is proud to present the 2009

C.S. Lewis Award

to

Michael Pape

Irving, TX

1st Place

(Category:  19 and up)

Bio: Michael Pape grew up in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin, which taught him the value of hard work and moon boots. He likes cheese and dogs, and dislikes raw onions and cats. He can currently be found fixing computers or writing crazy stuff in either Irving, TX or an unspecified location in Wisconsin, depending on when you’re reading this.  His web page is:  www.epthnation.com

To contact Michael Pape you may seek his contact information through the contest administrators by sending an email to director@athanatosministries.org.

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Those Chickens, They Don’t Roost in Some Random Coop in Another State.

by Michael Pape

copyright 2009, All Rights Reserved

The neighbor’s cat was determined and fearless, and it was now balancing itself on Derrick Hearst’s backyard fence. He believed the cat’s name to be Sprickles, but he almost certainly had that wrong. Sprinkles? Sparkles? Oh, he supposed it could also be their other cat, Tushka. It’s impossible to tell two similar cats apart when you don’t care about either. At least this explained the dirty little clumps of cat fur he kept finding in his yard.

On most other days, Derrick wouldn’t be staring out his kitchen window at 9am. He would be at the office, making sure the people who wished to stab him in the back got preemptively stabbed before they could brandish their knives. But today, he called in. Threw in the towel. Raised the white flag. Quit before he began. And why? Because of a bad dream.

The cat carefully prowled along the top of the fence for a few seconds, then stopped. Its gaze scanned the yard like a spotlight on a guard tower — forward and back, forward and back. Derrick loved to see animals hunt, even if this wasn’t exactly the wild. It was searching for something, but what?

—

His stunned state was caused by more than just a dream — the seeds for this were planted a week before, during a “non-mandatory teamwork and self-improvement exercise” held by his employer. It was billed the Weekend of Hypnosis and Beer, and it was held at the Twilight Hills Retreat Center, a spa/lodge/holistic (read: wacked-out) wellness complex 2 hours outside of town in the lovely Clackamas Valley. The stated purpose of the weekend was to eliminate all self-defeating thoughts from the attendees’ heads. He agreed to do it because he always attended any work-related event, especially the non-mandatory ones. They were all part of the game. Plus, everybody has self-defeating thoughts, right? If hypnosis and beer are all it takes to defeat them, then why not partake?

There was a shuttle from the office to the THRC for any interested attendees, but he decided to take his new BMW instead. I mean, come on — why go to a work event if you’re not going to show off a little? He hadn’t paid 50 grand for a totally impractical little car just to leave it at home during showtime.

The weekend was being run by the Twilight Hills staff, all of whom all had a decidedly hippie vibe about them, even while wearing polos and khakis. There wasn’t one male THRC person without a ponytail. This was the first bad sign. The next one came when he was handed the Schedule of Events, which was packed with things like “Group Meditations” and “Nature Walks.” There seemed to be very little hypnosis planned, and even less beer. He wondered why he was even there, but he recognized that as the kind of self-defeating thought this weekend was supposed to be about eliminating. Of course, because he was Derrick Hearst, go-getter, he ended up throwing himself full-bore into these activities without thinking about the consequences first. The Boss, after all, might be watching, and his bespectacled eyes appreciated constant enthusiasm for whatever the company thought was worth being enthusiastic about, no matter how inane or pointless.

The first night they all got together in a big flourescently-lit room and did team-building exercises. Derrick hated these things. It was like they were baiting the negative thoughts out of him. After what seemed like hours of Getting to Know Your Teammates, they each went to their own rooms without any beer at all. That was such a downer. Derrick wanted to talk to some of his office-mates — Morrison from sales, that Amanda chick from Logistics, the albino HR guy who always wanted to discuss fantasy baseball — about how lame Friday night was, but didn’t dare. If word got back to some of his enemies in the office, the ones that wanted his job and the jobs he coveted, they would surely bring it up to the Boss, and that would result in a big black mark of uncertainty being placed on him like a scarlet letter. It would be on his permanent record. He hadn’t worked this hard for five of his best years to be brought down by some non-mandatory work activity, no matter how lame it was.

