Tommy’s Song
Marcus Yu
The new single-floor home rested upon a rectangular plot of land, fourteen acres of tall grasses that stretched into a wall of trees at the end of the lot. The mid-century interior opened up to a kitchen, in front of which was the living room furnished with oak and white sheetrock walls. Maroon furniture surrounded glass tables, facing the back wall of windows that invited the backyard’s acreage into the home. The move into the house had begun under the midday sun, and Tommy would be quick with his minimal belongings. He was quite excited, which he did not show in its entirety.
#
Their belongings had begun filling the living room’s spaciousness, stacked in boxes and disorganized things from which they had taken a momentary break. Lily returned from somewhere while Tommy sat at the dinner table quietly before envelopes of mail.
“What’d you get?” Tommy asked Lily. His eyes were slanted from being middle-aged while still beaming with a vague hopefulness that his partner enjoyed the place as much as he did. His uninteresting t-shirt and sweatpants held him to the extent of comfort that did not conceal his anticipation; he withheld much of his opinions of a wonderous new life, considering the annoyance of being redundant. He wanted her to take in the space, avidly seeking her approval.
“Well, not a whole lot. I got the juice you’ve been asking for.” Lily placed groceries in various places across the kitchen. She was quite passive with her words, still refraining from expressing any evident reaction to the house itself.
Tommy took a deep sigh of the new air, sitting lower in his chair as he exhaled, “I can already feel the urban noise drowning out.” He looked at Lily from the small dining table between the kitchen and the living room. She hardly reciprocated his response, quiet as the sage green cardigan that drooped over her petit build, wearing jeans and unsuspecting sneakers as she often did without occasion.
Tommy watched his partner stare around the room and its new corners. The ambiance of a newly purchased home was empty, faint in its dim lights and unfurnished spaces that reverberated his conversations; the blue atmosphere of the supple sky diffused into the hallways, succumbing to the plainness of the entire house.
“What happened to that contract you were about to sign?” Lily spoke as she walked around the kitchen, digging through cabinets.
“What, for that software company?” Tommy replied abstractedly.
“Yeah, that software company.”
“They wanted someone else.” He yielded to his dismay.
“Since when? I thought you were ready to start.”
“They just wanted someone with better talent. Too many damn people.”
“Have you tried anywhere else?”
“No.”
“And why not?”
“Let’s just move first, already.”
“Tommy,” Lily’s tone dropped slightly. “Are you going to use moving as an excuse now?”
“Hey, come on. I know you’re upset about that. I hate being jobless. But no, I’m not going to use moving as an excuse, okay?”
A fret emerged from his partner visibly. “Tommy, it’s been half a year now. I’m getting tired of watching you not get your life going, and moving’s not helping. It’s exhausting hearing you say the same thing yet again,” Lily complained.
“Oh, come on, I got this place for us. And I told you I don’t need you to work extra. Just sit here and relax. I’ll move the stuff, okay?” His heart raced as he struggled to find an end to the conversation.
“That’s not going to change anything,” Lily argued.
“Oh, come on, just quit your attitude for once,” he said with deep restraint. “We’re not talking about this right now.”
Anger naturally became of the argument. “How are you going to keep chasing this dream life of yours by skipping all the hard work to get there? If you keep getting rejected—I don’t know how many times—don’t you think maybe you’re the problem? Not those damn employers?”
“I’m not skipping anything, God dammit.”
“We came here with the promise that you’ll be able to finance this house. That we’ll live happily. You still haven’t told me! Are you even able to finance this house or not? Why can’t you just answer that?”
“I can.”
“Can you, really? Show me, and don’t tell me it’s none of my business because it definitely is if you’re impacting both of us.”
Tommy sighed heavily, showing her nothing and lacking a better response amidst the agitation that befuddled his better judgment. “Money’s money. I’m living. Just stop worrying about me.” His defeat, the depression of an unseeable end, pressed his temples.
“Of course, money’s just money, but what if you’re living paycheck to paycheck? How the hell are you then going to just say, ‘money’s money?’ I told you I won’t help you finance the house if you aren’t going to get a job.” Lily pursued the topic rampantly.
“I already told you I should’ve tried harder before, but I’m trying now, and I will get employed. Just stop fucking yelling at me.”
“And that’s what you said months ago.”
