Morpheus Tales 26 Preview

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ISSN 1757-5419 Issue 26 –June 2015 Edited by Sheri White Editorial By Sheri White

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A Late Night Summons At The Crossroads By Andrew James Woodyard Illustrated By P. Emerson Williams

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Burnt Offerings to Disaster By Robin Wyatt Dunn

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Creatures By Leon Saul

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Farishta By Mithun Mukherjee Illustrated By Joe Young

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Calling Hours By Gwendolyn Kiste

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Mercy By Scarlett R. Algee Illustrated By Candra Hope

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Mrs. Flim Is Dying By Arthur Staaz Illustrated By Jeffrey James Oleniacz

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After Life By Richard Farren Barber Illustrated By Tex McCranie

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Stitches By Caitlin Marceau

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That First Real Kill By Daniel Weaver

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Obsidian Heart By Rose Blackthorn

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Cover By – Joe Young Proof-read By Sheri White All material contained within the pages of this magazine and associated websites is copyright of Morpheus Tales. All Rights Reserved. No material contained herein can be copied or otherwise used without the express permission of the copyright holders.

2

Reginald leaned against the outer wall of the apartment complex with his friend Poptart. The Santa Ana winds blew gusts of air and dust everywhere around them, causing tumbleweeds to roll across the street every which way, and dust devils to dance under the street lights. Poptart shivered in the cold of the desert evening, but Reginald kept his eyes up at the moon. Sometimes when the moon hung low on the horizon where Los Angeles sat to the west it looked yellow in the smog... but the moon that night was red, bright red. Something terrible was about to happen.

“Damn, Reggie,” Poptart said, shivering with his hands in his pockets, “it’s fricken’ cold out here, homie. How much longer we gotta stay?”

Reginald shook his head, which tossed his long dark dreadlocks around in the air, then pulled out his cell phone and checked the time. 12:15 am. Reginald slid the cell phone back in his pocket and sighed. “Fifteen minutes, Poptart.”

“Fucking shit,” Poptart cursed, and nodded to the moon. “Weird, huh? Must be the smog.”

He reached into his pocket and pulled out a joint, then smoked his brains away. “Mondays,” he muttered, exhaling smoke and steam into the cold, polluted night air.

Reginald leered over at him with pity, then looked back up at the moon. A nagging feeling came over him. He pulled out his phone again: 12:16 am. He looked down the street and could see a vehicle slowly making its way toward them. He knew it was going to stop, and he knew exactly when.

“You wanna play some games over at my place after this, Reggie?” Poptart asked. “I got that new starfucker-” he began to laugh childishly, then corrected himself, “starfighter game,” he said, then continued to chuckle. “Fuck, I’m baked!”

Reginald looked over at him, and shook his head back and forth. “Na, your house smells like dog shit, Poptart, and your T.V. only gets two colours.”

“Harsh, man. Harsh,” Poptart said, still shivering, then took another hit. “Bagging on a man’s pad.”

The vehicle was a bright orange cargo van with a bright orange crescent shape on the side. It pulled up to the curb right in front of the two of them and rumbled. The driver was an extremely obese man with a thin moustache.

“What’s this shit? Ice cream guy?” Poptart asked, and laughed wildly.

“No,” Reginald replied calmly, keeping his eyes on the man in the van.

The driver opened his door and as he got out the van rocked toward him as a result of his massive weight, then back the other way once he was on the street. He left the van running, then slowly waddled his way around it.

Poptart laughed maniacally. “Fucking fatass, man,” he whispered to Reginald.

Reginald kept his eyes on the driver.

The driver slowly stepped up the sidewalk, and came up to the grass, but stopped short of actually stepping on it.

“Yo, what you looking for, Holmes?” Poptart asked, keeping his hands in his pockets because of the cold, but tilting his head nearly sideways to the right dramatically. “This ain’t no candy store!” he said, mockingly.

“Poptart, chill,” Reginald said to him, “this guy’s a friend of my mom’s.”

