September 07: Fierce Loyalty

This was an interesting piece to write. I chose a very particular way to challenge myself in writing this piece. Like a puzzle, the challenge is hidden within the story itself. See if you can figure out what it is. Leave your guesses in the comments.

Fierce Loyalty

As long as I’m sitting here, I may as well tell you how it happened. Before you judge me it would be best if just try and put yourself in my shoes for minute. Couldn’t explain what led me to do what I did even if I tried. Don’t make any sense, really.

Everyone has a point where they break. Friends can become enemies as quickly as enemies can become friends. Good times can turn to bad in an instant. Here and there, like sunlight through roiling storm clouds, reason will shine down like a spotlight. I guess I just chose not to heed reason that day.

Jeremy and I had been camping up there on Stone Face Ridge just about every year since we were about twelve or so. Kids back then didn’t mind being outdoors or spending more than one or two nights without their parents in the next room. Likewise, we knew how to do stuff like build campfires, pitch a tent, or even set a snare to catch a rabbit or two to skin and eat later.

Most years we staged our camping trip over Labor Day weekend, even when we got older and we didn’t think like kids anymore, though we sometimes still acted that way. Nobody knew where we went because we never told anybody. Only Jeremy and I knew about the low-laying saddle between the western ridgelines up on Stone Face.

Pretty much every camping trip was the same every year, that is until this last year. Quite suddenly I realized this was to be our last trip ever. Really, there was no other choice.

See, Jeremy had brought his girlfriend up to ol’ Stone Face Ridge without so much as even considering the sanctity of an annual trip that had always belonged to just the two of us. This was an unforgivable breech of the very bond of brotherhood that we had sealed with a blood oath some fifteen years before around that very same campfire. Under the circumstances I’m sure you would have reacted in the same manner, more out of instinct than any sort of premeditated scheme.

Violence was never something I was very fond of, and I’m still not comfortable with the raw physical act of brutality that took possession of me at my very core.

Women scream at just about anything and Jeremy’s girlfriend was no exception, screaming from the time I grabbed her and tossed her over the eastern edge of the ridge all the way to the bottom where her screams just…stopped.

Xenophobia is what my therapist called it: an irrational fear of foreigners or strangers. You know, I think it’s more than that though.

Zealous loyalty…that’s what I’d call it.