Wade.

The sky was a strangled pastel blue, wading onto the shores of early morning. It couldn?t have been any later than six am, judging by the insects that kept landing on their skin and the disconnected soundtrack of humming birds and other life swaying on ground and the brooding branches of pine trees. The thick of the forest could have been so innocent. They were just yards away from the froth of a brook rinsing early spring freeze over rocks, and squirrels taking wary slippered steps in the afterglow of winter. It was what filled the crevices between the silence that really murdered the pretty scene. Overpowering the chaste lullabies of the birds was the blunt sound of shovel denting moist earth, muffled sobs and feet pacing over dry-roasted leaves.

They were not exhausted yet, as they had just started digging. But the electrocuting sensation of near-shock coursing through the veins of twenty-year-old Jessica Lafferty, and twenty-one-year-old Stephen Holloway was enough to almost cripple their knee caps. They were being stared down by the barrel of a gun. Twice, Stephen had swung his shovel blindly to try and ward off Bruce Calbert, but his mind was still dizzy with the injections of Cerezyme; not at all a narcotic, but it could knock one off balance quickly.

They were only about a foot deep when Jessica wrapped her fists tight around the shovel, and buried her forehead against it. Her boyfriend couldn?t look up at her, all he could do was plead in between forking away clumps of dirt.

?Keep digging, Jess, just keep on, baby.?

?I can?t,? she howled, her whole entire body rioting with under-the-skin tremors, her pretty face contorted and splotched pink.

Bruce was non-threatening in every physical attribute. He was about five-foot-seven, dark-haired, darker-eyed. He had the sleeves of his white sweater rolled up to the joints of his elbows, his hair wilting against the pores on an oilslick forehead. His face was full of awkward angles, his eyes were submerged too deep in their sockets, and his nose ran a crooked, beak-like line. His posture was that of a victim, not at all a predator. The only thing that kept the couple in line was the loaded Glock in hand. It was his father?s: he knew nothing about guns, save for the fact that when pointing one, people often turned into despaired loons.

The moment Stephen edged forward to try to wreathe his arms around her midsection, Bruce braked in his back-and-forth spell.

?Stop crying, Jessica.? He didn?t sound at all hostile, in fact, he sounded as though he were begging her.

?What are you doing? Why are you doing this? Why are we digging, Bruce? Please. Please, Bruce.? She dropped the shovel and sideways it filled the girth of the hole. Both of her frail hands steepled together in a prayer fold.

It took little to persuade him, it was the soft spot he had for her that drove him this to begin with. With his chin cliff diving toward his collar bones and a jagged pull of a frown, he summoned her over with his gun-toting hand.

?Here. Stephen will dig.?

?No, that?s not what I mean---? she grabbed a tuft of her boyfriend?s sweat stained t-shirt desperately, and jerked him close. ?Let?s just stop this, Bruce. Let?s just talk about this. We can sort this out---Stephen and I---we did nothing to hurt you.?

Stephen had too much pride to stop digging, even though he was more than aware that it was his own grave. His jaw was set bulging tight, his mussed brown hair matted to his stern brows. There had been tears, there had been frustration, but he traded it all in for something stoic. That was, until Bruce ordered her to stand next to him. Jessica did as told, especially under the reign of a gun and staggered from the premature hole with sloppy limbs and more gunshots of sobs. Bruce pawed her on the shoulder until she withered to the ground, drawing her kneecaps into her chest. Her highlighted blonde hair fell in a feathery shawl over her vibrating shoulders, her carnation-pink nails nearly clawing out chunks of skin at her tan elbows.

She saw this as her chance to talk through her wild hysterics, to reconcile, to turn things back around.

?We won?t tell anyone what happened here, Bruce. We won?t tell anyone, I swear. Just take us home. We didn?t do anything to you. Look, I?m sorry --- I?m so sorry I hurt your feelings, but killing us---killing us isn?t going to make this better for you.?

Stephen paused for a moment, his skinny chest rocketing to sideswipe a stare over the psycho hovering over his girl.

?Keep digging,? Bruce?s order was bland but judging by the grit of his teeth, underlined with venom.

?Bruce?? Jessica pressed on, blindfolding herself with her hands. ?Bruce? Are you listening to me??

His calm transmuted with a bipolar twig-snap, and he tore a stare away from the ditch-digging down to the girl. ?Shut the fuck up, Jessica! You did this. You did this.? He spat and clocked her on the side of the head with the side profile of his gun. Although it was painful, she didn?t falter.

?I want to dig,? she whimpered weakly.

?No, Stephen?s digging. You?re just getting more dirt in the fucking hole.?


At ten am, it would have been breakfast time for the trio. The sun was high and shamelessly filtering tangerine shafts through the trees. It was a mocking jester?s grin spilling its spotlight on the neck of Stephen. Every time Jessica?s lips parted and the opening of a syllable slipped out, Bruce cocked the trigger. She kept absently swaying, extending her arm to her boyfriend who was already waist-deep in a hole that she was sure would never end.

Bruce was seated on the trunk of his black Land Rover, writhing around and pulling at his jeans. Every now and again, he?d cradle his forehead in the open womb of his hand until he heard the gasp of the shovel stop. He?d catch Stephen staring, and simply ticked his chin. The digging was relentless.

It was by late afternoon that Bruce seemed satisfied with the depth of the hole. It was like a well; about ten feet deep, far surpassing his height. Jessica had lost sight of her boyfriend hours ago, but the dwindling speckles of dirt fringing the opening of the hole always soothed the missed beats of her throttling heart. He had something to keep him busy. Her mind was going awry: she knew she was going to die.

A long shadow eclipsed the gaping opening of the hole. Stephen?s wrist cut a dotted line across his forehead, sponging up sweat and collapsing limply at his side. He stared up with squinting eyes at Bruce?s face. It seemed so far away. His mouth hung open, and his expression was filled with nothing but side notes of curiosity. The first stone was just a little nip at his jaw, and he turned a blunt shoulder to it. He refused hang up his testosterone and cower. But when Bruce bent down to wrap his fist around a sizable one and pitch it at him, he started to crawl in the corner of the hole, his arms corset-lacing his concave stomach.

He could hear Jessica shrieking, but he tuned it out, because trying to dodge the oncoming rocks was a feat all on its own. Bruce?s throws were a lot more sturdy now. The impact was more violent, and they were coming in larger, quicker doses. He was being pelted in the back of the head, and along every thumbtack of his spine. His arms were crisscrossing armor at his face, trying to fend off stray stones. But when struck in the skull, he sucked in a deep breath and crumbled down to wrap himself in a ball. He buried his head between his knees and all of his muscles tensed to fight the blows. There were strands of blood trickling from temple to cheek now. Although his mind had sobered up hours ago, it was off-kilter again. His eyes rolled back to divulge nothing but eggshell white, his paralyzed body swinging from one side to the other, his neck straining to keep his head upright.

Bruce only stopped when Stephen stared up at him, mute, gaping, his teeth dyed with blood. Jessica was at his side with a hand clasped over her mouth, trying to suppress the urge to vomit.

?How does that feel, Stephen?? He crouched down to peg him with another rock, this time, it tore open his forehead. ?How does it feel??

No reply.

Tangling a palm around Jessica?s bicep, he stubbed the nose of the gun against it, and a shot cracked. It tore through her flesh and the blood was astounding. At first, she didn?t react. Her eyes were as wide as a fawn, and her mouth stammered over empty words. Stars crashed in front of her eyes and her steps stumbled, she did a backwards swan dive ten feet under. Stephen yelled something incomprehensible and bolted quickly from his fetal position to his feet.

?Jessica! Fuck! Fuck!?

?My a---my---?

He wrapped her up quickly, his cradling her head, dragging her into his lap. Whereas a moment ago he was aloof, now his face was wrenched in a hysteric frenzy. His jaw quaked, his eyes were streaming tears, and with every word his voice trembled and screeched, swollen.

?Oh Jesus Christ--you fucking shot her! You shot her man! You shot her arm. Oh God, Oh God, Oh God,? he chanted, his eyes scrolling quickly over her body, his head twitching from side-to-side. ?Oh my God. Jessica, Jessica. Jessica.?

Emotionlessly, Bruce watched Stephen?s wild scrambling. It took him a moment to realize he had to apply pressure to the wound. He tore free a jagged sliver of his shirt and struggled to rope her oozing wound with a makeshift tourniquet. His hands were quivering too much to even function, they kept slipping on her blood, they kept pawing at her like a fumbling old man with a misplaced piece of a porcelain music box in hand.

?Jessica, Jessica. Oh Jessica. It?s --fuckfuck---Jessica. I?m here. Oh no. Nononono. Nonono.?

His shirt was secured, but he was completely horrified over how fast her blood was filling the fabric. She was vibrating with shock. There was no expression in her eyes. They were orbited back in her head.

