the trees. But, they were only met by the songs of the crickets and the hoots of the owls.

Easton turned to the two girls, looking over the back of his seat. There was a bit of sour cream on his left cheek. "Yall know where they say the ghost light came from?"

"I've heard it's swamp gas or something?" Faye offered in a quiet voice.

"That's one explanation." Easton began as he fixed his glasses.

"They also say that it's just light from the cars on a road way further up, and we're just seeing it through the trees. But none of those really explain how people keep seeing a fiery green light that meanders through the treetops. But, then there's also a story about how a man in the nineteen thirties was walking down the nearby train tracks with a lantern. The story says a train hit him and cut his head off, and the drag light is him with his lantern looking for his head."

"So you think it's a ghost?" Scarlett asked, her voice dripping with skepticism and mild contempt.

Duke continued to shout out the window for Cooper.

"I don't know what it is. But I don't believe it’s car headlights or 'swamp gas', whatever that is." Easton asserted as he turned back to face the dashboard.

"You know this is your fault." Duke accused, pointing a sausage finger at Scarlett. “All you had to do was apologize to him for what you said, and he wouldn't have been acting so pissy. Now he's traipsing around the woods!"

"Duke do you want the last two tacos?" Easton asked.

"No buddy, you can have them. My stomach is starting to hurt."

Scarlett grabbed the sausage and bent it back causing Duke to squeal. "Get your fat finger out of my face." She growled, placing extra enunciation into the word 'fat'.

Scarlett and Duke were locked in a staring contest, as she slowly blew a pink bubble.

Duke inched his paunchy, cheese covered finger towards the bubble as Scarlett's eyes glowered, daring him to do it.

The truck hit another hole in the road, causing it to lurch and his finger to fully penetrate the pink bubble.

Duke kept his eyes on the road, and Scarlett spit out her gum, stuck it to the back of the seat in front of her and opened up a new stick before popping the gum into her mouth.

"Damn lovers quarrels." Duke muttered as he stared ahead at the dark road.

"Hey Duke." Easton began. "Your tits bounce really good whenever we hit those pot holes."

Duke's only response was to lift his right breast and let it drop. It continued to jiggle for several seconds.

"Whose do you think are nicer, mine or Scarlett’s?"

"Well, yours are bigger," Easton mused as he scratched his chin. They could hear Scarlett's eyes roll from the back seat.

Something slammed into the front windshield.

Duke smashed the breaks and let out a shrill scream.

Faye sat frozen with wide eyes and Scarlett continued to smack her gum, unimpressed.

The bat slid down the windshield and flopped around on the hood of her truck for a minute before taking off.

Easton, known for his weak and easily excitable stomach, opened the passenger door and vomited into the dirt. Looking pale, he leaned back into the truck and slowly closed the door.

"Is that the light?" Faye whispered, eyes wide, as she leaned into the front seat, pointing up at the nearby trees.

The trio watched in awe as a green, glowing orb, hovered through the branches, blinked out, and then appeared across the road in the next tree.

"That's definitely not swamp gas." Easton murmured.

"Or car lights." Faye whispered.

The orb drifted down the tree and approached the truck, bobbing and weaving like a floating apple.

"What's that?" Duke asked, his voice cracking like a heartbroken widow who had just given up on the idea that there might be anything good left in the world.

His eyes were trained on the sky.

Between the crowns of two large trees on either side, he hovered, directly above the road.

"Cooper?!" Cried Scarlett.

It was Cooper. He was floating nearly twenty feet up, mouth open, eyes blank, limbs hanging limp.

A choking noise came from Faye.

The green orb, burning and churning, bobbed up over the hood of the truck. There was a spark, a crack, and the engine sputtered and died.

The orb pulsed and grew, and an electric current coursed from it and into something invisible, momentarily illuminating a an object far larger than the orb.

The current left behind tracers, like an after image of a sparkler waved through the night air.

It was enormous. The head was as large as the truck. A cavern of long, sickle teeth, obscured their view through the windshield.

It's body was long and flexible like a gigantic lizard’s. It trailed back up the tree, and through the upper branches. Like a hammock strung between two trees, the last half of the body, which Cooper floated inside, hung over the road.

The glowing emerald sphere, the ghost flame, was attached to the end of a long, flexible stalk which grew from the monster’s forehead.

Like an insect's antennae, it swept the stalk and bobbed the orb, illuminating it's own grotesque face the same way they'd seen lantern fish doing in every picture taken of them.

The illumination, the after image of the stolen electricity which spelled out the beast's shape to their eyes, slowly faded, and the bobbing, weaving verdant light veered towards the forest, disappearing among the trees.

Cooper fell, lifeless to the road, landing with both a squelch and a crack.

A mildly luminescent slime coated his body.

The truck sat motionless. Not even Duke's usually heavy breathing could be heard above the silence.