To Open Hills by Sheldon Lee Compton

Moving through the hills was easier without the gun, and Chad could go back for it later. Besides, now that he had slowed down, it was more like regular hill climbing. He became calm and was soon doing hardly more than enjoying a walk. 

But he wanted to keep his anger up, so he kept remembering the funeral. He pictured Owen smirking across the cemetery. He absolutely had been smirking, and he had hurt people before. Chad wasn’t proud of how his father had lived his life, knew that keeping company with people like Owen had no way to end but badly, but that was way down the list now. If Owen had anything to do with it, now was his time to answer for that. He started to feel his anger rising again and moved on. No, he wouldn’t shoot Owen. But he was going to hurt him and hurt him bad. Give him a chance to feel that.

Even in summer the hills were still never mostly green. Brown was always with you in Appalachia. It was the way the grit and wadded tangle of the ground seemed to rise with the trees as they grew and tarnish the leaves to rust and darken the trunks to shadow so that even in its lusher areas there were always silhouetted spikes across the daylight sky. The brown was important in that way, the earth growing away from itself a reminder of magic living in strange and beautiful ways we call time. 

Chad took a rest on a cropping of mossy stones. The moss was at least two inches thick. He dug his fingers in and then under where it went from cool to fully cold. Then it was dark, all at once, it seemed. Right then, Chad realized true darkness for the first time in his life. It was the way he imagined his dad’s coffin would be after everything was done at the burial and everyone was gone and it was two o’ cold-clock in the morning. The blackness left forever in that hole with what remained of a person. The image terrified him then, was something he had forgotten, and was now terrifying again. But more than that. He felt now like nothing more than what was left of a person.  

When he stood and nothing in his field of vision changed, when the sensory world remained exactly the same as when he was sitting, panic collapsed his nerves. His coffin was a hillside above Red Knife, the town he was born in and lived all his life. 

He searched in a slow circle for something to touch and found nothing. He took a slow, tiny step forward, to the left, to the right, and backwards. His back smacked against a tree and he leaned into it, never more thankful in his life to have felt something solid in the dark.

There was a snapping crash of dry wood to his left.  

“Owen!”  

He called out before he thought. Whatever had been moving through the hills stopped. If it was

Owen, he would call back. Chad was sure of it. But nothing called back. Actually, nothing was happening at all. No crickets, no nightbird song, no sounds of movement, no wind. But then a flicker from the corner of his eye, a tiny glint in the black. 

“Owen?”  

The flicker again, and then again, and within a couple seconds Chad could see the barrel of Owen’s shotgun move through a thick shive of moonlight.  

Owen stepped into full view and pulled the trigger. 

Chad crawled in the dark, occasionally shaking his head to see how much he was bleeding. The left side of his head was numb but when he shook it he could feel blood slosh warmly across his neck and quickly grow cold.  

Crawling in the dark was not so bad. He couldn’t crawl fast so when he came up against a tree it was only a little knock against his face and then he made his way around it. Truth was, he was feeling better. He kept forgetting things, and the more he forgot, the better he felt.  

By the time the stars were gone and the sky was a robin’s egg shade of predawn blue, he forgot why he was crawling in the hills at all. When morning finally broke, he tried to stand but couldn’t. He didn’t mind. He kept crawling until, tired, he calmly rolled onto his back. It wasn’t like he thought at all. It rattled around in his mind. It wasn’t like he feared at all. It wasn’t going to be. It rattled around in his mind and rattled. It wasn’t, until it was.

Sheldon Lee Compton is the author of more than a dozen novels and collections. His latest is Oblivion Angels, a novel due to be released January 7, 2025 from CJ Press. Right now he's reading Dead Man's Walk by Larry McMurtry and None of You Shall Be Spared by Brian Evenson.