He slammed the car door shut and took a moment to stare out at the scene before striding towards it. His back ached with each step like a terrible fire seizing up every second. A heavy dreadful sense in the atmosphere leaned in on his chest, pulling him closer.
The tiny shop in front of him was a run down little building, complete with a series of rotting pumpkins and squash sitting in their drying muck. He walked past it all from the parking lot, taking in the frozen plants and scattered garbage over the ground.
He stepped inside the convenience shop to hear the jangle of bells strung above the head of the door like a miniature symphony of meaningless sound.
The old woman peered into her circular spectacles at him, fluffing up the puff of swirling white hair on her head.
Just as she opened her tiny mouth to speak, he interrupted.
“A friend of mine ordered some wood here for me?”
She nodded, and tapped the counter with her knobbly fingernails. He remained by the door as she asked: “Fire wood?”
He shook his head and scanned the cluttered shop for the first time. “No,” he said, and glanced at the piles of old newspaper, fire starters and endless boxes of packaged food. The smell of thick coffee and stale food clung to his skin like a disease. “No, more like building material.”
The old woman nodded, and directed him out to the back. “It’s the only pile of wood out there, not many people come out here,” she said. “You have a good pickup truck for all that?”
He backed away, giving a nod and a grumbled response before exiting the musty store. He wandered out around the building, noting the shingles scattered all over the gravel. He didn’t give the place too long before it just collapsed all around the old woman’s feet, just like life often did. Everything eventually rots away.
The hum of another car pulling up the lot from behind him was heard, the only sound ripping through the fragile air, shattering it like a thin sheet of glass.
There it lay; the stack of long planks of white wood. They all had odd dimensions, some unfathomably small and seemingly insignificant, others quite larger than his own height. All measured with extreme precision, he presumed. Every detail was already planned out time and again, every angle refigured.
When the car door opened from behind him and the slow even steps didn’t disappear behind the clang of door chimes, a pit formed and hardened in his throat, like a knot of his dread.
He sighed, letting the air escape in a frosty puff. He ignored the footsteps behind him, and headed up to the pile of wood, lifting and heaving three long planks over his shoulder. Just as he got it balanced in a rested spot on his shoulder, the voice split through his ears, blistering his brain like a bolt from the blue.
“Are you going to do it right this time?” it sneered with its low grumbled voice.
He paused for a moment, staring out at the cluster of dying trees all twisting together in a woodsy clump, before continuing on his way, deciding to ignore the jeering body of anger behind him.
“Hey!” it barked out into the cold, heating his head with the stressful tension it shot at him. He froze.
“I wouldn’t walk away from me if I were you, Jarrod.” He heard the metal tab of the revolver click into position. The eager way it all snapped into place, in such an efficient fashion, almost made his mind dissemble into its hard individual mechanisms.
Any second now, he thought.
The gun spit out the bullet, firing it out into the world to slice the tension into millions of sprinkled fragments, each individually livid as components.
And it was all triggered from him. Charlie’s nimble fingers.
***
The sky purred its deep luring growl, threatening to explode in any moment and to burst out into utter carnage in the skies.
Wind ran across our lawn, kicking up the leaves on the ground, having them whip about in the air. Dark clouds coated the sky, thickening with each second, forming into a massive lump of darkness looming above the world, like a smoky admonition in its dwelling.
“Pass me that yard bag, would you?” Doug said, motioning to the bag at my feet. I handed it to him, and assisted in shoving the damp crumpled leaves in his pile into the bag.
The wind blew my hair into my face, and I rubbed it back with the back of my hand.
“There are some more leafs over there, the wind picked them up,” I said, pointing farther up the lawn. They reminded me of strips of soggy flesh.
Doug finished packing up the bag with the leaves, looked to where I was gesturing, and said, “Don’t think that really matters, doesn’t have to look perfect. I don’t understand why they had to be raked at all; with snow arriving soon.” He cleared his throat, and turned back to wrestling the last of the leaves packed into the bag.
I nodded, and picked up the two rakes lying on the grass, hulling them over my shoulders, and then followed Doug. He had awkwardly picked up the yard bag, and was carrying it to the side of the house over to the shabby old shed. The wood was slowly rotting, and the window was boarded up.
Strands of hair wouldn’t leave my face alone, and continued to tickle me as I walked. I tried not to hurt myself while doing so, for the rakes were rather bulky, and I was rather clumsy. I simply took one step at a time, minding my footing.
