There Was a Killing In It
"Vermiculi" by Matthew Fertel
“This one time I was on a site. We spent all day seventy stories up welding T-bars. I’m pouring sweat under my mask, but it’s close to shut down and I’m ready to get back to the ground,” Randy says as Paula grabs another cold beer from the bucket.
Their work gear is in a pile next to them in the flatbed of Paula’s pick up. The sky is fading from the burnt orange of sunset into the loneliness of a Colorado night. Soon stars will puncture small holes in it and hang above them like tiny mouths no one will ever consider feeding.
“We’re making our way back down and I’ve made sure my harness is tight and my rope is secure, but this guy a few levels down must not have because I hear someone yell and then I hear a few more shouts and then a thud. By the time I turn around I see him hit a scaffold and flip and then he’s gone. It took, like, ten seconds before he hit the ground.”
They’re not working seventy stories up anymore. For the past week, they’ve been cutting wood for lemonade stands and game booths and fried dough vestibules for the county fair. There isn’t a skyscraper within a hundred miles and the pay reflects that. But their bad knees and failing eyesight isn’t OSHA certified for skyscrapers anymore.
“And I guess that’s what sticks with me,” Randy says and takes a knock from his beer bottle. The Coors Light label is torn at one corner and his calloused palms relish the cold from the glass. “At first it was the way he flipped, like the guy who hits the propeller in Titanic. But now it’s how long it took him to hit the ground.”
Paula is a thirty-year woman and has her share of war stories, but tonight she doesn’t feel like sharing them. Tonight, she’s thinking about the pain wrapping the inside of her wrists and ankles like arthritic barbed wire and is wondering how many more mornings she can wake up and keep doing it. It’s a thought she’ll never share with anyone else, but as the months pass it eats at her stomach lining.
“Do you ever wonder what you’ll do after this?” she asks.
“Do after what? The county fair? I hear there’s a new mall going up in Moffat. I’m sure they could use a few extra hands.”
“No,” Paula says, and in her head, she knows that Randy won’t understand what she means. That maybe no one will. It’s like the feeling she had when she watched a lioness eat a baby giraffe on a safari she took once when they all thought the union checks would come forever. When she tried to explain, it was like trying to bury an arrow in a moving target.
How do you put into words the fear that you’re already a husk whose insides have been scraped clean?
“After we can’t do these jobs anymore.”
“Oh, I don’t know. Probably die,” he says and laughs. It’s the same laugh another man in her Land Cruiser gave when the crack of the giraffe’s bones drifted out of the bush.
He laughs like it’s a ridiculous notion, but Paula thinks he’s as close to the truth of it as they’re going to get. The world does that to people. It eats up their usefulness and when there’s no meat left to strip from their bones it leaves them in the roots of a bush or in a trailer in some backwater town in Colorado and what she can’t put her finger on is the morality of it.
When she stood in the Land Cruiser with her fingers wrapped around the safety bar and watched as the lion dragged the baby giraffe, still alive and crying, into the brush, she tried to atone with herself the amazement she felt with the awfulness of what was happening.
So, when the pain echoes in her joints and thirty years have fallen off her like a man whose harness has come loose at the top of a skyscraper, she is trying to bury her arrow in the morality of it. There was a killing in it. But no one to blame.
“What about you?”
“Probably die. Same as you,” Paula says. Then laughs.
About the Author
Benjamin Brindise is a writer living and working in Buffalo, NY. He is the author of Secret Anniversaries (Ghost City Press, 2019) and Those Who Favor Fire, Those Who Pray to Fire (EMP Books, 2018). His work has appeared in places such as The Marathon Literary Review and Maudlin House, among others. He is the flash fiction editor for Variety Pack, and a teaching artist with the Just Buffalo Literary Center. Find more of his work at benjaminbrindise.com
About the Artist
Matthew Fertel is an abstract photographer who seeks out beauty in the mundane. Small details get framed in ways that draw attention away from the actual object and focus on the shapes, textures, and colors, transforming them into abstract landscapes, figures, and faces. His goal is to use these out-of-context images to create compositions that encourage an implied narrative that is easily influenced by the viewer and is open to multiple interpretations. More of Matthew's work can be seen on his website and Instagram: https://mfertel.wixsite.com/matthewfertelphoto https://www.instagram.com/digprod4/