Fiction Vortex - August 2014 Read online

  After dinner, Sarah and I snuck out to the back porch to watch the sun go down. Her parents had built their house on a beautiful piece of property overlooking the city, and they had an incredible view of the river snaking through the valley below. The sun had broken over the Willamette like an egg yolk, and the horizon was the color of fall leaves.

  “You don’t mind that I told them?” Sarah asked me. She took my hand and led me to a bench along the wall.

  “Hmm?” I asked, and she hit me on the arm. “You mean about Danny? No, I don’t mind.”

  “Good.” She turned into the sunset, her face now washed by its daffodil glow. “It’s important, that’s all.”

  “What’s important?”

  “That they know everything about you.”

  I let that stand a little.

  “Don’t you want to know why it’s important?” she finally asked.

  “Yes,” I said.

  She put her hand over my heart and put her head on my shoulder, still looking out over the valley. Her touch made my skin dance.

  “Because I think I love you,” she said. “Is that okay?”

  “I’m not sure,” I said, grinning. She lifted her face to mine and it was as open and vulnerable as the sky in spring.

  “I love you, too,” I said.

  The moment disintegrated when the back door opened. Sarah’s brother, Reynald Gray, sauntered out to the balcony without even acknowledging us. He pulled something from his shirt pocket, sniffed it, and cursed. When he finally turned toward us, it was as if he had seen us for the first time.

  “You got a light, Joe?” he asked me.

  “I don’t smoke,” I said, looking at what he held between his fingers.

  “Figures,” he said. He put the joint back in his shirt pocket.

  “Rey,” Sarah said.

  “Ah, don’t give me a lecture,” Reynald said. He plopped down into the chair next to me and began to drum his hands on his knees.

  “Rey,” Sarah said again.

  Her brother ignored her and looked at me instead. “What’s the matter with you?” he said.

  “With me?”

  “You don’t smoke?”

  “I don’t smoke,” I said.

  “Cigarettes?”

  “No.”

  “Anything?” His legs moved back and forth anxiously. His pupils, I saw, were bullets. “You a tool?”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Rey.” Sarah said, annoyed.

  Reynald laughed. “You probably haven’t even screwed my sister yet.”

  “Rey!”

  I didn’t like the way this was going, and I didn’t like Sarah’s brother.

  “Don’t talk like that,” I said.

  “Cause it’s not nice?” he said, dragging out the last word, mocking me. He sighed, leaning back in the chair. “Sorry, man. I just need to get lit. You know how it is, right?”

  “Don’t suppose I do,” I said.

  “Tool,” Reynald said. “My sister’s dating a soft-headed farm boy.”

  “Reynald!” Sarah snapped.

  “Nah, it’s okay,” Reynald said, flipping a hand in the air. He sniffed and then laughed. “She doesn’t usually go for the country hick type, is all.”

  Sarah shifted next to me, but I put my hand on her arm.

  “I’m just poking fun.” Reynald stood up and stretched. “You really don’t smoke?”

  “I don’t smoke,” I said.

  “You guys are lame.”

  “Go away,” Sarah said.

  “Great story about your brother, by the way. He was all mangled up, right?”

  “Reynald, that’s enough!” Sarah jutted a finger at him. “So help me...”

  “Whatever.” He went to the back door and then paused with his hand on the knob. “She’s spoiled, you know. My precious sister, I mean. She’s been in the back seat with her legs in the air more than a few times.”

