This is Teague's

Third Place Fiction
Sheer Force of Will
by Teague

A one-hundred-pound pumpkin sits planted on the deck overlooking mountainous Pennock Island directly across the Tongass Narrows. A man exhales chalky puffs of breath as he finishes shoveling, the stacked snow galumphing to the ground below the edges of the deck. He leans the shovel against the house and looks around while he rubs one of his copper dreadlocks between his thumb and first two fingers -- his spidery dreads kinky long and fat like his favorite sunburst strain of marijuana, Matanuska Thunder Fucked. Several hundred miles north of here, his dealer was able to hook him up with not only a pound of this kind bud for the somber winter months, but also this overgrown vegetable from the Matanuska Valley of never-ending sunshine and glacial silt in the summer months below Mt. McKinley. Both were guaranteed to scare the hell out of the neighbor kids.
But what's been scaring him lately is Cindy's dark mood, and he's truly dreading the day he finds her lying in a pool of her own crimson wrist-slit blood or out stiff-cold with a vacant stare as empty as the lidless codeine pill container beside her on the tile. But knowing her, if she could muster enough energy, she'd be more literary and shoulder a backpack full of rocks, then trudge out into the hypothermic salt water at low tide on a new moon night in December, at least trying to complete the circle by crawling back into the womb.
Pushing his wire-rimmed glasses back to their regular perch further up his nose, he spies a rusty chaise lounge in the corner and rolls it out by the pumpkin. Breathing in the fresh air, he notices tiny icicles have begun to form on his beard around his lips. Ever since he quit smoking cigarettes, he's discovered he could smell again, and the steely crisp scent of snow is a treat since Ketchikan is mostly rain year round. But he doesn't mind that usual damp-earth odor either, mixed with the strong whiff of fresh pine needles. And the taste of food was succulent now, so he couldn't wait to find out how many pie tins he'd have to buy for this surreal squash.
Satisfied with the setup, he slides open the glass door and steps in to stand by the wood-burning stove and warm his hands in the half-light of the late October sun. He peers at the couch, where a disheveled brunette sprawls under a down comforter. "Hope you like pumpkin pie," he says.
Her voice heavy and thick with sleep, she says, "I fuckin' hate it when it gets dark this early."
He comes over and sits down on the edge of the couch, whipping his rusty dreads over his shoulder. "Yeah." He nods his head in complete understanding for her. "Aint it a bitch?" Selecting from the paraphernalia littering the coffee table, he begins to roll a joint. "Shit, you haven't even gotten up yet and it's damn near dinner time." He glances over to her to check for a reaction, but none comes. "You want me to pour you a glass of merlot and grill up some sockeye fillets?"
"I'm not hungry." She curls up into a ball on her side.
"Are you Cinderella or one of her wicked step-sisters?" he chuckles. "Because, by the look of it, someone didn't make it home last night."
"You're not funny," she restrains sounding amused. Then her voice, not quite whiny, fills with a dangerous push-pull balance of take-care-of-me and leave-me-alone self-pity. "You don't know what it's like."
Walking the razor's edge, he chooses his words carefully as his slow fingers crease the edges of the rolling paper and he sprinkles a fine layer of pot in-between. He reminds himself that this is really an oral test that he has to pass and time just right in order to elicit her desired responses by showing that he's trying to empathize with her, while at the same time, showing that he's not just going to give up and let her fade away. And all in some poetic imagery too.
"It's like you're stuck in the first half of a total eclipse," he says, "and you can't escape the platinum shadow of the moon as it tugs on you like the tide's undertow, threatening to suck you under at any moment." Damn, he thinks, dual metaphors that worked together and platinum shadow. Shit, he isn't even stoned yet. He smiles to himself, wishing at least somebody were around or in the mood to appreciate his brilliant, from-the-hip improv.
She grips the comforter tighter around her neck from beneath and moans, "I wish I'd just hit bottom or float back up."
Really trying to bridge the gap from his world to hers, he tries again. "I can see how each day you'd begin to dread the longest night of the year more and more. And hell, the Winter Solstice probably feels as if God just finished dragging a manhole cover over the earth."
"Forever," she shivers and her voice becomes more desperate. "That's when I feel the most distant from you, thousands of miles away, frozen in time."
He finds himself at the wordless dead-end of her sadness now. "Me too," he says, humbled. "Me too."
Her words leave him a vision of her dressed all in black inside a void where a soundproof see-through barrier separates her from him, and she looks likes she's screaming, yet he can't hear one iota of sound as she slowly begins to recede. A chill racks his body, snapping him out of it. Setting down the half-rolled joint, he rubs her back with one hand and reaches up with the other to click on the sun lamp, which then bathes them both in hot golden light, like when it was late June and he had taken her out to the quarry to teach her how to shoot.
That spring, she'd seen someone peeking in living-room windows a couple of times when he'd been out, and he thought it was time she learned to protect herself. So after work one day, they met outside the bank where they both had jobs, he as a maintenance man and she as one of the various vice presidents. They had both just smoked a bowl as he drove north out of town in her old Toyota 4x4 pickup she'd given him when she traded up to an Explorer. The "Toy" he liked to call it, as his large frame crowded the steering wheel and cab. Metallica blared through the tinny speakers, and his 9mm Smith and Wesson hung strapped to his right leg in a black nylon holster as he accelerated around the curves.
