FALL WITH ME

Chapter Two

Funnily enough, the run up to Thanksgiving used to be my favorite time of year. One filled with family and laughter and so much goodness your skin felt stretched to bursting. It was easy enough to forget all the bad when you were too busy enjoying the good. Helped along by a little tipple of something festive, of course. Now I spent it chained to this infernal log cabin, huddled under coarse woolen coverings in a desolate bed, shivering my way to morning.

Though the woodpile was always stocked to the brim, I never used the fireplace. It was a work of art, one Tray took great pride in having shaped, river stone by river stone. We'd spent many nights roasting marshmallows and making s'mores, telling ghost stories and scaring ourselves silly about the monster in the woods. All the while, knowing perfectly well if that monster had come knocking, the two of us would've kicked its ass quick smart.

Still, it didn't feel right to relive those memories alone, nor to benefit off his dream. I wasn't here to enjoy an idyllic getaway in the woods. No, I was here to pay for my sins. So, with gritted teeth and fists clenched, I survived night after night on pigheaded willpower alone. Grimly holding onto all that was left of my brother. Memories and regret. Two snakes which ravaged each other in the darkest parts of my soul.

All the while, the seasons marched on. Relentless in their pursuit of the sands of time.

I didn't even come up to Tray's cabin only at Thanksgiving anymore. Lately, I'd taken to disappearing off the grid for days, sometimes weeks at a time, all so I could drown my sorrows in this self-imposed isolation.

Ironic, isn't it?

Professionally speaking, I dealt with death—or the aftereffects of it—on a daily basis.

Being born into a long line of grims meant my ancestors had turned the grisly facts of life, death, and its various unfortunate half-endings, into a thriving family business. I spent my work life freeing unwitting spirits trapped on the earthly plane, banishing pissed-off entities wreaking havoc on the living, decapitating the odd zombie outbreak before it could get a foothold, and dealing with other various magical miscreants looking to harness the power of the dead for personal gain.

You'd think I'd be better prepared for the day death visited my own family. Yet now that my brother was gone, all I could do was mimic the motions of living by forcing my feet to take one plodding step after another. Because to do anything less would be to spit on his grave.

But on the inside? I was frozen solid. My soul had become a block of ice, trapped in one defining moment of horror.

I blew through the partners the family lobbed in my general direction like they were candy floss. None of them could keep up with me. Or I ditched them because they were too much of a stickler for the rules. And, whenever I couldn't stand the pretense of normalcy any longer, I took off to Tray's cabin in the wilderness. Thanking the gods for the lack of service coverage as I creaked back and forth for hours on end in my brother's handmade rocking chair.

Cursing my brother's memory and the uncomfortable seeds of discontent he had planted in the last blissful months of his life.

Well, it was Thanksgiving again. Yet another year had passed and I was barely holding on by my fingertips. This time, I was actually on a forced leave of absence to get my head screwed on right. Apparently, my recklessness would no longer be tolerated by the higher ups—an arrangement which suited me down to a tee.

The blanket of silence which enveloped me up here was a relief. The incessant texts and alarmed voicemails had been stopped in their tracks by Mother Nature herself. My parents had practically begged me to attend the family gathering but I point blank refused to stomach another round of 'yes, dear, but how are you really?' from our obscenely large circle of nosy relatives with varying degrees of lucidity.

The old biddies—male and female—would peer at me over the gigantic carcass of a turkey like I was a science experiment or a charity case gone wrong. They didn't want to hear the truth, they simply wanted to offer pointless platitudes and move on with their dinner conversation. For the record, whenever people say idiotic things like— "Let yourself grieve, dear. Time will heal all wounds." —just know those people are full of shit.

The longer Tray had been gone, the worse I ached.

I gusted out an impatient sigh and went back to counting the falling leaves while my hands wrapped themselves more firmly around the chipped 'sexy lumberjack' mug I'd given Tray as a joke. It was filled to the brim with slowly congealing cocoa and tiny floating marshmallows. The marshmallows had been a token effort to cheer myself up. Instead, they bobbed fruitlessly while my restless eyes scanned the spaces in between dancing sunlight and dappled shadows in the late afternoon sunlight, hoping and praying for one fleeting glimpse of the afterlife.

Tray's ghost was nowhere to be seen, of course. Just like every other fucking time I'd come to visit. His aching absence was the kick in the teeth from reality I didn't want or need.

My stomach curdled with a fresh wave of bitterness. I don't know why I always managed to convince myself that somehow this time it would be different. In the city I would've been bombarded with sightings of ghosts I couldn't care less about, yet out here I was greeted by nothing but empty air currents and the busy rustlings of a forest preparing for winter.

Of course, that's exactly what Tray had loved about it, right? You could walk for hundreds of miles in any direction and never stumble upon anyone, let alone a spectral being. Here, your only company was Mother Nature herself, and she couldn't care less about you. She was too busy spinning an intricate web of uncomplicated existence to bother with one or two humans plodding about her wild lands.

That's irony in a nutshell, though, isn't it? The very escape my brother longed for had become my personal hell because it was empty of the one life-force which mattered. His.