  “Good night, Reynald,” I said.

  ~~~~~

  “I’m sorry about my brother,” Sarah said once we were in the car. “He has some problems.”

  “With drugs?” I asked.

  “Yes, and other things. He’s been through counseling but it doesn’t seem to work. I don’t think he wants to get help.”

  “What do your parents think?”

  “About Rey? I think he hurts them mostly. You know, with the way he acts. But they pretend it doesn’t.”

  I nodded. I knew all about putting on a good face.

  “They seemed to like you, though,” she said, slipping her hand just inside my knee.

  “Good,” I said. “I liked them.”

  “It’s not true,” she said. “What my brother said about me.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “I just wanted you to know.” She sighed, and I felt her start to pull away. “He likes to hurt me, too. Maybe because I’m older, maybe because he’s jealous.”

  “Hurt you?” I asked. The thought made me sick.

  “Oh, not physically. He wouldn’t do that. He just likes to play games. With his words.”

  “Oh.”

  “I used to be different.”

  “You don’t have to tell me anything,” I said.

  “I just want you to know that I’m not a bad person.”

  “I know that,” I said.

  “And neither is Rey. He’s just ... lost.”

  I thought he was a dick but I wasn’t going to say that.

  She smiled, and her hand moved further along the inside seam of my jeans. My foot hammered down on the accelerator.

  “You’re a good guy, Joseph Cook. A real swell peach of a man.”

  “I’ve always wanted to be compared to fruit,” I said, smiling.

  She leaned in and kissed me.

  “Let’s hurry back to my apartment,” she said, and in her eyes the half-lights of the night danced and everything in the world ceased to exist for a little while. There was nothing but her breath on my neck and the faint hum of her last word, vibrating in my ears.

  ~~~~~

  It was my turn to invite her home. It was part of the evolution of our relationship, but I didn’t like it.

  “Okay,” I told Sarah. “We’ll meet my parents, and then we’ll run away. Those are my terms.”

  “Those are the terms, huh?” She stuck out her bottom lip. “And what if we get lost?”

  “Oh, that’s the point,” I said. “Getting lost is exactly the point.”

  ~~~~~

  You will come to me, but not yet.

  They haunted me, those words. I had done my best to forget, but they came back to me on the two-hour drive to my parent’s farm, a whisper now rising to a scream inside of my head. It was all I could do to focus on the road ahead of me.

  Mom met us at the door. Her smile was genuine and her arms immediately went around Sarah’s slender frame. It was good to hear her laugh. The year had been hard on her though. Her shoulders sagged and the lines around her eyes were deeper. There was gray in her hair and in her eyes, and I noticed the slightest tremble in her hands when she reached for me.

  She called for my dad and when he came in from the back room all I noticed was how thin he was. I sensed in his gaze a distance that would never cease to be long between us.

  “Son,” my dad said, taking my hand. He turned to Sarah. “And who have you brought home to meet us?”

  “Dad, this is Sarah Gray. My girlfriend.”

  He nodded and shoved his hands in his pockets. “Busy season, son.” His eyes flicked back toward me, and then to the floor.

  It’s always busy season when you live on a farm, but that wasn’t what my dad was saying.

  “I figured you might be in the field,” I said. I felt Sarah slip her hand into mine, and I had never been more grateful.

  “Oh,” my dad said. His jaw clenched. “I’m around the house more since...”

  He paused and his mouth snapped shut as if the taste of those unfinished words was bitter. His
eyes bounced around the room and then finally settled on mine. In that instant I knew my dad was sick.

  “Why don’t we all go inside,” my mom said. She put her hand on my dad’s arm and led him to the kitchen, leaving me and Sarah alone in the doorway.

  ~~~~~

  That evening I took Sarah out to the barn to show her the horses, but they were both gone, their stalls swept out and empty.

  “Died. Both of them.”

  I turned around and saw that my dad had followed us out.

  “Around the same time as each other,” Dad said. “Without a symptom.”

  “That’s a shame,” I said.

  “A shame,” Dad said. He nodded, chewing on that word. “You could say that.”

  “I’ll leave you two alone,” Sarah said. She kissed me and then left us. Not many times in my life had I felt as lonely as I did watching her go.

  I hadn’t stood alone in a room with my dad in a long time. Even before Danny’s death, we were never close. I could never be who he wanted me to be, although he’d never say that. Not with words anyhow. Silence could be just as cruel as a fist.

  “How long?” I asked him.

  “Since the horses died?”

  “How long have you been sick?”

  “Since you left,” he said. My fault, his tone said.

  “What is it?”