Slipping out of her clogs, she stretched her skirted legs, pale and smooth, toward the dashboard, where she placed her bare feet and displayed her newly painted toenails. She leaned back into the seat, her velvet hair flowing in the wind, and stuck her hand out the window, flying it through the air like she was a kid again. She looked over to him with a smile that was like the liquid sunshine washing over the windshield, and her chocolate eyes drank him in with years of trust.
"So where we going to shoot?" she yelled.
He turned down the music some and said, "Well, there's the shooting range. But that place gets busy with rules and regulations." Then he winked at her. "We're going out past Totem Bite to the rock quarry where the outlaws go. No one will bother us there."
"A rock quarry?" She squinted at him as if from the other side of a dream, trying to wake up, but not really wanting to. "What the hell's going to keep the bullets from ricocheting back at us?"
Staring off down the road, he methodically rubbed his index and middle finger with his thumb and said matter-of-factly, "Spirits unknown to us and sheer force of will."
She was taken aback a moment at his seriousness and then laughed, falling against his shoulder, "That's why I love you J.D. I never know what you're going to say." She reached toward the volume to turn up the heavy metal again and said, "I hope this day never ends."
But now under the dusty din of the sun lamp, he wishes he could flash her back to the longest day of the year, that summer solstice at the rock quarry. She had taken to that 9mm like she was Calamity Jane. Clip after clip she shot up the bull's-eye targets tacked to a wooden stand he'd placed 50 feet out. Sometimes she'd shoot two-handed, focused and poised, measuring each blow as she sighted down the barrel. Other times, she'd shoot single-handedly from the hip, the pistol's kick recklessly jumping her hand around in ear-shattering explosions as she drained the whole clip, round after round, in a matter of seconds. What a picture. There she was, her six-foot figure standing there in her business suit like some Mafia hit woman, shells littered about her and a smoking barrel, letting out a heartfelt whoop when she was done.
Forty dollars of ammo buried in the dirt and four months later, he's now done trying to convince her things are going to get better again. He stops rubbing her back, but keeps his hand on her, letting her soak up his warmth. The little things he tries to do don't seem to be enough anymore, like trying to anticipate when she was going to bed so he could get ready first and slip between the cold sheets to warm her side for her. Or like in the morning, he'd get up in the blue-black chill of dawn and start a fire and the shower running so that when she joined him, the water was already steamin' hot. But lately, he's had to shower alone. Yet he still makes her coffee and starts her car so that the cab is toasty and there's no excuse for her not to go to work that day.
He moves his hands up to massage her shoulders. "You know I love you, and I'll do anything for you, but you won't let me help. You refuse to take Prozac. You won't move to Hawaii or the lower 48, and you hate to exercise." Exasperated, he throws his hands up into the air and lets them slap down onto his thighs. "I don't know what we're going to do because it's a long stretch to spring."
Crying now, she wipes her eyes with the palm of her hand and says, "I can't take this anymore. I'd rather kill myself than live through this again."
"Maybe so." He finishes rolling the joint, licking the zigzagged edge for a good seal. "But don't think that I'll attend your funeral if you kill yourself. I've got no respect for suicides."
"Leave me alone," she hisses.
He realizes he's just lost some ground. He's always been the one who was able to calmly take everyone's realities in stride; this used to be his specialty, like the time when she freaked out from an anxiety attack in a car full of people and wanted to stop and get out. He understood that's what she needed, even though they were late to the company dinner. So he pulled the car over and got out for a smoke as she paced up and down the shoulder until she had calmed down enough to get back on the road. Now it seems like she's telling him to pull over again, that this is where she needs to get out.
He lights the joint and inhales, staring out the window at the bloated pumpkin. While not exhaling yet, he ekes out, "But I do know that I'm not handling that monster carving myself."
She covers her face.
Exhaling a lung-full of smoke, he stands and walks into his room, speaking over his shoulder. "Come on, it'll be fun. I'va great idea for some wicked eyes." A dresser drawer scrapes open, and seconds later, he walks back out into the living room stuffing something into the inside pocket of his Carhartt jacket. Tucked into the corner of his mouth, the joint moves up and down as he speaks. "You don't even have to move." He reaches down and gathers her comforted body into his arms.
She shrieks, "J.D. put me down!"
"In a second hon." He shoulders open the sliding glass door and shuffles through sideways on to the deck. He sets her down on the chaise lounge and props her up to face the whale-sized pumpkin head on, her face a mean frown of sooty eyebrows and tangled raven locks. "Let's get this over with once and for all," he says, and in one sweeping motion from beneath his jacket, his hand flashes out the metallic 9mm Smith and Wesson. He ratchets back the headstock and lets it snap back into place, filling the chamber with the first bullet. He aims at the dirty orange hide and squeezes off two alarming bursts. Jagged bits of bile-yellow shell blast onto the deck and pulpy seeds leak out of a gaping eye socket like a coagulating tear. Almost dark now; he hands her the icy butt of the gun as the acrid odor of discharged gunpowder hangs between them and the thundering echoes kick back through the low-slung clouds like forgotten stardust settling on the dark side of the moon.

Footnote: Yep this is really his. I found it on the internet. I was just lookin around, and I finally found something.