Free The Bleeding Season by Greg F. Gifune Page A

lies ahead, when it’s just you and whatever god you pray to in the dark…that’s when all the masks are peeled away and it’s just you.  Just you, and whoever…or what ever you are.”
    There was a garbled sound, and then the hiss returned.
    “Is that it?” I asked.
    Rick shook his head in the negative and held his hand up like a traffic cop signaling cars to stop.  More breathing followed a series of clicking sounds; Bernard had stopped recording then begun again.  When he resumed speaking his voice sounded the same as before: distant and almost artificial.  “You guys ever wonder why we were friends?  I mean really wonder.  The last few weeks I’ve spent a lot of time thinking, going back through the past, remembering good times and bad—all of it—as much of it as I can, anyway.  When I was a little kid, maybe five or six, my mother told me that in this life we’re lucky if we have one or two true friends, people we can really count on and who stand by us through thick and thin.  That’s if we’re lucky .”  Bernard gave a quiet sarcastic laugh.  “Isn’t it strange the way we stuck together all these years?  All of us are from working-class families, all of us townies but…but that’s where it ends, really, wouldn’t you say?  Even in school it made people wonder.  Guys like us—so different, one from the other—might’ve been friends when we were little but surely once high school hit we’d go our separate ways and settle into the appropriate cliques.  But we didn’t.   In a lot of ways we got closer, didn’t we?  In a sense, anyway.  Rick the jock, Donald the bookworm honor student, Alan the rebel without a cause, Tommy the all-things-to-all-people charismatic leader…and then, me.  The joke, the dork.”  Bernard’s voice cracked, a clicking sound followed; then silence.
    I glanced at the windows on the far wall.  A light snow had begun to fall.  It seemed too late in the season for more snow, but just like Bernard’s distorted voice speaking to us as if from the beyond, there it was.
    “Christ,” Donald said softly, “how much more of this is there?”
    “He sounds like he’s in a tomb,” I heard myself say.
    “I think he recorded it down in that basement,” Rick said as the hiss on the tape gave way to another loud click.  “That’s why he sounds so far away, those cement walls are distorting his voice.”
    Bernard continued, calmer now, “I’m not stupid, I know how people saw me.  Except for you guys, anyway.  We were all well practiced at that, disregarding each other’s faults, no matter how hideous.  There’s always been a bond, a common ground between us.  Rick, you and me were only children; we both knew what it was like, the pros and cons of being the only one.  No pressure there, huh?”  Heavy breathing, a rustling sound.  “And Donald, good old Donny.  You and me, we know what it is to be different, don’t we?  We know what it’s like to be left out, made fun of…terrorized.  Isolation, that’s what we know, isn’t it Donny.  Self-imposed or not, isolation’s an old friend too.”
    I glanced at them quickly while their names were mentioned.  Neither made eye contact.
    “Alan, we knew what it was like not to have a father around,” Bernard said next.  “How it was to grow up with a single mother, what it is to love and be close to your mother and all the shit people give you for that.  Momma’s boys, you and me…and proud of it, right?”  He laughed lightly, and this time it sounded somewhat genuine.  “And then I think about Tommy and I wonder…I wonder what it was we shared.  It took me a long time, going over it again and again…and then it came to me.  Tommy was like all of us in one way or another.  If you took the best parts of each one of us and put them together into a single person, you had Tommy.”
    Donald, who was staring at the floor, nodded slightly.  Rick had turned his back on us and was