The last thing he said to Bryce was “You can’t wait to take a piss until we get there?” Cal leaned on his walking stick in the middle of the trail and watched his boyfriend climb down into the bramble to a place where he would not be seen. By Cal’s estimation they had about half a mile to the camping spots at the top of the ridge. There was no real reason they couldn’t stop for a bathroom break, except that Cal didn’t like stopping any more than they had to, “an object in motion,” et cetera.
Cal wondered how long it took someone like Bryce to piss in the wilderness. He’d complained about the bulky backpack he had to haul, about getting his feet wet at the river crossing, the swarming gnats. Cal waited what he thought to be ten minutes before calling out. “Bryce?” No answer.
The edge of the trail sloped down into a mess of green. In seconds, Cal was bushwhacking past thorny shrubs, and skirting poison oak. He thought he saw a path of crushed plants Bryce might have stomped through. Already Cal couldn’t see the trail. How far out had his boyfriend gone? He followed what he hoped to be Bryce’s footsteps until they stopped abruptly at the base of a ponderosa pine where Cal found a severed foot.
Cal did not think the foot was Bryce’s; it looked too small. And even if it was his foot, it gave no clues as to where the rest of him might be. The foot was a left foot, severed cleanly just above the ankle. There was no blood on the foot or the ground surrounding it, but the open wound looked fresh, as red and juicy as a slab of raw steak with the bone in. Cal found himself tempted to touch the exposed muscle, to see if any blood would stick to him.
Cal tried to imagine Bryce’s feet. His toenails were well cared for. He often came back from the salon with a new shock of color at the end of his toes, cherry or lemon or periwinkle.
Leaving the foot was not an option, whether it was Bryce’s or someone else’s. He gripped the thing in one hand, and felt no closer to Bryce. Cal called his boyfriend’s name again, but it felt a strange, obscene thing to do while holding a severed foot. Cal couldn’t just leave; Bryce was carrying the poles to their tent in his backpack. It was becoming increasingly apparent to Cal, however, that Bryce might have been the one who had left him.
Cal saw two options: complete the hike as planned, or begin his descent back to the car. If Bryce had started back down, Cal probably should too, but he didn’t want Bryce’s impatience to cut their trip short. The foot complicated things. And Bryce could be in trouble. A third option would be to look for Bryce, to struggle through the brush until he found him or found evidence of him. The sun slid closer to the horizon. Cal would not make the car by nightfall. He figured the foot could wait, and Bryce, whatever he was doing, could wait. He would try for the ridge. There was no room in Cal’s backpack for the foot. He tied it to his pack with paracord, where it dangled limply, like a keychain.
It took longer to get back to the trail than Cal expected, and when he got there, the sky had already grown darker. He’d hiked this path before, but in the diminishing light, the landmarks seemed unfamiliar.
Cal trekked up the trail, knowing there would be spots to camp once the thing evened out. He wondered if Bryce hadn’t just found his way up the ridge, and imagined his boyfriend waiting at the top, tending a cozy fire. Unlikely. Bryce wasn’t keen on wilderness survival, preferred “glamping” with a camp trailer and a mini fridge stocked with cold beer.
Bryce didn’t enjoy hiking, he liked music, so they had struck a deal. Last week they went to the opera, and Cal had had to wear a suit and tie. Before it began he bought a glass of wine at the small bar in the lobby, and during intermission he got two more. The show was in French, and though the hefty playbill offered translations of the lyrics, Cal couldn’t make them out in the dark. He slipped into sleep somewhere during the last act, and woke to the sound of applause, a trickle of saliva dampening his chin. Bryce refused to talk as he drove them home. Now, this weekend, it was a backpacking trip.
*
On the drive up, Bryce had put on a podcast. The guest being interviewed was a prominent atheist thinker. He had written a bestselling book, but Cal couldn’t remember its name. The atheist was trying to prove that the Bible was not a good source of morality. “Take the ten commandments, which many Christians consider the true north of their moral compass,” he said. “The first four have nothing whatever to do with being a kind or good person, but focus on pleasing a ‘jealous god’ which is how the god of the Old Testament refers to himself.”
Cal remembered the phrase from Sunday school as a boy. He remembered the rest of the quote too, that god enjoyed “punishing the children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation of them who hate me.” As a boy, he had felt his family tree fan out behind him like a peacock’s tail, and he prayed its branches might not snag the brunt of god’s ire. It seemed inevitable that some former ancestor had hated god, and Cal would have to pay for it. For much of his childhood, that wrath had hung over him like a storm cloud, a hammer waiting to fall.
Bryce too had been Christian once. He still went to therapy to unlearn the internalized homophobia and self-hate that Christianity had taught him. His social media profiles were clogged with articles and statistics against organized religion. Cal’s own faith transition had been smoother; he felt comfortably agnostic. He knew, sometimes, that Bryce quavered with fear, wondering if there really was a God up there, one who meant to torment Bryce and Cal for the love they had curated between themselves. These moments were rare, but paralyzing; no kiss or touch or words of affection could comfort Bryce when he felt this way.
The atheist on the podcast went on: “The stories in the Bible are a mixed bag at best. A few offer legitimate moral value, but most are simply horrific.” He ran through a few popular stories such as Noah, in which a vengeful god decides to destroy nearly all life on earth, and Abraham, who was asked to show his faithfulness by being willing to murder his own son. Then the speaker told a story Cal hadn’t heard before. He called it “The Levite and His Concubine.”
