'06 4 Ever

It called out to him. It glared at him. It stuck in his head to the point where he would lose concentration during sex. How could it be ‘06 4 ever? It didn’t make any sense, but he wished it were true.

Apparently he wasn’t the only one. Someone had felt so strongly about it that they had painted it on the pillar of the bridge, the railway bridge that sent the tracks just past the school. He could hear the trains from class everyday after lunch, first with the blaring horn and deep rumble of the diesel engine, followed by the rhythmic clicks of the steel wheels on the uneven joints. He had come to rely on it to carry his mind away from the drudgery of instruction for most of high school, but this year was different.

Stephen was an “early sprouter” as his dad liked to say. He sprouted hair on his chin and previously barren scrotum at the age of 10. He was a handsome kid about six feet tall with a writhe muscular build. His dad couldn’t have been more proud. Never mind that he was about as astute in a classroom as a chicken in flight. “The wings look good, but there damn near worthless.” His dad was fond of country sayings, even though he had never set foot on a farm. His dad spent his days behind the counter at the filling station up the road from his house, and that was about all he did.

Sports were easy for Stephen with his athletic build, as long as his role wasn’t very complicated. The football coaches tried putting him at quarterback once, but he couldn’t remember what all the other players were supposed to do, which hurt his confidence significantly. Wide receiver was a much more suitable role. He had the height, he had the speed, and he had just the right swagger after a touchdown. Of course, with this ability and his good looks, he was quite popular.

It was his senior year when he saw the crude graffiti. It was February, so football season was already over. He had decided not to play basketball that year, just so that he could take advantage of that popularity for a change. What good was it to be envied if you were always in class, at practice, or at games? He cashed in on it full force. “Why not,” he’d thought. “After this it’ll all change. I’ll be just like my dad with no action, no friends, and no life.”

He started skipping the class just after lunch. It was history taught by Coach Krebs, the assistant football coach. He knew that Coach Krebs didn’t care that he was gone; he didn’t believe history was worth remembering either. Besides, he was a football player.

He decided on a goal, to convince a different girl for every day of the week to skip with him. “Convincing three chicks to skip once a week should be a breeze,” he’d told his friends. They didn’t think he could do it and told him so, but he brushed them off with his usual brash demeanor. He was right too, and it wasn’t even hard to keep them separated. He used what he learned with each one to do even more with next, always pushing it a little further. It couldn’t get any better than that, which is why that little phrase bothered him so badly. ‘06 4 ever. Why did things have to change? Why couldn’t life stay that way forever?

The obsession started interrupting the sex, of course, when he couldn’t concentrate on it. He decided to do something about it; he would try to make things stay the same. He had heard rumors of an old woman from New Orleans who had moved up after the big hurricane. People said that she practiced voodoo, that she could do things to change your life. Most of the stories that he heard were about curses and hexes she’d cast. “I heard she made this one dude’s hair fall out in clumps just ‘cause he said something she didn’t like,” one guy told him. He started to reconsider when he thought of himself with bald patches all over. But what if she could make it true? The prospect was too tempting to let a little bit of fear get in the way.

He asked around and found out she lived by the river past the north side of town. He didn’t know the area very well. There wasn’t much there, only trees, a swamp and the river. Driving at night, he got lost twice down dirt roads that nearly dropped off into the rushing water. Eventually he found it. He knew immediately when he saw the shack appear in his headlights. The tiny one-room building stood straight, but somehow looked as though it could fall at any moment. The tin roof was red with rust, and the siding was just old rotting wood that had never carried a coat of paint. The din of the crickets and toads was louder than the city he’d thought. Smoke lazily rolled from the single fireplace laced with the smell of fried food, which made his stomach growl with hunger.

When he knocked on the door he heard her grunt inside. “Who it is?” The sound of her voice made him nervous, and he felt a shiver roll up his spine. After too much time had passed, she said, “Jus’ op’n da dow.”

Reluctantly, he gripped the handle and slowly pushed it forward. She was sitting in a rocking chair next to the fireplace. She was eating what looked like a frog’s leg with a plate full of them in her lap. She put the plate aside and stood up slowly. He was so nervous at this point that he couldn’t speak. He didn’t have to.

She walked over to him. With her greasy hand, she led him into the room and shut the door behind them. She sat him down on a stool next to her chair and looked him over for what seemed like hours. He just stared at her wrinkled grimacing face, too afraid to move. Her black hair was braided into locks that fell around her aging features. The parts of her eyes that should have been white were yellowed. She smiled at him finally parting her lips coated with grease, exposing a mouth that was missing nearly half its teeth.

She pulled an old wash tub from the corner of the room and placed it in front of him. She took her plate of frog legs and picked up six of the severed limbs and dropping them individually into the basin while murmuring something in a low growl he couldn’t understand. Shuffling around the room she gathered the fixings. One after another she added ingredients until she hiked up her patchwork skirt, squatted over the tub and filled it nearly to the brim with piss.

The strong ammonia smell of it dismayed him so badly that he couldn’t regain control enough to object when she pulled him up, spun him around and sat him down in the concoction. The warm liquid overflowed onto the floor and soaked into his clothes. He felt his testicles begin to tingle, a sensation that finally jolted him from his catatonic trance. He jumped to his feet with a quick gasp for air and bolted to the door without saying a word.

As he drove back into town wet to the core with urine and shivering in the wind to air out the smell, his cell phone beeped with the notification of new voicemail. The normalcy of the sound calmed him, but only momentarily. As he listened, the voice of each of the three girls erupted in consecutive unnerving messages through the tinny sound of his phone. They all said the same thing. “Stephen, I’m pregnant!”