Brody Turner pushed away from the computer desk. He was aroused and resolved that as soon as the pruning job was done he would be taking care of that. The web site was new to him and was filled with the images that he reveled in. They were all so young and beautiful. “Enough! Get outside and do the job, then you can play!”, his mind’s eye shouted at him.
He left the room and headed outside to the work shed, finding the ladder and the chain saw. He carried the twenty-foot extension ladder to the dying cottonwood tree and leaned the ladder up against a fork of one of its largest bare branches.
He went back, retrieved the chain saw from the work shed and improvised a harness to clip it to since he would need to have his hands free once he started moving among the branches of the tree. Safety first, he told himself as he serviced the chain, tightening it snug to the bar and then clipped the harness rig to the saw. The morning sun had grown warmer and higher in its climb toward the meridian. He had a light sheen of sweat on his forehead.
He climbed up the ladder, steadied himself, and started the saw. He revved the saw's throttle trigger a few times until the saw idled easily, then he started cutting, reaching up to the higher limbs while his energy and muscles were still fresh. He whistled the radio song that had lodged itself in his head earlier at the breakfast table that morning.
It was a Willie Nelson song. Brody liked Willie.
The limbs fell to the ground below, collecting in small piles. The work was moving along fine, a nice steady pace and Brody estimated that he would finish before noon; Mrs. Turner would be pleased.
But then something went very wrong.
Just as he was about to cut off the saw and shift the ladder to another position, the throttle trigger snapped and the saw revved up to a whining full-throttle scream. Brody braced against the ladder, the harness digging into his shoulder uncomfortably, as he tried the chain brake by pushing it forward, but the chain kept churning, the brake bolts would not engage.
He stepped up one rung even as he felt the ladder going sideways out from under him. Panic grabbed him for an instant, but then he pushed the saw up onto the nearest branch and used it as a handhold, and for a moment the screaming saw teetered on the limb and then slipped over on the other side as the ladder fell away from Brody. He held onto the branch by crooking his other arm around the branch and struggled away from the whining saw.
It all happened in one smooth, fluid stream of action, not in discrete moments, but in one continuous flow of time. Brody knew what was going to happen and at that moment he soiled himself.
It is said that at the moment of death the sense of hearing is the last to go.
Brody Turner couldn't really say. The sensation of the shrilly whining chain ripping wildly into his belly was startlingly painless. It eviscerated him, thrashing about inside him, the torque of the engine whipping it about like a frenzied, living thing, reaming him out as if he were a gutted pig hanging in a tree.
He smelled the hot engine spewing oil and gasoline.
Numbness came quickly, and he wasn't sure how or when he let go of the limb with his hand. He was aware of his body whirling around and around, entangled with the pitching saw. He was aware of being whipped about. He actually heard the liquidy sound of himself being flung and splashed. He thought an arm went tumbling away with a swipe of the chain.
He saw sunlight and earth and the trees in the neighbor’s yard and the sunlight and even dark splatters flying through the air; red-purple the color of torn plums. Somewhere in his ravaged belly something visceral separated and pulled loose and fell away. His sight failed.
The whining was vicious and deafening. And then it wasn't so bad. When Brody’s lungs flew out of his mouth, his screaming faded away too.
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