Raspberries

It took Victor thirty minutes to walk through the field behind his house before he came to the edge of the woods; from the beginning of the trees to the raspberry bushes was another hour. When he went out, he took four sacks with him, just enough to make it worth his time, but not too many to make his trip home agonizing. It was on one September evening, when he was running low on jam and wine and tarts and preserves, that he decided he better stock up before the birds and the fall took the rest of the berries from him.

Filling the bag, Victor found the forests’ light to be quite insufficient to meet his berry picking needs; he could hardly tell the rotten from the ripe, and as he struggle to determine which would be best plucked and bagged, he stepped through a termite-stricken log and fell; he landed back first on a slope and rolled, knees and elbows and shoulders and hands slapping against the leaves. In a moments’ time, his bag was lost to him and his face was planted in the dirt.

He raised his head and found himself staring into the mouth of a festering corpse; a pus-white maggot crawled out of the gum, tickled a tooth, then slipped back under the flesh. Victor contained his terror, and quickly picked himself up into a sitting position, where he could inspect his surroundings without a noseful of rot.

The forest was just as it had always been; old trees, branches to the sky and moss covering the trunks; the floor was composed of small plants and decomposing foliage; a canopy of green covered the whole sky; the corpse, however, was very new to him, although it appeared to be a few days old to the ground.

“Oh, hello!”

Victor turned around. There was a man sitting behind him, a tall thin man with short thin lips and long thin hair. He had on faded black pants and a grey t-shirt, both baggy on his boney self, and a grey wool skull cap with the words “Jim’s Hat” stitched into the brim in blue.

“I’m Warren,” he said, grinning enough to expose his poor dental hygiene.
“This,” he added, pointing at the pale naked corpse, “is Felicity.”

Victor looked at the man, then at the corpse. He felt at his hip, found that his knife hadn’t come off in the fall, and felt protected for a second. The corpse wasn’t going anywhere, so he focused his attention back on the man, who was still grinning, but nervously. Neither of them said anything for a moment. Warren, with an
awkward sort of nod of the head, asked, “What’s your name?”

“I’m Victor.” Victor stepped two steps back from the man and the body and observed the scene again; there was a thin pale man sitting ten feet from an aged dead body in the woods. Victor though to himself for a moment, then asked, “Did you, uh, did you kill Felicity?”

Warren shook his head.

“No, just found him like this. Really boring sort of guy, but he’s the only company I’ve had all month.”

Victor shuddered for a moment considering what the word “company” could mean, then walked up to the corpse. It was most definitely a man, a hairy beared man with a long black pony tail, lying face up in the leaves. He was covered in small scrapes and cuts, holes from the worms and grubs, but he was otherwise unharmed and with no clear cause of death.

“Did you know him?” Victor asked, wrinkling his nose.

Warren shook his head again.

“Nope. He’s got a tat, though, on his arm. The heart with the scroll?”

Victor squinted in the dark, and, sure enough, there was a tattoo of a heart with a banner in front of it reading “Felicity.”

“I don’t see what the point of getting your own name tattooed on your arm is,” Warren commented, playing with a twig.

“I don’t think that was his name. Probably a girlfriend?”

Warren shrugged and stuck the twig in his mouth, working between teeth and popping out bits of old food. “I’ve been calling him Felicity, he doesn’t seem to mind much.”

There was a silence, as Victor, Warren and Felicity weren’t quite sure what to say to one another. It was almost entirely dark in there in the woods, although their eyes had adjusted with the faltering light. However, Victor was not planning on spending his whole night between the trees with a stranger and a corpse. He spoke quicky, and rather louder than he intended.

“We should bury him then! It’s not right to leave a man without a grave.”

Warren groaned, and with a pout, replied, “I knew you’d say that.” Then he got up, walked out of sight behind some trees, and came back with two shovels. They were old and the handles were moldy, but without question, Victor took his and tore into the earth; the ground was soft with death and was easily lifted up; they spent an hour splitting roots and throwing scoops of dirt into a pile. Neither of them spoke, and when the hole looked deep enough, they took their shovels and rolled Felicity over; he fell into his grave and left behind a pile of bugs.

“I can take it from here,” Warren said, a small tear welling up above his dirty cheek. It was hard to see in the night, but his eyes were beginning to sparkle a little bit, and Victor stuck his shovel in the dirt and nodded. He made his way up the hill to the sounds of dirt hitting corpse, then collected his bags and headed home without any raspberries at all.