𝐒𝐭𝐢𝐥𝐥 𝐋𝐢𝐟𝐞 [𝐉𝐚𝐬𝐩𝐞𝐫 - 𝐓𝐰𝐢𝐥𝐢𝐠𝐡𝐭]

11 | Double-Bind

R U N E — 2005

            — THEY SPEND THE WEEKEND AT AUNT CALLIE'S, just Nick, Adam, and Rune, with the unceasing rain to keep them all company. Bella calls him once on Saturday morning, just as the Buckleys are all about to jam themselves into their rattly beige Honda, to ask him about nearby jobs. He recommends asking Mike about his family's hiking shop, tells her to flirt a little if she must, which he then briskly translates into, 'just trip over and smile, that'll work'.

            Bella and him never talk over the phone — brief updates in the truck are enough for them both — and he's eager to end the conversation. Not because he doesn't like her, but because he doesn't like the phone. And, he can admit, he might also loathe the niggling sensation he gets whenever they talk. Bella is profoundly boring in the same way Rune is, and sometimes when they speak, he gets this tense feeling that he needs to meet some social expectation because she won't do it for him. So, when Bella begins to clumsily hint at some dreadful beach trip, Rune hangs up. He even hurries his family along and into the car so that he can pretend he was pressed for time and had to urgently leave. Then he spends the weekend blissfully isolated, no parents or friends to speak of.

            The remainder of Saturday is spent playing monopoly, because Callie doesn't use the TV in her cabin except in emergencies ('Boredom is an emergency!' Was Adam's reply), and they need to be frugal with the generator the residence runs off of. Sunday is much of the same. More monopoly, a puzzle they can't finish, with no dreams or lingering strangeness to speak of.

            "I think I heard a wolf last night," Adam lights up with memory Sunday evening, and their aunt, a stout woman with the stature and presence of the teetering pines that surround them, spouts a series of legends she'd learned from some of the Quilette men on her hunting trips. Adam 'oo's and 'ah's at all the right moments, and Nick continues to pick at his fingernails, gaze absently drifting from the dark sky to the bug-zapper. Rune merely wonders at how close they are to the Cullens' house. From where they sit on the veranda, bacon sandwiches in hand, he imagines it's just a little way's uphill. If he squints into the thick sheet of rain drowning the surrounding wildlife, he can almost glimpse a brighter, warmer wood, like the panelling on the outside of their big house. Then the zapper goes off and he flinches away from the thoughts again, swats Nick's picking fingers apart again, tries to gauge the time from the odd lighting that comes with thick rain — where day becomes night, but night becomes nothing.

            "Do you think," Nick starts, voice wheezy and hoarse from disuse, from his low volume. Along the veranda, on separate stools, Adam and Callie pick through boxes of fishhooks and animal snares. This leaves the two of them alone on one swinging porch bench, with the zapper and the creaking drains and the rain thundering down on the tin roof. It's serene, tranquil, like sitting on the edge of a dark, misty lake. Ominous to a stranger, home to a friend.