Flannel opened his eyes, blinking into a sticky, pale-blue sky. The sharp gravel underneath him poked through the back of his shirt and he noticed the front was damp - signs he’d been asleep for a while. He wondered how he’d slept at all and made his first attempt to sit up. But the first lurch twisted his insides like it was a rag being rung out and his brain spun around unnaturally in his skull. With his feet in the direction of the bank, he was angled uncomfortably towards his head. He tasted rum trickling back into his throat.
Instead, he relaxed into back into the gravel hoping he was still drunk enough to pass back into not being aware of how shitty he felt. He pressed his eyes together to will himself to sleep, scrunching his face in a way that his mom would have recognized. But at 17, he had experienced enough of the embarassing and physical consequence that he had sobered up just enough that he was going to have to deal with it.
He heard rustling in the wild grass hanging dangling over the bank above his head, holding still, faking sleep. Fletcherhad a tolerance for alcohol worthy of scientific inquiry and endless positivity in the mornings. As the son of a baker, he’d been up for three hours by the time that he let himself into Flannel’s home bearing donuts most days before school.
A splash in creek startled him so completely that he sat up in a single motion, reeling immediately. But rather than Fletcher, or any of his band of misfits, he was looking at the back of boy in a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle costume. Or, in its pickled state, what he brain pieced together from the sight. Although the shell looked realistic, the rest was in a sad state.
With a cigarette in one hand, the boy poked at a large log partly submerged in the flowing water. Tendrils of smoke curling out of it. Flannel suddenly remembered dragging it from the bonfire, probably just before stumbling over and passing out. For a moment, he struggled to remember why - there had been a reason, he knew.
“Boy, it’s still a burnin’,” a voice too deep and sullen to be a boy.
Flannel came undone, then. That wasn’t a boy before him nor was it a costume. The green troll with a turtle shell had stringy black hair under a red baseball cap. He wore jeans shorts over his awkward bandy-legs. And when he turned, Flannel confronted wretched human eyes set into face much like a frog’s. The troll waddled over and took a seat to the boy.
He took a drag and then another, as if surveying his thoughts for wisdom, “Trom.”
After waiting for the boy’s reply, Trom added, “Trom’s my name.”
“Flannel,” said with the smoke drifting into his nostrils. But what he smelled was a mixture of body odor and ripe fish.
“You’re lucky, boy. I was gonna drag you down to the swimming hole and drown you.”
Flannel nodded, looking off towards the next bend where the bank rose into a hill behind a line of sycamore. Then felt an elbow against his ribs.
“Come on - I’m just joshing,” he took off his cap, “I mean we do that, sure. You folks land?”
“Yeah,” he pointed upstream to admit they were off by a bit and on someone else’s land. He lived in town and this little plot along Gum Creek was a convenient to get fucked up and not get in trouble.
Under the cap, the troll was bald and the skull indented like a bowl. He ran his froggy fingers through his hair, replaced the cap. Trom began his own story: he lived in the shaft of an aborted silver mine with the same family for generations. In return for working his influence to keep the springs on the farm flowing, they provided fresh vegetables, a little gin and his smokes.
“Speakin’ of which, I got a little somethin’ for your hangover for what’s left in that pack of camels,” gesutring to the contents of Flannel’s pockets tossed on his open denim jacket. He took out a little brown glass flask from the thigh pocket on his shorts, held it up to the light and shook it, “…help me roll that log over real quick.”
Today, the chill of a spring night was going to give way to the penetrating sauna of summer. Flannel was already sweating. Little stinging pricks of sweat broke out over his back, chest and arms. He was sore and sick so the little troll rifling through the contents of wallet didn’t provoke any ill will. The embers remained, hollowing the log from the inside. He pushed with the toe of his boot, then the heel. The stubby remains of a branch kept it from rolling so he groaned a little and rolled it with his hands from the other side. Water splashed on his face, so with a little reticience and an acheing to be home in bed, he sat.
“Just a little sip, now. Go find your friends first,” and with that Trom bolted back up the natural embankment and was gone."
What made for a sip? It smelled like peppermint. With the diligent recklessness, the boy figured what was left in the bottle approximated a sip. His mouth felt like cotton candy. A cool breeze picked up off the creek pushing through his hair. He reclined into the baptismal water and floated along just as God intended a body to do.
He vaguely heard the wings of angels around him, their feathers carassing his cheek before he slipped into deep slumber.
Crow was not amused with Trom, at all. He clutched the boys shoulders, drawing blood, and with all his might tried to pull him to the gravel bar until the creek opened around the bend and the flow of water slowed. And there he left Flannel drying out in the sun.
Fletcher would navigate his old yellow and white Ford pickup and drive him home in the bed with two of the girls keeping him from rolling around.