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He was bleeding out in a patch of wildflowers, moonlight catching in his glassy eyes. His bolt action rifle crushed bulbs beneath the bulk of its body. The man had a gloved hand pressed against the wound in his abdomen. Dying people often looked serene. This man was challenging the notion; he’d die as ugly as he was pissed and rot with that mad unyielding snarl smeared across his face.
Uri stood nearby in his dark cassock, holding an oil lamp and waiting just far enough away to not be considered a threat. He’d found the man sprawled like that and had planned to examine him. But. It didn’t matter how cautiously or quietly he moved, and it didn’t matter how softly he spoke; if he dared to come any closer the man would reach for and lift his rifle with those sturdy gloves, and he’d breathe so raggedly from the effort that Uri would fall back.
It wasn’t his intention to kill the man through exhaustion.
Uri studied him in the glow of his lamp light. He inhaled deeply through his nose. The air was rich with the stench of human blood. This man was young. A little too young to look as bitter as he did.
“I wonder what a pretty little church mouse is doin’ all the way out here.” The stranger had a grin that could inspire vivid and persistent night terrors. Uri gripped at the handle to his lamp as the man continued, “All alone in the woods in the middle of the night. There ain’t a monastery or a temple or nothin’ on the maps.. Now ain’t that funny?”
“I’d like to help you. Please just-”
The stranger barked a smoker’s laugh that frightened crows into flight. The flock blotted out the eerie yellow light of the moon above. He was pale as a sheet, perspiration building on his brow and long strands of his hair plastered to his forehead because of it. That laugh twisted into a string of coughs. The man shut his eyes. Not long enough to rest, the pair cracking themselves back open to train on Uri. They shut again, longer this time. Those blinks grew in number until the man grew too tired to keep up the charade.
Uri watched the man give himself over to God.
His cabin wasn’t the best substitute for an operating room. Uri made do.
The stranger’s body was this tale of mystery and heartache. A novel bound in flesh. Uri had undressed him to tend to new wounds and to examine old ones. The man was likely one of the criminally insane ones that spent their short lifetimes chasing after ghost stories. And it seemed a ghost story had tried to put him to death that night among the wildflowers.
The man woke four days later with a start, and Uri had flinched because of it, dropping a basket full of fresh picked mint. The man had just sat up in bed, like he’d been doing an impression of a spontaneous resurrection, panting and snapping his delirious eyes about in search of something.
Uri stooped to pluck bits of mint from the floor, strands of ash blonde hair falling into his field of vision. “I put your gun away for safekeeping. Please calm down.” He winced at the sound of the bed creaking, peeking up from where he was crouched to watch the man try and fail to get himself out of bed.
That strained expression suggested he’d need more than a few days to recover. Uri returned his gaze to the floor.
“I’ll return it to you when you leave.”
“Planning to nurse me back to health and everything. Aren’t you precious?” The man laughed about it as he collapsed back into bed, head falling upon a threadbare pillow. “I sure do love you self-loathing leeches. Y’all are always beggin’ to be put out of your misery, like there’s somethin’ noble about suicide. Do you want it painless, or should I make it hurt?”
Uri stared down at his basket of mint. “...Do whatever you see fit with me.”
“Oh?” The man found a silver case on the side table. He popped it open, peering down at a row of hand rolled cigarettes. He plucked one up and set it between his chapped lips, shaking a match out of a matchbox and striking it. He lit the end aglow as he watched Uri with eyes that laughed. “What’cha do, eat some kids with a small side of widows?”
Uri stood and strode towards a long table shoved up against the far wall, silently setting the basket beside an empty one. The curtains in the cabin were open. There was a budding line of pink just along the horizon. Dawn. Uri could feel an itch starting at the back of his neck. He should close the curtains. He didn’t move from the table.
“Damn. Worse than eating kids?” The man exhaled acrid smoke. The smell of it had Uri wrinkling his nose. “Does the church mouse have a name?”
“Uri Reiss.”
