Blue Boy Hanging
They reach the shallow bank, where an old oak feeds from the river and hangs its heavy head. Suspended from a thicker branch, hanging from a rope, is a sagging, layered shape of thin material. It tosses in the breeze and, after a picking up in strength, flips frontways where a pair of circular slits stare out. The butcher approaches the hanging tree and notices the texture—dried and clouded like fried rice paper or a snake’s molting. Now, he sees fingers and toes, the slump of arms and legs, the skin of a hanging man.
“Would you please take it down?” Sawyer stands a ways back, thumbing at the pinkie of his glove. “Has to have been hangin’ up there for a while now.” He stops, then starts again. “Could you please take it down?”
The butcher’s breath comes quick, and he turns. He knows how he must stare by the way the snag of the other man’s grin has fled. And it may be how his heart beats like a scattered strawberry beneath the curve of his clavicle or how the crescent moon shadows his shallow face. Sawyer’s eyes grow dull and his cheeks purple in a blush. The butcher turns back and tugs down the skin, though slightly torn now.
“Ew. Ugh. Sorry,” says the butcher. He hoists the molting into his arms and carries it as Sawyer hums a tune better suited for the harmonica. A cloud has shielded the moon. They head for the town. The cold has not yet gotten to him.
“Now be quiet here, alright?” They hush up, though Sawyer’s wet shuffle persists, and follow the wide road down to the small cemetery. The butcher takes them to an open grave. He drops the dry skin into the earth. It falls like a dress fluttering from a laundry line, but one weighted by water, and not a pretty one. The two stare into the hole, the molting tangled in its paper-thick limbs. Its mouth agape as if frozen in a scream.
“Reckon we’d look like bodysnatchers to some poor passersby?” says Sawyer.
“Reckon,” says the butcher, laughing.
They fall back to the edge of town. Sawyer pushes his hat tighter onto his head, pulling air through his lips and puffing his cheeks. His pink tongue rests behind his teeth like a sleeping snake, red walls of muscle flexing as he swallows spit.
“What was it like?” asks the butcher.
“Hm?”
“Hanging?”
Here Sawyer tips his head and basks in the moonlight filtering over the prairie. The substance of his body glows like a lone ember beneath a pile of suffocating ash. He has pale hair and pale eyes, but translucent blue flesh. He must have hanged, pleaded to live or die, died, and then wriggled from the burden of his skin only to bare himself again to the vast, empty prairie. What was it like?
“Humiliating.”
They part and the butcher goes back to his shop, back to his bed. He dreams of a cut splitting down his forearm and continuing to split till the layer of skin falls away, and he feels so achingly cold.
The next day, he is ruled to be hanged.
He wakes early in the morning to the sheriff leering over his cot. The butcher does not know his crime, but the judgment is a quick one. His death, it is decided, will take place late that evening. Now he sits on an old, gasping horse beneath the hanging tree, a rope gripping tight around his neck, his hands bound at the small of his back.
“The hanging of one Davey Mashton is founded upon conspiracies with the known outlaw Bobby Sawyer and the Devil himself, whose hands must’ve slipped the boy from his rightful noose,” shouts the sheriff. He readies his gun, facing his fiery tongue to the sky.
Davey stares down at the townspeople gathered in a loose ring around the tree. There is a roughness to his breath that he has never known before, which tears at and dries his throat, and there is also a dull hunger in the crowd, as they press their bodies tight and bulge their star-split eyes. He should scream. He should curse God. He should spit from his high place like a king, but he does not.
Far off at the horizon sits a man on his horse. Even from the distance, Davey can make out the brilliant glow of this blue man drinking the universe’s moonshine. The moon has broken through the clouds, lighting the prairie like a fire. And now he knows.
Bernadette Lehel ‘26
This is an excerpt from the ending of a 10-page piece of prose I recently completed. In this short story, I wanted to explore themes of insecurity within the human condition and the raw humiliation that comes with having purpose. I was directly inspired by Westerns and other cowboy media as well as numerous Southern Gothic technical influences, such as Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying.