Crank Harvest by Raven McAllister

361,443. Oh, I’m never going away. Never you think such a thing. Never. Just listen. Do you hear me? Do you hear me turn?

I was one of everyone staring out the window that day. My chubby face was just another prying background player on the austere stage, nose-hooked by a curiosity with no name to its beck and call. It seems this curiosity, this intrigue, emanated from the air itself, for there wasn’t a precipitator to this event. Nothing provoked us. We came to the windows (second floor appeared to be favored) as if drawn forth by phantom puppet strings, and then we stood. And we stared. I stared, and here’s what I saw.

John Colfax was standing at one of his back upstairs windows, too. His form was difficult to make out for the slate-blue suit I think he was wearing. It was strange to see him there, because this was a late Monday morning; Mr. Colfax should have been at work in the city. But there he stood, placid, blank-faced, his short peppered-grey hair neatly groomed and tie still straight. I had the feeling that he had gotten up for work, gotten dressed, then was called to the window. And he too stood. And waited.

The sky over his house was a crystalline blue. The birds were crooning, the branches of the landscaped oaks were waving slightly, and the sun was near its apex. To my left, with some leaning and squinting, I could see a man in a black suit and silver tie walking through my backyard. He didn’t acknowledge this fact in the least; nothing seemed to be on his mind other than a specific intent that came out in his steady gait. His hair was a darker silver than his tie, medium-length and worn brushed back. The man’s hands were a dark red, and this observation pried my eyes open somehow wider. He walked to our white back fence, clambered over it rather gracefully, then headed toward Mr. Colfax’s back door. It was you.

You looked like you didn’t have a care in the world.

At this point Mom and Dad joined me. Mom took my left side, Dad my right. Neither asked me why I wasn’t in school, though I had put on my dress skirt and vest before I came to the window planning on being there.

“A man just went through our backyard and into the Colfax’s house,” I pointed out to them. The only response I got was Dad’s hand resting on my right shoulder.

Our eyes travelled just past Mr. Colfax’s house, across the splendid spring day and into the far-off red-trimmed upstairs windows of the Wilson family’s mint green painted lady. Mrs. Wilson was visible in the back right window by her pink bathrobe. Her arm was around someone smaller, probably her youngest son Joshua. Another pair of faces was discernible in the window adjacent. No school for Josh and his sister, no work for Mr. Wilson—today was the day of the window, and the unnamed spectacle it had whispered vows of revealing to us in our slumber.

Mr. Colfax was no longer standing in his window. My family eyed his house until the back door opened again. Out you stepped with your red hands.

A mangy brown dog I had seen in the neighborhood for months before now approached you from the front of the house. It snarled at you, this out-of-place man in a suit; in turn, you produced something from inside your coat pocket. One end of the contraption looked like a rusty metal cone. On the other, flat end of it was a thin hand crank. As the mutt barked its threats, you pointed the cone toward the dog. You began to crank the object, which resulted in a shrill squeaking from its coarse and aged-sounding inner gears. This motion was calm and unaffected, positively unshaken by the dog.

And then the dog began to yelp. As the crank churned, the cone rotated. As the cone rotated, the dog began to vomit blood. Then its midsection began to bend. Its skin wrapped itself in a tight fold around the dog’s ribs until, to the painful cries of the wretched animal, it began to rip. The dog was crippled by its body’s distortion. Its entirety began to turn in a manner that seemed to almost violate gravity. The front paws started rotating upward as its back legs remained in contact with the grass. A series of wet cracking and popping noises accompanied this. I closed my eyes. There was one loud, prolonged crunch. When I dared to look again, I was met with what remained of the mutt: a pool of unraveled organs, wrought broken bones, and blood.

Still unphased in your dapper attire, you headed for the Wilsons’ back door. You found it unlocked. You knew you would. An instinctual part of me—the part that use to jump at creeping shadows and creaking doors—wanted to cry out to Mrs. Wilson, to warn her, but logic immediately ruled out any scream from this distance being effective.

“Are our doors locked?” I asked my dad. He only squeezed my shoulder.

And then I witnessed the Wilsons withdrawing from their windows. One by one, they backed away, not even turning around. Mrs. Wilson was the first to back away and out of sight. Then the daughter, Mia, edged back. Then Mr. Wilson. Only Joshua, the last one left, turned around at the window. His curly seven year-old head was cocked upward at something beyond my vision. Joshua grabbed his ribs. His knees buckled, and as he went down, his left hand came up and around into view. The way his head was facing when he collapsed . . . that hand shouldn’t have been where it was. That hand was the last part of the Wilsons I saw, in fact, trembling in what was undoubtedly horrific torment as it descended down past the window pane.