“Now ain’t that smooth? I like it, it’s a name that holds weight. Power. Well Uri Reiss, I think I’ll do you a favor and make it hurt. I think that’s what you deserve.” The man hadn’t shook his match out. His laughing eyes were on the flame now, and he was watching how slowly it was eating its way down the match stick, towards his fingertips. There was black beneath his nails. Uri figured it was the accumulated ash of the dead. “Don’t you want to know mine?”
“Not particularly.”
“There ain’t any romance in putting you down if you don’t know my name. It’s important to me.” The man blew out the match. “It’s Kenny.”
Kenny liked to talk.
Kenny talked for hours, and it occurred to Uri that he hadn’t said much of anything in response. He sat in a chair reading scripture, turning brittle pages. And Kenny talked.
About what, Uri couldn’t say for sure. Throughout the entirety of his long life, even when he’d been human, people took his grave silence to mean he was listening intently. That had never been the case. Sometimes he’d blink out of his dazes and find that people had confessed whole entire sins.
He talked as Uri cooked him stew.
He talked as Uri blew on a spoon for him.
And he was only quiet when Uri pressed it into his mouth, allowing himself to be fed with a surprising amount of obedience.
When night fell, Uri silently left in the middle of their one-sided conversation. He returned to find a deeply annoyed Kenny, and the man hissed, “Ain’t anybody teach you to say excuse me? Pardon me?”
Uri was toting a bucket of lake water. He set it beside the bed and rolled up the sleeves to his cassock. “You may continue, Kenny, I’m listening.”
“Shit, are you? Am I talking to myself here? Christ.”
Uri tugged open the side table’s drawer, taking a rag from within. He crouched to soak it in the bucket. “Please go on.”
Kenny sucked at his teeth, skin flushing beet red from agitation. Uri wrung out the rag over the bucket.
“Fine. So I was sayin’. This leech was working in a hospice. She lived on bad blood. The real sick ones, the doomed ones. It made her weak. Couldn’t wrap my head around her decision to do that. To live like that. She told me that being sick was as close as she could get to being human again. And I thought... Are you listening? Hello?”
Uri had preoccupied himself with peeling back the blankets. He cleaned the man’s bare skin with pass overs of the rag. Kenny seemed comfortable in his nudity, easily and wordlessly shifting to give Uri access to wherever. “Please lift your arms.”
Kenny sucked at his teeth a second time, eyes narrowing. He followed the order, watching with an unrestrained look of hate. Like disrespect was the only thing that counted as a sin in Kenny’s world. Uri just wasn’t very good at conversation. Had never been. He cleaned beneath the man’s arms. Along his chest, smoothing what hair that grew there down. Careful around his bandages. He moved back to dunk the rag once more. He wrung it out and when he returned, he reached for in between the man’s legs. He was halted by Kenny’s big mitt wrapping around his wrist.
“Now unless you’re plannin’ on givin’ me the ride of my life...”
Uri shook his grasp, washing the man’s sex mechanically, peering down at his thick tuft of wiry pubic hair. “And what did you think?”
“What?” Kenny was staring down with such focus and concentration, thighs occasionally twitching but for the most part still.
“What did you think of that? The woman who tried to feel human through disease?” Uri carefully pulled the man’s foreskin back with his thumb and index finger, gently cleaning the pink head with careful swipes of the rag. He released it and watched with dim eyes as the man slowly grew erect. “Did you think there was any truth in it?”
“It was nonsense, Uri. Bitch was talkin’ nonsense. So I let her pray, then I did her a favor. She got ash all over my coat.” The man had slid down to rest on his back, arm tossed over his eyes and long hair fanned out on the white pillowcase. Skin flushed. So healthy and alive, Uri could’ve heard his pulse across the room, across a field, across the length of an entire village. Kenny breathed the word, “Shit.”
The bed creaked as Uri climbed onto it. Kenny didn’t make a sound as the man wrapped the damp rag around his cock. Uri lied himself down, cheek resting on the man’s warm thigh. His eyelids drooped as he stroked him. He did that mechanically too, and if Kenny minded he didn’t say. He finally took a breath. Uri heard it, and he heard the soft exhale of it too.
