T.W: Death (Human, Animal), Murder.

“I’m real tired of all that touristy shit.” Imani grumbled, crossing her arms on the table and leaning in, “Café du Monde and all that bull.”

Jocelyn’s eyes drifted to the side to observe the pigeons getting fat on table scraps, sugar-loaded beignets from the tourists.

“I swear, if I have to run one more historical tour of the French Quarter, I’m going to perdre l’esprit, ouei? C’est connerie!” She huffed and took a rough, irritated bite out of her muffuletta.

“I killed my dog yesterday.” Jocelyn muttered into her straw and stirred her ice.

“Jesus, Joce!” Imani sat back in her chair, “What the fuck?”

“He was dying of cancer.” Jocelyn blew an air bubble in her Sprite and raised her piercing eyes to meet her friend’s, “I got out my great-grandma’s rifle and shot him.”

“That is not where I saw this conversation going.” Imani said, “Couldn’t you have taken him to a vet? Gotten him euthanized?”

“Too expensive and you know it, Immy.” She sighed, “Fortunately, my step-grandad loves making vintage bullets, so I could fill the chamber.”

Imani shook her head and muttered, “Jesus!”

A few minutes passed in silence until the waiter came, and they ordered spumoni to share.

“I’ve decided, I’m quitting my day job.”

Jocelyn nodded slowly, “And you’re going to be a writer?”

“Bien sur! C’est ma rêvée! I’ll write historical fiction. Something set in the south of France. Doesn’t that sound romantic?”

A small smile peaked on the corner of Jocelyn’s mouth as she hogged the pistachio ice-cream while Imani waged war on the chocolate and cherry. They finished and split the check down the middle, Imani not seeming to mind that Jocelyn ate more than her in the slightest. Jocelyn made less money than her as a taxidermist.

“You want to take the trolly?” Jocelyn asked, walking at her side towards the stop.

“Too many tourists.” She grumbled, shoving her hands in her large, sherpa jacket pockets, “I’d rather walk and be a little late.”

Jocelyn looked up to the gray sky and Imani watched her best friend close her eyes and breathe in.

“Did you hear that they’re running out of ABCs to call hurricanes? I think there’s one coming. The air seems pregnant.”

She paused on the sidewalk and considered her question, “I think I heard something about that. And yeah, Je pense qu’il y aura une tempête.”

“’Une tempête’, huh? That almost sounds beautiful.”

“Yeah,” Imani sighed, knocking her knuckles on a nearby fencepost.

“I’d better get home. And you know where I live.” Jocelyn said, turning to her friend as they reached another trolly stop.

“Ouai, in the middle of freaking nowhere!” She sniggered, then schooled her features, “Okay,” She said, “I’ll see you later?”

“See you later.” Jocelyn agreed.

They hugged for a few moments and then Imani waved as she continued walking to the tourist tour center ‘Artie’s Haunted French Quarter and Mausoleum Tours.’

Jocelyn watched her go, then fixed her attention ahead to the rail lines. The old-fashioned car packed with tourists arrived at her stop and she boarded, swiping her card. She went to stand near the front, squeezing her full form into a 1 1/2 square feet. It was an hour-long ride as she stood silently among the chatter of families returning to hotels, commuters returning to apartments, until she hit the city limits. She got off the trolly and found her faithful, red-rusted truck parked in the grass behind a bar and started the engine. She didn’t park in the city. Parallel parking was a nightmare with the huge brute of a vehicle.

Jocelyn climbed into the creaky driver’s seat, turned the key, pulled it out of park and drove out from the back of the bar along the barely paved road, heading west.

She bit her lip as she drove, keeping herself awake. She should have gotten that espresso at dinner, but she didn’t want to cost Imani the extra three-fifty. The farm came into view and her dogs came to greet her, she slid out of the seat and ruffled their fur. Instead of going into the house, she made her way into the largest barn.

She opened the padlock and stripped the heavy chain from the door, throwing it on the ground. Then she did the same with the lock on the trapdoor and descended the creaky wooden stairs into the basement.

The body was still there.

She just had to figure out what to do with it.

What had once been her cousin lay rag-dolled on the ground, ass sticking up into the air. He would have hated being seen in such a position. The thought just made her grimace, knowing that smiling is inappropriate, but still finding humor in the ridiculous, her face twitched.

Jocelyn turned her mind back to the method of disposal at hand. Unfortunately, she didn’t have pigs this year, they would eat anything. And that would be that.

She sat down on a hay bale and thought. She had bought herself time and an alibi of sorts, just in case. And Imani would never think that she had murdered her own cousin.

She rubbed her eyes and felt some granules of sleep under her palms, she might as well get some coffee. She trod up the stairs again and sealed the hatch, padlocking it again from the outside, and did the same with the barn doors after shooing her unruly dogs out.

