"They've been burning on that hill for years. Shit, you'd sink calf-deep in ash if you got anywhere near the top of it."
       Thomas Keevie planted the double-handled post hole digger in the soil at his feet. He rested his sweating face against his coupled hands as he leaned on the tool and gave a breathless reply. "That right?"
       "Hell," Rodney Leblanc went on, still packing dirt back around the last post they'd gotten in, "might be deeper than that. They been burning stuff up there for a hundred years. Longer, I'll bet. And that was after they'd taken it from the natives. Think it was Atakapas Indians or Coushattas, one of them. Those natives used to hold pow-wows up on it. I mean, it's the highest piece of land around here. Ain't but probably twenty feet off the ground at its highest, but hell, that's a damn mountain around these parts."
       Thomas wasn't originally from Domel, Louisiana (which he'd come to learn was pronounced 'dough mail'), but he could see what Rodney was saying. Everything was flat or a straight-up mudhole for miles in every direction. The hill, probably some forty yards from where they were at that point, looked out of place as if it had been constructed. It wouldn't even qualify as a hill back home in northern Arkansas, but Thomas wasn't one to share his musings aloud with new co-workers. That could lead to questions, like why did you come out this way and then why don't you just take your colored ass back up to Arkansas?
       Not that he saw Rodney going that route.
       They were cheap labor, Rodney and he. They both had a background in construction (so Thomas inevitably came to find out), they were both older hands (Thomas was forty-nine and feeling every second of it), and they'd both hit a dry spell trying to find work with contractors. Along came Chuck Porter Gray, who, for some reason, had introduced himself to both men at different points in time with all three of his nondescript names, with his newly purchased pasture land. Gray had bought it off the bank after it had sat unclaimed for at least three decades. The bank had actually taken the expense to have it kept up every now and then; it looked to Thomas like it had been mowed with a tractor maybe two or three weeks ago. Now, Chuck Porter Gray wanted it fenced in for his herd--all of 170 acres of it. This was just day one, but Thomas felt they had made pretty damn good progress for old guys with some post hole diggers and shovels.
       Hard workers, Thomas would have liked to think, developed into hardened wise men.
       "Let me move the truck up," Rodney said as he dropped his shovel. "Make it easier for us old farts."
       "I heard that." Thomas smiled and nodded.
       Rodney ambled to his white F150 hitched to a trailer bed full of fence posts, all the while working his keys out of his coveralls pocket.
       Thomas put his palms on his hips and turned toward the old burning hill. He didn't know if he was fooling himself or not, but he thought he could detect the smell of smoke still in the air as if the land had become imbued with it. He wiped more sweat away from his nostrils with the bottom of his white wife-beater to make sure he wasn't tricking himself. That only seemed to make the scent in the early fall air more clear.
       Rodney parked and slid out of the cab. He laid down the pine plank they'd been using to cross the ditch between the dirt road and the field.
       "Yeah," he went on (Thomas did notice his co-worker tended to keep talking without any further prompting), "they used to burn anything and everything up there. Mostly trash, junk, that kind of stuff, I'd imagine. The old butcher shop used to be 'bout a mile from here off the highway, and I think they used to come dump and burn the remains up there."
       "I know you ain't about to tell me they burned witches at the stake up there," Thomas half-joked.
       "Nah, nah," Rodney said. "Hell, I don't know. Maybe."
       "Shit," the other man hissed. They laughed as they went back to work under the late morning sun.
       "Want to go eat at the Burger King up the road in a little bit?" Rodney suggested.
       "Sounds good."
       "So, you just got here from Arkansas?"
       Thomas gritted his teeth. Damn. He'd creaked that door open a little too wide.
       "Uh, yeah, about a month ago."
       "Where you stay at?" Rodney inquired. Thomas walked over to the trailer and heaved another fence post across his shoulder.
       "Renting a room at the motel up the ways," he answered. He stood the post upright, his body already fatiguing. His cohort helped him steady it, and together they planted it into the recess Thomas had dug.
       "So, I can't help but notice your fall is more like summer out this way," he pointed out in an attempt to change subjects. "It's almost October, and it's like eighty-something out here."
       "Man, if you're lucky, you might see winter show up just before Christmas. And by that, I mean a high in the fifties."
       A flurry of black debris quickly floated between them. The pair exchanged a confused furrow of their brow before eyeing the burning hill. It wasn't remotely windy that day (they both increasingly hoped that would change soon), which was why it struck Thomas as peculiar that something had stirred the ashes in the field. A small, isolated cloud of flakes and bits had just come and gone from nowhere.