He heard Kenny strike a match. The odious smell of his tobacco followed.
Kenny probably had bad blood. It wasn’t any wonder it had smelled so awful among the wildflowers.
He masturbated him idly, listening to the blood rushing through his veins. Kenny’s hand wrapped around Uri’s to urge him into stroking him faster. He set the pace, grip strong on Uri’s smaller hand.
Uri let his eyelids droop entirely shut, listening to the man grunt. He stopped stroking him at some point, allowing Kenny to use his hand as he saw fit, the rag falling away and his bare palm meeting the hot skin of his cock.
Uri opened his eyes to watch the man cum on his own stomach. His grip on Uri’s hand was bone crushing. Those that broke, healed. Kenny was abnormally strong for a human and Uri thought that must've been troublesome when sleeping with the living.
They didn’t linger like that.
Kenny smoked and watched Uri a tad too closely as he returned to washing the man just as professionally as he had moments ago. Kenny exhaled smoke, lounging there in his sweat.
“Shit.” He repeated it like there was deeper meaning in it.
Uri dumped the bucket of murky water in the field.
Kenny’s circadian rhythm seemed to be broken entirely because of Uri, who was only ever awake at night. He slept during the day in his chair, his book of scripture lying open in his lap. All curtains in the cabin drawn shut, leaving them in the dark together.
There was something the man asked him to fetch in the clearing, one day. Something he’d dropped.
Uri returned to him with a twine bound journal.
He settled into his chair beside the bed, and stared off towards the window. New moon. There was a fire going in the hearth. He didn’t have much use for the heat but it’d be a bit of bad luck to have his guest die of hypothermia. Not a boogeyman, not a ghost story, but just a really cold night- Kenny likely wouldn’t have been content to go out like that. So the fire glowed in the corner for his sake.
Kenny unbound it. Flipped through entries. There were faces sketched onto pages with dates that spanned years. Uri supposed it was a personal record of the damned. He couldn’t figure out what the use of it would be, and didn’t ask either.
“What did you do?”
“You’ve already judged me.” Uri could make out the stars, just barely. “And I’m not as good of a storyteller as you are, anyway.”
“It’s important.” Kenny had found a pencil in the side table and had begun sketching. Uri watched him in the corner of his eye. “So what did you do?”
Uri pushed himself to stand, only for Kenny to hiss, “Sit. You see me workin’ here and yet you move like it ain’t gonna fuck up my sketch. You’re so damn rude, I swear. No home trainin’, that’s your problem.”
So Uri sat back down, the chair whining beneath his weight. “...What are you doing?”
“There’s not going to be a body left behind when I’m done with you. So I’ll do you another favor, Uri, and keep one in here. How about that? A final resting place.”
“Sentimental of you.”
Kenny sneered and said nothing in reply. So Uri’s eyes returned to the window.
“My sin is existing. But I was afraid to die. I am afraid to die.”
“Yeah, sure, you’re about to shit your drawls. You’ve got one hell of a poker face.”
Uri fell silent, allowing Kenny to focus on his work. There were so many faces in that book. Uri joined the legion of them.
There were some mornings Kenny couldn’t sleep, and he’d want Uri, so he’d take him.
Uri buried his face in the man’s pillow and inhaled the stench of tobacco. He was on his hands and knees, cassock shoved up and pooling around his raised midsection. Kenny held his hips. His hands were younger than Uri’s. Much younger, but rougher. Calloused. He left bruises that healed slowly beneath his fingertips. Kenny's heart was beating so fast. So loud. Uri listened to the sound of it. Grunted as Kenny grabbed at a fistful of his hair and tugged, pulled like he wanted to rip it from his skull. Everything might've hurt under different circumstances. Uri felt nothing.
