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It’s a big splash when it first comes, hot on your hands. Your hands there on the worn slatboard fence, supporting your weight as you, on your tip toes, lean in as far as you can to watch. It comes first in that big splash, like from a bucket, as the jugular is torn open. After that, it runs steady, steady but down at least, down onto the hay and then the cement and then it runs under that slatboard fence and out past you, splashing on your feet.

The thing is still kicking, still screaming. It sounds like a woman, you think.

“Goddammit!” It’s Harlan, shouting as the thing gets back on its feet, running circles, spilling blood. It rams one of the walls and you feel it shake, but still you step up onto the first slat so you can lean further in. Harlan kicks it, bracing himself against the wall, leaving a bloody bootprint on its neck. It goes down now, and Harlan gets on its back, grabs an ear, and sinks the blade in again, deeper. “Fucker,” he says, and you can hear the strain in his voice, see his hand wrist deep in the thing’s neck, see him twist.

It stops squealing.

You turn away as Harlan gets off it, wipes his brow. You hear him shout at his son, “Godammit, you let it get up!” But you are watching the red run past your shoes, a river, down into the mud of the driveway, where it begins to split apart, rocks and bootprints and tire tracks dividing into a thousand smaller tributaries. Spreading. Reaching. Like a great red hand toward the forest.

You turn back to see Harlan and his son have opened the stall, dragged the thing out, hefted it onto the bed of the pickup truck, that same blue truck they’ve always had. Harlan’s sweating now, catching his breath, his hands on his knees. His son says something and taps his shoulder and Harlan laughs.

They don’t look at you, but rather head back into the stall, shut it from the inside. You watch them push out as much blood as they can with a broom, then lay down a fresh layer of hay. Even with your allergy medication, you feel the dust crawling up into your sinuses and you sneeze, but just once, and into your sleeve. They don’t seem to notice. Harlan finishes spreading the hay while his son opens the gate on the other side and heads out into the yard. You watch Harlan as he leans against the wood of the stall, lights a cigarette. You see in this moment what you usually don’t – his age. It’s written on his face like a map, like a topography. A thousand tributaries etched deep into his dark skin.

There’s a rattle at the back of the stall and the kid comes back, pushing along another pig. The pig hesitates at the door, looking into the stall and snorting. Harlan flicks his cigarette out past you into the barnyard.

“Come on, pig,” he says, and the pig, it almost shrugs as it shuffles into the center of the stall. The kid shuts the gate behind it and climbs back out.

You, you climb up onto the first slat so you can lean in closer.

The pig is sniffing and snorting and rooting around in the hay. It lifts its head and its snout comes up red and dripping.

Harlan looks at you and says, “Cover your ears.” Then in one movement, he steadies his body in front of the pig’s, trains the pistol –

You didn’t cover your ears and they ring as you watch the thing stand for an eternity, just stand dumbly, blood dripping from its snout and the tiny hole in its forehead, then one of its legs buckles and it begins to scream and kick. You’re glad your ears are ringing. That screaming. That wet screaming. Harlan’s kid is back over the side of the stall and digging a knee into the pig’s back, pinning it down. Harlan gets on his own knees in front of it, seemingly deaf to the godawful wailing or the mist and bloody snot coming out of its nose with each frantic, gasping breath.

“Goddammit!” he says as the thing almost gets its footing. But then Harlan has driven the blade deep into the thing’s neck and pulls, hard and fast in a way you wouldn’t expect from someone his age. The pull is quick, almost a blur, and it leaves the pig’s throat gaping. And with that pull comes the splash. All the way to where you stand, like a bucket dumped onto the floor. You feel it splash your hands. So hot it stings. You feel a drop hit your cheek. Another hits your forehead. You watch the two men as they hold the beast down, as the shrieking grows quiet. You see the kid’s knee move up and down slowly as the pig breathes. It’s breathing mostly blood now. You see Harlan relax a bit, slide off its head, where he had placed his weight. He pats it on the top of its head, leans in.

He says, “Come on, pig.” He says, “Come on.”

