Acheron, Oklahoma, 7/3/1972. 
This is what Thomas the emaciated drunk looks like when he breathes heavy, the stench of death close by on his muddy shoes: 
	He stumbles onto the train tracks along the Acheron River, his fatigued clothing fluttering through the early AM summer breeze. His pale sickly body hurts, and his filthy boots lit by nearby neon strike on the rails around like a judge with his gavel. His back is melted, candy-caned; his blackened eyes are stuck on the ground like a guilty domesticated animal. He could have been seen through a bedroom window in one house and a bathroom window in another. His presence, however, is rendered visible to slumbering no-ones with their curtains shut and their doors locked.
"Wood knocks around", his mouth mutters singsongly within an unkempt beard entrapping mosquitoes. "Wooden houses shrink in the winnertime. And they grow in the summer." His breath is heard by no one; it dares not echo. Such a sound would disturb the slumber of the pests and predators lurking above and below where Thomas is balancing on the tracks, one muddy shoe in front of the other, dodging bugs and branches along the journey. Thomas suddenly stops in place when the buzzing grows no more louder, the flies in the sky jolting his body up from his arched gait. He rubs his nose and his eyes mechanically snap into place.
	Exposed now beyond the path of the tracks is an opening revealed through an archway of trees. "There lies… he who cannot die," Thomas says, pointing at the houses and homes ahead of him, his feet sliding on the dirt through the woods. He nods politely to the light pole above him, shining a holy spotlight upon his visit in an aged newspaper yellow. Gliding through with ghostly force, his arm extended outwards and his fingers weak and half-curled, searching for God's hand to guide him into the brittle and battered neighborhood, Thomas walks in. 
"Sodom and Gomorrah," Thomas murmurs beneath his bony sightgivers. 
The shingles of two houses in a row seemed to have fallen on the ground together in a rotting pile in the communal unkempt backyard, alongside piles of leaves and litter swelling like ticks. There's a yelling couple in the distance and Thomas sticks his ugly ear up: a glass breaks, a scream is heard, cries about in the night. It circles the neighborhood in primal aggression: something purely hormonal and corrupt is in the air. Thomas follows the ground like some wounded animal again near a collection of broken wires, back in a curve, eyes targeted on trash below like breadcrumbs, getting nearer to the sounds in the air.
A person stands on his porch, bathing a small yawning silhouette in porchlight green. His ears poke out to know the neighbor's clamor as he rubs his eyes: what the fixtures would look like after ripped from their intended positions, what new furious octaves the human voice can achieve in its weeping, what the quiet sound of two sides of a door locked in a panic feels like in the bones. 
"I n-n-n-need help," Thomas stammers as he approaches the figure, now revealing the age of a boy, his shaved head glistening in the moonlight. The boy turns quickly, his eyes big, his stance changed to an athlete.
"Who's you?"
"P-p-please, kid-d. I'm hurting r-r–e-a-l bad, and I g- g- g- go- g- gotta use a phone to get an amb-bulance," Thomas spills out haphazardly, "does your momma have one?" He shifts closer: his coat is ripped, his eyes right at him like a mantis. He's hurt. He's filthy. He limps, his foot scraping along the ground drawing a line in the dirt throwing mud everywhere. 
"Not supposed to let strangers in to use it," the boy states while taking a step back. "Against the rules. Sorry, mister."
"I need- I gotta get- help, police, ambulance-" Thomas comes to the base of the steps and speaks up in rapid fashion, his face scrunched in pain, just as auctioneers and preachers sell and tell the world about what parts of old civilization's scraps to keep around for the future.
"You stay out here, I call inside," the boy says strongly.  
"I'm hurtin'. H-h-hit me hard." Thomas blinked violently with each stutter.  
"No can do, mister. You stay here and sit down," the boy says while closing the screen door, locking it, "and I'll get Pappy to call 'em."
"Can't do that," Thomas says swiftly, sitting on the porch's swing clutching at his side.
"What?"
"Cause then you gotta go and wake your folks up! Don't get yourself in trouble because of me."
The boy's movement from the door to the phone paused, his frame submerged in darkness. He stood still and turned to face the door slowly.
"You stopped stutterin', mister."
Thomas lingered right outside the screen door, his face pushing the screen in, his teeth big and shiny. His face was scrunched like a fish, his whine growing. "Lemme in right now! I need help kid r-r-r-right now help me-", Thomas frantically calls out as the door opens inwards, the cheap plastic lock inefficient. Thomas falls through the screen door and hits the ground hard. The boy is frozen in place like the chills of a distant weather disobeying their annual schedule, far too early for their appearances…
"Fuckin' door," Thomas mutters angrily under his breath, looking up at the stuck child in his own living room.
"You okay?"
"Where's your mother?"
The man and the boy stare at each other for a while- such strange features on their faces. The man, tall, lanky with limbs like ropes, the face pushed in like a skeleton, a beard that hasn't been shaven. A bum. The boy still has his baby fat, sporting some stained and oversized tee shirt on. It waves around subtly in the breeze of an electric fan as the boy stands awkwardly and warily in the living room connected to a tiny tiled kitchen. As he stares down the man, Thomas stays on the ground in his line of sight. The man's mud has tracked everywhere in the house and the boy imagines how mad his momma would get at the sight of this mess.