Poptart looked up at Reginald, and glared. “Your mom fucks this fat fuck?” he asked.

The driver stood up straight, but did not respond to Poptart’s rude comment.

Reginald stepped forward. “What do you want?”

“I request an audience, Sir Reginald. My carriage awaits,” he said, pointing to the van.

Poptart broke out in laughter once again. “What’s this shit? Sir? An audience? His carriage awaits? Motherfucker’s some sort of paedophile, Reggie. Stay the fuck away from him.”

Reginald ignored him. “Why?” he asked.

“I carry a message from your mother. It is urgent,” the driver replied.

3

Jake loves the walls, and he touches them, feeling in his skin the feeling he had only felt from love songs. In the house he finds some part of himself he never knew, the part he had needed, electric.

He throws himself against the walls, crying.

It hurts and this is good.

He sings inside the hallway filled with dust: “I knew I found you! I knew I found you. Deeeeeeeeaaaaaad! I love that you’re so fucking dead!”

The house vibrates around him and he shakes his head like a head banger and lets out an animal cry, moving in, moving towards the logical end— ### “What is the logical reason why Nazism grew to power in the mid-20th Century? Why in Germany?”

Alice holds her pen in her mouth. Like it was a cock.

“Why was it in Germany,” the professor asks, “that the Holocaust occurred? Why did the disaster strike there? Why not in Russia?”

She sucks the plastic and she watches the professor’s mouth.

“Why was it in Germany that anti-Semitism reached its height? What social need was fulfilled with this horror that did not need to be fulfilled elsewhere? And why then? Why not earlier?”

She closes her eyes. ### He closes his eyes inside the house where the Jew died. He was an old Jew and mighty in his kingdom, lonely and philosophical about it, filled with a trillion stories that he had told in the neighbourhood and that he had written on his walls.

Jake loves the walls and loves what they are doing to him, covering him with a protection that he knows is his alone, a dusty Technicolor dreamcoat, absolution, a written explanation of the mystery he had suspected was looming inside his heart waiting to burst, and here it is, bursting, ripping his heart out, or it feels like that, this feeling in the house like everything has come to this, and the Grail is to be revealed at the other side of the door at the end of the hall.

4

Scritch scritch scritch ssshhhhhh Again, to the accompaniment of half-heard voices and slithering fabric.

Sitting up in bed, kneecaps drawn up under his quivering chin, Abel clenched his palms ’til the knuckles went white and trembled, his face stark and ashen and sweaty.

They were at it again…whatever they were.

The creatures.

In his closet, scratching around and hissing alien sibilants, plotting their diabolical plans.

The past four nights, Abel had heard them in there—had even once caught a glimpse of something awful through a crack in the closet door: a glimmering bloodshot eye, round as the world, and goggling.

He’d told his parents the next morning—breathlessly, frantically—but to no avail.

“Abel,” his mother had said in her lilting, maternal voice. “Come now, you know there are no such things.” His father, continuing with this parental reproof, attempted to assuage their over imaginative and hypersensitive only child in the only way he knew how. “Son,” he’d said in a firm, authoritative voice. “Come here.”

Already feeling ashamed, Abel had shuffled over to his father, who stood squat and tanklike in the middle of the kitchen floor. His wide, bald head gleamed in the reddish sunlight from the window. Abel stared at the spots on his father’s earth-dry skin. “What’s all this, hmm? What’s gotten into you lately?”

Abel began to protest, then abruptly stopped, the petulant whine dying on his lips. Did he even have any proof? Could it just be his imagination?

(The breathing sounds, the scratching, the rustling of fabric. The gaping, single white eyeball gleaming like an egg white in the harrowing darkness.)

Maybe he was just being silly, after all.

But at night-time, when the creeping sounds resumed, he knew he was right. There were creatures there, in his closet. Spying on him, plotting. Horrible things, perhaps. Malignant, terrible things. He had talked about it during lunch break the day before with his best friend, Blott. “Even if they are monsters, or aliens, or whatever,” Blott had surmised, “what makes you think they want to hurt you? Why do all monsters necessarily have to be bad? Maybe they’re like the friendly kind.