You can hear beneath you and behind you the blood running down through the barnyard. You hear it slow as it hits that big puddle in the center, all muddy water, ancient clay. You hear it tinkle along as it finds a dozen paths to the same destination. But you don’t look this time. You know what it looks like.

As they drag it from the stall, you watch the bloody clumps of hay that cling to the swinging slatboard fence. They heft it up into the pickup truck and Harlan once again rests his hands on his knees. His kid looks at you, says something, and they both laugh. Harlan straightens himself, moans quietly, then comes over, puts a hand on your shoulder.

“Nice night,” he says.

You nod.

“Figure we’ll skin ‘em out here. Fetch us a lantern, eh?” He pats your shoulder. You smell the pig blood his hand leaves behind, but you like the feel of his touch. Firm. Affirming. Strong. Harlan turns back to his son and you, you go to fetch the lantern.

It takes them two hours to skin both pigs, hides, heads, hooves put aside. They’ll be used. Entrails collected in a bucket and shucked out behind the edge of the lantern’s light. Even now, already you can hear things tearing at them. Fighting. Pulling strips off and out past the tree line. In the dark, you can imagine what these things will do.

You sit beside a small fire, warming your hands. But it is a nice night; he was right. The perfect September night. The air is still warm, with just that first bite of frost in your sinuses if you breathe deeply enough. You collected what blood you could in a metal pail when they hung them up. Let them bleed out before you butcher. The blood will hide in the meat, spoil it. Best to collect it. There are things to do with blood. The pail sits beside you at the fire. It stinks. It stinks like pig, but worse.

As Harlan and his kid work over the second pig, finishing up the night’s work, your eyes are drawn away from them, drawn to the big dark house down the driveway. It’s a classic homestead house. You know this from school. Small rooms arranged off big rooms. Small windows. To keep in the heat in the winter. You know – from reading and from where the chimney is – that the big cast iron stove sits directly in the center of the kitchen, pushing its radiant heat out toward all the rooms and up to the second floor. There’s movement in one of the windows, you realize, and you squint to make it out, your heart suddenly speeding up. After a moment it resolves, and you watch the reflection, that’s what it is, of Harlan’s kid’s back as he pushes and pulls. You hear the scrape of his handsaw against bone. In the window, his fire lit reflection flickers like an old movie.
Harlan’s hand on your shoulder startles you. You can smell the blood on it, feel its unnatural heat. You look up at him and he smiles.

“Looking at the house.”

“Yes,” you answer, knowing he wasn’t asking.

“You been inside?”

You shake your head. Harlan’s hand squeezes your shoulder, tight. You look down at it and see there are no wrinkles, no deep creases. It is a strong hand as it always has been. You think for a moment it must be all the blood.

Harlan turns, shouts something to his son, then pats your shoulder once and steps beside you.

“Well,” he says. “Let’s have us a look.”

You stand, your too-blonde hair not even up to his chest. Harlan pulls the lantern down and steps forward through the overgrown lawn toward the house’s back door.

As you approach, it dawns on you that you are terrified. Looking in all those black windows, murky shapes swimming behind them, you wish you hadn’t agreed. You wish you hadn’t been caught looking up at this thing. You wish you hadn’t looked at all.

But Harlan moves deftly, pulling open the storm door and stepping into the summer kitchen. The door creaks, long and low, but it’s almost welcoming. It’s familiar. You follow close behind, not wanting to be left outside the dim circle his lantern casts. The summer kitchen is just a screened-in porch, a place to work and prepare and even lounge when the summer temperatures and humidity made the damp house unbearable. In one corner, you see a torn hammock. All around are old coffee cans, some brands you recognize, some you don’t, some you can’t make out.
They are filled with rusted nails, acorns. Teeth.

“Used to sleep out here some nights. When I was a boy.” He looks down at you. “Got awfully hot upstairs. Some nights we’d all be out here. Or in the yard.” As he says this, you see something in his eye – memory?  love? – and then he turns and the lantern’s shadow leaves his face a black hole.

