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Spit, Fire! Spout, Rain! @spitfirespoutrain.bsky.social · 31/12/2025

"Jesi, what is it?" her mother asked. "It's bad," Jesi said. "Bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad." Her mother tried to shush her, but she couldn't stop. THE END

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Spit, Fire! Spout, Rain! @spitfirespoutrain.bsky.social · 31/12/2025

It was bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad bad, bad, bad. The whole year had been bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad. Her mother turned to her, opened one eye. Smelly cat breath leaked out of her mouth.

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Spit, Fire! Spout, Rain! @spitfirespoutrain.bsky.social · 31/12/2025

The train shouted and wouldn't stop. She was in a pile of blankets with her mother and Tyler, but they were asleep, and she alone could hear a police siren now, and an ambulance or more police cars, and were they coming for them? Could you sleep in the woods?

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Spit, Fire! Spout, Rain! @spitfirespoutrain.bsky.social · 31/12/2025

Chapter 16: Jesi Jesi woke to it, the blast and the rumble, the train was coming right at her, and where was she? She was in the tent. They were finally camping. The train had to be right outside. Did it run through the woods? She'd never escape it.

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Spit, Fire! Spout, Rain! @spitfirespoutrain.bsky.social · 30/12/2025

The train shone the brightest light upon him, miscarriage of a star, blared its furious scream. He wondered what Trajan had felt. And then he spit fire.

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Spit, Fire! Spout, Rain! @spitfirespoutrain.bsky.social · 30/12/2025

The train slowed but not by much, and it was at the 30 yard line, the 28. The brakes couldn't or wouldn't, just squealed. He let himself, just peed in his pants.

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Spit, Fire! Spout, Rain! @spitfirespoutrain.bsky.social · 30/12/2025

Charles held fast, remembered a man who jumped off a bridge to kill himself but somehow lived, and he was thereafter gratefully alive. The horn blinded him, the headlight rang his ears, a cowbell each. Charles was fine either way. Maybe 60-40, favoring death.

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Spit, Fire! Spout, Rain! @spitfirespoutrain.bsky.social · 30/12/2025

All he had to do was take a couple of steps to one side, either side. A screech of metal on glass erupted, but the train did not stop. The string of pain in his calf balled itself up. The horn blared, harmonized with the brakes' barren shriek.

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Spit, Fire! Spout, Rain! @spitfirespoutrain.bsky.social · 30/12/2025

The train let loose three quick hollers but didn't slow, maybe couldn't. Charles watched it straight on. His heart beat in his lungs, up in his neck, and down his back, through his bad leg. The engine was maybe 100 yards away, a football field.

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Spit, Fire! Spout, Rain! @spitfirespoutrain.bsky.social · 29/12/2025

The main headlight blazed, watching him, judging, and the two lower ones on the sides did not blink, eyes of fire. He was the deer. Who sat behind those windows, and did they even see? He did not care who ran him down.

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Spit, Fire! Spout, Rain! @spitfirespoutrain.bsky.social · 29/12/2025

He stood right on the track, and the train was coming. It squealed. It blistered at him. The rumble of it wiggled up his legs from wood and the metal, the vibrations thrummed within his chest along with his flat, tired heart. It was coming.

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Spit, Fire! Spout, Rain! @spitfirespoutrain.bsky.social · 29/12/2025

He would let the man or the woman driving the train decide. Was it horrible to put that weight on them, an innocent person? How did train brakes even work? For a man who thought he knew so much, and he had, he had, Charles knew nothing. John was right about his bullshit.

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Spit, Fire! Spout, Rain! @spitfirespoutrain.bsky.social · 29/12/2025

A wave of deja vu splashed over him. The burning calf muscle, the darkness, he had been there and done that, done this. The train yelled once and then twice, and he could never catch it, not like that. He hobbled toward the track. He would not go back, could not go back.

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Spit, Fire! Spout, Rain! @spitfirespoutrain.bsky.social · 29/12/2025

The train screamed, and then the headlight, a horrible artificial sunrise, broke out from the darkness, like a deer on fire, and had that really happened? Had all this happened to him?

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Spit, Fire! Spout, Rain! @spitfirespoutrain.bsky.social · 29/12/2025

He could hear the furious chugging now, and then the whistle shrilled. He took a step, and he wobbled like a fucking Weeble, but he could fall down, and he would fall down, and he wouldn't go back. He had never owned a Weeble, just seen the ads on TV. He coudln't. He couldn't do it anymore.

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Spit, Fire! Spout, Rain! @spitfirespoutrain.bsky.social · 29/12/2025

The train lowed, and he was ready, set to spring, and then a spasm went through his left calf, a muscle cramp, it contracted and burned, and this goddamn body, everything had failed him, he had failed himself. Good god, it hurt, and he hobbled forward. He'd never be able to catch it.