The headboard slammed into the wall. Uri let himself be fucked. Color didn’t fill his cheeks like it should’ve and he didn’t take a single ragged breath. He didn’t see a lot of purpose in moaning. Arousal hadn’t been something he’d felt since he’d been alive, and even then he’d always suppressed it. Always beat down that spark of something, because he’d wanted so badly to be good. He thought it must’ve been a lot like bedding a corpse and didn’t see what Kenny could be getting out of it.
Humping his cold insides.
Uri dutifully peeled potatoes by lamplight not long after, not a hair out of place. He was only warm between his legs because he was full of the other man’s cum. He was drowsy and waiting for it to be night; he wanted to wash himself down by the lake.
Kenny smoked in bed.
He didn’t have many cigarettes left.
“So what’s it feel like?” Kenny was lying on his side, clammy and tangled in the sheets and watching him peel.
“Intercourse? Nothing.”
“Nothing?” Kenny tapped ash off the end of his cigarette, letting it rain down in the sheets. “Damn, that’s rough. I almost feel sorry for you.”
“Why do you do it with me?” Uri thought that it was maybe a matter of convenience. Kenny cut his eyes to the left like it wasn’t something he was going to be forthcoming about, which was odd since he seemed to be a relatively honest man.
“You said I can do what I see fit.” Kenny took a drag on his cigarette. Exhaled. A plume of smoke. His cabin stank of Kenny by now. “What’s it matter to you?”
And that was the end of the conversation.
Uri had been damned to hell for ages. He didn’t really care how many more sins Kenny imposed on him, the list of them already so long anyway.
Uri bathed in the lake, breaking the surface of it, scattering moonlight.
Kenny sat not too far from the edge of the water, watching him strangely. Uri wouldn’t be able to explain or describe the expression, he only knew it persisted most in times Kenny thought he wasn’t being watched himself.
Uri splashed his face.
He waded towards land dripping. Stooped down for a towel, and grunted as his wet hair was yanked towards Kenny. The man kissed him. Rough, quick.
When he was released he returned to the task of fetching his towel. He lowered his head and dried his hair.
It was not that Uri didn’t think it was possible that Kenny could be fond of him. Fond enough to hold and kiss and fuck him like he was alive. Just that. It would be extraordinarily unlucky if he was. Uri stared at his neatly folded cassock, the towel on top of his head hanging damply.
“Are you still going to do me that favor, Kenny?”
“Yeah.”
“Alright.”
The sketch wasn’t bad, actually. The one of Uri. He looked through that little graveyard in Kenny’s journal. Kenny likely would’ve never let him, but he was asleep and Uri wasn’t and Uri wasn’t so holy he was against taking advantage of him like that.
Everybody had a name.
Everybody had a death date.
Except Uri, who was just a face floating at the back of the journal.
He wound twine back around the journal and left it where he found it.
So Kenny healed.
Uri had no way to tell time. He just knew his was up, personally, and waited in his chair reading scripture while Kenny dressed. He put his hat on last. His rifle was on the bed, and he was staring down at it contemplatively.
Uri turned a page.
“So you’re scared, Uri?”
“I’m terrified.”
Kenny scoffed at his monotone, an ugly grin carving itself into his face. “You must’ve always been like this. Boring, I mean. No flair for the dramatic, no showmanship, no romance. I’ve met leeches that cried, you know. Crocodile tears, but they did it.” Kenny picked up his gun and slung it over his shoulder. His eyes flitted to the window. A full moon. Evil tonight, yellow.
“Pack.”
Uri stared down at his book.
“Kenny...”
“Pack. I ain’t got all night. I’m thinkin’ I find the leech who did me in that night you found me. Make ‘em pay, understand? Then maybe some hooch or... Ah I don’t know. I’m feeling adventurous, basically.”
Uri glanced up at him. Kenny's heart was beating so fast, it must’ve hurt. He wasn’t breathing as much as he should've either, and Uri noted the lack of it.
“How about I kill you tomorrow? How’s that, Uri?”
Uri wondered how long something like that could be postponed.
He wondered how long Kenny could justify it in his head.
“Tomorrow, then.”