Harlan slowly opens the door to the house and you can almost hear the air being sucked out. Or in. As you follow him inside, you’re struck immediately by an acrid smell, old woodsmoke. Years of woodsmoke. It’s not just in the air, it’s in everthing. In the thick, rich wood of which the house itself is built. And you, standing here in the kitchen on cracked linoleum, dirt and dead bugs beneath your feet, it’s in you now, too.
Harlan raises the lantern over his head and squints and you get a look at the whole room. The kitchen. There’s the woodstove. There’s the table. A modest window looks out toward the woods. Off to one side, you see a narrow door and beyond it, a cramped bedroom. An old bedspread is perfectly made atop the bed. You can’t see much of it, but when you look up to Harlan, watch him scan the room himself, see how his mouth is half open, how he wipes his hand on his workpants, you get it, really get it, that this is where he was born. He and his sister, your grandmother. This was their home. You hear Harlan take a deep breath, hold it, let it out slowly.

“Yup,” he says. He says, “Smells like it.”

Then, his boots heavy on the old floor, he leads you through the kitchen, into the parlor, the sitting room. Through the front windows, you see what was once a grand porch, the whole length of the house. You pictured your great-grandfather, a man you never met, taking his coffee on the porch, his socked feet up on a milkcan, looking down past the yard and into the creekbed, where the forest starts.

“You see that tree out there, boy?”

You squint, then nod.

“There’s a rake in that tree.”

You frown, confused.

He says, “Been a rake in that tree for damn near thirty years.” He says, “I leaned it there one afternoon. Forgot about it.” He says, “Just a couple tines sticking out the trunk now.”

You look out the window, straining to see, but Harlan has moved on, taking the light with him, and begun to head up the narrow staircase. You pause at the bottom, watching the silhouette of this man grow smaller with each creaking step. He pauses, waiting for you, and suddenly you are again terrified. Not of the dark, not of the stillness. No, what scares you now is everything that used to fill this house.

You step carefully up behind him.

In the hallway at the top of the stairs, you’re hit once again by a smell, this one sweet, like old grass or dried flowers. You close your eyes and smell, breathing it in deep. You’re about to ask what it is.

“Batshit.” He says, “Bats up here in the attic.”

You get nervous, begin to swipe at things you know are soon to be crawling all over you, flapping at you, sinking teeth into you, drawing blood, drawn to blood.

“Not now. Don’t worry. Too hot for ‘em up here now. But by the winter.” He looks around, holding the lantern high again. You watch as Harlan bends down, picks something up and hands it to you. He is smiling. You take it and then in the lantern glow you see what it is.

A dead bat. Its wings frozen out at its sides. It looks like those tissue paper bats you hang up with your mom at Halloween. Tissue paper bats with cardboard wings, dangling from the ceiling, baring their teeth. You lean in a bit to look. You can’t see its teeth. Or its eyes. Just dead little sockets like empty nail holes.

“Got another one.” You look over and Harlan is picking them up off the floor. He comes over to you and says, “Here,” hands you the lantern. He takes the bat out of your hands and, his own arms full of them, sticks it in his mouth, clamping gently down on one of those dry wings. He looks around, finds two more.

“Esgoyouleedown,” he says, muffled by the dead bat in his teeth. In the lantern’s glow, you see little dribbles of brown spit running down the corners of his mouth, his teeth and hands full. You shrug at him, then understand. He nods to the stairs and you again see the spit as the corners of his mouth turn up around the bat in his teeth and you know he’s smiling at you.

Holding the lantern high, you lead the way down.

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Award-winning author and filmmaker Jacob Strunk was born in the dark woods of Wisconsin and raised on George A. Romero and Coca-Cola. He now lives in sunny Hollywood, California with his cat, Stephen, and a few framed posters. He is sustained presently by Camel Lights, George A. Romero, and strong black coffee. He holds degrees from Brooks Institute of Photography and the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast MFA in Creative Writing. He makes films. He tells stories. He has to. www.sevenmileswest.com