Not Buried Deep Enough by Gary Robbe

Author:Gary Robbe [Robbe, Gary]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Denver Horror Collective

POEM OF THE RIVERBANK

Originally published in Todd Sullivan Presents:

The Vampire Connoisseur by Nightmare Press, 2020

Seven miles south of Denver, along Cherry Creek, a tired man with a full pack on his back and walking stick in his hand rested on a slab of concrete beneath an underpass. It was dark but slivers of light crept through at either end. The man listened to the unraveling of the water as it rushed to the rapids not more than twenty feet away. It was a bogus moon, the man thought, as he leaned away from the ball of light that flittered toward him, soft and fragile like Chinese lanterns he’d seen somewhere a long time ago. The bogus moon grew dark and large and stopped near the man in the swift but shallow water.

The tired man stood and gripped his stick like a baseball bat, ready to swing with all the might his beaten sixty-year-old body could muster. He started to speak but before he could the light reached out to his throat, filling it with mud and river slime, a swelling fist forcing its way gently but forcefully, crushing his trachea and esophagus, his eyes suddenly on the trail of stars and the real moon as he was dragged into the water and out of the underpass. His last thought was how pretty the watermelon moon was.

***

Gerald woke early, as usual. The sun was morning dull. It was exactly seven o’clock. He removed and folded his pajamas neatly and placed them in the dresser, then put on gray sweatpants and a gray tee shirt. He brushed his teeth a full sixty seconds, gargled with mouthwash, then wiped the mirror where splashes of water and toothpaste had landed. He used the toilet, washed his hands and face, and brushed his hair. He donned a gray sweatshirt before leaving for the river.

The South Platte River was two and a half blocks from his one-bedroom apartment in downtown Denver. A path led to the riverbank not far from a pedestrian bridge, and Gerald followed it until he came to a bench that faced the river. In late fall and winter, when the trees were bare, he could see the skyline of the city, and he always enjoyed watching the soft rushing water of the river. At night he sat on the bench and listened to it bubble past.

Gerald said hello to everyone he met on the path. He liked people. All people, whether they crawled out from the bushes reeking of body odor and alcohol and pot or walked on the path wearing a Polo outfit and top-end running shoes. He noticed shoes. Make and model, how they were worn, how the person carried themselves in the shoes. He was a shoe salesman, after all.

“You can tell a lot about a person the way they walk or run in their shoes,” he told a homeless man named the Sage that morning. The Sage didn’t talk much but often met Gerald at

the bench around sunup. Gerald paid attention to him and talked to him like he was a normal person.

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