Prologue
A country road, even on the darkest night, still radiates a faint luminosity. Of course, you have to be on foot to see it, and without a flashlight. If you drove down this same road with your high beams, afraid of deer, it would seem like the darkest place on the planet, as if you were about to fall into the void of deep space at any turn. But on foot, accustomed to the dark, you can see this soft glow, even on a night like tonight.
The air blows overly cool for summer. The earth’s warm moisture escapes the ground, drawing the clouds close overhead, smothering the surrounding hillsides, hiding the moon and stars. From the blackness of the wood line, a figure lurches suddenly into silhouetted view, a man, clutching his hands to his chest, staggering into the high grass. His gasps and gulps replace the sounds of the night as he tangles and suddenly disappears in the grass with a painful oomph.
By all shadowed appearances he has been shot in the chest. In this part of West Virginia, it would be easy to believe that scenario. These hills have long been the home of nomadic pot farmers, and better you wandered into a den of rattlesnakes than wandered into the middle of one of those crops. Perhaps this guy thought no one would be looking for him on a cold, wet night and tried to steal some weed. That would be one way to get yourself shot in the chest. It’s also hard to tell, in this area, where a meth lab, or a still, or a ginseng patch might pop up. Any of those might get you shot too.
The man wobbles back to his feet. His hands still clutch his chest. Now he stumbles, zigzagging through the weeds toward the road. Desperation emanates from his every breath, echoing along the ground, the sound suppressed by the low clouds, unable to escape into the night sky. They must still be after him because he stops at the side of the road and casts furtive glances in either direction.
And that’s when you see it, the chinchilla that he holds tenderly to his chest. To be perfectly accurate, it is a three-legged chinchilla, though there’s no way you could perceive that, even with the iridescent nature of country roads. Those little legs. How could anyone see that in the dark? No one could blame you for missing it, and it is only noted here for its significance later.
The man turns south onto the road and staggers off, cradling the three-legged chinchilla, still huffing and puffing, the sound of his exhaustion giving away his location long after the mist has gathered behind him. He is wandering deeper into the fictional universe of C.M. Chapman, a foggy, dangerous, and unpredictable place.
C.M. Chapman has worked within the literary realms of realism, Appalachian fiction, metafiction, and surrealism, as well as magical realism. In the pages of this website you will find the rest of the story.