Secrets (standard:drama, 1713 words)
Author: KShaw	Added: Jan 02 2006	Views/Reads: 5352/2727	Story vote: 0.00 (0 votes)
We all have them: A secret is something only one person knows, and for an hour I splendoured in its spiciness... but for a lifetime I have been shadowed by its cold kiss over my conscience...

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passing yacht, and wave as if I was a city kid waving to a stranger sat 
at the window of a passing train.  It somehow connected me to something 
or someone far off, and for a moment, the feeling was as if I'd stepped 
out of my torn and scuffed boots for new horizons. 

It's hard for me to talk about the mountain because for me it was a
living thing.  It was a protector, a guardian, a constant, like a 
parent.  It had good days and bad days, one day be gentle and the next 
day severe.  It didn't matter what came, who or why.  It taught lessons 
and some of those lessons were bad.  Dad said that city people didn't 
understand its moods. He always said that.  He said, “The mountain can 
keep them for a season in hell if they take chances.” I never forgot 
that. A season in hell. 

It's not every day that a fourteen-year-old boy finds a dead body, but
that is what happened.  It wasn't lying there in the snows of winter, 
nor was it motionless among the yellow flowers of spring.  Instead, it 
hung in the wind from a bare branch that protruded from the rock. 
Strangely, there was no terror, no panic – and if there was a momentary 
grin, a split second of doubt that it wasn't real, it left me as soon 
as the body twisted in a gust of wind. The stretched limpness, the 
pungency of death was unmistakable.  I held my breath.  I wonder, 
still, this many years later, why I never ran immediately to get help; 
why it was that I felt a need to get closer. 

Death was not something new to me. Walking home from school I had to
pass the slaughterhouse, in Salen, and one time I waited for people to 
pass, and be far enough away so that I could peek between the wooden 
slats of the fence. I saw cows, pigs; even goats hung by their rear 
legs,  blood gushing like a crimson waterfall from the beasts' throats, 
till the last trickle splattered into the gulley. 

The girl hung the way those animals did.  The dried blood from her
mouth, diluted with vomit, blossomed thickly on her blouse, and looked 
like a poppy stain on her breast. Her head tilted awkwardly sideways, 
her neck broken and stretched, and her hair appeared almost unreal, 
straggly.  Her lips were bright blue. She stared down at me.  It was an 
empty stare. 

I got into a position where I could see up her skirt. I had been
masturbating three, four, sometimes six days a week, but never on 
Sundays. I unzipped my fly, my nostrils flared, I felt good, she had 
enormous tits and though dead, her shining eyes looked at me. I heard 
the priest's voice behind the velvet curtain of my young mind. 

This was neither a picture nor the carcass of a dead animal, but a real
girl, albeit she was dead.  She surely wasn't going to mind if I looked 
discreetly up her skirt.  I felt a secret, guilty pleasure, imagining 
the tuft of hair between her legs behind the lacy panties. She wasn't 
very pretty, in fact when I looked at her face I thought she was quite 
ugly, and not at all like Susan Rafferty, one of the girls in the wagon 
that passed my house on Sunday mornings, and of whom I sometimes 
thought about while masturbating in my bedroom. 

I never touched the dead girl. My hand momentarily stretched out, and it
quivered near the hem of her skirt. The bell tolled. It seemed a thrill 
to see up her skirt, but to do anything else; well it just seemed plain 
wrong. 

It all happened so quickly, dare I say innocently. I heard the voice of
my father, ‘A season in hell.' I scraped and banged my knees as I made 
a hurried exit from the crags, coming upon Mr. Hodges, out with his two 
dogs, and to whom I breathlessly garbled my find. He ran home and 
telephoned the mountain rescue team in Tobermoray. 

They brought her body down on a stretcher, bumping against the rock,
occasionally stumbling.  A few city folk gathered, silently. Ambulances 
attract attention in the valley. The doctor came to me and asked me if 
I was okay. He said that sometimes when people find a dead body they 
suffer shock.  I didn't say anything to him, other than being okay. He 
said I was very brave. 

I never talked about it, but I did masturbate that night, not seeing the
crumpled images of women in magazines, but instead, the darker image of 
the dead girl's panties, visible to me while her legs dangled apart.  
It felt like, well... it felt like a fire in my stomach. 

The newspaper said the man found hanging on the side of the mountain was
Trevor Johnson, 27 years of age. He was wearing a woman's clothes, it 
said. They reported that it was a suicide, a note found in his bedroom 
indicated he no longer continue to live as a man. 

I never masturbated for a long time after that. But when I did, the
priest in my head let the perversion fall like a curtain over my 
conscience. 

Something I did as a young man, as innocent as it might now appear, has
cast a shadow as big as a mountain over my life. 


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