The next day brought with it the promised hypnosis, and significantly more beer than Derrick thought was possible. Because of the beer, and possibly the hypnosis, he didn’t remember much. He remembered getting up at 7am and going for a wonderful, pore-opening run in a majestic valley. He remembered taking a shower and rushing down to the kitchen just in time for the end of breakfast, which turned out to be runny eggs and toast with some funky-tasting hippie-produced jam. At 10am the group meditation started, and he remembered everyone lying flat on their backs on the same kinds of mats he once used during nap time in Kindergarten. He remembered starting to space out, and thinking that hypnosis is just being really sleepy. He remembered being instructed to find his “safe place,” or place in his mind where he could be safe and feel like everything was super great. For that, he chose to imagine his old college frat house. He didn’t remember his reasoning in picking that place (since he hadn’t thought of it in…like forever), but he remembered mentally walking up to the red wooden door on the front of the house, shoving it open (it always stuck), and stepping into the foyer. He remembered it being unusually warm inside the frat house in his mind, so he decided to go into the hall and change the thermostat, again in his mind. He was getting a little bored with the exercise at this point, and just needed something to do. Moving from the foyer to his right, he strolled down the two steps into the main party room. The hallway was on the other side of the couch. He remembered it being really tedious to continue imagining the process of walking step-by-step, so he flew over the couches in the middle of the room and into the darkness of the back hallway. There was a bright blue light coming from under the door at the end of the hall, but that was the only thing Derrick could see. He couldn’t even see the hallway walls, and it felt like the darkness was crushing him.

He then remembered waking up to the sound of a clanging bell being enthusiastically wrung by one of the ponytail guys. It was 5pm in the evening. He had “slept” right through lunch, as had (apparently) all his office-mates. When he awoke, he was greeted by the sound of rushing water and the smell of bacon. He remembered being totally confused and disoriented, and thinking that he was still back in college. The rushing water turned out to be a CD the hippies were playing, and the bacon turned out to be, well, bacon. It was dinnertime.

He remembered sitting down at the long supper table and seeing two giant kegs on a stand at the far end of the room — one of LaBatt Blue and one of Molson. He remembered thinking that the hippies must be Canadian, which actually explained a lot. He was very excited at the first appearance of beer, even the crappy Canadian kind. He went over to the keg stand and poured himself a frosty one, then sat back down. He vaguely remembered drinking and eating that night, but for some reason he felt like he was having a meal in his old frat house, as if the hypnosis session and the meal were mixed together in his mind. He didn’t remember anything after dinner, either – the scene dissolves as he’s drinking Molson at the dinner table, and resumes the next morning with him waking up in a pool of sweat.

On Sunday, he asked Morrison from sales — the only one in the company he felt he could really trust with such a question — about the previous night, and Morrie indicated that ol’ Derrick had been the life of the party. There was apparently lots of karaoke and bad drunken dancing involved, and possibly a 10pm “nature stumble.” He assumed he had gotten drunk and blacked out while on his feet, and he expected memories of that night to come flooding back as they always did in these situations, but they never came. That night, and most of that day, has remained an impenetrable mystery to Derrick, even after Morrison forwarded him a link to an internet video featuring Derrick dancing with the ugliest life-sized clown statue in the world and singing that inane “In the Year 2525″ song. He didn’t remember any of what he saw on that video. He had been drunk before (too many times to count, especially in college) but never had he been so out-of-it that he permanently forgot a memorable shindig.

—

The cat stood motionless in a dead crouch on top of the wooden fence. It seemed to be staring very intently at the one tree in his backyard, the giant spruce he desperately needed to have trimmed. It stayed in the crouch for at least 30 seconds, patiently waiting for something. The top of the fence was no more than two inches wide, and the cat’s sense of balance was quite impressive. It was trying to become, for all intents and purposes, part of the fence.

