Taking care of business

Taking care of business, by Martyn Winters

“Taking care of business” is the way Charlie described it. He left me and his greasy faced brother, Carl, loitering near the old cowshed while he disappeared into the hayloft with Marla, her bright red ankle socks, and plump legs the last we saw of her before the giggles turned to screams.

I turned to Carl, who was kicking frozen crumbs of cowpat at a scary-looking carrion crow perched on the rusting handle of an arcane farm implement. “Do you think we ought to do something, Carl?”

“Nah,” he said, spitting a gobbet of tobacco at the cowpat, “it always ends this way.”

I looked at the rickety ladder, which was little more than tinder nailed to a pair of struts, no precision in its making, and imagined myself plunging to an inevitable death on the shattered glass fragments of ice forming a spiked crust on the rolled-up wire netting and garden tools twenty feet below the ladder’s summit.

“It sounds like he’s hurting her.” I tried to appeal to his sense of duty, but the Kornbluths had none, and he met my appeal with little more than a raised eyebrow and a face full of contempt. The whole family lacked boundaries.

“Yah. Probably is.” He resumed his crow taunting and turned his back to me with a finality that made me think he’d been here before.

“But we’ve got to stop him.” I tried once again, partly to salve my conscience, but also because I’d already envisaged the personal consequences, and saw jail in my future. The Kornbluths were all built to survive incarceration, but I wasn’t, not physically nor mentally. The thought brought an icier shiver than the frigid air. I had to do something.

The screams were getting louder and more staccato, echoing across the frozen fields of the abandoned farm. I ran to the ladder, sliding on the ice as I went.

“Hey, where’re you going?” Alarm spread across Carl’s face. He lived in fear of his elder sibling. Charlie was almost an adult, with enough hand spread to encompass my face, arms roped with muscle and sinew from lifting engines in the family junkyard, and a force of nature temper that lived on the edge of a fault line.

He started laughing – a gurgling chuckle worryingly reminiscent of a thousand Southern inbred movies that never ended well for the foolhardy hero.

“You think you’re gonna stop Charlie? YOU. You gonna stop CHARLIE?”

I didn’t look back as I clambered up the ladder, certain there was some knee slapping going on behind me. At the top, I could see Charlie’s heavy-set shape heaving rhythmically a dozen yards in front of me and crept across the floor, tensing my small body, ready to hurl myself at him.

He stopped, and all that was left was a slow wheezing.

Marla stepped from behind a thick cross section of beams holding a pitchfork, a bruise below her right eye swelling, her lipstick smeared across her face, a red cloud of pain decorating the tight, hard line of her lips.

“You came to rescue me,” she said in a monotone. “I don’t need rescuing. Not anymore.”

She plunged the pitchfork into Charlie’s back, and his wheezing ceased.

“I’ve taken care of business,” she said as she fell to her knees.

(c) Martyn R Winters 2022.

Author’s note. This flash fiction was inspired by a Tweet I made for the daily #VSS365 hashtag.