Are You Afraid of the Dark?. Seth Adams C.

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СКАЧАТЬ the most even, unobstructed path, avoiding creek beds, rocky areas, and fallen trees.

      The tree house was about a football field’s distance from home, where the woods bordered his family’s property. He’d helped his dad build it a few years ago. Reggie still thought of the summer days cutting and measuring the wood boards; nailing the ladder to the trunk of the oak; passing supplies up and down. The sun bright and high and beating down on them. Pepsis and sandwiches in the shade; man and boy shirtless and smiling. Watching the becoming of the thing above them; the floor and the walls and then the roof. The pounding of the hammers and the buzz of the saws like a music of sorts, hypnotic and calming.

      Reggie pulled the sled beside the oak. The tree house above put them in deeper shadow than natural from the early evening. The man seemed almost to disappear dimensionally, only his shoes sticking out from the shadow, so that Reggie had to kneel to see him more clearly.

      ‘I’ll be back later,’ Reggie whispered, though it would take a full shout for his mom to hear him at this distance.

      He recalled the man’s words before he’d passed out again.

      It’ll need … stitches, he’d muttered, staring from the bloody, crumpled bullet in his left hand, to the puckered wound in his stomach, dribbling blood like a lazy volcano.

      There was nothing to be done about that just now, Reggie thought.

      It was dinnertime and his mom was waiting.

      5.

      His hands in his jeans pockets when he approached the porch, his mom awaited him under the bulb of the porch light, like an archangel haloed by heavenly light ready to pronounce judgment. Reggie shrugged as if it all was no big deal, saying it all at once, their routine – I’m not a kid, I’m almost fifteen, don’t treat me like a baby, I can stay out late – without a word.

      ‘Wash up,’ she said, too tired to fight, saving him the excuse he’d been planning to get to the bathroom to wash his hands before she saw them. She closed the front door behind him as he turned down the hall.

      Locking the door, he turned on the faucet and grabbed the bar of soap on the sink. Scrubbing, he watched the pink swirl away down the drain. The whirlpool effect made him think of the ocean, a sinking freighter, and sailors being sucked down into the depths.

      Reggie washed the soap clean as well. Grabbed some toilet paper from the roll and scrubbed down the doorknob where he’d left a scarlet smear. He peed and flushed the bloodied tissue away with his piss.

      He looked briefly in the mirror. Saw how normal he looked. Not as if he’d just helped dig a bullet out of a man.

      ***

      His food rolled around his plate aimlessly, like wanderers in a vast wasteland. Then he noticed his mom watching him and he ate to avoid suspicion. Silverware tinkled for a time against china before his mom tried conversation.

      ‘You were gone awhile today,’ she said, speaking around a mouthful of roast.

      Reggie shrugged.

      ‘I was just walking in the woods.’

      Her sharp, short intake of breath was just audible in the space between them.

      ‘You have to be careful out there, Reggie,’ she said. ‘There’s coyotes, bobcats, mountain lions. Not to mention squatters.’

      When he didn’t respond, she continued.

      ‘You’re gone longer and longer,’ she said, staring at him across the table. Fellow travellers separated by a looming gulf.

      He didn’t know what to say and so said nothing.

      ‘I know it’s summer,’ she said, ‘but it’d be nice to see you around more.’

      She smiled to show her diplomacy and earnestness.

      ‘Maybe we could go see a movie,’ she said. ‘Wasn’t there a comic book movie you wanted to see? Maybe we could have lunch, make a day of it, like we used to.’

      ‘Like we used to’ meant when his dad was still around. It meant lots of things, but mostly it meant when things were still good. When things still made sense. When they still knew how to be a family.

      She waited for him, but he had nothing to say. There was nothing worth saying.

      He stared at his plate as if the answers were there. But there was only meat and potatoes, so he crammed these in his mouth to avoid answering. Still, she wanted something; he knew this would continue unless he gave her some acknowledgement, so he nodded vaguely, noncommittally.

      In his peripheral, he saw her turn her attention back to her dinner. This submission saddened him in some indefinable way.

      They ate in silence and went their separate ways.

      ***

      Reggie lay in his dark room waiting for his mom to fall asleep.

      With the door ajar an inch or so, he could see the occasional flash of the television from below like the stroboscopic lights of a landing aircraft. He would also be able to hear the buzz saw sounds of her snores, and know when it was safe for him to get up.

      In the meantime, he was in the dark with his thoughts.

      Sometimes the darkness frightened him. Other times the blackness was calming – or numbing – like a void. A neutral place where he felt nothing.

      Occasionally, as now, the dark was a place in-between, where his mind drifted to things unseemly in the light of day.

      Arms behind his head, stretched out on the mattress, at first his lazy thoughts threatened to invite sleep. But then, as so often happened, they converged on the wake in the funeral home not so long ago. He didn’t want them to, tried futilely to steer his mind in another direction, yet it betrayed him.

      The place had a lot of curtains, he remembered thinking. The coffin was open at the front of the room. He had to walk down an aisle of mostly empty chairs to get to it. His mom sat off to one side in a black dress like a phantom, crying.

      With each deliberate step the coffin drew teasingly nearer.

      Until he could see over the rim of it and what was there wasn’t his dad but a facsimile of the man. Waxen and stiff and immobile. A mannequin or life-sized doll and not his father at all.

      He stared at it for a time until his mom stopped crying and one of the employees there came up to him and led him gently away. But he glanced back, keeping the thing in the casket in his line of sight for as long as possible.

      Then the coffin was shut and that was it.

      ***

      When the deep, droning hum of his mom’s snores started, Reggie rolled out of bed and slipped his shoes back on. He hadn’t changed out of his clothes and his mom hadn’t checked in on him, so there was a minimum of rustle and noise before he was ready and moving downstairs.

      He СКАЧАТЬ