Maybe they’re just curious… ” But somehow, in the pit of his stomach, Abel knew this wasn’t the case. Not these creatures.

They would hurt him. Oh, yes. And not only him, but his entire family.

Murder them in their sleep.

And even that wouldn’t be enough. They would then go out and look for others…and murder them, too, slowly. Hurt them, first, because they were different, and simply because they wanted to.

So Abel resolved to watch. It was his responsibility now; he had to be vigilant to protect his family, to not let his guard down. He couldn’t go to sleep, because the creatures in the closet were waiting, waiting for their chance to strike.

He gripped the bone-handle of the large kitchen knife he’d snuck in his pocket after dinner.

Kept his eye on the closet door, which was shut for the time being like a badly bruised eye.

He waited, and waited some more.

5

A total of three houses were all that my eyes could see. Dry skeletons of apple trees stood planted around the house I was in. There was a dog, too. It held no surprises; a black pooch with ragged hair, pine needles caught in its fur. His right ear was chewed off, a trophy of when he might have been a pup. His eyes gave off the feeling that it knew much more than it would ever be able to tell someone. That he had seen things or could still see them while you stood and patted his head or ran your fingers through his tangled hair.

The sun was getting ready to set and there was a chilly nip in the air. ”I am everyone here,” Shyam, the caretaker, laughed, showing gutka-stained teeth and an expression which told me he was speaking the truth. His clothes were torn, fixed at places with bright patches of cloth that stood out like cherries on a cake. Taking off from Delhi to settle in the middle of nowhere for a total of two days hadn’t seemed such a bad idea. Being stuck with a man who possibly had a few bottles of hooch tucked away somewhere in the vicinity unsettled me. My mobile was dead.

The last milestone I had encountered while driving down here was about thirty kilometres away, before the serpentine roads gave way to gravel-filled, narrow, twisting paths, occasionally marked by small avalanches of rock and silt. Nowhere had I encountered another car. There had to be a landline somewhere. I would use it tomorrow, I decided.

“I live in that one.” Shyam pointed to the furthest cabin, over a little hill in the distance. He was bringing in firewood by the armload and dumping it, getting ready to prepare a small bonfire for the evening. The night began here, crawling, reptilian, spreading across, encroaching upon the flowing river, the hills, and eventually filling the skies. Stars, thousands upon thousands, bobbed up and out of the grim blackness above.

“Does anyone live there?” I asked, pointing to the wooden building next to mine.

“Did. Not anymore,” he said and grinned again. Then he went back to lighting the fire.

“Don’t you feel afraid?” I asked.

“I have my farishta.” He grinned, his eyes reflecting the small wisps of flame that were starting to lick the twigs at the bottom of the pile.

“Farishta?”

“Yes, like you call fairy. Or angel. Here, have your soup. It is very helpful in making your heart strong,” he said, passing me a steaming bowl. I drank a spoonful and immediately felt better.

“Don’t you ever feel alone?” I asked.

“Do you see this orchard?” he said, almost immediately.

“What about them?” I asked, a cold shiver running through my body.

“They keep me company,” he said, his eyes steady on the dancing flames.

“The trees?”

“Not only the trees. Everything.”

Later, when the fire had died down and the dancing orange carcasses of the trees around it had returned to the darkness, I drew the blanket over and closed my eyes. I do not know how much time passed between closing my eyes and opening them again. Something made me strike a match and light a candle. I sat up straight and put my feet down on the hard, smooth floor.

Something was skittering.

It sounded like a lot of tiny feet. Frenzied, panicky. I put on the slippers and made my way towards the inner part of the room, where the bathroom was situated. The sound was coming from within.

6

People said my sister’s funeral was beautiful.

“She looked at peace,” they said. “She looked lovely.”

She was neither peaceful nor lovely. Not after what had been done to her.

Through roses and earth and syrupy speeches, she was there. Peeking around corners or laughing someplace far off, someplace I hoped was better.

