Joseph Randolph

Mercy is Not Movement

Jim had come back that summer, or maybe it was later than that. Maybe it wasn’t summer at all. Time had begun to rot around the edges by then—softening, curling in the corners like wet photographs left out on a windowsill too long, losing their shape but not their weight. But he came back, that much was certain, or close enough to certain to make no difference. The dog was still there.

Still tied to the same post in the same patch of dust-worn grass behind the house, where the earth turned chalky in summer and slick as bone when it rained. The rope was still looped in that strange, distracted way, like someone had tied it mid-thought, with hands busy remembering something else—not how to bind, but why people do it. It wasn’t even knotted, really, just wrapped around and fed back through itself, the kind of loop that didn’t so much hold as hover—like it was waiting to be undone by nothing in particular.

Jim stood there for a long time, just watching him—not the dog exactly, but the posture he had become. A shape learned through not-moving. His body no longer flinched at flies or sound. It had forgotten how to expect. The kind of stillness that doesn’t wait—it just endures.

“It’s still like this?” he asked. The words came out half-swallowed, like they’d lost their nerve on the way out. He kept his eyes on the dog.

Mark didn’t look up.

He was crouched in the garden, knees wide, sleeves rolled, back roped in sweat, like he’d been there all day. He was pulling at weeds or maybe planting something. It was always hard to tell with Mark—he moved like he was preparing the earth for some ancient ritual only he remembered. His hands were caked. Not just dirty but stained—the kind of grime that gets into the skin’s memory, not its surface. The kind you don’t wash off but live around.

“What do you want me to do?” Mark said, flat and still not looking up.

Jim’s voice was low. “He’s not suffering?”

Mark sighed. Not impatiently. Just as if the breath had already been half-spent somewhere else. “It’s a dog, Jim.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“It’s the only one that matters.”

A wasp spun low between them. The sun hung heavy, old. It felt like a coin left too long in the mouth. Jim rubbed his fingers together as if something sticky had passed between them. “You could let him off. Just for a little.”

Mark turned, slowly, like his spine remembered Jim before his face did. His eyes were unreadable—not cold, just tired in the way things get when they stop expecting to be understood. “And then what?” he said. “It runs? Gets torn up by something bigger? Dies under someone else’s car instead of mine? Would that be better?”

“Yes,” Jim said. Then, quieter: “I think so.”

Mark made a sound then—not a laugh, but its ancestor. He wiped his palms on his thighs, leaving streaks like bruises. “You always think there’s a cleaner way. That mercy is something you can measure. You think you can just bring a longer chain, like that solves the fact of it.”

“I did buy one,” Jim said. “A longer chain.”

Mark looked at him like he’d never expected anything else. “Of course you did.”

“It’s not about running,” Jim said. “He should be able to move.”

“You think movement is freedom?”

The words hung there, like heat over a field—visible, oppressive, already on its way to disappearing. Jim had no answer. The question wasn’t for him, not really. Mark had turned back to the dirt.

The sun shifted. Somewhere, a cicada screamed. The dog lifted its eyes—just once—and then forgot why.

Jim left that afternoon, or maybe the next. Time was folding again. The car turned at the same angle it always did, the tires leaving no mark.

The call came after—days or weeks. Time again. A flat hour. Jim picked up on the second ring.

“The dog,” Mark said. And something in his voice had changed. Not cracked—softened, like a wall pressed for too long by weather.

Jim said nothing.

“I buried him in the backyard,” Mark said, “like he belonged there.”

Demolition Man

Mark was not, by any reasonable metric, built for football. He was filament-thin, tendon-strung, more attic than engine—the kind of boy you’d expect to find wedged between a radiator and a library shelf, whispering Heraclitus to himself with jam-stained fingers. And yet here he was: all plastic clatter and borrowed pads, on a piss-colored practice field behind the middle school, where the grass gave way to gravel and the gravel to something less nameable. The air smelled of chainlink and warm Gatorade. The sun pressed down with bureaucratic indifference.

