Originally published September 21, 2010
I sat on a branch, clutching the dead tree, it’s splintery black bark drawing pinpricks of crimson from my palms and wrists. I couldn’t let go. If I let go, vertigo would undo me and I’d fall. If I fell I would die, but not from the fall, I was barely nine feet in the air.
“Don’t do it,” my friend Dan had begged me on a cloudy morning in March nearly a year ago. “It’s sacred burial ground.”
“Sacred for whom?” I scoffed. “Sacred for a bunch of hunters and gatherers, when? A thousand years ago?”
“The Oondaga tribe had powerful shamans, Ross. They still do. The government may’ve taken their land from them two hundred years ago, but the few that are left still consider it their own.” He paused to take a sip of his coffee. The diner was cool. I had a sweater on, but Dan’s face was moist with fear. “They’ve cursed the land, Ross. It’s not safe there.”
“I can’t believe this. Look at you, you superstitious idiot. You look like you’re going to keel over.”
“I’m worried about you. We’re friends. That’s what friends do.”
“Listen.” I leaned toward him over the table and tapped my index finger once against my chest. “It’s my land. It’s my project. I’ll build wherever I goddamn please. The Oondoggies or whatever they’re called can go take a flying fuck through a chocolate donut for all I care.”
Dan dug two fingers into his tight collar and pulled. A bead of sweat cascaded down his Adam’s apple and dripped beneath his shirt. “I didn’t want to tell you this, I knew you’d laugh…but there have been rumors.”
“What rumors?” I asked, leaning back in my chair, already tired of this ridiculous conversation. Ever since we were kids, Dan had been a little ‘off’. I’d heard from his sister, who still to this day calls him ‘whacko,’ that he’d slept with the light on until he was eighteen. He would make arbitrary connections between what he dreamt at night and what happened the next day at school, calling it prescience. He was always the first to plunge headlong into whatever cockamamie parapsychological boogah-boogah theory that happened to be trending on social media.
But despite how overwhelmingly goofy he was, I liked him. We’d grown up together, went to college together, but lately he had been straining our relationship with this nonsense about sacred burial grounds and ancient curses.
He leaned over the table and whispered. “There have been rumors of dead tribesmen walking around there at night.”
I threw my napkin on the table. “Oh, for fuck sake, Dan.” I waved my arms and caught the waitress’s attention.
“Check, please.”
Now, perched nine feet from the ground on a thin, dead branch, I stared down into the luminous eyes of at least ten rotting corpses, listening to the sounds of their teeth snapping off as they gnawed at the base of the tree.