       "No witch burnings, huh? You sure?" Thomas elbowed his co-worker, then chuckled.
       So did Rodney. "Well, that was some out-of-the-blue shit. Might be a rabbit or fox or something burrowing up on the hill."
       The duo went back to work securing the post in position. Thomas had been almost thankful for the random interruption.
       "Hey, wanna stop by the EZ Mart and get some beers with our burgers?" Rodney suggested.
       Thomas smiled politely. "Ah, no. No, thanks."

       Half a six-pack in and feeling like a piece of shit, Thomas hadn't even bothered to turn on the lights or TV when he came back to the motel around six. Harsh remnants of evening light fell in a line from the ratty blinds on his left to the front corner of the dark little room. He hadn't showered yet, either, but that only felt fitting. His eyes weighed heavy with sleep as he slouched against the headboard.
       Thomas jolted to attention at the short snap of shattering glass. The beer in his hand doused the bedspread. His head darted side to side in the dark. He reached for the lamp on the end table. There was no glass on the floor, nor any indication that anything else had broken.
       He'd been hearing the sound of glass breaking for a couple years now (ever since the accident). There was never any to be found, of course. It was all in his head, and almost always hit him on the verge of sleep, but this one had seemed so loud--
       "Fuck, fuck, fuck," he muttered to himself as he got up. He dropped the remainder of the beer in the garbage can. That had almost been a week of sobriety, but he already knew he could do a week. Hell, he could pull off two if he had to. But failure was inevitable. And in alcoholism, as he had found was the case in death, too, it often hit swiftly and almost for no discernible reason.
       Get up, he mandated himself. Go. Start over. Just start again.
       The first step in starting again would be a shower. Thomas fired up the tiny stall in the dim bathroom to almost boiling before he stepped in.
       There was an agenda of stagnant, unresolved items that his brain always ran through in the shower. What was Carissa doing right now? What did the kids think about him? What was he going to do once this fence was up? What was the point of all this? Why not get smashed and stay smashed if there was no point?
       With no concrete answers to any of this, Thomas's eyes wandered the bottom of the shower, where they picked up on something odd. There was a lot of black something-or-other running down the drain, something (apparently) running off of him. He started scrubbing his arms and legs harder. More the stuff rinsed off. The funny thing was that he couldn't seem to see or feel it on his skin, to begin with. After three more minutes of scrubbing, he stepped out of the stall to dry off. He checked the thin white motel towel to see if the stuff had come off on it, too. But that didn't seem to be the case. Nor could he see it on himself.
       In his bid to start again, Thomas dreamt that night of standing atop the burn pile in Chuck Porter Gray's new field. And there, buried between every still-warm crevice of ash, yellowed eyes with enlarged black pupils traced his every move.

       The next day by the field was hotter than the last. Thomas wondered what the hell the dead of summer must have felt like in Domel, and how many of those sweat-drenched days pouring concrete his co-worker had endured.
       The fence had progressed a good two football fields in distance from the ash pile, yet he could still detect the lingering hint of smoke. It was possible someone had come and burned last night (without Church Porter Gray's knowledge, probably), but his gut claimed that was unlikely.
       Rodney, who was using a heavy mallet to drive the first post of the day deeper in the ground, dropped something else entirely on his new friend. "You drank last night, huh?"
       Thomas straightened his spine and stared at the white guy with a leery mistrust.
       Rodney saw this, holstered the hammer in his worn tool belt, and wiped his brow with a short laugh. "Yeah, I tried that. Not drinking. Then drinking. Then not drinking. Then drinking." Rodney shook his thick head, which waved his short salt-and-pepper curls under his Dallas Cowboys cap. "Shit gets old. Figured that was the case when you said you didn't want a drink yesterday. And this morning you're even quieter than you were yesterday. You're plumb disgusted with yourself, I'll bet. Been there."
       Instead of answering, the black man only began shoveling dirt back around the post.
       "I started. . .well, I started a long time ago drinking," Rodney began, "but it didn't get to be all the time until three years ago. My wife hates the shit, but she don't say much about it. She don't like conflict."
       Thomas buried the post hole diggers at his feet, scooped a clump of mushy soil out, and decided there was no point in not talking anymore. "What happened three years ago?"
       Rodney was still for a moment, hands on his hips, eyes down on the hole being cleared. "My youngest decided when he started college, that'd he'd come out of the closet. He told my wife. My wife told me. And one day, when he was home from school, and I was about five beers in, I punched him in his stomach and called him a faggot. That was about as confrontational as I've ever seen my wife, 'cause she came pushing on and screaming at me. I didn't fight back; guess I'd done what I thought needed doing. Well, in my black-and-white, simplified kind of reasoning, anyhow."