It wasn’t so different than before. She and I always hid at funerals. We’d sneak into back rooms or under tables while the dark figures bled past us, lamenting a lost aunt or uncle or grandparent. Everything was wet handkerchiefs and black garb as if the mourners were austere pagans conducting some strange ritual.

“No one better ever do this on my behalf,” she said.

“Why would they?” I asked, all wide eyes and arched brows. “You’ll never die.”

“Everyone dies, silly,” she said.

And my sister was right. She did die, but not in the way any of us thought she would. A cult swallowed her whole and then spit out the bones. Not quite the stuff of flowery obituaries. For their part, our family and friends pretended not to know, pretended they couldn’t see the marks on her face inside the coffin, tattoos in honour of some arcane god.

She’d been a sacrifice, and based on the coroner’s report, she didn’t even put up a fight.

After the sermon in the cemetery, I bid farewell to all the vacant faces and told them I was going home to be alone. But I didn’t go home. I drove around the block and returned to the cemetery. For the rest of the day, I sat outside the gates and watched the men work, their sunspotted hands caressing shovels, the shovels caressing dirt. I was a voyeur, even though I stared into my own life, a life they had no right to touch.

I fumbled for my pack of cigarettes on the dash, my arm brushing against the chicken foot that dangled from the rear-view.

I flicked a gnarled toe, and the thing danced a forbidden jig.

It was painted a kaleidoscope of colours and still stunk of death. No one else could discern the scent of course, no one except me.

My sister had bought it on a whim.

“Something to help with your spells,” she’d said and giggled as if magic was only for children and mystics. Because I was neither, magic wasn’t for me, at least according to her.

7

It’s been a quiet day, for a Saturday. Hell, it’s been a quiet week, all told.

Bryce Whitmire leans back in his old leather chair, puts his feet up on his coffee-stained desk, and starts to give his Colt Walker another polish with a scrap of rag. That ten-year-old gunshot scar in his right calf aches and twinges as he stretches his legs; he stops to rub at it through his denims. Movement catches at the corner of his eye, but it’s just his dog Kenshaw, settling down with a grimy stump of soup bone he’s ferreted out from somewhere. The mutt’s staked out the rearmost of the three tiny cells that make up the town jail, and since Finus Barton’s last bender two weeks ago, Kenshaw’s been the jail’s only occupant.

Bryce grins at his dog. Sometimes being the sheriff for a town of sixty people isn’t so bad.

His attention’s got by the rattle of wagon wheels outside the door, the weak neigh of an old horse whose mouth’s pulled on too hard. Bryce sits up, grimacing at another twinge in his calf, then stands as the door opens.

“Sheriff.” It’s Seth Laidlaw. He stumbles in the door, white hair flying, reedy frame threatening to fold, and Bryce has to catch him to keep him upright. “My place. Come. Please.”

“Seth.” The man’s so frail it seems a good shake would send him to pieces, but Bryce gives him one anyway. “Catch your breath, man. What’s wrong?”

“My girl,” Laidlaw pants. “My Mary. She’s... changin’.” ### Changing. That’s all anyone’s ever called it.

Laidlaw had got back on his wagon and whipped his beaten old nag around fast enough that Bryce had nearly choked on the dust. He’s following now on his own horse, but he’s not bothering to keep up; the Laidlaw homestead is barely a quarter mile out, Bryce can guess at what he’s going out to see, and he knows there’s no real hurry.

He hadn’t been here in Broken Willow when the strange meteor had fallen out of the sky and streaked into Reverence Lake; he’d been in Kansas as a bounty hunter, chasing cattle thieves and courting a farmer’s daughter. But one of the rustlers had shot him and Delilah had been taken by what they called the Spanish Fever, and after that the tiny quiet place by the lake hadn’t seemed so bad.

