Cass by Catherine Herlihy

Someone’s dog had been barking for hours.

I was drinking Natural Light on the front porch, listening to the static on the police scanner. Not a lot going on tonight. I hadn’t bothered dragging my amp out onto the porch because the sky’s bowels were rumbling like it was going to be sick. I was trying out some new riffs on my electric guitar. Nothing was quite clicking yet.

The skinny girl with pothole eyes and a sinkhole belly a whole town could disappear into came out onto the front porch across the street. Her name is Cass, I thought. The porch bowed underneath her bare feet. I’d seen Jerry out there reinforcing it with some cinder blocks. He’d crawled under the porch bare-chested and came out looking like a coal miner with dirt on his face, scratches across his chest, and cobwebs in his hair, likely smelling of mildew and mice poo.

This street used to be nicer, but now the city had marked several houses to be condemned. Those of us left were trying to keep up what was ours, even though my grass cutting money didn’t go too far.

Anyway, I was thinking Jerry might need to put more cinder blocks under that spot where Cass was standing. If a dandelion wisp of a girl could bow a porch like that, then the whole thing was likely to collapse. The orange trumpet creeper strangled the rusty downspouts on the old logging house, and I thought those vines might be the only thing knitting that home together.

Cass just stood there staring down the street towards Mercy Chapel. Couldn’t understand why. No one was there. Sun was going down.  Lights were off. Someone had recently changed the letters on the marquee to read “Lost Souls Welcome.” They were trying to get more members, but the congregation was getting old and dying off. Cass stepped off the porch and drifted down the sidewalk towards the church in her giant KISS FM t-shirt and gray drawstring shorts, her red hair a burning bush. She knew exactly where the roots from the scarlet oak had busted up the concrete and she stepped over the cracks without looking down. I peered up at the sky. She might get caught by the gully washer that was percolating. The clouds would burst open and leak down the hillside any minute.

That’s when the police scanner started scratching about a call coming in over at Jerry’s house. I thought, Uh oh. Cass and Jerry are up to something. The way Cass looked, maybe Jerry had roughed her up. Her hair looked wild, like a skein of wool yarn a cat had pawed with its claws. Maybe Jerry had his hands in that mess, holding on and yanking her around, his wobbly arms like their porch ceiling fan that had been slowly oscillating for years with one broken blade bent at a right angle. Except I hadn’t heard a thing. It had been silent, save for the one dog and the thunder rumbling up over the ridge. And truthfully, I’d never seen Jerry do anything like that. I felt kind of guilty for thinking such a thing about my neighbor.

The red and blue lights flicked aureoles down the street, the humidity making them pale and unimportant. The officers didn’t seem to be in much of a hurry. They’d been to every house on this street, including mine, over this past year. The urgency was gone. It was a fate we all accepted now.

Jerry’s screen door slammed around back and he stumbled slow-motion down the back steps. His hands went to his mouth, and he bent double, vomiting electric bile in the grass before stacking his spine back upright and wandering off into the woods behind his house. I wondered if the cops were looking for him or Cass, but neither of them seemed to be in any sort of rush.

The cops exited their car, adjusted their hip-belts, and climbed the front steps. Sure enough, one cop’s foot went through the rotting wood of the porch. The whole place was decomposing around here, the earth threatening to just take everything it wanted back. Maybe we were being punished for something, but for what, I didn’t know. I took a swig of beer and watched him dislodge his boot. A fire truck and an ambulance rolled up behind the cop car.

Oh, shit. This didn’t look good for Cass and Jerry.

I heard one of the paramedics say, “It’s too late for Narcan. Does one of us want to call time of death?”

“Gotta wait on the coroner. Looks like they might have been in there for a while.”

“Who called it in?” They all looked over towards my porch, and the two cops came walking over.

“Evening, sir. Are you the one who called in the overdose across the street?” His eyes surveyed me, assessing how many beers I’d had. They looked hard, like they were made of lapis with no man behind them. Just the metamorphic heat and pressure of millions of years. Vermeer would have ground those lazulite eyes to a powder.

“Overdose? No. That wouldn’t have been me. Who is it this time?” I was growing numb to this kind of thing. Like I said, they’d been to nearly every house on my block, bringing out people in body bags.

“We can’t give any specifics until we talk to the family, but it was the couple in that house across from you.” He was already dismissing me, ready to move on with his paperwork. I glanced over his shoulder towards Mercy to see if there was hide or hair of Cass. I knew she was long gone, but the lights were on in the chapel. Maybe she’d found a place to hide for a little while.

Catherine Herlihy grew up in Huntington, West Virginia, and now resides in Reno, Nevada. She is pursuing her MFA in Creative Writing. When she isn’t writing, she’s making things and spending time with the people she loves. She enjoys traveling and going on adventures both real and imaginary, but her heart will always be in Appalachia.

**Featured image: Irem Dur, Pexels