?You fucking motherfucker! You fucker! I?m going to kill you! I?m going to get out of here, and I?m going rip your fucking balls off! Do you hear me, you fucking psycho?! Do you hear me?? Stephen ranted with a vicious sort of passion, he spat and shook his girl like a rag doll. She was splayed out flaccidly in his lap. Bruce offered nothing but his refined profile for a moment. He seemed set in thought, the way his upper lip flinched and his jaw muscle kept launching through his chalk-white skin. He turned his gun down at the two.

Stephen worked to protest. ?No.. don?t. Bruce, don?t.? He shaped the unconscious girl into his chest, his fingers digging into he back of her head. ?Don?t do this. Don?t do it.?

At first, he seemed to hesitate, shaving the still-heated mouth of his gun along his hairline, scrunching and indenting the root. His lids dropped down to a brooding half-mast, and he submerged to his knees at the very ledge of the hole. Stephen felt his insides crushing in a panic attack. He kept vibrantly shaking his head ?no,? but he didn?t even feel it. His ears were ringing with a needle buzz. Everything else was drowned out, warbled and mute. He didn?t have any time to react before the bullet lodged into his shoulder, just barely missing the temple of his girlfriend. Bruce was smart: he made sure neither of them would be able to climb out of that hole.

But it didn?t stop there. In the middle of screaming on the top of his lungs and jerking his head back with the sudden head-splitting rush of pain another shot went off. Bruce tumbled all ten feet on the hole and landed atop the train wreck heap of the two lovers. His body was limp; his blood and guts had splattered like confetti.

Stephen jolted up to a knifed stand, dragging the girl upright with him, even though she just faltered against his chest. His whole entire body was earth quaking as he stared down at the dead body that had taken a blow to the temple. He couldn?t hear himself screaming anymore. The cables of veins in his neck were standing upright, his head was a carousel ride on methamphetamines.

He didn?t know how much time elapsed before he finally surrendered to wilt next to the corpse, still hugging the girl to his chest under the current of the moon. With the serene dribble of blood loss and the shallow steady rattle of her heart, he passed out.

He woke to the merry parade of birds and chirping insects. There was a cellophane sheen over his vision. He could barely see. He could make out that the sun was starved and the early morning sky was overcast. His left arm was completely anaesthetized. The smell of the rotting, fly-swirled corpse was overbearing. Immediately, his attention fixed on Jessica. In his detached state, he delicately rustled her the same way he did every morning before class. Instead of groaning at him, and swatting him away with her butterfly giggles she failed to respond. He smoothed his hand over her clammy forehead and thought nothing of her still chest.

For a good half-an-hour he stayed frozen in place, his saucer-wide eyes climbing the length of the hole; watching, waiting. He wasn?t flooded with thoughts. His brain was full of air-pockets of silence and nothing. His ear drums still tingled. Jessica had yet to wake up. Caked with dry, scabby blood, his punctured lower lip trembled, his thirsty voice croaked.

?Jess.?

Nothing but the void. He shook her with more aggression.

?Jess.?

Alarm began to infiltrate his voice; retiring the former tranquility.

?Jess? ---Jessica? Wake up. Jessica---? Jess--??
He considered Bruce for a moment, with his face splattered in the soil, his spine bent at a strange degree, legs still pronounced in a sideways-slanted kneel.


?No, no, no, no.? It started as a murmur like a prayer, but steadily his skepticism was resonating into a bellow that scared the wings from the gnarled branches of the trees. He turned his head to dry-heave, but buried his forehead quickly back into her sharp clavicle, tossing her around ruthlessly. The girl refused to wake up. The girl wouldn?t wake up.


When the world went black again, Wade camouflaged well with the corpses. When the neon day glow vest of a hunter treaded near and stared down into the hole, he only had one word on his tongue:

?Jesus Christ. They?re all dead.?

"It's a clear-cut case. He's suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. It's quite common for an event like this to significantly impair his ability to operate on a normal level. For most people, it's temporary. It puts a strain on their social life and their ability to function on that scale. I think that with brief hospitalization you'll have your son back. Stephen needs therapy, he needs to be weaned back into the real world. I'm sure that given enough time for healing, the nightmares will stop, the relapses will stop, and he'll begin to talk again. You shouldn't lose hope, Mr. and Mrs. Holloway. Now, more than ever, he needs your love, he needs your support."

The wheels to her swivel chair tattled on Dr. Tammy Greene as she stepped away from the podium, or rather, put a paper clip around her manicured speech. She folded her dark hands over her manilla envelope and offered the couple a polished smile. Mr. and Mrs. Holloway were inchworming toward midlife crisis. They were a prim-picked Wallstreet couple; pearl earrings, business suits and an uneasy pinball of their eyes.