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Spit, Fire! Spout, Rain! @spitfirespoutrain.bsky.social · 28/12/2025

His heart flashed horizontal inside him, he was all heartbeat, a web bursting in his chest. He was ready as he'd ever be, and the fact that he wasn't ready at all did not negate that. This was it, his last chance for something, for anything, to fly away.

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Spit, Fire! Spout, Rain! @spitfirespoutrain.bsky.social · 28/12/2025

He'd knew from the movies—you ran alongside it, and there was always a ladder or an open boxcar, something to grab on to.

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Spit, Fire! Spout, Rain! @spitfirespoutrain.bsky.social · 28/12/2025

Charles was moving. All that walking. His legs were the legs of a much younger man. The rest of him was old as shit, but he could move. He was out on the street, and the train mooed again, but it was still heading into town, he could not yet see it. He could do this.

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Spit, Fire! Spout, Rain! @spitfirespoutrain.bsky.social · 28/12/2025

Charles pushed through the trees. A branch cracked up above in the wind but nothing fell. Goodbye to branches raining down on the tent. A train whistle blew out of the dark, and he had to hurry. He scampered through the trees, scratched his arm against a skeletal limb, but that didn't stop him.

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Spit, Fire! Spout, Rain! @spitfirespoutrain.bsky.social · 26/12/2025

One of the last of Trajan's plastic leis had found another resting place. They blew through the trees, the petroleum products, they would outlast them all, the thoughts of the dead, the dead thoughts.

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Spit, Fire! Spout, Rain! @spitfirespoutrain.bsky.social · 26/12/2025

He ducked under a bare tree branch, almost scraped his head against it, and what was he doing? He snapped on the flashlight. To his left, a gangly dirty neon-orange snake hung from a tree, and he almost laughed.

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Spit, Fire! Spout, Rain! @spitfirespoutrain.bsky.social · 26/12/2025

That's where the pinky-red-haired gal had made her escape. She had fled from Charles, from Trajan, smartest thing she'd maybe ever done. But what if he had missed them all? No, there was always another train barreling through the night.

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Spit, Fire! Spout, Rain! @spitfirespoutrain.bsky.social · 26/12/2025

It did not matter. Goodbye, Eighth Street. He headed out through the path that led to the cement plant, where the trains rolled slow because of a zag in the track.

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Spit, Fire! Spout, Rain! @spitfirespoutrain.bsky.social · 26/12/2025

God didn't live in The Hole, never even visited, except the little bit that was in people, the jokes or the extra taco someone wasn't going to eat or the way Frankie could sing, which she seldom did, even though she could. She should have sang all day. Charles should have asked her to.

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Spit, Fire! Spout, Rain! @spitfirespoutrain.bsky.social · 26/12/2025

She had shared her videos and only smeared her God around a little bit. She never rubbed it all over, and why would she?

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Spit, Fire! Spout, Rain! @spitfirespoutrain.bsky.social · 26/12/2025

Eighth Street, The Hole, whatever, he had spent his saddest days here. He had a sudden urge to wake Christie, to hug her and kiss her cheek, and tell here he loved her, not like that, like a cousin or something.

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Spit, Fire! Spout, Rain! @spitfirespoutrain.bsky.social · 26/12/2025

When he was a boy, you could see hundreds, but the whole world had been set alight, and now a couple raw dozen glinted stubbornly against the false illumination. People had ruined the sky, ruined everything, and Charles acknowledged that he himself was a people.

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Spit, Fire! Spout, Rain! @spitfirespoutrain.bsky.social · 26/12/2025

He wheeled around, tried to take it all in, the tents and the trees, the bite of the wind, the tinge of woodsmoke, a shaftless scythe of bright moon and a smattering of stars.

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Spit, Fire! Spout, Rain! @spitfirespoutrain.bsky.social · 25/12/2025

Goodbye, money. He was done with that, and then he laughed out loud, had to snuff it back in, out there in the cold and the dark of Eighth Street: he and money had gone their separate ways a long time ago. It was too late for goodbyes.

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Spit, Fire! Spout, Rain! @spitfirespoutrain.bsky.social · 25/12/2025

They'd be sure to find it in the morning—it's not like Christie would steal it from them.

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Spit, Fire! Spout, Rain! @spitfirespoutrain.bsky.social · 25/12/2025

He should have done more for them, he should have done anything for them, and that was all so easy to think now, when he didn't have to speak to them. He pulled the four ten-dollar bills from his bag and pinned them under a rock right by their front door.

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Spit, Fire! Spout, Rain! @spitfirespoutrain.bsky.social · 25/12/2025

He zipped himself out—goodbye for real. Goodbye, smoking fire. Goodbye, piles of trash. Goodbye, and he looked over to Frankie's old tent. The new family had to be asleep inside by now.