But he’d heard the stories even before he’d returned: the earthquake that buried the Cherokee village on the lake’s north shore, the glowing milky-green vapor that had hung over the water for four and a half weeks, the... changes that had taken place in the people who swam the water and ate the fish. Scales. Gills. The bulging, staring eyes, the gasping mouths lined with tendrils. By the time Bryce had made it back, federal marshals had come in, dispatched the suffering and burned the bodies, and put forth the official word that nothing had actually happened.

Just delusions caused by all the marsh gas released by the earthquake.

Apparently Seth Laidlaw has learned better.

Bryce’s horse skitters on the dirt road and he slows the beast. Ahead, Laidlaw has come to a stop and climbed down from the wagon. From here the mist over the broad sag pond is barely visible, thin and stretched and gapped like fog in the scattered sunlight, faint and almost white.

Beyond, Bryce can see Laidlaw’s weedy corn patch and the house itself, surrounded by ankle-high grass and cattail stalks, leaning between two bald cypresses. The air scrapes his tongue with hints of dead fish and rotting vegetation.

“Horses won’t get no closer now, Sheriff.” Laidlaw’s gaunt face is pale. “You can hitch your critter to the back o’ the wagon. Ain’t too far nohow.” He waits as Bryce knots his reins.

“Preacher should still be at the house; he come by ‘fore the mist got up an’ I asked him to stay ’til you come. Give him time to do the necessary.”

8

It’s so quiet. A neighbour pads softly down the street. A light breeze blows through the tall grass of the overgrown lawns, making a sound that seems to warn us. Hush. If I listen carefully, I believe I can pick up the deadened whispers of my neighbours. And in the distance, so faint you can barely hear it, that peculiar music. Constantly probing the perimeter of the neighbourhood like a discordant invader threatening to destroy our silence. That’s the way it’s been around here since we found out Mrs. Flim is dying.

It wasn’t always like this. The neighbourhood used to be just teeming with children, loud and uproarious, like you’d expect them to be. During daylight hours, if there wasn’t a cacophony of laughing, screaming, call and response, and good-natured arguments, there seemed to be the sounds of constant chatter and young footsteps plodding the pavement. It only settled down after dark, and even then, especially in the summer, you’d hear them laughing at the TV or calling out to their mothers for a drink or a snack.

But now Mrs. Flim is dying, and that’s got to be respected. She’s going through enough. She doesn’t need noise, especially the kind kids are prone to. It’s not just the kids, either. We all try to whisper when the need to talk arises. And while no one used to care if the dogs let out a few barks at squirrels or raccoons or passing neighbours, that had to change, too. The Mossoleys down the road started spraying their dog with the hose any time she started up. Ben Klommer didn’t want to take any chances. He took his dog Phaedrus down to the woods by the river and put him down.

Yes, it’s affected us all, but especially the kids. The quiet has hung over them like a thick cloud, the grey seeming to seep into them. Their faces became bloodless. Darkness filled in the sunken areas around their eyes and under their cheekbones. They developed the habit of floating wordlessly from place to place, quiet in rubber-soled shoes and heavy sound-muffling clothing.

Heads down followed by lengthening shadows.

None of us really remember when we got the news about Mrs. Flim. All of a sudden, it just seemed to be common knowledge. My earliest recollection of it goes back to when the new ice cream truck started coming around. None of us liked the look of the ice cream man, what we could see of him. He was very tall. So when he came to the window and leaned over to take the kids’ orders, none of the adults could see his face, hidden as it was beyond the uppermost edge of the window. All we saw was a strange outfit, motley like jesters used to wear. A black-and-red checkerboard pattern, interrupted here and there by solid patches of black. The kids could see him.

And though they looked up at his face with a mixture of awe and dread, none of them ever said anything about it.

The adults ultimately had to put their foot down. Ice cream trucks make too much noise. His in particular. It broadcast this strange music, like from some primitive instrument. A metallic clanging sound, like the plucking of thick wires or metal tongues. The notes came haphazardly, with no regard for rhythm or melody. It was not very conducive to the kind of rest a dying person like Mrs. Flim needs. So a group of us met him at his usual stop. No kids. We explained Mrs. Flim’s situation and politely asked him to stay away. He didn’t seem happy about it. Hard to tell. We couldn’t see his face. He just grunted and pulled down the shutter over the window with his blackgloved hands. Then he turned the truck around, leaving us with the receding tones of his primordial, chaotic symphony.

