Characters: John, OFC, Alastair, Anna, Mary, Lisa, Benny
- 1
Dad pulls you back by the shoulder, with a heavy hand and fingertips digging in just below your collarbone in a way that makes you twitch. But you know to follow his directions, three steps, four steps, five, raising your feet high so as not to trip. Wiry patches of grass grow in the dusty, cracked soil.
"Now try again," he says.
The can is just a thumbnail reflecting the too bright sun, up there on the post that might have been part of a fence once.
You set the rifle back against your shoulder, same sore spot so you know you got it right.
"Don't rush it," Dad warns you.
Against the assurance in his tone, you pull yourself straight. "Yessir" shoots like a reflex from your lips.
You breathe, and you shuffle your feet until your stand is solid, and you let your entire focus shrink down on the weapon in your hand and the target at its aim. And then, when you find yourself not listening to the nervous voice in your head that says you're a disappointment, in that short moment, that's when you shoot.
The bullet flings the can right off the post.
Dad smacks your back so hard it makes you stumble, ears still ringing with the thunder, but your fingers find the safety anyway, with an ease that's been drilled into you. Dad's arms close around you from behind, hold you so tight you can't help a grimace.
"That's my boy," he says and laughs, and you fall into it, and all the world is bright.
- 2
She rolls her eyes when you make your way across the cafe towards her, but makes space for you all the same. She clears the table from all her sprawling notes and papers and slams that big book shut. You can't see the title, though you do recognize the tag of the same library where you did your research earlier.
"I like smart girls," you tell her when you take the seat across from her.
"Is that your pick up line for every girl with a book?"
Maybe, but that doesn't make the statement any less true.
She's giving you a show of being unimpressed, but she likes you anyway - enough to keep you around, or at least more than the paper she's working on. "Henry James," she says with a sigh. First year literary student, new in town, still misses home. You spin your job into a tale of obscure research, for a paper, just like hers. "Deadlines," you complain and she doesn't want to smile, but the right corner of her mouth keeps twitching upwards.
You want to kiss her there, and you do, later, against the setting of the sun. In the smell of her hair and the sweetness of her mouth, tasting of wine and cherry gloss, you could just lose yourself, and you deem yourself a lucky man.
The shared student room of hers isn't an option and neither are you taking her to the cheap motel out of town where the carpet smells and the sheets are stained. The car will do just fine, and she doesn't seem to mind, not in the slightest judging by her kiss.
And then you sink into the upholstery to make space for her, curve of your skull resting against the backbench, your knees hitting the front. She only lifts her skirt and pulls her panties to the side, doesn't take them off, but she allows you to open another button on her neckline. When she sinks down on you, when she takes you in, when the world is only soft touches and her shallow moans and the gentle creaking of the car, you hide your face against her chest, kiss her there, over and over until she holds you so tight, you can barely breathe.
"Will you be at the library tomorrow?" she asks when you drop her off at the student home.
You kiss her on the mouth one last time. These days you already know better than to fool yourself with hopes and dreams.
- 3
Pain only knows pain. Sure, you can pinpoint a beginning, hellhounds mauling you to death, as well as an ending, marked by the sudden quiet of a grave. But you can't measure the inbetween. Pain defies concepts like time. It exists outside, on its own, in absoluteness.
You remember its textures, its spikes and hooks and spirals, how it burned and crushed and shred you. The moments it ebbed away felt like you were coming up for air, like you'd been drowning and drowning and never died. And the few times that it lifted entirely, all that pain that had become you, you were ground down to nothing, you were lighter than light, and it was bliss.
With tendrils of smoke and sulfur, Alastair wove you back together, and he held you, and you remember all his promises and all his praise.
Yet Anna looks at you. All that she knows, she still looks at you, and she takes you into her arms like you deserve to be forgiven.
- 4
When you come back from the dead - again, though the journey went upstairs for a change - you take the photo out of your wallet and hide it at the bottom of the trunk. Not that you want to lose it; you just can't stand to look at it right now.
Only much later, long after you made true on your promise to stab Zachariah in the face, after you've been walking down the hallway with the pictures of Ben and his Gran more times than you can count, some day in winter when you wake to a snow-covered world and for some reason don't feel half-dead with grief anymore, only then do you throw back the tarp and unearth it from a dusty corner of your weapon's cache.
"That's my Mum," you say to Lisa because she's come up behind you with a whiff of cold air, groceries dropped on the kitchen counter. You should have helped her, but instead you're sitting there, dumbstruck, running your fingertips over the photo like somehow you might be able to wipe away the grey and the stillness of it.
Lisa slides in beside you on the couch and calms your shaky hand.
"She's beautiful," she says after a moment. "You have her eyes."
This right here is what Mum would have wanted for you. You remind yourself of this. Then you dry your sorry eyes and put on your best smile.
"Hey Liz," you say. "Come here."
- 5
You're not sure what comes over you the day you drive off. "I'll be back in a day or so," you tell Sam and shut the door before he can ask where you're going. There's a ping of guilt all right that you swallow down. Besides, it's not like you know.
Out on the road, you dial Benny's number, and if you were the type, you'd say a prayer right now that he hasn't trashed his phone. It rings once, twice, then goes to voicemail. You leave a message, he better stock up on beer and tell you which direction you got to turn your nose.
Since there's nothing to do but wait, you eventually decide to take care of provisions yourself, and by the time you slide back into the driver's seat, a cooler full of AB positive in the trunk, you've got a voicemail with an address. Hearing Benny's drawl again is enough to make you laugh.
It's a four hour drive, and the sun's high and the road smooth and you make plans of treating your car to a new set of speakers. The old ones are tinny now that your ears are getting accustomed to the warmer sound of vinyl.
At the end of a service road that it takes you twenty minutes to find, Benny's holed up in the poorest excuse of a cabin you've seen in a while. "It's all right," he'll mention later. "Man like me knows how to get by."
He's waiting for you outside, under the shade of a sprawling tree. "That car of yours is making enough noise to wake the dead," he says for a welcome and before you even get around to telling him how that fits just right, doesn't it, he's already grabbed you in some bone-crushing hug. "It's good to see you, brother."
You got the sun in your eyes, and you can feel Benny's laughter against your shoulder, and you smack him on the back and then hold on. "It's been too long."