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Spit, Fire! Spout, Rain! @spitfirespoutrain.bsky.social · 23/12/2025

Goodbye, propane heater, which he shut off, frugal now—someone may need that heat in some nebulous future, when Charles would be far away, dust in the wind. Goodbye, tent, shelter and villain and embarrassment and scold, all those days it tried to fall down upon him in Kansas wind, in Kansas snow.

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Spit, Fire! Spout, Rain! @spitfirespoutrain.bsky.social · 23/12/2025

He had nothing else he cared to save, to have, beyond the clothes upon him. He would have been a good Buddhist, Charles suspected now, but it was too late for all that. This was it, goodbye to everything.

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Spit, Fire! Spout, Rain! @spitfirespoutrain.bsky.social · 23/12/2025

He had his go pack. Two bottles of water, a clean shirt, a pair of clean boxers, three pairs of socks, a handkerchief, a thick pair of woolen gloves, some beef jerky, and four ten-dollar bills, a pittance, the whole lot.

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Spit, Fire! Spout, Rain! @spitfirespoutrain.bsky.social · 23/12/2025

It was the middle of the night, and he was a fucking idiot, he knew, but Charles couldn't spend another minute here, inside this infernal tent. If he could, he'd light the whole damn thing on fire. He'd burn every trace of himself, every yellow-pitted T-shirt.

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Spit, Fire! Spout, Rain! @spitfirespoutrain.bsky.social · 23/12/2025

And her legs weren't as long as his, and her arms weren't as long, and he was stronger than her, and he was dumber, he knew that now, so maybe, if she could do it, he could too.

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Spit, Fire! Spout, Rain! @spitfirespoutrain.bsky.social · 23/12/2025

The pinky-red-haired girl jumped trains, sometimes maybe with a burger in one hand, and though she was certainly younger and nimbler and faster and braver than Charles, he could see that she did it.

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Spit, Fire! Spout, Rain! @spitfirespoutrain.bsky.social · 23/12/2025

In fact, Charles had better ideas—he would never consider them theories—of where John might be or what he might be: dead of course. But if John were dead, it was not death by train. So John was not the touchstone here.

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Spit, Fire! Spout, Rain! @spitfirespoutrain.bsky.social · 23/12/2025

He startled himself with it: one way or the other, he should ride a train out of here. If John could do it, Charles could do it, but John probably hadn't done it.

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Spit, Fire! Spout, Rain! @spitfirespoutrain.bsky.social · 22/12/2025

You didn't have the right to possesss it, to be it. You had the right to pursue it, to try, to make seven dollars and 25 cents an hour, which would never fund happiness, couldn't even bankroll a knock-knock joke.

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Spit, Fire! Spout, Rain! @spitfirespoutrain.bsky.social · 22/12/2025

Charles had failed in the most American of rights: the pursuit of happiness. How did happiness get so fast, a roadrunner? Beep beep. And that made Charles Wile E.

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Spit, Fire! Spout, Rain! @spitfirespoutrain.bsky.social · 22/12/2025

The days had been mild this week, maybe even 50 today, but the nights didn't give a fuck about easing you in. That mom would have a whole book of life already, but those kids were barely chapters. They looked happy, but what did Charles know about happy?

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Spit, Fire! Spout, Rain! @spitfirespoutrain.bsky.social · 22/12/2025

The wind whirred above all the tents of Eighth Street. It wasn't the longest night of the year but close. Maybe the third-longest? The mom knew to come here, he guessed, but what if they hadn't?

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Spit, Fire! Spout, Rain! @spitfirespoutrain.bsky.social · 22/12/2025

It might be good for Charles to read his own book to—to brush up. All that dumb shit he forgot and needed to get mad about all over again. It had gone quiet outside, so they must have gone to bed. He turned and burrowed. Come on, sleep, come back.

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Spit, Fire! Spout, Rain! @spitfirespoutrain.bsky.social · 21/12/2025

And he'd say, Imagine this—when you met someone you could give them a book that told them everything that had ever happened to you. A collection of hurts. But Christie only read one book, so she maybe wasn't the ideal beta tester here.

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Spit, Fire! Spout, Rain! @spitfirespoutrain.bsky.social · 21/12/2025

If Christie were up, but of course she wouldn't be up, he'd go over to her tent right now. Shut that phone down, he'd say, and she'd say, Charles, what?

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Spit, Fire! Spout, Rain! @spitfirespoutrain.bsky.social · 21/12/2025

He imagined a book for every single person who had ever lived, like about their life, a biography of sorts. He would have read his mom's and his father's and Denise's, he would have read John's and Trajan's. Hell, he'd read Harold Whitechurch's. He'd read Frankie's, Christie's.

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Spit, Fire! Spout, Rain! @spitfirespoutrain.bsky.social · 21/12/2025

Outside, the voices conjoined and then blew away from him, and then, he realized, they were singing a Christmas carol, and he lay in this space, awash in high murmury voices. Only at the end did it coalesce: go down in history indeed. We all went down in history, died in it.

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