“No shit!” Tommy glared at her, lashing his gesturing hands before darting his eyes elsewhere, anticipating words to surface from his mouth that projected from uncontrolled upset. “Why are you bringing this up again, anyway? We talked about it already before we came here. It’s like you’re trying to put shit between us for no damn reason!”
“How am I supposed to feel bad when you keep doing this to yourself? When you keep lying to me, and I somehow just let it slide?” Lily stood in her place in the kitchen. “I can’t keep living with this absence of—whatever it is, Tommy.”
“Absence of what? Say it!”
“You don’t think I struggle too? When you’re sitting there all depressed, and whatever I try to do to help does nothing? Don’t you think it’s hard for me when you’re just wasting so much time and blaming others for it? Growing more distant from me? I can’t stand seeing you suffer. I just want you to get up, Tommy, but you won’t if you keep hiding everything from me.”
“Are you helping? If you’re still giving me this shit after everything?”
“I gave you opportunities, time, and patience, Tommy. It’s your responsibility now!”
Tommy averted his gaze for a moment as he sighed deeply without a better retort. He began again, “What’s absent from your life?”
“This is not what I imagined after two years.”
“What more do you want?”
“I don’t know! I want you to snap out of it, okay? I’ve been trying for so long, and I don’t know what to do to help anymore. I can’t. And I’m giving up trying.”
“I’m trying! What kind of a fucking person has no life and buys a new house, anyway? Is this not enough?”
“I—"
Tommy cut her off. “I did all this for us and you’re still complaining. Doesn’t this house mean anything for trying?”
“It does, but I can’t accept you struggling to find work and finance the home. I will not pay off all your bills when you brought us out here.”
“I’m fine!”
“That’s not true. You know it’s not, and you won’t even prove it to me. I know you’re lying, Tommy, and you can’t keep hiding it!”
“Of course not, nothing’s true. Everything’s just fucking meaningless. Everything!”
“God, just shut up. You’re so goddamn pathetic.”
“And you aren’t?”
“How am I pathetic, Tommy?”
“You don’t have to love me if you don’t, you know that, right? If you can’t stand me, I’m not forcing you to be here.”
“Oh, fuck off, Tommy. I’m not the one trying to waste two years here!” Lily emptily walked into the bedroom, stamping her feet before slamming the door.
“Well sure as hell seems like it when you keep throwing this shit around!” Tommy scolded a blank wall. He threw his head into his hands before one grabbed his tightening chest. Lily disappeared without a word into the bedroom, remaining in silence or perhaps stifled tears, and refused to see the mere image of Tommy. There was agony in the air and between them, one for which he did not see immediate healing. For far too long had the turmoil accumulated, one that Lily concealed deep within, and it seemed to have revealed just then.
Sounds of silence chimed as though a breeze were menacing a tiny bell, ringing an incoherent song that dissipated into nothingness. It was the only song to be heard for miles, reverberating within the home that held Tommy’s dreams.
#
Nothing rationalized the dog-whistle nuisance he had borne during the empty night as he tried to sleep in this unfamiliar home. A drone as deep as what felt like ocean trenches hummed faintly throughout the air, so low that he was perhaps the only person to conjure the sound in his head. Yet it was a new sound, one he had not heard before. It may as well have been the dense walls droning with the pattering breeze, or perhaps his ears flushing out the assent and dissent of civilization.
It drove Tommy mad. Perhaps he merely needed time to adjust. For now, he was staring endlessly into the adjacent window.
Lily lay next to him in a deep sleep. There was no reverberation in her head; she was always seeming fair in this unfair world, mentally and physically stable so that Tommy was thus pitifully comparable—jobless, subordinate to the dins in the breeze, lesser than the property upon which he wished to live happily.
Life was lost to an existential sorrow since his unemployment; he only wondered what he would leave behind when his day arrived, or what the universe would become at the end of time.
Tommy was utterly compelled, still, that the sound came from beyond the land; the trees that lined the end of the property gamboled distantly as they abstracted in his aimless reverie. They were but shapes limned in the moonlit horizon, mounds of black withholding the dins of the air. He was compelled: the sounds came from behind their mirage.
It must have been. No such delusion would seize him awake past the morning hours were it merely an overactive imagination. He knew when white noise was that of a reverberating wall, a fluttering fan, or an insect on the other side of the house.
It was beyond the trees. It was—
“Tommy, why are you still up?”
He turned to face Lily. “How’d you know I’m up?”