—

Calling in sick was a brand-new experience for Derrick, and as he was about to dial the office, he realized he had no idea how to do it. What does one say? He knew about the proverbial pretend-coughing and such, but didn’t know how much of a ruse was necessary. He had a bigger problem, though — if he called in sick, people would undoubtedly view this as extremely out-of-character for him, and assume he was either a) on his deathbed, or b) having a nervous breakdown (a la what happened to Dzelzkalns last year). It didn’t matter that b) was probably right; what mattered is that there would be a chance that the Boss would send someone to his house to check on him. Even if nobody came, he would at the very least have to field several “concerned” phone calls disguised as work questions. He needed to have his story straight. If he claimed illness, they would send a doctor and the jig would be up (more likely, the doctor would diagnose it as “stress,” which would effectively end his career advancement because he would now be “unable to deal with the pressure” or whatever). However, if he said he just needed a day off, he would prove himself unreliable on a day-to-day basis, and that would be that. He could see no way out of this conundrum, besides going to work. And since going to work with those people was definitely not an option, at least not today…

He calmly dialed the office number and spoke his pre-planned script to the albino from HR, the one that would most likely shoot down his rising corporate star. He went with illness, the kind that has served derelict workers for decades — sore throat, sore muscles, probably highly contagious. He even did a fake cough, mostly out of guilt. He was going to see the doctor, and might be in later if everything looked okay. He hung up the phone and stared straight ahead at nothing in particular. After all he had done for that company and that Boss, they owed him at least one mulligan.

—

He continued to stare out the window at the cat on the fence, but he wasn’t thinking about the cat. His mind wandered to the dream he had experienced earlier, the one that had set his rocker off its hinges and out the door. It was getting fuzzier with each passing minute, as these things do, but he vividly remembered the end of the dream. In it, he walked through the glass doors that separated his company’s office from the rest of the Brubaker Building. Everything looked the same as real life, except for a couple inches of freshly-fallen snow on the floor and the cubicles. He was wearing one of his normal everyday suits, and was shivering from the cold. He crunched his way through the snow down the hall past cubicle row, and noticed that nobody else was there. He walked left through the open doorway to his own personal office, and suddenly found himself outside in a blowing snowstorm. There was a woman in a white hooded sweatshirt about 20 feet ahead of him holding a shovel, and he trudged up to her and tapped her on the shoulder. She turned and looked at him. He vaguely recognized her face, but could not think of her name. (What was her name again? No. Just NO!)

The mystery woman smiled, dropped her shovel, and whispered, “On to the next thing.”

He awoke, not knowing where or who he was. It was 4:42 in the morning. This rang a bell in his head, and he just lay there and let reality re-coalesce around him. He didn’t want to think about the woman in white, or 442, or the snowstorm, or the dream (No. Just NO!). Staring up at the ceiling, he thought about fantasy baseball. He discussed with himself for at least 30 minutes the possible merits of trading for a different backup catcher, then went on to mentally tweak his outfield. He got scared a little when he thought of the consequences of losing one of his starters, such as that unhittable stud Cole Hamels, to injury. Two hours later, he got up and took a shower. The thought of going to work (Just NO!) made him nauseous, all of a sudden. He blamed the Canadian hippies, but it didn’t take.

He made some coffee and the deceptive phone call. He read the paper and listened to some talk radio. It was 9am. What do people who call in sick do all day anyway? He missed the office, and with it the habitual clawing for that golden ring that so consumed every minute of his days. So why was he watching this cat become one with a fence again? And why had he made his coffee so Irish this morning?

Because…(Just NO!)

—

The cat still stood in the same exact place. It had been at least 10 minutes since the cat stopped moving. Derrick could tell it was still watching the tree, and had figured out that it was actually the birds inside the tree that the feline predator was watching. He counted at least 20 brown and black birds in its ample supply of branches, most of whom were just hanging out and chirping. Some of the black ones were making noises that sounded like electrical equipment short-circuiting. He hated those oily birds and their gosh-awful racket.

Something must have spooked the birds, because instantaneously the tree emptied, pouring black and brown blobs into the air towards the fence. Derrick thought at first that the cat would be knocked off the fence like Humpty-Dumpty, but the birds all flew over and past the cat in their hysterical race to escape. The cat waited silently, crouching even lower, and what happened next forced coffee out of Derrick’s mouth and nose and onto his Parisian silk bathrobe.