They loped along happily beside her as she sighed and walked through the tall grass to her barely illuminated house. She opened her front door, screen first. She flipped the lights on and let the dogs in, and they scampered all over the floors and knocked into furniture in their glee.

Jocelyn took the hallway down to the kitchen, and began setting up to make coffee. She grabbed her Krispy Kreme ground coffee bag from the top shelf with the squeaky hinge and the can of powdered chicory beside it. She boiled water in a kettle over her gas stove until it whistled, and poured the water into the French-press, which had the coffee grounds and just a dash of chicory, to taste.

She bent down and pet any part of a dog that came near her until her coffee had finished steeping. Then she poured herself a cup in a chipped Peppermint Patty mug and took a long sip. It tasted earthy and bitter on her tongue from the chicory. She swallowed and pursed her lips, running her tongue across her teeth to suck out the brown granules.

“Alright,” She sighed, “Time to go deal with it.”

She took a few long gulps of her coffee and set it down next to the sink to wash later.

When she turned around, her eyes met with the dining table, and the seat at the head of the table, facing the back screen door. In the dim and flickering house lights she could still see the dark impression of blood. And the slight smear on the wall and screen door ahead, where the blood had splattered. She had spent all afternoon cleaning it all up, after dragging the body to the barn.

She winced. She would have to get rid of the table, and it was a family heirloom. She could keep the chairs, she decided, and take the table outside to be chopped into firewood.

Incinerating the body wouldn’t work, the smoke would either attract humans or animals, or the flames would not work effectively enough to cook away everything. She slipped into deep thought with her hands gripping the sink behind her, leaning back. A few years ago, when her Pa was with her, they could raise pigs, because it was at the very least a two-person job. But one of them, Missy, had died in childbirth, along with most of her progeny. Pa had cleared out her sty and lay down a spread of hay, and layered good peat, and horse manure on top of the bodies, and they had rotted away to bones after a few months.

Jocelyn remembered holding the tiniest skull she had ever seen in her life in her hands, after digging through the compost pile to use for fertilizer, and the piglet’s skull broke into little pieces at the barest press of her fingers. She had cried then, just like the day around three months before when the mother sow and most of her piglets had died.

She pushed off the counter and walked over to bend down and smooth her hands over the surface of the blood-darkened southern live oak and sighed.

Tomorrow she would go to her neighbor’s farm and beg some manure from Dug McGaughey. For now, she could break down the table and set the sty up with some hay. Then get to bed as soon as possible to wake up at the ass-crack of dawn to catch Dug before he went to milk.

Jocelyn pushed her way out the back screen door and found her ax resting notched in the worn-down stump of an oak. Wrenching the ax out, some dogwood petals slid past her on the wind from the copse of flowering trees around her. Now she just needed to find the gumption to chop up six generations of family dinners, loud and messy breakfasts, and all the graces that were said by elders of moral and religious propriety.

Jocelyn went back inside and knelt by the nearest table leg, and aimed skillfully, taking a practice swing. Then she struck, and little splinters sprayed out into the air and scattered on the floor. She realized she would have to pick up all of them to spare her dogs’ paws from stepping on the tiny hazards. She set down her ax and left the leg half-cut as she went to go shoo all the dogs out of the house.

Once she locked the door and returned to her work, she still felt guilty for locking them out of getting a night’s sleep on various small beds, cushions, or armchairs. But they had their own little insulated barn next to the chickens with food and water and some beds. She picked up her ax and assured herself that they would be fine.

She knocked off the leg and the table leaned over slightly. She caught it and skirted around to its mirror side and repeated the process. In two whacks the second leg broke off, and the table tipped to rest in an upward dog position, only propped up by its last two legs. They were gone in short order, and soon the legless table was turned on its side and slid through the screen door and thrown down the stairs.

Inside, Jocelyn gathered the legs and shoved them into her woodfire burner that led to her oven. Then she went back outside, grabbed her ax, and dragged the tabletop by the edge over to the stump and set it overtop it.

She looked down at the light-wash oak, and the dark pooling at the head of the table, and the splatter shot down the middle, and gripped the ax tighter. To get through this, she would think of all the times she had nothing but coffee and chicory alone at the head of this table.

The ax came down weakly against the wood. Hesitation marks were evident in the fissure, and it had hardly cracked. She in a way felt like she was beheading herself with this motion, coming down on the stain, where she had once often laid her head when Pa was gone.

She squeezed her eyes shut then opened them abruptly, then came down with purpose. The wood split down the middle, severing the table in two. The table got broken down into smaller and smaller pieces until each piece was roughly the size of a whiskey bottle. All of the pieces got stacked in the wood pile, then she re-struck the ax and left it in the oak stump.

She swept the kitchen and cleaned it over again, top to bottom, and by the time she was done, it was one AM. She sluggishly changed into a stained college t-shirt to somewhere she never went and a set of cow-print pj shorts and collapsed into bed. She groaned and fumbled across her bedside table for her pillbox and water bottle.