She murmured sleepily, turning in bed briefly. “Just seems like it.” There was fatigue and moroseness in her tone.
“My ears are ringing.”
“Did you take your pills?”
Tommy remained motionless for a moment. Begrudgingly, he reached for the nightstand. Angst carried his arm slowly.
#
The pills drowned the noises. It was called panic disorder, but he scarcely believed that lunacy that doctors loved to prescribe. At times, he was enclosed in a circus of jarring noises. Time would withdraw from his perspective, and the world would accelerate with no time elapsed. Not until he passed his thirties did these things conjure in his head, a condition kept at bay by symptom suppressants and mental ignorance.
He knew it was from work. From love. He was wrought between his occupation and the woman he loved. He took scarcely anything from the doctors save the medication he abhorred. He would skip dosages because he did not find lunacy in doing so—he resented bearing the image of a lunatic.
It was all for nothing. It was nothing that would kill him.
#
The street on which they lived rose up and down like froth upon a shore. It was a straight road stretching for two miles before any intersection appeared, turns which were invisible behind the gingerly sloped terrain. There were vineyards and crops, silos and sheds, trucks and patina jalopies; lonesome homes much like their own were sprinkled across the pastoral landscape.
Lily took many opportunities to walk upon the rising and falling road, finding solace in the gentle wind, in the absence of Tommy’s rage. There was only this new environment to observe, miles of pastures that tessellated into an abstracted panorama. None of the mosaic of city windows glimmered in the air, faceting shards of light across populated roads.
#
Were the sounds inflicting his dreams?
Visions of a pale street devoid of all civilization stranded him on a directionless plane; Tommy would stand upon a road that suggested there was a forward and backward without end. He would awake with the sensations of eternity that faded in his waking, grasping his head and droning within.
He would rouse, asking Lily, “Do you hear that?” And she would associate his irritations with delusion, urging him to take his medications. She had little sympathy during her frustrations.
Because nobody would believe the word of a disturbed man. Tommy did not attempt to argue, yet the noise drew him toward the trees off in the distance. It was calling him like a song.
He feared the fret of his wife. The thin ice on which they ambled was growing thinner.
#
“I’m going to go see Michelle tonight and grab something to eat. Do you need anything?” Lily projected into a silence that rang throughout the house. She appeared into the living room curtly, standing blankly before Tommy. A leather purse hung from her fingers, and a white sweater held her glum head above black jeans and boots.
“I’m fine. Where?” Tommy replied with the vaguest of genuine concern. Two days later, the distance between them had not grown closer.
“She found some restaurant. We’ll be at her house afterward. B-bye.” Lily crept out the front door moments later, where the hue of a passing dawn tickled the living room. Michelle’s car, which Tommy did not see arrive, idled quietly behind the door. Lily departed suddenly as she often did with her friend from college, a brunette woman Tommy often heard of and never cared to understand.
Soon, dawn perished beyond the eye, and the backyard darkened under the Earth’s approaching umbra. The dimness grew around the kitchen lights above him.
#
The nightlight cast a tangerine glaze across the bedroom, revealing the opened nightstand before receding into the corners of the room. Tommy sat at the edge of the bed, where the midnight silence donned upon him.
The drone faintly tugged at his eardrums.
At last, he was free to investigate the sound without judgment upon him. The insufferable sound did not bother him, for he was going to find out himself.
He grabbed a flashlight and strode into the backyard, wandering throughout the acreage that appeared in layers of muted moonlight. A disdainful performance of cast shadows swayed across the grassland that seemingly ebbed and flowed with his strides; this and the whispered stars were all that carried him into the blue.
The vibrations were heard, and he expected this. He controlled his heart rate, breathed deeply, and approached the land as his own. He was not on medication, and the sounds were clearer in his head; he needed this clarity in light of his answer. The flashlight revealed passages of the field throughout its beam, having scarcely a clue of what it intended to unveil.
After ten minutes of marching across the acres, Tommy reached the back end of the property. There was a vast wall of brush and trees, dense yet spaced enough for him to tread across. His flashlight met the trunks of dying, overgrown trunks through which he began walking; he tried not to lose sight of the landscape behind him.
The quiet drone maintained.
Pillars of blackened woods trickled past him as he shuffled through withered foliage. Tommy paused in his tracks and gazed around him; the blue of the night sky was but a fragmented array, visible behind him and above in the boughs.