The last bird out of the tree was a brown one, looking bigger and plumper than any of the others. In an instantaneous burst of motion, the cat pounced off the fence directly toward the path of the flying brown bird. It had compensated for the brown blob’s speed and acceleration, and if the bird noticed the flying cat it was far too late; the bird was carried by inertia into the waiting claws of the feline missile, and the two small animals crashed to the ground in a explosion of fur, feathers, and squawking. As the coffee hit the bathrobe, Derrick looked around as if to say, “Did anyone else but me see THAT?” Looking back at the ground, he saw that the impact of hitting the lawn had caused the cat to let go of its avian prey, and the scared plump brown victim was flapping its wings in a panic in order to get away from the momentarily stunned cat. The predator took a split second to roll to its feet, and shot off towards the bird. At first, it was making up ground, but even fat brown birds can eventually out-fly a ground-ridden cat. Eventually, the bird got high enough in the air to clear the fence, and the cat stopped and began walking in circles. It was looking up in the air, and now had an obvious limp.

The cat deserved the limp for trying something so rash, stupid, and unnecessary, thought Derrick. There were probably Tender Vittles waiting at home in a dish — didn’t the cat know that? It squeezed its little furry body under the fence with great difficulty, hind legs clawing at the ground in a desperate push. There was just enough space for it to smush its bones in-between the fence and the grass below, and it was tearing a hole in his lawn. Stupid cat.

—

As Tushka or Sprickles’ hindquarters slowly disappeared, Derrick looked down at the brown stain on his robe and wondered what could get coffee out of Parisian silk. Amazingly, the shock of cat vs. bird had taken the starch out of his malaise, and he now found himself able to think semi-clearly. The cat may have been a gift from God, sent to snap him out of his mental prison and help him face whatever he had to face. (No. Just NO!)

(Maybe.)

(Ok, FINE. Have it your way.)

If there was guilt inside him for what had happened to Abbie Rehfeldt, it was time to deal with it. Drinking himself into oblivion during hypnosis weekend didn’t stop this, and neither did pleading ignorance. It’s obvious that things like the bad dream would keep happening until he found a way to be rid of them. He couldn’t afford to miss any more days of work. This had to end now. Only a clear-headed man could achieve what Derrick wanted to achieve in life, so it was time to cleanse his head. And he knew a possible way to do it. Hoping for a lucky break, he pulled his laptop out of his briefcase, set it on the dining room table, and attempted to open the lid. His hands were shaking so much he was unable to pop the latch.

—

He really didn’t remember much about Abbie, since he only met her once, and that was over nine years ago. He couldn’t recall anything about her face, but always remembered she had jet-black straight hair that went down to the middle of her back. What he thought of most were the things she told him during their conversation at the beginning of his very first frat party. She was a freshman, just like him. She grew up in some crazy cult in Alabama that she literally had to escape from, like through underground tunnels. She hadn’t seen her parents in four years, because they had disowned her. It was a really heavy conversation, filled with the sorts of things you’d discuss at the end of a party, rather than at the beginning.

So when the slimeball Steve Sanderson took him aside and handed him a vial of some clear liquid with the numbers “442″ on it and told Derrick to drop it in her drink, that this was part of the initiation process, and that everybody does it before they get into the Brotherhood of Alpha Mu Rho, it was quite disappointing. He thought she was pretty cool, a fact that always bothered him on those few occasions he thought back to the events of that night. This wasn’t some dumb sorority girl we were talking about here — this girl had substance. It wasn’t even clear how she was able to get in the party in the first place, since she apparently didn’t come with anyone. Abbie was just a naive alone girl trying to make some friends. For that mistake, she was victimized in a way that Derrick couldn’t allow himself to think about.

She left to go to the bathroom. His eyes and Slimeball Steve’s met. He looked down at the vial. Everybody does it. Part of the initiation process. I need to do this to get on to the next thing. God, all those thoughts, and many more, went through his head. He was trying to convince himself. He confirmed that Steve was still looking at him, emptied his brain, and felt a flood of something enter him — Confidence? Power? The Devil? Whatever it was, it got past all the mental barriers he had, and he coldly opened the vial and poured it right in her nearly-full beer glass. Now not only Steve but Brett “The Plow” Wilkinson and Terry Leonard and like 12 other Brotherhood members were smiling at him. Some were nodding approvingly. He took his finger and stirred Abbie’s beer. She came back and smiled at him. She fricking smiled at him, after that. She sat down and asked why he was sweating.

It is precisely at this point that the memory fades. Thinking about it always made him sick to his stomach (No. Just NO!), so he tried his best to forget it and get on with his life. He had succeeded for nearly nine years. He hadn’t thought of Abbie Rehfeldt at all since he landed his current job, and with it the girlfriends, the house, the BMW, and the stress. He made one mistake in his life, and he couldn’t get away from it. The whole thing wasn’t even his fault! I mean, Steve gave him the vial and made him use it. It wasn’t Derrick’s plan. So why did he feel so guilty?

