Bluewood Mountain

[Gum do Mugu]

Inca’s friends didn’t turn around to see her coming. Even when she shouted out into the blue—“Hey, guys!”—they just kept looking at something. Something on the ground. A brown sack on the ground. It was the kind of sack used to store grain or root vegetables. And some of the sack’s brown fabric looked darker; the icy lake water was rippling against the old bag, wetting it, turning it almost black.

She humphed loudly. It was tough for Inca to be ignored, because she’d always been the quiet one in the group. So, she tossed her book bag down, away from the waterline to keep it dry, and yelled again. And again. And again!

“Guys!”

Nothing.

“Hey, you guys!”

Nothing.

“Guys? What are you looking at?”

What were they looking at? Whatever it was, it was able to turn the world around them to black. Inca’s friends—River Roe (her cousin) and Martie Berch—were uneasy, looking down at the bag and kicking at the pebbles and cobbles. Inca could see they were anxious. And their anxiety was infectious, Inca started to panic. What could possibly be wrong with them, she wondered. To her, they were acting so strange...

“INCA!”

River finally bellowed back at his cousin. When he turned around to shout, she saw that his eyes were strained with worry.

The uneven substrate was dangerous, but Inca Roe broke into a frantic run nonetheless. As she reach her friends, she stumbled right into Martie’s arms. Martie Berch was the proverbial third wheel in their crew, but in fact she was the fourth of four.

“It’s bad,” Martie said to her dear friend Inca. Using both of her hands, Martie grabbed Inca by the shoulders and steadied her. Slightly emboldened by a deep, deep breath, she tried to continue. “Inca,” she whimpered, “it’s a dead body… we found a dead body. In the bag.”

That was when Inca knew. She knew whose body was in the bag. She just knew. In fact, all three of them knew. And that’s why they just stood there, looking down at the fingers sticking out of a hole in the side of the brown sack. They were all too scared to pull the damn thing open to find out what they all already knew.

The warmth drained from River Roe’s hands. His eyes filled with water, and he wiped away the nascent swell with his cold hands. Those hands slipped down from his eyes and rested on his nose, making a cup over his mouth. River tried to talk through his fingers, “I’m gonna do it,” he mumbled. His words were slow, sinking with the sodden march of certain despair.

Inca and Martie flanked River, each girl placed a gentle palm on his back. They meant to console him rather than encourage him, even if they didn't realise it. River could hear them stifling the tears, and he whimpered himself as he bent down to grip the edge of the sack. As he left their touch, the two teenagers leaned into each other, buttressing their grief together.

As he pulled back the coarse fabric, he knew it was the beginning of a miserable chapter in a rotten story.