Ahead of him was nothing that he could perceive. He aimed the flashlight toward his right and found what appeared to be a recess of flat soil. Toward this, he hastened.
Undulations in the drone throbbed his eardrums.
He entered the clearing that was roughly ten meters in diameter, relatively small yet wide enough to breathe within the heavy woods. The soil was dry and reflected the clear weather’s complacent smell. Down where the dirt continued was a wide crevice surrounded by mud formations; the flashlight went across it, and he walked toward it in its sudden appearance. His light fluttered for an instant, and he slightly increased his pace. Light carried him forward, and he was nothing without it.
Vibrations toiled under his skin. At last, it was not a feigned delusion trembling within his imagination. This recess held the source of it all, and he was standing above it with his own two feet.
He aimed the beam into the middle of the fissure. The nearly inaudible drone deafened his ears while it rose and fell into disturbing rhythms, fluctuating into nothing he had ever heard.
Within the opened soil was a dark, organic curvature under the inorganic pattern of the dirt. Tommy kicked at the soil around the object, only for a continuing form to reveal.
There it was.
He had begun digging with his frenetic hands, dropping the flashlight instantly.
Hyperventilating with panic, he unobjectively clawed the ground as though he were ordered to at the cost of his life. The imperceptible sound penetrated his skull, and his face crumpled into a feral, unconscious brute that mongered the soil. He momentarily removed himself from his fever, grabbing the flashlight again and illuminating the ground. There was nothing but the partial form of a large and unidentifiable body.
It was dark flesh under the soil, and it was breathing. It must have been massive, for Tommy scarcely unearthed any of its bodily shapes.
Ebbing with the drone, it was all beneath his feet, his lunacy, his lies, and the truth behind it all. Sleeping.
Hibernating.
The pupils of Tommy’s eyes shrunk into calamity.
He kicked the soil back upon the thing in a mindless effort, scarcely covering his unearthing, and ran back toward his house with the flashlight off.
The drone followed him into the field.
#
Lily was gone and had not answered the phone since the night before.
Still, Tommy could not tell her what he had found. In a grave fear of the unknown, she would take the property from his grasp and erase his new beginning, sending him back into the incessant nihility from which he had retreated. She did not comprehend the drone. She never heard it and never cared.
Nothing rationalized the correct course of action. No method was right, and he was in no condition to find such. The world existed beyond his conscious mind, and so did his destitute.
It was easier to not say a word, to act as though it were not a thing. Then, however, the consequences were upon him—it could result in nothing, or perhaps the calamity of the entire world. All he needed was his home and his future, and the discovery of the otherworldly would dawn catastrophe upon his life.
He needed someone to tell, yet he could not. It was nothingness that replied in the bedroom, caressing him, enfolding under his arms so that his blues became woe and darkness.
Tommy must have been the lunatic.
Had he awoken it?
A text message from Lily rang in his pocket. He opened his phone.
Sorry for the late reply. Slept in. I’ll probably be out until later tonight. We’re gonna head to the city.
Lily was gone without a word, merely returning to the city Tommy had left behind. She did not consider the vexation of her unresponsiveness, yet the lingering tension was not what pardoned his reaction.
He did not bother replying. His heart raced, but not from the woman he currently resented. Lily would be gone for the day, and it offered him a moment to breathe. Still, he did not have enough time to figure out the next instances of his life. The sounds were steady, and he had not listened so intently until now.
#
Early in the morning, Lily returned to the dimly lit home.
Tommy was spotlighted emptily at the dining table. Sleepless. He did not glance as Lily shut the front door. There was a plate of crumbs and an empty glass before him.
“Why are you still up?” She inquired with a forced softness. Tommy assumed she had been drinking a moderate amount some moments prior; he knew it must have been intoxication that uplifted her gloom.
“Just sitting.” Tommy struggled to restrain the angst burning within him, the enigmas spilling over the precipice of his mind.
Lily set her belongings on the dining table aimlessly, shuffling near Tommy’s ghastly face. “What’s the matter?” Her scent of perfume still lingered, likewise a vague cordialness from alcohol. She looked the same as the moment she left, save the lighthearted air she now brought into the home.
“Nothing. I just can’t get tired and sleep,” drifted Tommy’s voice.
“Are you upset that I was gone for so long?” She asked without provocation.
Partially, he was. Yet not enough to consider himself agitated. It was not possible when his anguish existed beyond her. “No. You probably needed space anyway.”