  “Cancer. It’s in my liver.”

  I cursed the space between us. If a son can’t reach for his dad in a time like that then what good is he? What kind of world is that to live in?

  “You tell Mom?” I asked.

  “Yeah, she knows.” He pulled a piece of straw from a nearby bale and started twisting it in his hands.

  “How long do you have?” I asked.

  He laughed. “They told me six months, but I already beat that. I reckon they don’t even know, them doctors.”

  “I’m sorry,” I told him. I wiped a hand over my face. I wanted to look at anything but my broken father, so I looked at the floor, the bales of straw, the tack hanging from the wall.

  When I looked at the window, I saw a face there, staring back at me, just a shadow in the dim light. But I knew who it was. The little girl had found us again.

  When I turned to my dad, he was crying.

  “You shouldn’t have left us, son,” he said. He didn’t wipe his eyes, just let them drip like he was wringing out his soul, and somehow that was a terrible thing. “You just shouldn’t have done it. Not after Danny left us the way he did. Wasn’t right.”

  “He died, Dad. Danny died.”

  “You shouldn’t have left us, is all.” He looked at me for the longest time. Then he turned and went away.

  When I turned back toward the window, the little girl was gone. Maybe I was seeing things, but I didn’t think so.

  ~~~~~

  We had planned to stay the night, but after the conversation with my dad it just didn’t feel right. That kind of tension gets under your skin, makes everything inside feel hollow.

  “Your family is nice,” Sarah said.

  I pulled onto the interstate, grimacing at darkness beyond the headlights.

  “Nice,” I said. “That’s not the word I would have used.”

  “They seemed nice.”

  “My dad has cancer,” I said.

  “Your mom told me,” Sarah said. “I’m sorry, Joseph.”

  There was a detachment in her voice that unsettled me.

  “Who else lives with your mom and dad?” Sarah asked.

  “Just them,” I said.

  “What about the people working for them? Do they have children?”

  “I don’t think so. Why?”

  Her hands were in her lap, and I could see them working against each other. She shook her head.

  “No reason,” she said, and turned toward her window.

  I did the worst thing then. I let it go. I knew something was on Sarah’s mind, but I didn’t have the energy to pursue it. Maybe if I had she would still be alive.

  ~~~~~

  Reynald was arrested the next day with an ounce of meth in his bag. Turns out that brother Reynald was into more than anybody in the Gray house had known about.

  Sarah called me in tears. Her family was devastated. I don’t know how they missed the signs that their son was royally screwed in the head, but what do I know? She asked if she could come over, and of course I said yes.

  Two hours later she called again. Reynald was out on bail and they were going to hold a family meeting. A kind of intervention.

  “I’ll be a few more hours,” she said.

  “No problem.”

  “I love you so much, Joseph,” and then she was gone.

  Darkness fell over the busy streets below my apartment, and with it came the rain. I watched in silence, waiting for a phone call, or a knock at the door, wondering about Reynald and his stupid punk ass decisions and how they would affect Sarah. I reached for my cell twice before actually calling her, but I only got her voice mail. Finally I fell asleep on the couch with the cell phone in my hand.

  My ring tone yanked me out of a thin sleep early the next morning. My cell had fallen on the floor and I almost didn’t find it in time.

  “Sarah,” I said. But it wasn’t Sarah. It was her friend Erica, and she was sobbing so hard I could barely understand her.

  “I wanted you to know,” she told me. “I thought you should know first.”

  “What is it?” I asked. “What happened?”

  “It’s Sarah. Something happened. Something horrible.”

  Sarah and her family staged an intervention for baby brother Reynald. They sat him down and he listened to them talk, dealt with their tears and their pleas for him to get help, to be better. He listened to it all silently, and then after they were done he stood up, went to his room, loaded a gun, and then shot each member of his family in the head. Sarah had been the last to die. He tortured her with a knife, and then he put the gun to his own head and spent the last bullet in the magazine.

  I terminated the phone call and sat at the edge of my couch, staring at my hands. The silence in my apartment had teeth.

