Encumbered

by William R. Eakin

About the Author: William R. Eakin is a professional writer of short stories, with a love for things past the margins, and with recent work in places like ANALOG and FANTASTIC STORIES, as well as AMAZING, REALMS OF FANTASY, F&SF, etc. His fiction that most exhibits his dark and weirdly criminal side has appeared in such zines as THE HORROR ZINE, BLACK OCTOBER, CITY SLAB, and HORROR GARAGE. He lives and writes on a cliff a lot like the one in this story.

Excerpt

I knew since I met Eddie in third grade he’d be like this.  I was breathless as I plopped my not badly misshapen rear on the flat stone clifftop. The river below and before me turned in a big green oxbow curve between high flat canyon walls.  Its water was higher today than it had been in years, too high for canoes, perfect for our purposes: a white stretch of rapids and boulders signified where we’d just come from and where we’d lost the baby.

Eddie’s frazzled white top appeared over the stone edge below me, then his white bushy eyebrows and beard.  He carted the tent and sleeping bags and overnight gear, and he was huffing and puffing from the near vertical path.  He’d been in fourth grade, when I was in third, and that nearly fifty years ago, so he earned the huffs.  But he also hadn’t just had a baby and two months of postpartum depression.  So he’d had to do it, carry our supplies. And he’d sure enough helped me pitch the baby. Down there now its little limbs had been snapped and cracked by rocks and rapids—it, she, was lost and probably in pieces and no longer worth thinking of.  I knew that she would be found; this was a river well-populated by rafters.  But not this week, perhaps not the next. And DNA would certainly trace itself back to me.  It did not matter.  I would be free.  Free.

I stood up to help Eddie pitch the small tent against lichen-covered shale and dirt.  He was red-faced from the climb, from the exertion of the day, from what he’d done.  He looked guilty.

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