She meandered around the kitchen, looking for nothing. “Yeah.”
“Would have been nice if you answered the phone,” Tommy started. He paused for a second before continuing when he felt Lily would respond in a moment. “Forget about it, it’s whatever. We all needed some quiet.”
“Sorry, Tommy. I wasn’t feeling the best.”
Neither was he.
“What were you doing out for so long?” Tommy stood and reached for the fridge. No beverage intrigued his sudden thirst; he stood pointlessly in his awkward position.
Lily sat on the kitchen barstool. “I was with Michelle, shopping and eating out. And I crashed for one night since I had a little too much to drink.”
“And a little much today, I imagine.” Tommy sat back down.
Lily reached for her phone, attending to something only visible in the illumination on her face.
“Somewhat. We shared some drinks earlier before she took me home.” She tried to soften the befuddlement within her head, which did not align with the melancholy around Tommy.
“No kidding,” he said to himself.
“Tommy,” Lily set her phone on the table and leaned over it while standing. “What’s the matter? You look miserable.” The sincerity in her voice was only partial; whatever spirit she might have had inhibited the depth of her outreach.
“I’m fine. Go shower and sleep. You reek.”
“C’mon, I did not drink that much,” she snickered, “tell me what’s on your mind.”
“Everything, alright? Everything is. I can’t put it into words.”
“What, you mean this house? Us?” Lily seated herself beside him without an objective, speaking on the whim of an inebriated mind.
“We don’t need to talk about it anymore, though, do we?” The drones shuddered in his temples, invigorating slightly at every thought of its source. Tommy ignored it, uttering in his detachment, “I just need to recuperate a little.”
“Then I’ll go shower. Come to the bedroom after.” She left with a simplicity that aimlessly diminished the tension. She slipped past him toward the bathroom and left her belongings on the dining table. There was a bifold wallet he had not seen before, her worn leather purse, and her cellphone.
The bathroom door had closed, and the living room resumed its devoid solace. Tommy rubbed the anguish on his face with a palm and perched his head upon it. Nothingness was all he gazed about for elusive moments, ignoring the occasional buzz of Lily’s phone.
His eyes wandered to the wallet near the table’s end, failing to recall from where it had come. A hex pattern and a name brand were embroidered across its face, slightly bulging from its contents. It was a rather expensive accessory, which was evident to Tommy.
Another ding rang from her phone. In his probing curiosity, he now wondered what continued to disrupt the silence at this time. He reached for the phone, bringing its luminous face near him as the screen automatically activated. The notification ran across the screen, displaying a sort of financial statement about which he had no clue. There was the description of a transaction for eight hundred and three dollars.
He had never searched his partner’s phone until now, but in the momentum of his wonder, he opened her device. What sort of payment occurred at this awful hour?
He took himself to the source of the notification, and a page opened on her phone. He assumed he would find a bank account or an application for personal investments, yet he was taken to a platform for monetary exchange. He searched further, wondering from where this consoling pay came.
Tommy scrolled through a feed of activity. Numerous transactions were stacked upon one another, upwards of four hundred to a thousand dollars bi-monthly. The activity displayed the continuous reception of large sums of income sent by an unnamed user. He could not discern any identification, and he grew fretful within.
Somebody was sending Lily substantial money. There were messages attached to each sumptuous payment, at which Tommy began agonizing. Sinking. Words of foul luster and desire were displayed before him:
-See you soon, dearest.
-For last night.
-Eager as ever…
One after another, for four months according to the stamped dates.
There was someone else in Tommy’s life.
For an instant, he wondered where his pills were; his racing breath sought the suppressants in a desperation he did not know how to cease. His frenetic hands trembled at the mania deluging his mind, plummeting over his neck, and scorching his palms. He swore to himself innumerably through teeth that spat without opening, holding his hands over his ears and uttering denial in a final attempt to negate his affliction.
Ringing ears became his thoughts; the drone became a voice that entered his throat and perched upon his lips. Whom could he tell? Could he even tell? For the love of God, what if he said it all?
Tommy’s ghastly face was distorted with wrangled tears and wrought emotion. Did he just give up everything for this?
The home that rose over his head, the floor over which he knelt and palmed, were all in his grasp, ready to enfold the life he was destined to fulfill. He could feel its warmth, the seamless wood pressed against the condemned and his heaving weight…
And his life was over.
Lily was almost out of the shower.
