"Accidents Happen" from Everything That Happens In-Between © 2013

**And expanded version of this story will appear in The Centerville Trilogy this spring**

George had never fired a gun before. 

Tom had never witnessed a murder. 

Machen always had a story for the children. 

No one knew what started the fire.

The trees that lined the highway were all dead.  An effluvium plumed from gashes in the tarmac and crawled over the mound of landfill used to divert traffic from the old route.  Machen and the boys waded through the waist-deep toxic brume.  There was nothing anomalous about it to them.  They had grown up with it.  It mystified them that people traveled considerable distances to see it. 

Spring was wrestling winter, and it was winning, and its eminent victory diffused restlessness and boredom throughout the region.  George and Tom would likely find trouble, so Machen thought to occupy their destitution with an excursion. 

“When do we get to shoot the gun?”  George was getting impatient.

“In a little while,” Machen tapped the holster hanging from his belt.

Machen led the boys past the gaping wound in the abandoned highway.  A decade of graffiti detailed the dregs of disquieted youths across four lanes of the two mile stretch.  “Don’t get too close,” he cautioned them, “she can cave at any time.”  The fire was forty years old, and its toxic emissions had extended south and west of Centerville.  But it was too late.  The town was gone.  

George and Tom followed the old man past the aperture to the head of a trail that entered the woods on the shoulder of the southbound lane.  The smoke broke apart as it engulfed the bottoms of the trees at the forest’s edge.  Small patches of snow were still scattered through the woods where the ground wasn’t too hot. 

Just before he entered, Machen paused, turned to the boys, and said, “In August of 1963, Anne Marie Burk threw her crutches in the bed of a beige and white Chevy Fleetside pickup, climbed inside the cab, and never came home.”  It had been a few years since he told the story.  George and Tom were awkwardly silent on this particular day, and he brought it up because this is what they’d come to expect of him on excursions through the woods around Centerville.  “It changed this place.”   The old man led the children through the underbrush that had claimed most of the trail.  “That was the same year the town began to burn.”  The odor of sulfur wafted through the woods.

“What happened to her?”  George was staring at the holster attached to the old man’s belt.

The old man stopped again. “Well,” he recalled, rubbing his jaw that had been shattered in a mining accident forty years previous, “it was pretty awful what happened to her.”

“Was she murdered?”  The typically noticeable body odor which clung to Tom was masked by the emissions of the mine fire.

“She was.”  Machen rubbed his jaw again and stopped to rest his bad knee. He pointed through the bush.  “Her grave is just over there.”

George’s eyes were still on the gun.  He was a handsome kid, muscular and athletic with no intellect to match.  He had known Machen for all his life.  “Is that where we’re going?”

“Is that where you’d like to go?”

“I would!”  Tom’s hands were filthy, and when he used his finger to wipe his nose it left behind a dirt mustache.

“Then that’s where we’ll go.”

Tom swung a stick at the underbrush.  “How’d she die?”