Right after we sent the ice cream man away, several of us met behind Carimon’s Store to discuss things. The most common question was, “Who told you?” None could say. There were vague descriptions of vaguer memories of some unidentified neighbour mentioning it in passing or perhaps some talk around the counter at Carimon’s.

9

Mary waited until the room was empty. She stood up from the chair and laid her hand on the door, pausing for just a moment before snapping it shut.

“There,” she said. “Now it’s just the two of us. I thought they were never going to go.”

She walked back to her chair and when she sat down she leaned forward into the coffin and took John’s hand into her own. It was the first chance she’d had to touch him, other than the obligatory peck on the cheek when she had been marched into the chapel by the brusque attendant.

His skin had the glassy sheen which meant she could not avoid the truth that she was looking at his corpse.

She had been ignoring this moment all day. She had fixated on the preparations as a way to avoid thinking about why she was there and what she was actually doing.

She was saying goodbye. To John. To her life.

She smiled; a look that John would have recognised. “I know, love. Too dramatic by half.”

She patted his hand. His skin felt different to how she had expected. In her mind she had built up the moment when she would touch her husband’s body as something terrible – cold and alien and a world away from the soft skin she had become familiar with over the past fifty years. In truth, it was immediately apparent to her that what she touching was not alive. He was cool, but not cold, not really, and she wondered if the temperature in the room had something to do with that.

It was only a small room, barely large enough to hold his coffin and a row of chairs on either side. There were no windows and the radiator at the back of the room pumped out hot air.

“We don’t have much time,” she told him. She looked over to the door and wondered exactly how long it would take for the children to barge in; for Sheila or George to peer around the door – just to check that you’re all right – as if she were the one they needed to worry about.

Mary stared at her husband’s features, searching for a sign that he could still hear her. There was nothing. His eyes were closed. Those perfect brown eyes hidden away forever. That was the first thing she had noticed about him – even before he had spoken to her. His brown eyes.

“You promised you wouldn’t leave me,” she told him. She dropped her voice to a whisper in case any of those outside heard her speaking. It wouldn’t do to give them any reason to think that she had lost her mind. Sheila had already made enquiries with the local care home, just ‘in case,’ as she liked to suggest. It was called Cedar Wood Lodge, but Mary held silent on that – John didn’t need to know everything.

“I always said you looked better in black,” Mary said. She reached into the coffin to straighten his tie and pick a speck of lint from the lapel of his jacket. She tried to ignore the way he seemed to have shrunk within his clothes. Instead she focused on thinking about how smart he looked. How dapper, as he he’d liked to describe himself when they were going out on the town.

Not that they had done much of that for the last ten years. Mary tried to think back to the last time they had gone out together, just the two of them. She couldn’t remember.

“You said you wouldn’t leave, not even when… ” but she didn’t say the woman’s name. She had made a vow to herself all those years ago that she would never say her name. “Not even when she tried to turn your head,” she finished.

Mary smiled, her lips pulled up into a grin. The sort of grin that John would have recognised and taken as a warning. The sort of grin she had worn when he had sat in their front room – their best room which was saved for visits from great aunts and the man from the Co-Op – and had told her that he had made a mistake. That it had been his fault, not hers, not the kids; all his fault and he would understand if she left, but she had to believe that he was sorry and he had never intended for it to go this far and he didn’t want to hurt her, or the kids.

Always the kids… always her and the kids.

10

He holds the thin shaft of metal between his sweaty fingers and tries to steady his hands.

Squinting, he tries to thread the needle, missing the hole for the tenth time in a row. He holds the needle up to the light, which feels too bright and burns his eyes, and tries again. He’s never been good at sewing, always making Elaine fix his collared shirts when he pops off a button or tears through the fabric, but he’s not going to let that stop him. He only hopes his poor craftsmanship won’t be too noticeable when he surprises her with this gift.