#
She could hear the dilapidated breaths shuddering in the living room when she stepped out. Promptly, she walked toward him.
“What, Tommy? What happened?” Her voice was stern this time.
He shuddered maniacally and breathed heavily. He was distraught.
“Tommy, your pills. Where are they?” She looked around before turning to the bedroom.
“Don’t.”
She paused. His tone was crude but clear. He stood abruptly, and the chair on which he sat scooted loudly.
“Tommy,” Lily looked at the exasperated expression that contorted his teary face.
“Why? Why would you do this?” Tommy lost his voice as he drew her phone up to eye level. Lily approached and watched the damnation on her screen behold her. Nothing but a period of painstaking quiet held her responses.
“Tommy, you don’t know what that is. It’s not—”
“What don’t I know? I’ve already lost everything, what else don’t I fucking know?”
Lily gazed at him with an expressionless seizure.
“Who is this?” He shouted.
“It—it’s my friend. It’s for that tour we went on through Berlin. Don’t you remember that?”
“What?”
“When I went to Berlin with Eric and Jasmine?”
“What are you talking about?”
“I paid for their rooms and trip expenses. I didn’t tell you about it then since you started financially struggling. But I did, and they’re paying me back now. I don’t know, it went over my head, okay?”
Tommy gazed for a moment. “Do you expect me to believe that bullshit? Lily, that was a fucking year ago!”
“And they weren’t able to fund that trip! So, I helped. Can I not?”
“Eric makes upwards of seventy thousand dollars a year! What the fuck are you talking about!”
“Tommy! Just listen!”
“You think I’m that stupid, as always? Do you? There’s one payment in the last six months from Jasmine. Who the hell is telling you they can’t wait to see you? Who the fuck is paying you for ‘last night?’ Tell me, dammit. Tell me!”
The house shuddered in his echoes. Lily stared dumbfoundedly.
“Tell me!”
Lily gazed down with a pause before she looked up and started, “I don’t know what to say, Tommy. I’ve been fighting myself for so long. You were in a bad position. I wanted to stay and help you, but I don’t know how to anymore. You’re falling so far into this shithole, and you’re dragging me with you. You know that.”
“And so you can go ahead and make me a fucking cuck, can’t you?”
“I couldn’t not fall out of love while you grew so distant from me, okay? As I watch you struggle and fall farther away. I can’t help you anymore!”
“Are you trying to justify seeing some sick bastard who probably gets off to a cheating woman? That you and this son of a bitch can just go off and live in your fantasy while I sit here slaving away to my thoughts every day? You’re trying to justify that?”
“No, it’s wrong Tommy. I’m not, okay? But when do you treat me like you once did anymore? Love me like you once did?”
“I try, Lily!”
“When have you ever been there for me, Tommy? Ask me how my day was? Stand beside me like an actual couple, not just a stranger who forgets I even exist? When have you ever cared when I was alone without you?”
“I do!”
“No, you don’t! When have you ever given me your full attention? Think about it!”
“I—"
“When was the last time we even had sex, Tommy?”
“You—” He tripped on his yelling words, gazing away in grave confusion. In defeat. He started again, “Did you really think this would never happen? That you would get away with this?”
“I don’t fucking know, Tommy.”
Tommy shuddered as he chased his heartbeat, as his saneness depleted with every word that escalated his anxiety. The hysteria collapsed over him and punctured Lily’s words—words he screamed over to speak.
Yet it was futile. It was impossible to overpower the noise that saw no boundary, no finite object, while his mind was confined to the structure of his brain and the cranium under his skin. The hysteria overflowed and submerged him without resistance.
Tommy drowned.
“This—this house,” Tommy spoke on no train of thought. “I bought it for us!” He grabbed a barstool and hurled it over the counter. The kitchen cabinets cracked at the impact and created openings in the wood and the membrane of his soul. The drone howled as much as he did, and his voice was no longer audible. Lily’s beckon to cease the violence was merely an undulation that cupped his ears and moaned within.
“Tommy, Tommy! Stop!” Lily rushed toward him and grabbed his broad shoulders that flexed and wrought in her grasp; her eyes attempted to reach his gaze and saw no man inside. Spontaneously, he pushed her aside and departed for a moment, returning promptly with the flashlight he had previously used.
Tommy grabbed her left wrist with an impenetrable grasp. Lily winced at the hand that would not release by any means.