The drill had no name. Or rather, its name had been spoken once, years ago, by a long-dead assistant coach, and it stuck like a curse. The boys called it the Circle. It was dumb in design, blunt as parable. You ring up a dozen boys—testosterone barely minted—and choose one to stand in the middle, legs jittering like a seer mid-prophecy. Then you point. The coach points. Always with the finger. That slow, priestly singling-out, more Inquisitor than instructor. One boy is named. One boy is launched. Collision as pedagogy.

Mark stood in the middle now. The smallest. The most unappointed. The kind of small that seems like it might be reversible with enough prayer or protein powder. His legs churned not from readiness but from the sheer metabolic panic of being seen. Every gaze in the ring was a heat lamp, a slow rot. He could feel the sweat peeling from his scalp like tithes. It wasn’t a drill. It was a minor eschaton. An unveiling. A ritualized offering to the gods of forward motion and underage brutality.

Then came the finger.

It landed on Davey.

Davey: helmet scuffed like warhead metal, shoulders broad as system error, a jawline ideologically committed to punishment. He stood with the doctrinal certainty of a Roman column. He was football, in the Old Testament sense—spiteful, unyielding, eternally pre-concussed. And when the finger touched him—lightly, almost mythically—he nodded the way temples collapse.

Mark blinked. The world blinked. Time held its breath.

And then he ran.

Not a sprint. Not a calculated lunge. But a heretical blur of such unaccountable violence that even the grass bowed away. He was not Mark. He was velocity unshackled from subject. He was Job pre-answer. A filament flung. The meek made momentarily mythic. His cleats didn’t grip—they pronounced. And when he hit Davey, it wasn’t a hit.

It was an unwriting.

Davey flew.

Not stumbled. Flew. He went horizontal like scripture being redacted. His feet left the earth, his soul reconsidered its contract, his helmet ricocheted with the sound of ideology hitting asphalt. He landed flat—hard and final—as if the ground had been waiting to teach him something. His mouth opened skyward, a stunned “O” searching the clouds for doctrine.

Silence.

The kind that follows explosions. The kind that seeps through locker rooms and liturgies. Even the coach, whistle limply pendulous against his chest, offered no sound. Just a faint grimace. A note in the margin of his worldview. The air itself seemed winded.

Mark stood there, vibrating with the afterglow of an accident that felt authored. His brain was a zoetrope of static. He couldn’t understand what had happened, but his body—his body had known. It had lunged. It had apostatized.

Davey staggered upright, shoulderpads matted with mud and disbelief. He looked not angry, but mortalized. As if—for the first time—he’d felt the limits of his own legend. A Goliath made suddenly aware of the stone. Not beaten. Undone.

And Mark—Mark said nothing.

He just stood there. A boy-shaped heresy. A filament of holy contradiction.

Waiting for someone to re-invoke the rules of gravity.

And, of course, they did.

Not with a gesture, but with time. Not a rebuke, but a resumption. The ritual ended, the circle dissolved, and somewhere between the locker room and a Tuesday, the myth began to rot. Because that’s what they do, myths: ossify, then curdle. By the next season, Davey was back to hitting harder. The coaches stopped calling his name. And Mark—Mark began to collapse in other ways.

He was not standing now. Not in any proper sense. He was folded—creased inward, not like paper, but like a ledger closed on a debt no one could pay. No pads. No crowd. Just the scuffed laminate of an abandoned hallway, the flickering EXIT sign above him stuttering like a vowel on its last breath.

And it was Davey’s voice now—but not Davey—that hovered above him. It was the machine’s voice, reprocessed through every humiliation Mark had ever internalized and renamed as authorship.

“You’re doing great, buddy. Real brave stuff.”

Laughter, soft as communion wafers dissolving on the tongue.

Mark blinked. The air vibrated with fluorescent tension. The camera drone whirred overhead like a clumsy angel, unable to intervene. Somewhere, an automated applause track activated, then cut out mid-surge, as if divinity had reconsidered.

He did not rise. He did not explain. His breath came in short, rewound gasps—like lungs trying to swallow the sound back. A static came over the intercom. A single phrase repeated:

“Mark Anthony Cronin has accepted the outcome of his own narrative.”

And Mark—what remained of him—simply nodded.

Not like agreement.

Not like surrender.

Like the hit had kept going.