It’s the thought that counts, he reminds himself, missing the loop with the clear fishing line yet again.

“Christ,” he cusses, tossing the needle onto the desk.

He gets up quickly from his seat, pushing himself away from the table so fast that the chair falls backwards onto the ground. It makes a loud bang, which cuts the heavy silence. If he didn’t know any better, he’d think he was alone in the Upper East Side apartment. Except he does know better, and that when he leaves the bedroom and walks down the hall, he’ll find Elaine like she’s been for the past few days; curled up on the sofa staring at the blank TV screen with red eyes framed by dark circles. She never cried, or made a sound, but her grief was inconsolable.

Elaine hadn’t been ready for a child when she got pregnant. She’d spoken to him about getting an abortion, but he’d wanted a baby so badly that she’d decided to keep it for him. She’d loved her job working at the ad agency, and giving it up to stay at home with their child had been hard on her. As her pregnancy progressed, she began to change, becoming more withdrawn and depressed. While most women glowed when they were expecting, she became sullen and pale. Her olive skin turning pale and sickly, her thick black hair growing thinner by the day. Harvey had hoped when the baby came things would be different, better even, but they only got worse.

There was no motherly bond, no connection. Harvey would watch the two of them and it was like she was disgusted by their baby. She’d put Arthur down for a nap while he was still crying, and not want to pick him back up again. She’d leave him wailing in his crib, diaper filthy, until Harvey came home from work to take care of him. He’d watch as Elaine fed him milk from her breast with a mixture of repulsion and regret on her face.

“He’s not mine,” she’d tell him in bed late at night. “He’s not my son.”

And every night he’d try and convince her otherwise as their child lay in a crib in the room next door.

11

I remember the first time my father told me about hunting, I didn’t understand how someone could kill something and then call the whole thing a game.

“They have families!” I pled with him. “Ya wouldn’t like someone killin’ me or Ma, would ya?”

“Shuddup, boy,” I remember he’d said, his speech muddied by the ball of chew he kept lodged in his jaw. “It’s different. Those things… th’ain’t nothin’ but beasts.”

Now though, I’ve come to find comfort in the game. I don’t know if it’s the fact that for once I hold all the power, or some imagined congratulations I still hear from my years-dead dad after every clean kill I make. It was rare for my father to have a kind word for me, but in those minutes, he always seemed so proud.

It didn’t matter that I wasn’t interested in football games on Friday nights, or chasing tail every weekend. He knew I was a talented hunter, and that was something he’d found to love about me.

Or maybe I like hunting so much now because I know these beasts are giving back to the world. Anything we can eat from them, I feed to my family, and everything else, well… I find some use for it.

Truthfully, I think the biggest reason I like it is that I’m carrying on a tradition. My father took me hunting for the first time on my twelfth birthday, and his father did the same for him, and in nine years, my boy’ll be out there on his twelfth birthday, too. From that first day until the one he died, me and my daddy hunted together every weekend from April to October, driving that long 40 miles in silence from our house to the old family farm, and from October to April, well, we’d be finding new beasts to bring up for next year’s kill.

It wasn’t really a farm, it was too woodsy for that, but my dad always called it the Farm, like it deserved a capital F. Before my first hunt, I’d only been up there one time about four or five years earlier. I remember lying in my bed at home one night, not sleeping because my mama (the Lord rest her soul) and my daddy were screaming at each other downstairs in the kitchen.

“It is not fine!” I remember she’d yelled at him. “I’ll tell the police, I swear to God I will!”

“It’s just somethin’ to take th’ edge off sometimes!” he yelled back at her. “It ain’t like I’m hurtin’ nobody!”

“Ya’ ain’t hurtin’ nobody?” she’d shouted. “How can you think that?”

The two were always fighting about that stuff my daddy smoked with my uncle, and I figured this was just another one of those fights. This one must have been pretty bad though, because after a few minutes, my daddy came storming into my room and started shoving some of my clothes into a backpack. He told me we were leaving, “getting away from that bitch,” he’d snarled, and I didn’t know what to say, so I said nothing.