“Tommy, let go!” She began to panic. “What are you doing?”
He looked at her suddenly. “I won’t hide it anymore. You will see it for yourself.”
“See what?”
“I’m not crazy like you always say. That you would think I need meds when the sounds are real! That you would never believe me!”
“You’re mad!” Lily began to whimper in helpless fear. She tried to shake him.
“I’m not. You will see for yourself, and I will show you.” Tommy’s eyes only held tears. He released from her, entering the bedroom before thrusting open the back door. With a flashlight, he entered the night.
“God, what are you doing?” She followed him outside.
The acres of land opened up to him in the dark. Moonlight above carefully illuminated the dim surface where the grass was faintly visible, lesser upon the black trees at the end of the property.
The flashlight was lit, and its beam began spotlighting the grassland before him.
Tommy marched forward without regarding Lily’s beckoning. She yelled at him to turn at once, which he did not, and followed him into the land.
“Tommy, just stop! Where are you going?”
The tall grass brushed his ankles. Wet streams on Tommy’s cheeks sharpened the chill air until they dissipated into streaks upon his skin. The drone was steady and voracious, muting the pleads behind him so that he followed the command of its vibrations, reducing Lily’s demands into nothing. He walked without knowing how far he had gone, infatuated with nothing but the march’s end.
Lily raced to Tommy and grabbed his arm. “Tommy, can you just stop for a minute and talk to me?” She held him with both hands, at which he violently shook, fighting her small grasp. He forced her hands loose and now grasped her wrist with his empty hand.
“Stop making this harder,” he growled.
“Let go, Tommy!”
“Stop making this harder!” Lily’s resistance trampled his anger as the noises burrowed within his skull. His vulgar grasp released the fever that wrought within him, and he threw her onto the ground, dropping the flashlight. She fell over herself, facing the sky as Tommy isolated her hands and sat above her. The circulation throbbed in her hand, and she began to wail in a fearful delusion—she thought he would kill her.
Lily felt his strength overpower her as her hands became immobilized. She felt vulnerable; she knew Tommy could have killed her then if he wished. There was little to bargain with, and upon reconciliation, she began crying like a fretting child.
“Please don’t hurt me, Tommy.”
The man heaved maniacally above her in exhaustion. “I have no intention of hurting you. I need you to follow me, or you will pay for what you have done.
He pulled Lily up to her wavering feet and continued pressing forward with the light beaming ahead, pushing like a diabolical mountaineer into the slopes of the midnight air. He was somewhere halfway down the stretching fields, treading an expanse between his waking dream and illusion. Stripped of all dignity, Lily stopped resisting his desire to walk into nowhere; she helplessly followed in profound anguish and confusion, trudging under a perverted hunch into unforeseen destiny.
Ginger grass pressed his feet as though it were a foot of snow; the drone continued to lead him forward into the night. He moved without a visible destination, yet the sounds knew where he was meant to be. Somewhere in the night, there was a place for him to stand, vibrations that waned and rose in thunderous crescendos.
And the sounds ceased in an instant.
He froze in his tracks. The sobbing behind him stifled as she came to a halt. For a moment, he gazed around with the light in his hand, revealing the trees that shadowed the property’s end. The recess would be just several meters behind, in a place only he recalled.
Lily’s eyes flitted in horror as she imagined profound darkness beyond the surrounding void. “Tommy, please. Just turn back,” she uttered weakly through tears welling over her eyes.
Tommy, frozen unnervingly, appeared static in time as though he were intently listening, lost to a sound beyond that which the ears perceive. Lily was unaware of what had stopped him in his tracks, sobbing as she pictured torture on a desolate field.
Tommy continued forward. He urged Lily to follow closely.
Within the trees, they moved in a measured gait. He no longer marched after the beam of light but followed it cautiously. Pointed somewhere, Lily walked toward where only Tommy knew. Soon after, a clearing would emerge from the trees, a recess of soil where dirt was spread instead of wooded flora.
This was where Tommy was meant to be. It was evident in the measure of his posture and the depth of his breaths. Lily imagined this was where she would be laid to rest, in a clearing where nothing but seclusion would serenade her final moments.
However, Tommy moved further into the recess and threw the beam of light everywhere before his eyes. Fever disfigured his face as he scarcely revealed what was behind the inundating night, as though something were missing.
Lily dared not approach him, yet there was defeat in Tommy’s presence; he fixed his light upon a patch of soil where the dirt was uplifted and destroyed.