Doug plopped the bag down, and grunted. He then motioned me to hand him the rakes, which I did, and he walked them over to the tiny shed right at the back of the house. I hesitantly followed, and tried to peer inside the peculiar hobbit sized building, for it was very new to me. What the scruffy grey walls of the shed concealed, however, was nothing out of the ordinary, simply lawn mowers, and other lawn equipment, along with assorted tools and such.
When he emerged from the shed, he looked at me with an emotionless face. His eyes seemed to look past me, and he turned around to lock up the door with his still silent manor. After completing the task, he stepped back and headed up to the back porch, calling me to follow him for dinner.
Thankful to be finished with the yard work, and out of the unpleasant rain threatening to poke a hole in the clouds to pour from, I followed the old brawny man back to the house, where the sneaky, playful wind couldn’t follow.
In the house, it felt exactly how I always imagined a gingerbread house to be like. The kitchen was warm to the point where it was almost luxurious, and the lights gleamed a heavenly hue of blissful glow, and a sweet, deep scent of ginger drifted in the air. I was immediately uplifted and brought into the accepting world outside of the angry thundering sky that went on and on and on for an eternity of on.
Claire hustled over to us with a bright smile on her face as soon as our feet slipped out of our boots. “Thank goodness,” said she. “Good work guys! I thought I’d treat you for doing that for me, so I made ginger cookies!” she squealed, giving me a tight squeeze and Doug a kiss on his thick head.
It appeared to me that Claire was overly exhausted or perhaps trying extra hard to tie us together again as a family. It was because of me. I was always questioning something.
Why couldn’t it be enough for me? Why couldn’t I just accept it like Claire has, to keep her poor heart at rest? Why couldn’t I let myself be tied down to something?
I wrapped my arms around Claire one more time and inhaled her ginger scent, before assisting Doug set the table. I caught her oddly staring at me because of it, which made a part of my heart shrivel in guilt.
I looked at Doug, whom was wrapped up in his kind, and in the task set ahead of him, and realized that working with that man, raking up the leaves and cleaning out the garden for winter, was an interesting experience for me. it was almost like having a normal day.
“Do you have any homework tonight dear?” Claire asked while scooping rice and vegetables onto the plates.
I thought for a moment, then answered, “There’s still that paper I intended to finish the other day, but that got interrupted. Then it’s just studying.”
Claire nodded, and passed me a plate. The hot steam radiated up into my face and I quickly set it down.
Within a few minuets, the three of us sat at the table in silence, with out forks scraping across our plates, producing the only sound other than the blistering wind outside. I scooped each forkful of rice into my mouth without thinking much of anything, just chewing the bland mushy rice.
Claire quickly broke the silence.
“So guys. You all agree with the new cat idea, right?” she wiped her mouth with a napkin, and placed her delicate pale hands on the table in an orderly fashion.
Doug grunted, and pointed at her with his utensil, waiting to clear his mouth. He gulped, and said, “Hey. We don’t need a cat in this house; it’ll only bring more stress and stuff. They’re useless things.”
He went back to cutting his meat with his knife rather forcefully.
Claire shook her head attentively. “This is a beautiful cat, my love, and I'm afraid that I have already talked to the lady about it. Snowball will be coming home to us tomorrow,” said she, carefully observing Doug’s face for any trace or flicker of emotion.
Doug’s face, however, was as still as a newly born stone. He shrugged and sighed. “Well, there you go. Looks like we’re getting a cat. I don’t see why you asked me though, wouldn’t listen to me anyways.”
Claire’s eyes flickered, shining beneath the humming kitchen lights. She looked somewhat hurt that her husband wasn’t fully onboard with her beloved notion of having a cat roam the house, but nodded and kept to herself for the rest of the meal.
I figured that cats were like spirits, slipping in and out of reality while stalking the house in its slyness. Perhaps they too were curious creatures of wonder, but unlike me, they knew that thinking of it more so could be fatal.
As I cleared my plate, and disappeared into the shadows of the living room, I ignored the lessons of the cat. All the while thinking of Samuel’s proposed theory. Lincoln. He was basically the theory.
To me, he was like a runner in the night. A mysterious, undiscovered species, always hiding away from civilization, living away from undesirable ideas, and things incomprehensible to him.
To the untrained eye, the lifestyle could appear quite laidback and peaceful, the ultimate thing to strive for.
I knew better, despite the temptations.
“Sea?” Claire called, concernedly striding up to me from the kitchen.
I looked up at her and the beauty in her tiny, worried smile. Her casual blue dress rustled and swished around her as she moved. The light from the kitchen behind her illuminated her light hair and creamy skin, had bestowed the image of a silhouette on her. She looked like the angel she was in her heart.