  You will come to me, but not yet.

  I jammed my fist into my mouth and screamed around it. I screamed until sound no longer came out of me, until I was as dry as old bones and my soul was utterly spent.

  ~~~~~

   I had two months left on my apartment lease, but there was no way I could stay there, so I accepted the penalty and took what I could carry in both arms, and I got the hell out of the city. It occurred to me I was running away again, and that no matter where I went heartache followed. That was a kind of death, I think. Like slowly being eaten alive.

  I had nowhere left to go but home. Within a couple days I was on a swather again, cutting alfalfa. Dad told me that he had hired enough help for the summer and fall, but I needed something familiar in my hands. When a man’s hands are empty and his mind is in a bad place, there’s no telling what he’s capable of doing. Reynald Gray taught me that.

  The fields welcomed me. It was like returning to an old lover. There were hard words and bitter tears and even blood sown into that ground, but there was also a little magic there, and that’s what I needed to find.

  I made an unspoken promise that I wouldn’t leave the farm again, and that was all right. Maybe that’s the way it was supposed to be.

  ~~~~~

  Dad died within the month.

  I was moving irrigation lines when he went, but I was told that he went peacefully.

  Mom cried, and so did I. A man should cry for his father. After the medical examiner took away my dad’s body, Mom asked me if I had seen that little girl running through the field. She had a black dress and hair the color of dandelions.

  “No,” I said. “I didn’t see her.”

  The seasons bled into each other after that. Time is a wheel and we’re all just monkeys hanging from it. I kept myself busy, but there were times when the wind would blow at night and I wo
uld lay there listening to it, and I would think about the people I loved and the people I missed the most. Little things, you know, details that shouldn’t be forgotten. The way Sarah used to bite her bottom lip when we made love. The way Danny used to dance sometimes in the rain. The way Dad used to sing sometimes while washing dishes with Mom.

  It’s the little details of the people you care about most that remain. These are their ghosts. And they haunt me.

  When Mom died, she was eighty-eight years old. She held my hand as she slipped away, and she never said a word about a little girl in a black dress. For that I was relieved.

  ~~~~~

  I’m alone now. Just me and these fields and the voices that come and go with the wind. I’ve got guys who stay on at the farm now to help, and I would call some of them my friends. But none of them fill the empty places.

  I’m fifty-one years old. An old fart. I’ve never married and I’ve never fallen in love again either. That part of me I gave to Sarah long ago, and she took it with her to the grave.

  I look for the little girl sometimes when I’m out in those fields. She’s out there somewhere. Waiting for me.

  You’ll come to me, but not yet.

  I’m almost ready, I think.

  No one knows how many days a man is given after he enters this world. Maybe somewhere those things are written down, but it’s better not to know. There will come a day when I see that little girl, when I hear her call my name, and I’ll take her hand willingly enough. Where she goes there are people that I love, and they are waiting for me. I’m not afraid anymore. So I’ll go with her, and I won’t complain.

  But not yet. There’s still hay to rake, and the wheat is coming on. And it looks like rain.

  ~~~~~

  ~~~~~

  Sean Ealy has been writing since he was ten — when he first discovered an ancient Hermes typewriter in the garage — and he's been lost in the words every since. His fiction has appeared in Under the Bed, Jersey Devil Press, and Menda City Review. Native Oregonian and avid Red Sox fan, he sometimes blogs at seanealyfiction.com or you can find him on Twitter @SeanEaly.

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  Book Review: Talus and the Frozen King, by Graham Edwards

  Review by Jon Clapier; published August 21, 2014

  Talus and the Frozen King by Graham Edwards is a novel set somewhere in the Stone Age with a strong primitive spiritual and magical influence. The main character, Talus, is a wandering bard cursed with intelligence and curiosity. His companion, Bran, is an ex-fisherman/bodyguard who accompanies Talus in the hopes that they can reach the place where the northern lights touch the earth, which they believe may be a gateway to the land of the dead. Talus seeks to find truth; Bran seeks his lost love.