       He stopped his story long enough to bend over with several audible creaks of his joints and pick up a post from the small pile they'd made. Thomas helped him guide it into its resting position.
       "He ain't been back to the house since. And we haven't talked since. My wife says he's about to graduate. Gonna be a chemical engineer, probably get hired on right outta the chute over in the plants in Lake Charles. Smartest kid I've ever known. Ain't gonna be doing this shit at fifty, y'know?"
       Thomas asked quietly as he shoveled, "You gonna go see him graduate?"
       "Well, hell yeah, I'm gonna see him graduate!" Rodney responded as if the question was completely ludicrous. "I could care less if he spits in my face. Actually, I'd prefer it, 'cause then at least he would've acknowledged me."
       "What if he dodges you?"
       "Then, he dodges me. Then fuck me, 'cause that day is gonna be about him, and I brought that shit on to begin with."
       For a moment, the pair stared at the upright fence post without a word or movement.
       "What about you, Thomas? You got kids?"
       Thomas inhaled and exhaled, then yanked the diggers out of the ground he'd stuck them in. "I got three. All grown and gone."
       "Wife?"
       "We're separated."
       He already felt too uncomfortable to go on. But Thomas didn't stop. He didn't stop because stopping was another one of those damn things he kept doing that kept not working.
       "About three years ago," he started while waging war on his own reluctance, "I was moving glass plates into a brownstone that was getting renovated in Fayetteville. It was getting to be the end of the day; I was tired. . .hell. That's where I always blame myself. But what really happened was the car. See, we were lifting a four by six plate out of the installation truck, me and this other guy, and we uh. . ."
       Thomas froze when he noticed his hands held outward, gripping for dear life onto nothing. He battled on. "We were about to go down the ramp we'd laid against the back of the load compartment. Well, this was a big blue box truck we were in, right? I don't know how you miss it, but this woman driving this car did, I guess. We were parked on a residential street, and somehow she clipped the front end of the truck, and we both almost fell, this other fellow and me, and uh. . ."
       He noticed his hands open. He noted that this was the part of the story where there was nothing left to hold onto.
       "The glass plate broke off in our hands. It just. . .snapped into pieces. Three or four big sections fell forward when it happened, and uh, at the bottom of the ramp. . .the family that was restoring it, their little girl. . ."
       Thomas waved a slow hand in a cutting motion away from himself. Rodney's eyes fell to the ground.
       "She was six." Thomas couldn't add anymore. All he could do was nod in affirmation of the last fact he could recount. "Yeah. Six."
       "Wow," was the only thing the other man could comment. He averted his gaze, pretending not to see Thomas swallow back tears.
       "So, I keep hearing that glass breaking off in my hands whenever I'm drifting off. Hell, sometimes in the middle of the day, out of nowhere. I don't know, man. That's the problem: I don't know. Started drinking, I guess like you did, and just sort of drifted apart from my wife. I mean, I tried to quit, but--"
       "But there's always a reason not to," Rodney finished.
       "Yeah."
       "What do we do now, Thomas?" Rodney waved his hands in the air at his sides. "I mean, what's the point?"
       "I use to ask Carissa that." Thomas nodded. "She'd tell me that was a rhetorical question, but it wasn't supposed to be. It's supposed to be answered. She'd say I had the answer, I always had it, but I just lost sight of it. Just forgot it."
       "Wait, is someone burning on the hill?"
       Thomas blinked to bring himself back to the moment and gazed downrange. There was a thin plume of white smoke snaking from the top. Shafts of golden light pierced it from the early morning sun. He hadn't seen or heard anyone approach from that end of the field.
       "I dunno. . ." He frowned. "Man, I had a jacked-up dream about that hill last night."
       Rodney turned to him slowly. "Same here." He looked back at the hill. "There were. . .all these eyes. . ."
       "Watching from the ashes?" Thomas filled in.
       Rodney looked flummoxed. "Now, that's some weird shit." The Domel native's voice dropped. "That sounds like we had the same damn dream, Thomas. I mean. . .should we go over there and check it out?"
       Thomas marched forward without a word. Rodney followed closely.
       As the hill came closer, the smoke seemed to dissipate. Thomas forced his old calves to begin to ascend the expansive crest of ashes. He was careful because of Rodney's warning on the depth of stuff. It merely crunched beneath his feet at first, but as he got further up, it began to crumble in on his ankles with every step.
