Free Plow the Bones by Douglas F. Warrick

allow them to cling to their prey…” In the center a circle left empty, dark; he pointed to it. “Really down deep here, they’ve got a couple of very sharp teeth that function like knives. Really, they’re more parasite than predator. They attach themselves to an old and dying fish and,” he chopped downward through the air with his hand and Cotton recoiled a little at this man, this slight and bespectacled professor, “they slit the skin, secrete an anticoagulant, and gorge themselves on the blood of the dying fish. When the fish finally shuffles off this mortal coil, so to speak, the lamprey detaches and looks elsewhere.”
    The image sat in Cotton’s belly like a lump of raw meat, heavy and wet. When he swallowed spit, his Adam’s apple felt swollen.
    “Fish are lucky. They’ve got tiny, stupid brains, six–second memories, no cogent idea of what is happening to them at any given point. Just consider your last moments, the loneliness, the humiliation, as you die with this…” he gestured weakly at the mouth on the black board, “sucking against your side. Fish don’t care. They don’t know that they should. Nature does have, it appears, some compassion. Anyway, the lamprey is a single example — not a very good one, but one I’m sort of fond of — of a larger biological mechanism…”
    Cotton loved Eisley then, wanted to become him and feel his own hair tangle over his forehead, to have spectacles that filled with light. He wanted those blazing crazy smarts, wanted a brain that sizzled like Eisley’s. And in those days, after that weird lecture when everyone in the room seemed to become aware of the hardness of their seats, he was a little afraid of him, too. Because that lecture had stopped being about biology. Because Eisley was talking about something else for a second, lost in a tangent that seemed to have swept him up and dissolved him and washed him over the entire lecture hall. And when he said that last bit, the thing about nature and compassion… Cotton could tell he was lying.

    §

    “You know the funny thing about these visits?”
    Eisley looked up again. For a second, his glasses looked like they might flood with whiteness again, but just a flicker and then his eyes were on Cotton, those eyes that used to be so wild, so mad with the things he knew, now just sad and accommodating. He sighed and said, “What’s that, Cotton?”
    “When you’re around,” Cotton said and shifted his weight on the hard, lumpy hospital bed. The memories of his dead–sleeping mind still stuck to him and he was grateful. “I feel better… Not… you know, not all the way right again. Just… I know where I am.”
    Eisley nodded. His eyes left Cotton and he sighed again. He really hadn’t changed. Not in sixty damned years had he changed. His brown hair still crept down across his wide pale brow and he still brushed it back in place with the side of his finger like he didn’t even know he was doing it. He had the same suit. Even now, in spite of his compassionate tone and his pitying eyes, he was still performing, still impressing himself with his own aesthetic control.
    Nobody really changed all that much. Not in the end.
    The things in the shadows chattered and mumbled. They sounded like children… no… no, like the tapes he used to play for… for his grandkids, the ones, the… the Chipmunk tapes. In the van. On the way to… to what? Jesus, what a thing was this that he could remember the goddamned tapes but not the names of the kids he used to play them for. What a goddamned thing was this.
    “I guess… this will probably be the last visit?”
    Eisley leaned forward, rested his arms on his knees and squeezed his long thin hands together. His fingernails looked blue. His voice was clinical. “What makes you say that, Cotton?”
    “I’m tired. I’m… running out of…” His mind locked up. He felt his mouth open up, heard the confused mewling, croaking noise that came out. He felt stuck,