Birch and Lawrence **OLD**

Gone

A horrendous feeling of disturbance and terror washed through Birch as he watched Lawrence go limp. He whimpered loudly, fearing what he had just seen was the death of the only person he cared about. The klansmen released the rope, and Lawrence fell to the ground like a ragdoll. They picked up the body and tossed it away like it was a piece of trash.

Then they untied Birch. Mr Kelton slapped him hard across the face and kicked him to the ground. "You goddamn son of a bitch!" he screamed at him. "I hate you! You ain't my son! You ain't nobody to me!" With that, he pulled off his belt and gave Birch ten hard lashes with it, each one worse than the last. Mary tried to intervene, begging her father to stop hitting her brother. But when she tried to pull the belt from his hand, Mr Kelton slapped her hard across the face and told her to go home. After the beating, Birch raised his head and looked at his father with pleading eyes. "Pa, I'm sorry!" he wailed.

"Shut up!" Mr Kelton screamed, kicking Birch in the side with his combat boots. "I ain't your pa, ya nasty faggot!" Then he took a sobbing, crying Mary by the arm and roughly dragged her away. "C'mon, Mary, you're better off without this thing you call a brother."

Even after being disowned by this man who never understood him, Birch whispered to him "I love you, Pa."

The Klansmen circled around Birch. "Well, well, well," one of them said. "A faggot who's in love with a nigger. I ain't never heard of somethin' so disgusting in all my life."

"What should we do with him?" asked another.

"Whaddaya mean, what should we do with him?" the first klansman replied. "We're gonna kill 'im, that's what we're gonna do."

With that, Birch squeezed his eyes shut and braced himself for the pain moments before one of the men hit him with a baseball bat. He cried out loudly as another hit kicked him in the same spot his father had. Another picked up a large stone and chucked it at Birch's shoulderblade, chipping the bone and leaving a huge gash.

The beating was relentless and brutal, and lasted for nearly fifteen minutes before Birch finally played dead. "Is he dead?" one of the klansmen asked. He poked him with a stick a few times. "Yeah, I think so. C'mon, our work here is done."

When he was sure the coast was clear, Birch raised his concussed head. "Lawrence?" he called softly. He crawled to his corpse and cradled it in his arms. "C'mon Lawrence," he coaxed, denying that he was dead. "You gotta wake up now."

Lawrence remained silent.

"C'mon," Birch said. "You ain't dead. There ain't no way you're dead."

Still no answer.

"Lawrence, you're really startin' to make me mad," Birch said firmly. "C'mon, open your beautiful blue eyes."

Still no answer.

"Lawrence!" Birch ordered. "Wake up now! I mean it!"

Still no answer.

"Lawrence! C'mon, Lawrence!" Birch sobbed. It had finally hit him. Lawrence was never going to utter another word, take another breath, or express his love for Birch. He was dead. He was stone, cold dead.

Sobbing loudly, Birch held Lawrence tightly against his chest, as if he were trying to revive him with his own alive, beating heart. His body was even still a little warm. Birch tried to absorb the last of it, taking in any drop of life that was in Lawrence's corpse.

As the pain whirled through him like a deadly tornado of wasps, Birch suddenly felt something snap. He didn't know what it was, and didn't realize it was the feeling of his mind breaking away from sanity. He was all rage and zero remorse, and he was hell-bent on getting revenge. His father, his sister, and all the klansmen had taken the only thing that was meaningful to him, and now they were going to pay.