Their ivy league son was severely emaciated in the east wing, with tubes murmuring life into his forearms. The police weren't permitted to ask questions just yet.

Linda Holloway bobbed her chin in agreement, her Kleenex skirting her glossy tear-duct. Ian fastened his support on her shoulder and looked away. They signed him away and shook hands.

Before they left, they swung by his room, and they crept through the peekaboo square of window. He was seated upright on the bed, with his back hunched over. The dimples of his spine gnawed through his sallow skin, the gown gaping in the back. The window was drawn wide, and he had a wonderful front row view of the parking lot.

Linda crushed her swirled russet hair to her husband's stiff shoulder, and sputtered out a sigh.

"We should be thanking God he got out of there alive, Ian. Jesus," she gasped, her fingers sprained against her quivering mouth; stifling a bubbling sob. "What is he looking at, Ian?"

He leaned down, and weighted a kiss to the top of her scalp, the hand cramped to her bicep smoothing in placating up-downs. "Come on," he threaded in a distraught whisper. "Let's go home for tonight."

As he edged her away to clap dress shoes and heels down the strenuous yawn of varnished hallway, she latched onto him like a crutch, clawing at tufts of his suit at his ribcage. "What's he looking at? What's he looking at?"

http://us.ent4.yimg.com/movies.yahoo.../ontheedge.jpg

<font color="#f22735" size="1">[ December 15, 2005 04:24 AM: Message edited by: methadrone ]</font>

Stephen's little sister, Mary hated her name. He had missed the last four years of her youth, she transformed from a gangly thirteen-year-old into a shapely princess that sun-bathed to caramel-coat her freckles, and dyed over her auburn hair with a shocking platinum blonde. So she didn't feel that the name fit her. It reminded her of ribbons, the frilly socks she used to have to wear on special occassions as a child, and sheep. Having grown up in upstate New York, where the pleasant acre's of her family's property sat isolated, she had seen plenty of cotton-spooled sheep.

Her best friend was an awkward boy named Will that had had a similiar upbringing; rich parents, spoiled, with no real interest in indoor pools or a tennis court. They'd known one another since the fourth grade, so he was familiar with her brother. Stephen had been famous, at least locally. He remembered Stephen dropping by the reck room downstairs when they were busy watching re-runs of Rocko's Modern Life on Nickelodeon. He swamp the couch behind them while they sat cross-legged on the floor and he'd watch just as intently as the children until the phone rang, or until it was four o'clock for football practice. The mansion was so ridiculously huge that he would've expected that the two siblings never communicated. But, they were inseperable once upon a time. When Stephen disappeared, Will noticed that there was a huge chunk missing from the everyday animation of his best friend.

It was a soft, taboo subject. No one ever brought it up. But sometimes, when they were sprawled out in her front yard, just a few feet shy of the marble gush of fountain, star-gazing in mid-August, her eyes would well. And he knew why, he always knew why.

Stephen's door was always shut. Whenever he passed it, his spine became rickety with chills and he'd always look away really sharply. Mary pretended not to notice the Trainspotting poster scotch-taped on the door.

As usual, they waltzed past it as though it weren't even there. They had been mid-conversation when his peripheral vision caught wind of the bright orange lettering. They always grew silent when they crept past the haunt of that door. But once they crashed into her bedroom at the end of the hall, their conversation was quickly rejuvenated.

Mary's bedroom was still reminiscent of childhood. Now that she wore eyeliner and underwire bras, she wanted to claw away the pink wallpaper, and the canopy over her bed. She split the veil of foamy white, and took a seat on the ledge over her mattress. He collapsed in a bean-bag chair, and knocked his scalp against the wall.

"We could just take your car," she chirped.

"Yeah, but Mr. Halston knows what my car looks like. What if he sees it? We'll get caught."

She considered this, even though it put an anchor on their scheme to egg houses on Mischief Night. It was too far of a walk to the sparkle of suburbia--they needed a car.

"We can park down the block, and run back to the car? I don't know."

It was on utter whim that he decided to ask. He had kept his curiosity quelled deep in the pit of his stomach all these years, even though his family was the rumor mill. He was more than aware of the basic facts: a kid named Bruce that used to go to high school with Stephen and later went to Princeton with him tried to murder him and his girlfriend. The girl died because of blood loss due to a gunshot wound to a main artery. Afterwards, Stephen was in the mental hospital, but then--- he was never spoken of again.