You aren’t human. I damn well know that. Humans stick cats in microwaves and babies in trash cans, but they don’t do what you do.

When you came back out, red hands dangling carelessly at your sides, I knew you were on a dead march for our house. I described it to the police in those exact words before they hung up on me. You were like clockwork, and no silly variable like the cops or someone in their home with a gun dared to gum up your diabolic cogs. It was as if the path you walked—still walk—was rendered inert to reality. After it was over, no one would listen to what I had to say about you. No one would come see Mom and Dad’s remains, and when I surprised them with my parents’ remnants in tow in garbage bags, do you know what they did? They smiled and looked brain-dead. They all seemed to respond with an I don’t understand. And that was fucking that.

I watched you reach our back door. You turned the knob. It opened. I turned around and threw up a little on the floor. I shrieked at my father. He did nothing. I kept shrieking.

Quieting for only a moment through panic and tears, I listened. I could hear you. Your footsteps never ceased. You never paused. It was as if you had lived with us for years. You knew exactly where to go. You knew precisely where we’d be.

“Daddy! Please!” I pleaded. Stamping and dancing with urgency around him, I pulled at him his arm, but he refused to even face away from the window. Your footsteps were falling at the top of the stairs.

“DADDY!”

But he didn’t turn around. Even when you opened the door, neither he nor my mother moved a muscle. But my back wasn’t to you; I faced you, I screamed at you, I demanded that you stayed away. You looked at me for the longest second of my life. I remember your eyes, and how they were an unblinking near-ebon brown. I recall your wrinkled face. It was long. It was stone. I remember feeling for just a hair of a moment that there really wasn’t anything I or anyone else could do. Yours was a face that had never seen denial. It was gaunt and cold. It was the face of a monster who harvested suffering.

Those red hands search the inside of your jacket. Out came the damnable thing. It was indeed rusty, only about a foot long. I braced myself against my father’s side. And then you started to crank.

The squeal of the metal grinding on itself was what made me scream again. It came in cycles of a little less than a second as you turned the shaft. My eyes shut hard, my body clenched around my father. But when I felt a jolting pop from inside his arm, I let go, scared to touch him any longer. There was a wet, long tearing sound from his shoulder. He grimaced—that’s how I know he was there, in some control of his mind. I sobbed his name again and again. The squealing crank sounded again and again, too. It won. When you were done rending my dad into shreds of blood-soaked skin, bone, and innards, you turned the thing on my mother. I wanted to stop you . . . . But of course, you had fixed the rules so that I couldn’t. My legs wouldn’t obey me; they slumped down at my mother’s side, and I was sprayed by her splitting exposed arteries.

And when it was over? You left. You didn’t hesitate. I stood in choking sobs among what was left of my parents and listened to you leave. Your sure footfalls took you straight out of our home without any pause or thought. This part was over for you. Cheerio and so fucking long.

The days were so very long and empty after that. When you lose your parents in such a horrific manner, it’s one thing. But when the world refuses to accept that fact or care in the least about it? It isn’t right. In fact it may be the worst part of this all. There’s only my vivid memory, and I’m the one person who wants that memory the least.

Yet, I need it. It’s my only weapon.

I know I’m in your head now. I feel you cursing me inside. You’re still doing what you do, going door to door without explanation or consequence, turning your crank, but I am there with you. These words are burned into your eyelids by now. I can imagine that you’ve considered even turning that device on yourself if not coming back for me, to violate your own contrived killing rules and put an end to this unrelenting psychological grind.

I’m not going anywhere. I’m going to keep writing this memory, word per word, verbatim, because I know you feel me now. It would take a rage like mine to find you and haunt you; maybe it’s the only thing that can force an uneven step in your brazen stride. The Catholic school girl you let live while she watched her family be mutilated around her isn’t done with you. Not a chance. She’s going to sit here, in the same darkened bedroom she’s sat in for last nine years, and she’s going to write. She’s going to turn that crank.

But then, you’ve heard all this before. Haven’t you, friend?

361,444. Just listen. Fucking listen. Do you hear me? Do you hear me turn?