Beyond the Horizon by Ryan Ireland

drinking from the sea. When the rigger died, they ate him too. Blood seeped through the deckboards and dripped on the boy’s bunk. He touched the spot of blood. It was cool and wet. His father didnt notice when he licked it off his fingertip.
    At that moment the stranger understood the man. He had to see him as a boy, know what happened, what could never be undone. He had to see the memories of the man and how they were different from what the story was really about. If he bothered to ask the man what happened, it was this. But the stranger knew better—he knew what shaped the man was kept in the darkest wells of his mind, a place where terrifying dreams wake us into being.
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    At first he tried to take the woman by the hand as a gentleman from another time might. She spat on the stranger, cursed him. He knew then how it had to be. With one hand he seized both of her wrists. With the other hand he grabbed her hair. She screamed. He pulled her from the hovel and out into the grasses. She jerked her head to the side and left him holding a tuft of hair. Stumbling only a few more feet, before the stranger grabbed her by the ankle, she resigned into sobs. Without the crying she might have been a pretty thing. But now her face contorted, tears dragging dark streaks of dirt to her chin. Her breasts swollen with pregnancy heaved with each inhalation.
    The stranger sat next to her, his mind far away. Finally, when her tears subsided and she sniffled, she asked if it could be quick.
    â€˜Usted pudiera aprovecharse de mí y irse,’ she said.
    He shook his head. ‘No puedo perdonar la vida,’ he said. ‘Tengo que acabarlo. Su tiempo aquí se ha acabado.’
    The news did not surprise her, she figured this to be the case. Again she asked for it to be quick. ‘Sí,’ the stranger said. He stood and extended his hand. This time, the woman took it and they walked out to a flat rock, to where a wagon broke down years before, splintering its wheel on the stone.
    The woman sat on the stone and watched while the stranger pulled the steel band off the outer edge of the wheel. The band held to the wood with tack nails; one of them sliced his fingertip open. He put the finger to his mouth before going back to work. The strip of metal wavered awkwardly as he held it up, gauging its usefulness.
    The woman turned her attention elsewhere; she looked out across the plains. The skies were clear, not a chicken hawk or buzzard in sight. The thwap of the rock against the metal pulled her attention back to the stranger. He raised a stone above his head and brought it down against the band again. Where the stone impacted, the metal edge of the band became spiny and dented, forming a jagged blade.
    â€˜Â¿Será rápido?’ she asked.
    And it was.
    Pitiful how she whimpered before he swung the blade, how she raised her hand as if this would deflect the blow, how her other hand cradled around her womb as if she could save the unborn from this fate.
    The man crossed the plains as he would in the lifetime before, encountering the solitary trees left from antediluvian times and spared being scorched into salt. He saw the occasional being, the troupe of scalpers and a man riding distant on a beast. At night he watched the stars, tried to reach out and touch them while he lay on his back.
    The stranger followed. He followed where highways and billboards would eventually slice the land and blot the sky. The horizon remained unbroken, not a guy wire to a radio tower or the vapor trail of a jumbo jet marring the expanse. He walked over a sop of grass still quelling with dew from the night before. In time this place would be quarried, chunks of stone pulled and pulverized and ground down into pea gravel, used to set sidewalks and level commercial housing. While men in hard hats and diesel construction vehicles toted the stone away, bones from dinosaurs would be discovered, discarded and tossed into the tumbler with the