Shallow Graves

“Why do you keep saying that?!”Eric barked at Dennis, his younger brother. The city lights twinkled in the blackness around them, the crisp night air tingling their bare arms. Dennis stepped forward, intimidating the shorter and slightly built Eric but also putting him in his place. This was in no way his fault. There was a bleeding man in pain on the red earth next to them too frail and fearful to make any shouts for help.

“Because you need to understand that this is the story you have to tell the Police. If you thought she was bad we must make both of them disappear.” The way Dennis said ‘she’ said everything anyone would ever need to know about his Stepfather’s mistress, who lay buried in a shallow grave a little to their right. Their Stepfather did not know this but as he lay helpless on the ground, hands and feet bound behind him by tight ropes, suspected that she had met a fate not dissimilar to his. The wan moonlight illuminated silver beads of sweat forming on Eric’s forehead. His right hand was starting to get sticky. The metallic smell of blood wafted upwards to his nostrils, stinging them and jolting his gut.

“You do not have to keep repeating how he rapes Erica to me!” Eric spat. His twin sister was in hospital nursing wounds no teenager should ever have to bear. Dennis had finally acted on the raging impulses that flooded his mind each time Erica’s cries had betrayed their Stepfather’s visit to her room. He figured he was the only one with the guts to defend the family as he kicked the older man in the ribs and heard him heave heavily, thereafter spitting what could have only been blood.

“Remember the witch you were planning on killing our mother with?” Dennis asked their Stepfather.

He did not reply. Dennis did not care. Laughing, almost maniacally, as he recounted the details of how they had discovered the murder plot.

“That was not it at all.” Their Stepfather managed to say, his breath displacing some of the dust in front of his mouth.

“We do not care now.” In one move, Dennis swung the dirty machete in the air and hacked at his Stepfather’s neck, sending warm blood spurting all over his bare ankles and feet. Eric’s mind slowed down to a crawl when he heard the half moan, half gurgling sound the writhing man made. It reminded him of the Easter goat Dennis had slaughtered the year before, one short hour after receiving his last brutal beating from the man who now lay still, dying. Eric’s stomach gave up its contents and like the blood, chunks of his late lunch rested in their fetid pool of gastric fluid on the same earth that kept receiving a steady flow of blood.

“Pass me the hoe,” Dennis said after Eric’s retching had ceased. “We need to finish and go. Tomorrow’s exam starts at 9, but today we’re free.”