FICTION
Back to FictionWolves at the Door
By William Haskins
They’re out there, waiting for me. They think they can shrink into the shadows, but every glowing cigarette tip, every glint of gunmetal in passing headlights, every low murmur of conspiracy gives them away. One in the alley, one on the roof, one in the doorway across the street: the men who’ve come to kill me.
They won’t come inside. They know fighting a desperate man on his own terms, on his own turf—like an animal backed into a corner—is messy business. No guarantees you’ll go home after that kind of day at the office. Besides, they’ve come to gun me down in the street, like an animal.
Make an example of me.
I realize now that I was a fool to think I could run from my past, that I could hide in your arms from the world and all the chaos I’ve inflicted on it. Loving you made me want to shed my skin, like a snake; to somehow become reborn, redeemed. But it was too late. I knew I had sown the seeds of my destruction long before I met you. And now, all the dirt’s come back to bury me.
I could claim I don’t deserve this fate, even profess my innocence. But that would be a lie. My sins are too many to count, and there’s no need for me to confess them. They’re etched into the lines on my face, the scars on my body. The flow like the sickness from my soul… like the blood from these wounds.
I allowed myself to get lost in you. I tricked myself into believing the past was but a fading nightmare, that all my transgressions had been forgiven by time. I felt myself begin to breathe again. I caught myself strolling easily down the street, smiling for no reason, immersing myself in the music of strangers’ conversations. I walked with my head held high, and felt the sun on my face.
I got careless.
The flowers spilled out of the shop onto the sidewalk, an explosion of color and natural perfume. The shopkeeper hovered over them, misting as if gently bathing a thousand children, as a young girl pointed and rattled off the endless stream of questions that spring from the minds of the young.
For so long, I had walked through life like a ghost, locked inside the prison my mind had become, governed only by a bitterness that blurred the line between good and evil into a dull and gray existence. But now the gates were thrown open, and I was saturated to the core by the flowers’ delicate beauty, the serenity of the shopkeeper, and the wide-eyed innocence of the child.
They made me think of you.
I smiled at the little girl, waiting for a pause in her curiosity, a breath that would open the door for me to ask the shopkeeper to arrange his floral masterpiece. Instead, without missing a beat, she turned her conversation to me.
“That manner suits you.”
I looked down at her, at once confused and delighted by the grace of her language, the sharpness of her insight. I was intoxicated by a newfound sense of freedom, a capacity to envision a future free of paranoia and despair. She was right. That manner did suit me. But that’s not what she said…
What she really said was: “That man’s gonna shoot you.”
By the time I processed the words, a bullet had burned its way into my side. I spun around to see the gun still leveled at me, guided by eyes I had looked into long before. The past washed back over me like a tidal wave. In an instant, I was feral again.
I pushed the girl out of the way as the second shot rang out. Her screams echoed in my ears as my flesh was seared by another slug. A woman rushed from the shop and quickly pulled the child out of the fray. The shopkeeper wasn’t so lucky. He tried to grab the attacker and was shot dead immediately.
My survival instinct overtook me, and I darted across the street.
The attacker stepped off the curb to follow, raising his gun. I ducked into the alley just in time to see the cab strike him, launching him through the air and to a splattering death on the pavement. Almost immediately, the wails of sirens cut through the air.
I crept deeper into the alley until I saw the boarded-up window, splintered and split by the unstoppable tide of human desperation. I squeezed through and dropped into a dank, moldy basement.
A vagrant scrambled toward a rickety staircase, whimpering. He looked over his shoulder frightened, and found me struggling to breathe, stooped over with my hands on my knees. He stopped and crept back toward me.
“You okay?”I stood upright, and his eyes widened when he saw my blood-soaked shirt.
“Your jacket,” I said. “I need it.”
He nodded and walked toward me, peeling off his dusty, threadbare denim jacket. He handed it to me and pulled back. I slipped on the jacket to cover the blood and reached into my pocket, retrieving a twenty-dollar bill. I held it out and he took it, timidly, forcing a smile through broken teeth.
“Keep your mouth shut,” I told him—and, then, through sheer force of habit: “or I’ll come back and kill you.”
He went pale, and backed away slowly.
Night fell as I crept through the back door of my building, rounding every corner of the staircase not knowing if I’d make it up another flight. At last, I reached my floor and stepped inside my apartment, locking the door behind me.
My first impulse was to fall into bed, to smell the lingering scent of your hair on my pillow, to lose myself in memories of your breath on my neck, the timbre of your voice, the soft friction of our flesh. But I knew if I lay down, I would go to sleep.
Instead, I doctored my wounds to stem the flow of blood from my shoulder and side. I told myself I could survive this, as I had survived so many times before. But the man who now peers back from the mirror is already dead. His eyes are hollow, his face a sickly white. I don’t have much time.
I could call the police, but what would I tell them? That, after all these years of living by the law of the jungle, I’m now prepared to genuflect before the laws of man? Throw myself on their mercy? That’s a fool’s game. They see no distinction between me and the predators outside—and in the blinded sight of justice, we would surely meet the same fate.
I could take down the box from my closet shelf, so long forgotten. The tools of my trade in that former life. With a night-vision scope and rifle, I could clean off the street in a matter of seconds. But they would only send more. They always send more.
I wish I could run to you, take you in my arms and spirit you away before they could discover where we’ve gone. Someplace where I could pay penance for betraying your trust and seek absolution in your heart for all those lies I never spoke, but lived.
But I know I can never see you again. I know that would only condemn you to death alongside me, and I refuse to sacrifice you for my sins. My greatest regret is that I can never ask you for your forgiveness except in this wretched letter. Just know that I never meant to deceive you; I only wanted to deceive myself.
The men outside are the only logical end to my story. I’ve dodged and outrun and sidestepped my fate for too long, and the world never forgets. It tracks you through the guilt, the sorrow and the anger. It lets it eat you from inside, like a disease, until you’re numb to the pain, until the sickness is so long in your bones that you can no longer even recognize it. And then the ground opens beneath your feet and swallows you.
That’s all that’s left to me now. My killers have waited long enough.
And so have I.