“Oh my God,” muttered Tommy repeatedly, fixed on a massive crater that opened up immediately below him. Lily walked around him and the pit, wondering if ever she were fated to a burial beyond unspoken woods—if ever she were bound to fall in love with someone else.
Waves of a deep vibration abruptly entered the air, and they both flinched at the perverting drone. Lily cupped her ears shut, collapsing backward in an immeasurable discomfort as Tommy drowned in the undulations. He yelped and stumbled to remain standing; his frantic hands cupped one ear, and the other beamed the flashlight into the recess behind Lily. They both turned to gaze past the ray of light.
And it met the form of a sentient body, stagnant before the trees like an arbiter of the night.
What lay ahead of them was built upon ten elongated legs that widened above to the body which they held. Tommy slowly drew the light upwards and to the faceless form that was inseparable from the oblong of the darkness; the beam illuminated an armless entity that had but a shapeless a body, broadening into a wide crown about its head. With small appendages that jittered where a mouth could have been, its eyeless visage gawked toward the insects who gazed from below, towering fifteen feet above them.
Tommy, struggling to stand, began poising himself up from bent knees. His hands slowly lowered to his sides as the flashlight continued illuminating the entity.
He succumbed to his arrest with martial stillness.
The sound ebbed and flowed before crashing like alarming waves, writhing Lily upon the soil and silencing her screams while entrancing Tommy. He was immobile, holding the light ahead of him like a static beacon, bound to the monolithic horror before him, watching the abomination speak unintelligible sounds.
One of the entity’s legs rose and loomed over Tommy’s thoughtless eyes. He ogled blindly toward the divine that dismantled him at last, that stripped all sensations of his humanity; he was forsaken into the nihility from which there was no escape.
However, Lily would see now the becoming of all that Tommy had sought to destroy—it was before him in the cloak of the damned, the eternal dark, and the arbiter of the night.
And nothingness followed.
#
Tommy awoke into nothingness. The sensations of time no longer existed; he did not blink, breathe, or move his legs. Think, for that matter—that was moving forward in time. Instead, he experienced all sensations of being from his conception to the end of time. Suddenly, the purpose made sense; destiny emerged from the mire that submerged him into the present. Tommy had led a life without dimension, without access to anything but the actions he employed and the consequences that followed, constrained to the entropy of all matter and time around him. Now he freely roamed across all that ever was, and all that ever would be.
What lay ahead of him was indeed despair and darkness, a dim fracture in time at which he no longer existed on the three-dimensional plane. Yet now, with a body that moved amorphously throughout time, the eons until the universe’s end circulated under his skin, the blood within his veins. Everything made sense, such that the cosmos held only an ounce of life for which it was never created—that life was as much a byproduct as gamma rays are to black holes.
What lay at the end of nothingness was the feeling to express the end of everything: a heavy, unforeseen reconciliation, of which Tommy had finally found himself a part.
The entity before which he had stood moments before was a dimensional traveler who had found refuge at the end of the field, conversing beyond linear words. It was a command, a direction to lead him into his respectful place—to be within the stomach of the beast that would assuage his suffering in time. Since the beginning, it was hunting, searching for the damned who owned the land on which it probed.
At last, it had acquired him: Tommy, who had heard its song.
#
Lily held her ears tightly shut as she attempted to regain her stance. She finally stood and watched the entity raise a leg over Tommy’s dumbfounded trance, unable to call over the drone, unable to reach over the sound that inhibited her strength. She watched in horror and tried to amble backward, away from the atrocious scene.
The entity quickly swooped a leg and wrapped its snakish appendage around Tommy. Lily screamed his name helplessly as he rose above the ground in its grasp, statuesque as he faced the being with the flashlight still in his hand.
With Tommy immediately before its face, its short appendages opened into a gaping star, releasing a crackle into the drone.
Lily watched the man get strangled without resistance.
The entity threw Tommy’s torso into its cackling mouth, dismembering and consuming his body into nothing. The flashlight fell onto the ground, and Lily wailed indescribably.
The drone had ceased while it masticated on Tommy. Feeling a shock return to her legs, Lily sprinted through the trees and back into the plot of land, crying hysterically as tears flitted off her face. An unrecognizable fear propelled her across the grass; her phone was still inside the house, and she ran for it. She did not know if anyone would believe her call for help.
THE END