Dale Kole killed a man two weeks after his sixteenth birthday. He saw his first dead body at the age of eight. Some unknown sister of his father’s cousin’s wife – or some such melted blood nonsense – had gone to sleep one night, as his mother told him, and couldn’t wake up because… well, just because. That man’s face, eyes closed, head prostrate in the coffin did not look like the face of The Man. The Man in the alley, Dale later found out, was a Ron. Ronald Mann. Ronald’s face was not like the dead, somehow powdery-dry face frozen in the coffin. Ronald’s face seemed like the reflection of Ronald’s face in a broken broken mirror, with cherry pie filling spilled over it. His bald head cracked as perfectly, comically cracked to the right-side, and right down the center; the jaw askew preternaturally to the left.

When Dale thought back, when he saw those quick, bloody and breaking flash images comprising his memory of the attack, he could not estimate how many times the pipe struck Ronald, or how long or how short the beating was. Remembering how sore and strained his body was the next morning indicating to him it must have lasted awhile. Afterall, Dale Cole lived on the outskirts of the budding township dubbed Alden, known as “Al’s Den” to locals – whoever the hell Al is or was Dale never knew – and helping clear land of trees, shrubs, and collected brush was as much a part of his upbring as fishing for bass. Swinging an axe or hatchet for hours was expected weekend chore-labor, clearing the woods into open, flat plots for more construction.

Being as sore as he was indicated he must have been swing the pipe as fiercely as Cobb giving it his all to a high fast ball.

After walking away from the mess, Dale wondered if he w0ould dream about it? If there would be dreams of blood bursting from heads, splashing against the grey and red brick wall of the rooming house and East Pond and Lakes Bar. Of the body slumped, limp, swollen, and stained in the alley. A dead thing whose ghost escaped with the visible steam within the chilly night 0air, the iron smell of blood, stinging ammonia-piss and rotten shit appropriately perfuming the pervert. He stopped thinking about it – the dreams – two weeks later, after no manifestation of such dreams occurred.

The nightmare, as Dale felt it, came from others in the community talking about it. Talking shit they knew nothing about. Getting it all wrong. All of them making up their own versions of what happened, passing it off as fact.

What did they really know?

Nothing.

As they, in Dale’s mind, must be nothing. Not real. Just images – realistic phantoms – walking around in his world.

So, for years young Dale Cole left the murder to be turned into a scary story – a myth, if you will – gradually devoid of any facts, aside from a man was killed in an alley. That was about the only truth to any of the nonsense occasionally brought up by locals.

Dale wondered how long he would let that go on.