The Field: A Short Story

Prologue

*

The clanging gold bell had protested more vehemently than usual, as the glass door, within a delicate metal frame, slammed against the doorpost of the cozy little café. Logan Malthus wrapped his navy blue coat around his slender body, much like how he’d used his bony arms, as they bound him like a rope. In discomfort, he waded through the heavy foot traffic, usual for a Friday night in the centre town of Crystal City. Logan’s pale, skinny, bony face was mostly covered by the jacket’s flapping raised collars and the black beanie that almost licked his eyelashes, as he walked through the melee of bodies. He headed to a little parking lot outside of the busy, festive-like center town.

No sooner had he been seen strutting into the parking lot had a tiny old red convertible roared out onto the road and petered off into the distance. The slightly cracked window meant that sounds of his frustrated screams could be heard from yards away.

Logan through a fit, as the car next to him at the traffic-light would attest, as the slender stranger noted the pantomime displays of rage and assault inflicted on the steering wheel.

Logan’s date had stood him up for only the second time.

He’d wanted to crawl into a hole and die, and so, he did the next best thing, stopping at the liquor store on his way home, for his piqued night had turned solitary, as it were.

It was a grey and dark evening. The air was humid enough to drown one’s lungs. Throwing the kaki paper bag into the adjacent, empty passenger seat, Logan would feel a sudden calm. He consoled himself with the notion that he’d dodged a bullet on that one, sweeping the remaining dust of hope under the rug of his car. At a sturdier pace, and unknowingly avoiding a speeding ticket that evening, Logan now drove down his street.

Coral was a dry, sparsely settled suburb, the only home he’d ever known. He lived in the house that his parents had left to him, a thirty minutes’ drive out of Crystal City. The music volume was raised to obnoxious window-reverberating levels when the pale thin figure had cracked open the bottle.

But just as he’d gotten too lax, having even reclined his seat, as his petite car ebbed along. He noticed the hair on his body rise up instantly. Logan sat up, erectly. A blue crackling light of electricity had flashed in front of him. The car came to an instant halt. Logan slapped his face and looked around, frantically, hoping that the neighboring house that he’d just then been passing had also seen that something strange that had appeared and just as soon disappeared from sight.

As if things had gone back to normal, and just as soon as his foot had gently pressed on the gas, an old man fell from the sky, seemingly having appeared out of nowhere. In the blink of an eye, Logan’s breath was cut out as he watched the squirming man who’d crashed onto his windshield, through the spider-web like crack in the glass.

The part-time delivery boy, and fulltime procrastinating twenty four year old, had zealously stepped out of his car, only to remain frozen in place. The bloodied grey haired man groaned in pain. In agony, he reached his hand out to the statute that stood above him, shivering, he begged for help. Logan was overwhelmed. And then, as if having been stung by a wasp, Logan’s eyes had shot wide open.

He wriggled his phone out of his pocket, in a panic. But as he dialed for the ambulance and other emergency services, two digits into the three digit number, the dying elder would protest, almost trying to getting his clearly impaled back up even more twisted. The squeamish elder fell back down, almost pathetically.

No hospit- No hosp-

The forced words would protrude from the grey haired man’s bleeding mouth. Logan got the message. No hospitals.

Logan wasn’t taken aback by the request not to go the official route, having lived in Coral for as long as he had. But this old man didn’t stink of crime. Why would he be averse to the authorities? A plethora of thoughts raced through Logan’s mind in the split seconds that elapsed. Then it dawned on him. The electrical discharge had happened just seconds before the old sack of bones had smashed into his car’s windscreen… But what was the connection between the two incidents?

Logan had an idea. He remembered the two trolleys that he’d stashed in his shed, and how they could connect to form a bi-platform train. He could carry the old man into his house and call Cassie over. The Coral-raised social worker was the neighborhood’s makeshift doctor, and lifesaver to many an overdosed victim.

2

Ah, c’mon Steve-O, you know better than to have a woman waiting for you to show up. You did show up, right?

Cassie Malthus had given Steve her trademark stare down, her face looking twenty years older and replete with grimace made wrinkles.

"Well, you’re always cutting me off. And now you want to hear the