Taking the pills, she swigged from the water bottle, swallowing hard then putting the bottle back and falling back down onto the pillow. She was so bone-tired she fell asleep instantly, but like always, rose without the need for an alarm, as the first rays of light reached her eyelids through the east-facing window.

Jocelyn cracked her back as she got up and stretched. She pulled on some duck-boots as she trudged out to feed the chickens and check on the dogs.

Once those duties were complete, she climbed into her truck and headed for the nearest McDonalds. She acquired two sausage McMuffins, two hashbrowns, and two coffees; one coffee black, and one loaded with more cream and sugar than coffee.

Placing the black coffee into her cupholder, Jocelyn packed away the other coffee and food in a thermal lunch box to keep everything warm on the twenty-five-minute drive to Dug McGaughey’s place. At the entrance to the farm, there were chains locking the waist-high gate, so she parked on the other side and vaulted over with her thermal lunch box in hand.

She checked her watch: six-thirty. He should be done with the cows now and onto feeding. She grabbed the bag and removed the creamy coffee, so she could carry it without spilling it. She walked in the general direction of where his livestock would be kept. She just followed the noise of animals waking up.

Once a man with a bent back was in sight, she drew in some breath, “I come bearing food!” She called, hefting the greasy McDonald’s bag like a prize, though her flushed face betrayed the trepidation she was feeling inside.

The man turned around; right hand still curled into the feed bag. His hair was gray and frizzy, long and tied back in a ponytail, and so was his beard. His cutting blue eyes flashed as he saw the fast food, and within seconds, the old man was in front of her, feed bag already set down, gnarled hand already wrapped around the coffee cup.

“McDonalds?” His voice crackled in delight as he cracked open the plastic lid to check the contents and the cream to coffee ratio. Seeing what he liked, he began drinking deeply, then popped the cap back on, and prying the bag out of Jocelyn’s hand and digging through it. She knew he had the envie for it.

He pulled out the hashbrown and munched on it, a little bit of grease slipping down to gloss his beard.

“How’d ja get it so warm? You got a microwave in that truck?” He mumbled around mouthfuls of McMuffin.

“I keep telling you, it’s a thermal lunch box.”

“Right, right, thermal lunch box, right…” He nodded and wiped the crumbs off his mouth and deeper into his beard with the back of his hand.

“Can I ask something?” She ventured, tucking the box under her armpit.

Relieved that he had accented to letting her shovel some of the horse manure into bags she paid for in a few dimes, she headed back to her truck and slammed the door shut with an exhausted sigh.

On the drive back she ripped bites out of her cold hashbrown and sipped the remnants of her coffee until she reached her own muddy driveway. She drove up to the stys, to the picket fence, and turned off the ignition.

She then hauled each of the bags of manure from the truck bed and set them heavily down next to the base layer of hay that she had made the night before. She laid down the first layer of manure, then retrieved some more hay and some johnsongrass clippings from the mower to lay over top. After another layer of manure, she decided that it was time for the body.

Jocelyn lured her dogs, who had been sniffing around her workspace the whole afternoon, into the house and locked them inside. She ignored their howls of betrayal and dismay with a wince, then continued to the barn’s basement. The body had not slid even a little onto its belly, gravity having no effect due to rigor mortis on his propped position. She grabbed his body by the armpits then looped her strong left arm, not that her right arm was weaker, around his front and ascended the ladder holding onto the corpse.

Upon reaching the barn floor, Jocelyn rolled her cousin’s body like a tight wicker ball up onto the dirty wood, its face then once again met with and rested on the floor. She got up onto the floor and shut the trapdoor with a puff of dust: it was go time.

Jocelyn lugged the body through the fields and to the sty that lay waiting. She got to the pie of fertilizer and bulking material she had just loaded in a mere thirty minutes earlier. She tossed her cousin onto the pile and began adding more bulking in the form of lawn clippings and hay, then packing the flesh and bones in with manure.

She finished it off with a sprinkling of hay over the top that made it look like a chocolate sundae topped with toasted coconut flakes. But it smelled like shit, and she smelled like shit. She would need a long shower, thank you.

She locked up the sty’s pen and gate to hopefully keep out the dogs. She would have to get some more fancy dog toys from the Pet’s Smart’s dumpster to keep them busy for the next three or so months. Take them hunting more often.

The shower was bliss, until the hot water shut off, and Jocelyn sighed and turned it to cold to continue showering. She brushed her teeth, got dressed for bed, took her pills, and turned out the lights.

When her body hit the bed the exaustion mouldered at her bones, turning her soft and weak. 

If she didn’t know any better, the faint smell of manure still clinging to her along with the cool breeze from the open window could have tricked her into believing she was out there in that stall, laying in all that rot. 

Decaying.