Chapter Four

A Long Way Down

We teach children that they should always tell the truth, but I don’t want what follows to be true because I don’t know how to carry it. It happened to me—as dreams happen—when I was young and living in Port Butler. The truest thing I know is that I and my older brother Flynn, when we were twelve and fourteen, found in a ditch bloomed with algae and trickling out from Bayou Chaqueteau, a hand severed just above the wrist, tied with ribbon to a bundle of deflated mylar balloons. As I recall it now, the images flash like phantasms, eldritch and strange, not like the other memories I have of those years. I remember riding down to the lakeshore on humid afternoons, fishing the shallows until the heat grew too oppressive. I remember queuing up at Mr. Antoine’s sno-ball stand, calling out for cherry-lime, and devouring the icy sweetness as it ran down our chins—mine and my brother’s. Memories can be mutual, but two don’t share dreams.

We never spoke of it. I tried not even thinking of it. I could go for years untroubled by the thought, but that ghastly spectacle always crept back from some sick depth, where I had put it. There it might react to some lesser trauma, and I would drive it off with something. Drink helped, but the mornings came and made it worse. Exercise or picking a fight—those things sent it back into its hole though. Normally, I kept all passage to it sealed, occluded like a stopped artery. I’m only telling it now because my therapist said I should. She got it out of me by dumb luck last week when she wasn’t even trying. I lost my composure, and now she thinks the hole it’s in just might go a long way down toward the bottom of what’s the matter with me.

Excerpted from A Long Way Down, by Rick Hoffman, now available on Amazon in paperback and Kindle formats.