In a certain chapter of the book of Judges, the atheist claimed, there was a story about a Levite who was travelling with a concubine and a servant boy. They were forced to stop for the night in the town of Gibeah, where a local man took them in. That night, a group of men surrounded their lodging and insisted the Levite come out so they could rape him. The Levite offered them his concubine in his place, and the men, according to scripture, “raped her and abused her throughout the night.”
The next morning, the Levite found his concubine lying dead in the doorway, whereupon he took his knife and cut her body into twelve pieces and had his servants scatter the pieces across the known world.
The story had chilled Cal. As he drove, the trees seemed to lean in over them, threatening to blot out the sky. He could see no purpose in hacking the woman to pieces, and in forcing his servants to carry those pieces across miles and miles to the edges of the world. He imagined being one of those servants, carrying a head or an arm bundled in cloth, travelling day and night. What did they do with the parts? Bury them? Burn them like animal sacrifices? Or leave them out in the desert to darken and shrivel in the sun?
The podcast asked: “What kind of morals do we learn from a story like that?”
*
After an hour of hiking alone, Cal had gotten used to the thumping sound the foot made against his backpack as he walked. It was full night now, and the trail continued to slant upward. The sides of the trail were clogged with trees and undergrowth. There was no good place to set up camp, and anyway, Bryce had the tent poles, so there was no real way to put up the tent. A sliver of moon hung in the sky, like a Cheshire Cat smile, bright and malicious. After another hour, one side of the trail began to slope off dramatically, until Cal was effectively walking along the edge of a cliff. He began to worry he had made the wrong decision.
The night grew cold. Cal knew at some point he would have to stop and rest. He stood in the trail and surveyed his surroundings. The cliff on one side of the trail was sheer and straight. On the other, dark copses of trees huddled together. He didn’t remember there being a cliff the last time he hiked this trail, though that had been some time ago.
Cal rifled through his bag until he grasped a tightly wadded hammock, which he strung between two trees just off trail. Once in the hammock, he did his best to wrap a sleeping bag around his body, which mostly staved off the cold. He leaned his backpack against a tree in such a way that it could not be easily seen from the trail. The foot looked strange and blue in the starlight. It was beginning to smell fetid, like water too long stagnant. The skin of the foot gave softly under his touch, like a bruised fruit. As he slept, Cal imagined meat writhing with maggots, blood tacky and brown as maple syrup.
*
Cal woke frightened. He caught fragments of the bone-white moon through the canopy of leaves above him. He heard movement on the trail and was afraid to look. He’d had any number of animal encounters before, had heard howling wolves and seen berry-drunk brown bears, and had even woke one desert night to find a tarantula scurrying across his feet. But none of this inspired the dread of the noise he heard now, which sounded wet and sloppy, like some sharp-fanged thing tucking into a fresh kill. Cal worried what he would see if he turned to look.
He did turn. The shadow on the trail looked nearly human, crouching like a neanderthal on toes and knuckles, its face pressed into the ground. It seemed to be licking dirt from the trail with loud slurping sounds, like a dog lapping up a puddle. But that was not quite it. When the image snapped into a shape that was understandable, it made Cal tremble fear. The thing on the trail was kissing and licking the severed foot.
The hammock rustled around Cal, but he could not still himself. The sound caught the attention of the thing on the trail and it lifted its head in Cal’s direction. There lay the foot, glossy with spit, gleaming in the moonlight. When the shadow turned in its crouch, Cal recognized his boyfriend. “Oh God,” he whispered.
Bryce stood and stepped closer, until his shadow fell over the hammock. Cal shook violently. “Oh God,” he said again, like a litany. “Oh, God.” Bryce peeled the sleeping-bag blanket off Cal’s feet, and tugged off one of Cal’s socks. He hunched over the bare foot and began to lick off the day’s worth of dirt and dried sweat. The tongue was terribly wet, like a full sponge, or large slug clinging to the ball of his foot. Bryce’s lips latched on to Cal’s big toe with a tremendous slurp, the sound of someone sucking marrow from a bone, and Cal fainted into a welcome pit of darkness.
*
In the morning, Cal’s feet were cold. Somehow, they had kicked their way outside the sleeping bag, and his left foot was bare, its sock lying limply in a fern under the hammock. He had had a strange kind of dream but was afraid to remember it. There was no sign of Bryce. The severed foot was still strapped tightly to his backpack. His own bare foot shuddered strangely, but it stopped when Cal laced up his hiking boots.
As he packed up camp, he wondered how one would cut a body into twelve pieces. The hands and feet and head made five. Would you cut the arms at the elbow? The legs at the knee? Would the torso remain intact or be hacked in two?
He thought again of the servants relaying bits of the body to obscure corners of Israel. It was such a morbid task, but the god of the Old Testament had demanded stranger sacrifices. At his command, cities had been razed, kings assassinated, children slaughtered by bears. He no longer wondered how the servants must have felt, carrying out the order.
Cal didn’t know if he believed in God, but he believed in the foot. It was a comfort to hear it thud softly against his backpack as he worked his way up the trail, offering a strange sense of direction, of satisfaction. He knew now that he had made the right choice. Eventually, he would crest the ridge, and the trail would level out to the clearing where most campers stayed. When it did, he felt certain he would know what to do, and he would be prepared to do it.
00
Holden Tyler Wright is pursuing an MFA in creative writing from Bowling Green State University. He has fiction published and forthcoming in Cahoodaloodaling, Barren Magazine, and, perhaps, @holdenwrightnow.
00
00
00
00
00 ← prv 0000000000 → 0 toc 0 ← 0000000000 nxt → 00 