"She's not here. What do you want me to do?"
"I said, where's your momma at?", the man asks again, lower, quieter this time, on the ground, crawling around towards the couch, attempting to climb up it.
The boy stared at Thomas like the record needed flipped.
The man seemed to understand this well by changing the subject. "Tell them I hurt someone and I need to b-b-b-b-" Thomas stops and looks up at the boy for a semblance of sympathy- "be put in jail for it. I feel real bad about it."
The boy is on the phone, he's spinning the dial and getting the new 9-1-1 on. He was taught by his momma to stay on the phone for the 9-1-1 people, to let it ring a few times and wait for a person on the other end called an operator to pick up. The first ring seems to never come, however. It's dead silent in the child's left ear.
	"I did something… real bad, kid." the man says while wincing in pain, his mouth open like a primate showing teeth. His dark eye flourishes a single drip of surprising moisture down his sun-battered face.
"Sir," says the boy. 
"What is it?," asks Thomas in a low tone, reminiscent of therapy and church.
"The phone ain't working."
"Well," Thomas responds, still on the ground, unable to get up although he tries with a Samsonite might, "isn't that something?"
The boy was scared, frozen in place.
"My name is Abel," Thomas says slowly. "I fought a guy at the gas station. I b-b-b-b-beat him up real b-b-b-bad. I left him in the bathroom."
"Is he okay?" asks the boy.
"I don't think he's dead but he could be," Thomas says. "I'm real scared," he mutters, his body rising and becoming bipedal once more. "I need help. I do all these bad things all the time."
The boy feels now, that Abel has an easy ability to corner him in the kitchen, to trap him and kill and eat him right by the fridge like the big bad wolf his momma told him stories of.
"I tried to hurt someone a long time ago and I got caught before I could kill him," Abel says. "In the winnertime."
	"...who?"
	"A baby." Thomas bluntly pronounced. "It was a baby. My baby. Me and my girl had this pretty baby and I couldn't stand to look at the thing anymore." The boy's eyes widened as Abel lingered and hovered in front of him, casting a close shadow onto the boy's form. "So I tried to kill it."
	The boy paused for a long time, feeling the eyes of Abel on him. "Why?", the boy subtly whispered.
	"To be entirely honest, I don't even know. Somethin' in me just… s-s-s-napped."
	The boy wanted his mother. He wanted her to scream, to kick the man out, to show that she was just as scared as the boy was. In reality, the mother, "a woman with a lot of struggles" as the boy's grandfather spoke of, lived in some other town now. A lot of nights and early mornings the boy spent ogling longingly into the cosmos for her.
	"You ever need help?," Thomas asked, completely tall and close to the boy with nowhere to move. Abel's voice begins to break. 
	"Please h-h-h-h-help me," the man says as he falls to his knees, extending his arms outwards. "I just n-need a hug."
	The boy, empathetic yet anxious, stayed in his spot.
	"I said gimme a hug," Thomas spoke in a jagged ugly fashion. He grabbed the boy hard by his clothes, pulling him in and covering his mouth as the hug began to constrict even more. The boy had one calm thought during this short chaotic moment- although the man was now closer to him, the boy now felt strangely colder against the man. The boy had this thought yet he had many more, all of them saying at once hand-in-hand that this was a gesture that was not okay. If he didn't escape this man, he could be "killed, eaten, and thrown in the river" like his momma always said.
	"LET GO OF ME!" the boy erupted out with as he punched, slapped, scratched, and kicked at Thomas despite the man having a strong clutch upon him. Thomas whipped his arm back and punched the kid back, sending the child on the ground coiled into himself like a dead spider.
	"You fuckin' bastard," Thomas spat out after coughing up a mouthful of blood from a strong shoe to his jaw, shattering teeth in the process. "You really did it now."
Both people in the house broke their battle turn nervously toward the dark hallway.
"HEY!", the grandfather yelped from the dark hallway, adjusting his boxy hearing aid, cane raised above his ancient head. "Get your fuckin' hands off 'im!", the diluted grandfather yelled aggressively as he smacked Thomas with his cane, kicking the tall man in the ribs once he hobbled over from the strikings from the old man's cane.
"Get the fuck OUTTA HERE!," the grandfather primally screamed as he took his hands upon Thomas and pushed the man forwards.
Thomas collapsed through his screen door, breaking the frame off the hinges and tumbling down the stairs of the porch with his frigid body tangled within it. He hit his head hard, like when he was a child, on the concrete ground which led up to the stairs he had cascaded downwards on. The door slams quickly behind Thomas, the door locked. 
He kicks the dirt present everywhere on the road, staring at the dirt for a third time this day. The sun shows a colorful feature of Thomas, the emaciated drunk on his walk back to the tracks. His purple eye bruises, dripping scratches, and ripped clothing only enhance the figure staring downwards, twinkling in the nubile sunlight as a rooster crows in the distance.