See, I thought he meant we were leaving my mama forever, so I remember reaching for her as my daddy pulled me out to the truck, and I remember seeing her there in the doorway, a cigarette between her fingers as tears rolled off my cheeks, and I couldn’t understand how she could stand there and watch and not even try to fight for me to stay.

Looking back, I think that was the first time I’d felt resentment towards her.

That weekend was also the first time I’d ever been to the Farm, and in those few days, I felt like I was one of the men, instead of some little boy at the kids’ table.

“Where we going?” I remember asking my daddy during that long drive, once the tears had stopped pouring from my eyes.

12

It was raining outside, droplets tracking down the window glass like saltless tears. Seren stood in the gloom of the living room, lights off in ticking-clock silence, and watched. Once she had cried tears enough to rival the heavens. But that was before, and she was over it now.

When the phone rang she turned her head, raindrop-shadows streaking her face. After the third ring the answering machine picked up. “Hi, you’ve reached the Konig residence. We can’t take your call right now, so please leave a message. We’ll get back to you as soon as possible.”

There was a moment of silence, then a soft tone.

As the machine began to record, Seren could hear soft breathing, and then what might have been a muffled sob. Finally a woman’s voice spoke, thick with barely controlled anguish. “Ryan?

Pick up, Ryan. Please.”

Seren gazed at the phone until there was a soft click. After a moment, the machine stopped recording, and a red light blinked in measured cadence. The sound of the other woman’s voice was all the proof she needed that Ryan hadn’t changed.

The rain pattered, drummed, pounded as the storm became heavier. Outside the plate glass window everything more than a few feet away disappeared in a flickering grey sheet that pulsed and eddied. The lights from other houses were little more than smears in the downpour. One burnt yellow flare marked the nearest streetlight. When a pair of blue-tinged headlights swung in, occluded beams flickering across the front of the house, Seren’s eyes stung. Behind her, the sound muffled by the storm, she heard the grandfather clock chime. It was time. ### Ryan came in through the mudroom, shaking his half-deflated umbrella before hanging it to drip on the tile. His coat was wet and he hung it up as well, the damp wool smelling of musty sheep.

He entered the kitchen, flipping light switches as he went. After the day he’d had, and then driving home in this flood of a storm, all he wanted was to relax with a glass of good whiskey.

He stepped into the living room, noting the red light blinking on the answering machine before he turned on the indirect lighting hidden above the crown moulding. The large front window flickered from clouded grey to obsidian black, no longer a view but a mirror reflecting the elegantly furnished room. Ryan kicked off his wet leather loafers, and thumbed the playback button. There was a long moment of quiet, then Nina’s low voice.

“Ryan? Pick up, Ryan. Please.” After a couple more seconds, the recording ended and the machine beeped.

“How much more obvious do I have to make it?” he said, speaking to the quiet rain-washed room. “Over is over, woman. Take a hint.” One more touch, and the message was erased.

He continued on through the living room, down the wide hall past office and bathroom and laundry room, to the master bedroom. The blinds on the two large windows were open, shedding a dim grey light into the room as he reached for the wall switch. Something moved, a dark figure among the moving shadows caused by the rain, and Ryan flinched as he turned on the lights.

The room was a contrast of cream and deep red. Cream carpet, baseboard and crown moulding, cream-coloured wood furnishings and painted ceiling. The walls were painted a deep, rich red and the upholstery of the leather loveseat and the silk bedclothes were the same shade.

There was no one in the room except for him, and Ryan laughed a little breathlessly.

“Damn storm,” he said, and stripped off his clothing before going in to take a quick shower.

When he came out a few minutes later wrapped in a towel, he frowned. The carmine-red bedcover was partly covered by wooden rectangles. Ryan cocked his head to one side, brows drawn together in puzzlement and irritation. The bed had been uncluttered when he’d gone into the bathroom. There was someone in his house.

13

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