“Love? Do you want some cookies?”
I smiled at her, and nodded, even though I was never one to have a sweet tooth. “Thank you grandma.”
She didn’t move, but instead watched me with her eyes sputtering with questions. She stepped towards me, gazing down at where I sat in the couch. Her stormy quartz coloured, greyish hued eyes poured into mine. Her delicate face fell stern, and said to me, “That social worker, what did he say to you?”
I looked away, searching my mind for anything to say. I simply stared at the table and shook my head. “I don’t know. Nothing really. We just talked about dad. He’s also a detective, so, you know. He’s been looking into that.”
A bitterly empathetic smiled brushed upon her face, and she stroked her soft hand across my cold face. I didn’t turn my head to see the tears springing to her eyes. “Does he know how he disappeared?”
I shook my head, feeling hapless. I was reminded of a feeble tent, hardly clinging on in a whirly wind.
“He’s gone, isn’t he?” she asked quietly.
Too many questions, I thought. Too many that I couldn’t answer.
“He doesn’t know for sure. But, it could go either way.”
She sighed, looking away at the wall with me. we stared at the empty beige space, as if waiting for it to morph into something else. She placed her hand on my knee.
“You know, I hate saying things like this. Especially this, but I don’t think we’ll ever see him again. He was an origin of species, one that needed to be looking for something.”
So was I. so was Lincoln, so was he. We were all mad, because we couldn’t stop looking.
“Okay. Okay,” I started slowly. “I don’t know. I'm sorry…”
“Love, I'm sorry. And, take your time. I see that you’re struggling, so just slow down. You don’t have to be sorry for who you are. Doug talked to me about it, said that you are so similar to your father in the sense that you could never let something hurt you without understanding it. Except, you are braver, for once you start to understand, you stay persistent and never run away. I suppose I respect you for that,” Claire said, and finally climbed up to her feet.
She stretched, evidently not wanting to partake in the conversation much longer. She wished to make it float to different topics. She wished to make our small conversations soar.
“Come to the kitchen, dear. Give yourself a break.”
I nodded, and rose to my feet as well, baffled that she understood. I was terrified that her seeing my involvement pursue even farther into the mind boggling situation didn’t make her lock me up for good, but instead, she accepted. Again, it was so foreign to me, to be respected and understood. I wondered if I could have known these feelings my whole life if things could have been different.
When morning prodded my eyes awake, I took my time with rising from my bed. The comfort of sleep lured me deep into a semi conscious state, half drifting in the depths of my mind, and half busy being aware of the stirrings among the house.
Eventually, my awareness overpowered my fatigue, which was beginning to wear off. I threw the blankets off of me and staggered out of my room, feeling my weight on my feet so suddenly made me feel a little awkward as I bumped into a wall.
“Sea!” I heard Claire call from the front of the kitchen.
“Sorry I got up late,” I mumbled. “I don’t have much to do this morning anyways. I won’t be late.”
“Not that. Although you do have to get a move on. But here, come look!”
She looked up at me with a proud, excited grin, and motioned me to kneel on the floor next to her. Hesitantly, I did so, and ducked my head to see what she was so energized about.
In her arms, there was a grey plastic case. I watched it suspiciously.
She opened the door to the case, revealing a podgy, furry ball of angry fluff. The angry fluff ball turned around, producing eyes which glowed an intoxicatingly eerie green glow like emeralds, and then buried them in the fur. It let out a slow, disappointed grumble.
“It’s the cat! Her name is Snowball, isn’t she lovely?” Claire exclaimed, waiting for my response.
I nodded. “Yeah, she’s really cute,” I replied, hoping I matched her enthusiasm.
Claire reached her arms into the cat case, pulling the cat from its dwelling. The grumpy black cat scraped its claws against the case, trying to escape her grasp. Claire held it in her arms, trying to soothe it by petting its standing up fur.
“She’s just a little scared Sea, don’t look like that. Isn’t that right my little sweetie?” she defended the cat, and then used a high squeaky voice I never heard her use before to talk to the cat.
As I approached, I carefully reached my hand out to give the cat a pat on its back, and wondered whether or not my father liked cats.
Something told me that he was more of a dog person.
In the moment when I placed my dry hand on the silky fur, I wondered if something wasn’t quite right. I couldn’t determine it. Somewhere out in the vastness of the universe, I could feel one of the invisible threads secretly connecting all of the population being clipped from my control.
I don’t know why, but I just knew that I lost another tie.