—

Ever since making the transition from sales to management, Derrick had found the internet to be an invaluable tool in evaluating and understanding the people who worked for him. It always amazed him that people would put personal details, likes, dislikes, and dreams out there where anyone, even their enemies, could find it. He needed to clear his conscience once and for all. Surely Abbie Rehfeldt had an internet presence. Surely she would be a successful writer, or banker, or something. Surely this one thoughtless act hadn’t totally derailed her life. A desperate hope filled his soul as he finally popped the latch and got the laptop open.

He typed her name into the Google search box and pressed enter. It was entirely possible that she got married, and now had a different name, but he had no way of knowing that. The first result that came up under “Abbie Rehfeldt” was a ZPlace page, one of those social networking sites where people typically put too much information about themselves. This might be it, he thought. He clicked on the link, and came to Abbie Rehfeldt’s ZPlace page. This particular Abbie Rehfeldt had customized her page with a black background and some blinking crucifixes. There were tiny blinking Jesuses all over the screen. At the top of the page was a picture of a raven-haired girl who looked like the one he remembered from nine years ago. This was definitely her, the Abbie Rehfeldt he once met. There didn’t seem to be much on her site — some generic comments from various people he didn’t know, the one picture, the blinking background, and that was pretty much it. She didn’t even have any hometown listed. Derrick’s hopes faded, but he did notice the page stretched past the bottom of the screen.

Scrolling down and scanning her “notes” section brought everything into focus. He couldn’t believe what he was seeing at first. Was this a joke? He looked away, and looked again. It was still there. In all caps, the note’s title screamed TO DERRICK HEARST. The walls of his home started to spin counterclockwise around him, and his field of vision was reduced to a small circle around those three words. After a few seconds of spinning he succumbed to the encroaching darkness and slumped completely off his chair…

…And was back in the frat house hallway, facing the back door just like during the group meditation. This time, however, he slowly walked toward the door (instead of running away in terror for hours). It was open a crack, and the light coming from behind it was a burning bluish-white. Derrick pushed open the door and was greeted by a rush of cold air. The room was filled with falling snow, and before him stood the woman from his dream, the one with the white hooded sweatshirt. She took down the hood, but she didn’t have to. He knew it was Abbie. Who else would it be? She smiled at him, the same smile he saw after his treacherous act. He started to cry.

“Why are you crying?”

“Because…it’s all so horrible.”

“Horrible? You haven’t even faced it yet.”

“What do you mean? I came into the room. I know what I did.”

“Do you? Why is it snowing?”

Derrick thought about this for a bit. He didn’t know. He was sure he didn’t want to know. The stern-faced White Abbie held out her hands in front of her, and cradled inside them was a tiny, twinkling snow globe. The dream got loud and black immediately, and he was forcibly ejected from his own head.

He heard frenzied yelling, and his sprawled-out body sat up in an instant. He was sitting on the floor of the kitchen, and the yelling he heard was coming from his own mouth. With its ceasing came the surrounding sounds of the mundane — the refrigerator was humming, the birds outside were making friendly little chirps, his wall clock was methodically ticking, and he was breathing heavily. The chair out of which he fell was directly in front of his outstretched legs. The concept of standing up didn’t quite process yet, so he just sat there and let his senses lead him. The distracting smell of coffee was coming from his robe, his throat felt tingly and sore, and his cheeks were damp with tears. His eyes went up to his laptop computer, sitting on the table. Oh, yeah. TO DERRICK HURST.

—

Less than five minutes after the 18-year-old Derrick Hurst had done the dirty deed, even before Abbie showed signs of feeling whatever effects were in store for her, he got sick and excused himself from the impending act. He didn’t want to hear any of what would be going on in that back room, so he went outside and vomited over the porch railing into the bushes below. There was a recliner on the porch, so he collapsed into it and stared out into the night sky above campus. It was an absolutely gorgeous fall night. A bit chilly, but gorgeous. Next to the recliner was a small wooden table with a snow globe on it, which he picked up and began to turn back and forth and upside down. The snowman inside stared at him with two black pinhole eyes, and it was never not smiling. The little flakes floated up and down in the water, making it look like the stereotypical winter scene it was intended to be. Between the hypnotic globe and the comfortable recliner, Derrick was able to relax a bit and take stock of what had just happened.