       "I don't see the smoke no more," Rodney noted from behind him. Nor did it feel warm around their legs as they moved on.
       "Damn, I know I saw it," Thomas attested. Though there was none to see, he could definitely still smell smoke.
       "I know. Be careful, Thomas."
       The crunching was settling deeper as he went higher ahead of Rodney. His ankles were buried, and the ash rested almost up to his calves. Near the summit, he paused and took in the surrounding fields. The sun was angling hard from the east; everything west of him, on the other side of the hill, was lit up in brilliant coral-gold hues.
       "Well, at least it's pretty from up here," he told Rodney, who had come to a halt next to him.
       "Guess we'll count this as a coffee break," the other man sighed.
       "Yeah--" Thomas began as he took another step up to the top, and was abruptly cut off by the shriek of something metal giving way underneath his feet.
       Before he could react, Thomas was falling. Weightlessness hit him in the black surroundings, and he felt himself slide against some sort of wall before landing hard on his ass. He grunted deeply in pain.
       "Thomas!" he could hear Rodney call. "Hey! Thomas, you alright?"
       The man below had to give that some consideration. The bruise he'd incurred was throbbing throughout his lower body and back. It smelled strongly of smoke wherever he was, so much so that he had to stifle a coughing fit. And try as he might, there was nothing to see but absolute darkness. That was, save for above him, where what he figured was Rodney's head loomed within a rectangular reprieve of daylight.
       The coughing came, but he spoke anyway. "Uh, I. . .yeah. Holy. . . I'm alright."
       "Man, you fell right through the hill!" Rodney exclaimed. "There's an old metal trap door or something hanging off of here! Looks rusted to shit. I mean, I don't know why it's there, but you must have made it cave in."
       Even up in Arkansas, he'd never encountered a hollowed-out hill like this. There were no sides around him, only something hard against his back. He reached warily into the dark, but his fingertips contacted nothing. When he looked down, he saw he was sitting in waist-high ash. It was warm in here, too, warmer than it was outside, even. It reminded Thomas of having to crawl into an attic during the summer, where all the heat was trapped with nowhere to go. He started hacking again.
       "I ain't ever seen anything like that!" Rodney bellowed, still astounded. "Hey, hold on, okay? I got a fifteen-foot ladder in back of my truck. I think that might be enough to get you out. Be right back, okay?"
       "Yeah, yeah," Thomas croaked between coughs. As his co-worker's footsteps scurried down the hillside above, the man inside attempted to settle his lungs. When he succeeded, he leaned back, wiping the sweat from his brow, and keeping an eye upward.
       Ash shuffled in the pitch black just beyond his feet. He froze his breathing and tried to make out some semblance of anything in front of him. The effort was futile. His ears strained for more movement.
       His first idea was a snake. It was warm in here, and any number of their burrows could run into the cave-chamber for just that reason. Thomas drew his feet in. Attempting to stand sparked a number of new aches in his hips and legs, but he preferred that to a pair of fangs.
       The ash was still. Thomas hacked a dry cough and clenched his throat. He was beginning to perspire like crazy, beads of sweat now rolling into his eyes. He glanced up, but still no Rodney and still no ladder.
       Like the flame of a pilot light bursting to life, a large form outlined in a close, searing blue fire popped into terrifying existence in front of him.
       "Holy fuck--"
       The first shape that his bewildered brain spat out was that of a centipede. It was reminiscent of one for sure on longer inspection--elongated, with probably dozens of pairs of legs flanking its slender, oval body--but he had never seen a bug that large. The trunk was probably a foot in diameter, and it stretched back into the ash chamber for at least ten feet. There may have been more of it beneath the ash, but Thomas couldn't stop gawking at its head, which took the rough appearance of a human skull but with larger, uneven sockets. Its upper third was cocked upright in a threatening posture.
       When it parted its short mandibles, it hissed like a territorial cat. Thomas couldn't tell if he had pissed himself or not.
       The creature was intensely hot, which he could feel even through his throttling adrenaline, yet it didn't seem bothered in the least by being aflame. There were several other appendages on its back, limbs like arms but without defined hands, and they waved and danced high above it along its spine as if trying to distract its prey.
       Rodney's portentous words replayed sourly in the midst of his panic. They've been burning stuff up there for a hundred years. Longer, I'll bet. Yeah, they used to burn anything and everything up there.
       What in God's name had they burned below?
       Then peace seized him with a strange, contrary iciness. Here it was, after all: the end. It looked like the face of death itself that had confronted him. Wasn't that just what he'd been waiting for to show up, anyway? Wasn't this all that was left? All he had to do was wait, and it would happen at any moment. Maybe it would be fast.