"Do you even think Stephanie's gonna come? She's too much of a pussy I think, and like, you know that her parents are really crazy when it comes to curfews, plus you know that it's gonna be---"

"Mary?" Will ventured, driving a splinter into her gossipy rant.

"Yeah?" She seemed minutely peeved, but she cracked her gum, and drew up both eyebrows.

"Whatever happened to your brother?"

A long swollen silence enveloped the bedroom. She stared at him dead-on, as though she were challenging him to have the audacity to repeat the question. Even though it was shaky, he managed to.

"What happened to him?"

"I don't like to talk about it. It was bad, really bad. Fucked him up." she replied curtly.

"No, I mean, not what happened in the woods. I mean, where is he? Whatever happened to him?"

The color drained from her face, and she turned away, her thin shoulders jogging up and down in a lost shrug.

"I don't know. He was in the hospital for a few months. One day he checked himself out, I don't know how or when----he came home, and took some clothes. No one heard him. I had a dream that he kissed my forehead, but I don't know if it really happened or not. He never touched his bank account, just left town. He left a note to my mother that only said: 'goodbye.' They wouldn't let us file a missing persons. And mom and dad are always trying to find him, but he covered his tracks well. He just ...left it all behind, I guess."

Will suddenly felt guilty, and his voice suggested that much. "I'm sorry, Mary."

"Don't be sorry." She suddenly straightened up, haughtily shaking her head. "It's not your fault he's a nutcase. It's not your fault that he doesn't care about anybody."

Graduation.
Years ago.

Mid-June fell sticky over the eager flashbulbs of cameras and sighing kids painted in rows before the makeshift stage. St. Peter's football field was alight with a quiet festivity; the class of 1998 was graduating. Exuberant parents clutched hands and watched their child's name echo into the muffled mic, wagging their diplomas with huge smiles. They sighed through principal Glenn's stifled speech about the future and accomplishing as much in a generation as humanly possible.

He introduced the valedictorian as President of the National Honor Society, editor of the St. Peter's Herald, a member of the Model United Nations, a peer mentor, vice-president of the Art Honors Society, and a star track and field champion with a 3.91 GPA. He was struggling to delineate the last of his accomplishments when the class exploded into impatient applause. They knew who their valedictorian was, they knew who represented their class. He was head-to-head with that really stuck-up Indian kid, but he got it. Like some cheap t.v. show host, the principal nearly sang his name.

Adjusting his silver tassel over a mop of dyed brown hair, Stephen Holloway offered a clever smile to his best friend, John Berringer, and skirted to the front. He took the podium and let the applause die down. Though he scoured his audience for his parents and came up dry, he knew they were there. They were probably sitting somewhere in the back row. They were always late to everything.

"Thank you. Thanks a lot." He didn't stall in the face of silence. Though his speech wasn't written, he had it for the most part, memorized, and began to fluently faucet his passages into the microphone with pregnant pauses, as rich as a politician's.

"Mr. Glenn told me to make this short and sweet. I haven't tracked down any quotes that would really describe any experiences in my high school career to integrate into my speech, nor have I been able to find down any of those "strive for excellence" posters with the silhouette of two people in a canoe rowing toward a tea-colored sunset that we used to see all the time in our elementary school classrooms. I guess they were rowing towards ..uh, the future. Or something."

The audience stirred with a titter of laughter.

"What I can say is that I'm glad I won't have to be waking up at six in the morning anymore, or rather, six-fifty-five if you're Stephen Holloway. I can also say that we've all taken a significant metamorphosis through the years since we were measly little freshman. And whether we're considering Universities, or community college, or joining the army to make a difference in our country, I've noticed that everyone in our class present today is a very important key to the step forward of our generation. I can't guarantee that we'll change the world, because that's impossible. But I have a feeling the class of '98 will at least make a dent, thanks to the support of our friends and family. If it weren't for you guys, I would've never survived Sister Hartman's Calculus class, or Badminton in gym."

There was another spell of chuckles, one jock-bellow on whim, and faded clapping before he continued. He caught the eye of Jessica Lafferty in the first row. Her smile glistened, and the whites of her eyes were veneered with waterworks. Her fingers wriggled in a weak wave, and he tossed her a wink. She flipped away her sunshine-sweet hair over her shoulder, and her shoulders shrank to pass a discreet airborne kiss to him. The remainders of his speech was shredded and jumbled. It went in a blur. Because in the back of his mind, he knew he'd lay with her again tonight. At the beach house in Long Beach Island, while all of their best friends were sprawled out in a drunken trainwreck.