After choking down so much darkness, the town paused to catch its breath.
Come September of 2002, my fourth grade year, it started to gag again.
At recess one day, a kid in my grade found a sack. He had a strange name.
Balthazar, but we called him Bal.
Bal was a weird little kid that was quiet all the time and kept to himself. I've heard that some horrible things happened to him later in high school, but that's another story for another time.
Bal was at the corner of the playground, watching the teachers. I was swinging, watching him. All the teachers were talking to each other and not really paying attention to Bal.
My mouth fell open when he hopped the little chain link fence out where he was.
I knew what playing hooky was from watching television, but I never thought I'd see it happen in person.
Bal didn't leave though. He walked two steps and picked up a sack. It looked like it was made from heavy burlap or canvas. He walked back to the fence and threw it over, then hopped over himself.
Looking over to the teachers to make sure no one had missed him, Bal smiled.
He didn't know that I was watching him.
Crouching down, he opened the sack. He stayed in that position for what seemed like a long time. When he stood up, he dumped the contents out on the grass and started arranging. I stopped swinging and walked over to him.
He nodded when I got there and kept working.
Austin walked up beside me. Jonah joined him. Then more started coming to watch. Someone behind me started crying, but I didn't turn around and no one tried to comfort the kid.
We all stood there, eyes wide and mouths open, as Bal pieced together the remains of a decomposing corpse on the grass of the playground.
One of the teachers came over to see what was going on and screamed at Bal, telling him to quit touching the too white bones and grey flesh. He ignored her and kept placing the pieces where they belonged. Calm, as if all he was doing was putting together a human puzzle.
I remember the teacher walking towards Bal to stop him, and I remember Bal looking up at her with his little fists clenched into tight balls.
He said a single word.
"No."
The next thing I remember is the corpse being fully pieced together on the grass and the teacher escorting Bal to the office.
No one ever saw Bal again. He moved to Solo.
The body in the sack?
About a month earlier in South Austin, the grave of a recently deceased woman named Kelly was robbed. The clothes and jewelry were left in the casket. The body was not.
Kelly's corpse was what Bal pieced together on the grass of the playground.
The police came out to the school, and semen was discovered inside the corpse's rotting vagina.
The semen belonged to the one and only, Nicolas Troy.
Over the days that followed more graves were disturbed. The graves of a woman and several children.
The names of those children are as follows:
Ivan.
Maggie.
Xenna.
All were removed from their caskets. Their clothing and jewelry were left behind. The bodies still haven't been recovered.