       Like a sheet of glass to the throat.

       Rodney wasn't aware he could still run until he tripped down the ash mound, landed hard on this shoulder, rolled over twice, then got back up into a mad dash without pausing to curse.
       In the midst of his graceless, hectic motion toward the F150, the shoulder pain became evident. But so did an overriding, stinging rush of adrenaline that spiderwebbed through his strained muscles and bones. They had been abruptly called upon to pull off a feat that Rodney hadn't done since high school track. It wasn't until he had crossed the field and practically fell over onto the open tailgate of the truck that he asked himself why he planned on going back.
       This ain't right. None of it, he thought in response. Those eyes from that dream. Like the ashes themselves were always watching, waiting--
       Huffing hard, and with a deep, dry swallow, the overweight man grabbed the folded metal ladder (that had become painfully heated in the sun) stuck beside the stack of posts. It was wedged in tight but came free when he yanked on it. Rodney, still breathing with a harsh rhythm, steadied his footing.
       Gotta make this one right, Rodney, he coached himself as he heaved the ladder upon on his bad shoulder. He marched as quickly as he could with it but was already so spent that he moved at half the speed as before with the awkward object in his arms.
       At last, at the summit where Thomas had fallen through, he let the ladder slip out of his clutches. Panting, Rodney flopped down to his belly and peered back down the hole from above. He didn't understand what he was looking at.
       Something had Thomas backed against a wall, and it was wavering slightly side to side like a cobra about to strike. There was imminent danger--he got that much. But Thomas already seemed numb to the fight or hypnotized, or something that looked like he'd just straight given up. Rodney's hand searched his toolbelt for anything that could be a weapon, even if it did already feel too late. He had to give the old hand a fighting chance.
       Even old hands like Thomas and he deserved that much.

       "Thomas! Headache!" Rodney yelled down. Thomas knew what it meant--watch your damn head--but he didn't dare unlock his gaze from the hellish freak in front of him. He slid slowly to his left, and just as he did, the iron-headed mallet from Rodney's tool belt thudded into the ashes he'd been paralyzed with fear in.
       At first, he actually considered not going for the hammer. Then this thing would eventually kill him, cook him, probably gnaw on him, and go back to living however the hell it was living down under the burning ground. How was it even here? How could something like this be?
       It was in the midst of the pondering wash of his terror and awe that Thomas found himself snatching the mallet from the ashes.
       "HEY MOTHERFUCKER, UP HERE! HEY!"
       The creature took Rodney's bait, arching its flaming, cadaverous head up toward the rectangular opening above. The man in front of it acted on instinct. He swung the mallet through rather than across, straight towards the skull of the fiery menace. The azure blaze singed his knuckles as he buried the iron into its mandibles, fracturing its face with a deep, dull crack. Parts of the skull fell off as the ash dweller thrashed away from Thomas. Seconds later, it dropped limply into the ashes. Its blue flames faded, and he could no longer see it.
       Thomas eyed it closely, mallet in hand.
       "You get it?" Rodney asked from above.
       "I think so."
       "What the hell was it?"
       Thomas found himself shaking his head. "Something that wouldn't burn."

       "You sure you're okay?" Rodney asked again, motioning to the smear of fresh burns across the knuckles of Thomas Keevie.
       "I'm fine," Thomas dismissed. He got up from where he sat on the hilltop and took another deep breath as he beheld the opening at his feet. "That was messed up, though, for sure."
       "You're telling me," Rodney said as he lifted up as well. "At the very least, we need to tell Chuck Porter Gray about this shit so he can fill this thing in. Or level the shit altogether."
       "Speaking of which," Thomas waved him on as he went downhill, "let's get this fence put up."
       The man behind him laughed. It was ludicrous that they would just put this life-and-death encounter behind them. But he also knew that was what old hard workers did.
       Halfway back to where they'd installed the last post, Rodney pointed out the obvious. "Man, you had to be scared shitless."
       "I was. But then, there was a moment there when I just didn't care. You know?"
       Rodney was silent as they both slowed up, but to Thomas, the look on his face told of a man who strongly identified with the notion.
       "How did you decide to care? What. . .what went through your head?" Rodney asked finally. His new friend stared down the dirt road, along the long run of grass where the rest of the fence posts would eventually stand. The thought itself hadn't been a singular one at the time--more of a mix of emotions and realizations--but he tried to put it as best as he could.
       "Maybe it's not all ashes."