Alexander Zelnyj
Artwork by Chris Cartwright.

My boyfriend wrote on a school wall tonight. He wrote: there is a jackal living inside me.

He thinks he’s pretty fuckin’ cool for writing that there. Pretty rough and tough and ruff and tumble. And he thinks he’s the rebel of the world when he tells me he’s going to take me out of Hell, just going to grab me by the hand and take me away to a good place, like Chicago or a small shanty in the county, overlooking a small river.

Rebel. I want to tell him: You’re no Luke Skywalker. You are definitely no mister Han Solo. I wish he’d just spontaneously combust or some shit like that.

A jackal, he says.

Idiot.

He doesn’t even know. And he’s known me so long. He doesn’t even imagine what lives inside me.

Dear Ralphy, hey Ralphy: I eat your face and your life and your redundant, weak little thoughts.

Blue Love,

Maria

When Ralph Lamb was found by the small gang of boys, beneath the spruce tree in the tangle of woods abutting his parents’ house, the community of Woodslee was stunned. At first, only a select few knew the grisly details of his death: he had been found with no face. It had been removed with some great force of violence. His hands were missing as well, and his feet, too.

And all of his remains, as well as a small area of grass around his body and the lower portion of the spruce beneath which he was found: painted blue. Blue spray paint, thickly layered over his skin, hardened and congealed like a second layer of sad skin.

The letter from Ralph’s childhood friend and girlfriend of one year, Maria Reed, was discovered creased and hidden beneath his pillow the day he was found in the woods.

Authorities were quick to visit the Reeds’ home, only several houses west of the Lambs’ residence, but she was not there.

She had disappeared.

Her parents, indeed, had spoken with the police the day prior, frantic in their worry: Their fifteen-year-old daughter had not returned home the night before.

She had said nothing of significance to them that last day they had seen her, said very little at all in fact. But then she was always like this, silent, looking at her feet crossing the ground away from them, always away from them.

One thing, with tears choking off Mrs. Reed’s words, and she’d thought very little of it then, because it was an old picture: Maria had wandered by her in the upstairs hallway that last afternoon, crying. Her mother had turned after her, considered asking her about it, decided vicious rebukes were something she couldn’t handle that overcast day. And she’d turned and gone downstairs, to television voices and less painful breaking news than further proof that she knew nothing whatsoever about the strange human living quietly upstairs.

Maria had disappeared, and her last afternoon at home, she had been crying softly.

The neighbourhood turned into its annual orange and black and brown, and Halloween arrived; and some kids were reprimanded, swaggering teenagers sent home for their tastelessness, all covered in blue paint, their faces hidden beneath hoods, gaping blackness for faces, their hands tied away beneath too-long shirt sleeves. Black jokes were passed in school lunch rooms when a ninth grader opened his brown paper lunch to reveal a Sonic Blue Kool-Aid juice box, and it did little to alleviate the fear hanging on the air. Teachers grew red and livid at these discoveries, and detention rooms the community over were filled to brimming with brash, embarrassed girls and boys.

And the younger children, they absorbed strange tales in their own ways, too.

Blue Love Maria, they’d say softly, eyes all over the ground: She made me do it.

And pumpkins everywhere were painted blue in the night, and on Halloween night, the jack-o’-lantern faces grinned sadly in the darkness, their light wavering with each cold breath of autumn wind.

Maria Reed was never found. But everyone who knew her said she had always been quiet, and fuming in her silence. And crying. She had cried often, and no one knew why; huddled over her desk in the rear corner of her classrooms, sprinkling her school work with sad showers, wandering alone at the distant edge of the football field during her spares, scanning the iron skies with wet cheeks. When asked about her tears, the anger came forward to help her. And it was sad to see, that perpetual fury, like something dark wishing for sunlight. That’s what people said about it, and what they still say.

Legend twists and changes over time, it is the nature of its life.

Now, in Woodslee, when a girl breaks up with a boy, or vice versa, or when a child leaves home secretly beneath the dark blanket of night time, it is common for their parents and friends and lovers to find their names signed in bright blue ink or marker, and to find the spot marked with a heart of the same sad colour. And this tells a lot, it explains a lot of things.

And this is somehow true in other ways, too, somehow very, very true, and the raised hands and voices of the wild-eyed adults often lower themselves and soften at the words, a little, a little…

Blue Love Maria, the frightened children sing softly, sadly: She made me do it.