He never thought of himself as a criminal, but he had committed a heinous crime, one he could go to jail for. One he should go to jail for. This really was beyond the pale. He was now a real-live criminal, thanks to the Brotherhood. They owed him now, big time. What if she told people? He knew the Brotherhood would stick together, but that might not deter her from calling the authorities. If he could just…

This was ludicrous. He was a criminal. It didn’t matter if she told anyone — the truth would always be that he did this terrible thing to another human being. And his first thought is “What if she tells people?” What the hell kind of man was he anyway? It was that Slimeball Steve’s fault. He had made Derrick an unwilling accomplice, and now the Brotherhood and Derrick stood together in mud and blood. Maybe that’s why they have initiations like this in the first place. Nothing binds people together like a secret that’s too evil to tell, right? What kind of people had he just attached himself to?

On the other hand, he was now definitely a Brother, which marked the culmination of this stage in his life plan. He needed this. Being a Brother would mean connections, a probable good job, prestige, and an incalculable number of tremendous potential experiences. He had to do what he just did, if he wanted his life to work out in a superior way. Sometimes tough moral choices just needed to be made by men of action. Would the admiration of friends and family make up for the guilt of destroying that poor girl’s life? Probably, eventually.

So as the snowman fell prey to an intense snowstorm which pelted him from all sides and turned his life upside down, Derrick decided that this Just Didn’t Happen. He would not think of it again. If someone brought it up, he would act like he didn’t know what that person was talking about. She might accuse him, but admitting it wouldn’t help anyone. The Brotherhood were the only ones who knew the truth, and they would never tell. It wasn’t over and done with, because it was a non-event.

He put the globe down, walked to his dorm room, and slept his sleep.

—

And now as he sat alone on the dining room floor of his four-bedroom ranch-style house, he realized that everything he had, he owed to Abbie Rehfeldt. If he hadn’t made that bad choice, it was possible, even probable, that the Brotherhood wouldn’t have accepted him. That would have meant no internship with the Plow’s dad, and no job offer from Duke’s family friend, and no experience which led to a job with his current company, and no BMW or nice house or closets full of suits or hot girlfriends or membership at the Club. He might have turned out just as successful, but probably not. In any case, he used that to become this, and he therefore owed it all to her. There’s guilt, and then there’s the kind of guilt that has nowhere to go, and so it just seeps into every cell of one’s body and stays there, never moving, waiting to pounce at an opportune moment. It had measured exactly the right time, and jumped when Derrick saw his own name on his victim’s ZPlace page. It was all too much, and it wasn’t going away. The parade of “on to the next thing” had ended. There would be no next thing, anymore.

The last thing on earth Derrick wanted to do was read that note. He wanted to get up, go to work, push the guilt back down his gullet, and get back to his life. But he owed her this. This was about her, Abbie Rehfeldt, the real human. He was led to her — he didn’t know how, or why, but there was definitely a set-up involved — and coming this far was pointless if he didn’t go the rest of the way. So he crawled up from the floor and slid into the chair in front of the computer. The screensaver was up, and the words “Failure Is Not an Option” floated by in 3-D. That platitude seemed so…completely dead, now. He hit a key and the blinking crucifixes were back. He closed his eyes, and tears formed as the afterimage of crucified saviors filled his entire field of view. She was a real person, and the event was a real event, and these were facts he couldn’t bear for much longer. He clicked on the note, which brought him to a new page. The note said:

Derrick,

i don’t know why, but i feel the need to do this. you’ll probably never read it, and that’s ok. i’ve got to write it. it’s taken so very long to get here. if you should somehow stumble onto my page for whatever reason, you need to know

i forgive you.

– Abbie

The cat skulked back to its home, wounded and prideful and hungry as a lion. It would lick its wounds and get back on the fence again, if it was allowed to roam free. No amount of reason can convince a cat to stick to Tender Vittles in a dish. Even so, a bird has no real reason to be worried. The cat may have claws and guile, but it’s also subject to the laws of gravity. The ground is always fast approaching, and birds are blessed with wings.

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