Scott S. Cravens

Trample on the Bracken and Kneel 

 

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The man broke through the dense barrens of the New Jersey wild, seeking escape. Running from something. Maybe himself. The blue morning bore a light drizzle among the pines, draping their base in a hazy fog. Trample on the bracken and kneel, thought the man. Just finish it. A raven’s call echoed through the glade as he knelt on the weathered ground. He pulled a piece from his waistband, and stared at the droplets that waxed and waned down the edge of the steel, gleaming in that newfound light. The density of the flora surrounding the wooded dell created in him a sense of isolation, something he’d grown accustomed to. Looking up through a break in the trees, he caught an ephemeral glimpse of the backdrop to this sanctuary. The skyline’s firmament hemmed in red, signaling the sun’s coveted promise of a new day.

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The senses were heightened to a point not known to him before. Each detail was unobscured from his vision. The veins of a fallen leaf, each pine needle that littered the ground, the moss on a stump that thrived and subsisted on the morning dew—all intensely arrayed on the canvas before him. 

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He sat for a long time and thought. The singular conception of one’s own life is a profound thing. A closed finite system that encompasses your thoughts and actions, constantly interpreting and interacting with events by way of a graceless methodical form—an unending series of synchronized acrobatics. The thought always precedes the act, yet here his fatal thought lingered on the tips of a failing hand. He knew that the cold steel in his clutch would turn warm after he pulled the trigger, but could he really know that heat if he no longer existed? And if he no longer existed, did the warmth exist at all? Did anything beyond the man’s system of orbit exist if he did not experience it?

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A clatter and a crash.

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From his monastic carriage he looked for the noise that broke his reflection. A pine tumbled and collided into its brothers along the way down, plummeting to the wet vegetation below. The man alone bore witness to this tree’s fall from grace.

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“If a tree falls in a forest and nobody is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” A wan smile broke across his face as he made this proverbial utterance aloud. 

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The tree, with its death, would soon bear fruit, maybe becoming a home for fungi or termites, he thought. What fruits will my death bear? The cessation of pain? An end to the heartbreaking experience that has become my modus operandi in relationships—with my family, and friends? With her? His face was hardened, wincing with pain at the intruding feelings that pervaded his prostration.

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The most incredulous event in a married man’s life, he thought, is the day that the sacred love of a union is no longer reciprocated. For twenty years, I had stayed true to her, and still do. The last straw had to have been that game in Atlantic City. I mean, what kind of a father bets his son’s college fund on a game of cards? 

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Shame had kept the man down, lower than any form of depression or exhaustion. Two mortgages, bankruptcy, beatings in alleys and deserted parking lots by loan sharks—like a heifer being milked, day in and day out. The debts he accumulated—an inordinate amount that no average person could ever pay back. The man looked down at the four fingers gripping the pistol. 

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She had had enough, and I don’t blame her.

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The recollection of pure hell panged his thoughts. The picture of trepid associates at his house in the middle of the night, threating him with death. It was time to pay, and he couldn’t. Two of them held him down and placed his right hand on a cutting board. His wife screamed horridly and grabbed a kitchen knife to defend herself. One of the thugs approached her, gently took the knife from her hand, and said, “Thank you sugar.” 

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Pain seared his consciousness with utter humiliation. 

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After that she was gone, and so was my pinky. My son, my wife—all that I believed mattered in this world, I gambled away. The divorce papers came a month later. Even though I had been loyal to her our whole marriage, loved her unconditionally, committed no infidelity—how can a ceaseless love exist for a leper? This disease, that I seem to have a predilection for, recurs in me, and does, and will until the day I die. 

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Slowly, he pulled back the slide, forcing a round into the chamber.

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The man knew that impending doom was unavoidable. The sordid individuals he borrowed from would have a hit out on him for his inability to pay them back. What could I do? he thought. The inevitable pull of the trigger will come from either a thug or myself, so why not take control?  

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Control. There’s a word. A damn near impossibility.

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Not once in his life could the man recall the feeling of control. God knows he had no control over his finances. No control in relationships, job—he couldn’t even control his own impulse. But here, as he knelt on the trampled bracken with gun in hand, the sagaciousness of pure autonomy overwhelmed him.

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The bore of the gun entered his mouth. 

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Control. 

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The man thought hard. He had often sat and wondered what the last thing is that goes through a man’s mind before taking his own life. Maybe his family or some nostalgic memory. Maybe just a bullet. 

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Closed eyes. 

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No memory filled his consciousness. No loved ones. No relic of shared recollection. No yearning for days gone by. Nothing. Only the taste of steel, cold and metallic. That’s all he could think of. How awful the taste of the metal is between gritted teeth and a lapping tongue struggling for room. 

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A slow squeeze of the trigger.

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A Click. 

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He was not alone. As he pulled the bore of the barrel from parted lips, he slowly turned to see what was interrupting his final act. There, standing maybe fifty feet away, a single stag. It bore a wide spread of antlers, still covered in the amber fuzz of summer days. It just stared. It was not alarmed by the man’s presence, nor the man by his. The buck just looked searchingly at him, bearing an air of understanding—posturing like a king who lords over the ground the man is encroaching. With locked eyes and trembling lips, he called out to him: 

“If a man falls in a forest and nobody is around to hear it, does he make a sound?”

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There was silence. 

 

As an undergraduate student, Scott S. Cravens became enamored with the writings of Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Cormac McCarthy, Franz Kafka, Albert Camus and various other novelists while working on the completion of his degree in Social Science. Before he graduated from Harding University (central Arkansas) in 2018, he worked as an assistant editor for the University's journal publication Tenor of Our Times. Currently, he is a graduate student of writing at Johns Hopkins University. His work has been featured, or is forthcoming in various publications: Ariel Chart International Literary Journal, CafeLit Magazine, The Periodical Forlorn, and The Amethyst Review.

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