Black Static #52 (May-June 2016) by 2016 May-Jun (epub)

Author:2016 May-Jun (epub)
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: TTA Press
Published: 2016-05-07T00:00:00+00:00

***

I wait for them to show for dinner, but they never come. So I remain downstairs at the table until long past midnight, a bottle of beer warming in my hand as I listen to the rain pelt the tin roof. Eventually a door creaks open overhead, followed by the groan of wood risers as a body gradually descends the stairs, its gait awkward with the provisional unsteadiness of the infirm.

“Dara?” I squint through the gloom at the figure, and she stills at the bottom of the stairs, her nightgown pale pink and hung lifeless over her narrow frame. She’s too tall to be Aunt Lydie, but she doesn’t move like my sister, not at all.

“What? Oh, yes,” she replies, my sister’s voice after all but spoken in a scratched-vinyl rasp. “I was just going to…” She points toward the kitchen with a spindly arm, skin pale blue in what little diffuse moonlight manages to filter inside the room. “May I?”

“Please.” I wonder why she’s asking permission, it’s her house as much as mine.

She shuffles over to the refrigerator and reaches inside for the water pitcher, the spout of which she brings directly to her lips. Dara drinks for an interminable length of time, until the pitcher is drained and returned empty to its shelf.

“Thirsty, huh?” I chuckle lamely.

“Yes,” she says, “thirsty,” and laughs in vague imitation. Her black hair shines in the dim light, but not her eyes, which are hooded and obscured as she turns toward the stairs.

“Hey.” I rise from my seat, which makes her stiffen, as if I were a wild animal she knows she can’t outrun. “Don’t you ever wonder why Mom never said anything about Aunt Lydie?”

“But she did, she did.” My sister slowly nods, and continues to do so. “She told me something once, about how you can’t ever stop what’s coming. That when it’s your time, you have to open yourself up to it and let it do its work. She said those exact words.”

“And you think she was talking about Aunt Lydie?”

“Of course, silly,” she says and gives another little chuckle, her head still nodding. “What else would she be talking about?”

“Dara…” I step closer and she steps back, but now I see just how skinny she is, her nightgown soaked through and clinging to her chest like a false skin. “You look like you’ve been having night sweats. Are you feeling okay?”

“Yes. Oh yes.” She smiles, her teeth gray in the moonlight. “Oh yes.”

Her wet eyes swim with glaze before she turns away again and heads up the stairs, the sound of bare feet padding against wood steadily diminishing until the only sound is the beating of the rain.

I ease the screen door closed and step onto the porch, breathe in the steaming wet smells of late summer as it continues to pour, the rain a thick curtain off the eaves and overflowing gutters just this side of the vast darkness beyond the house. A snap and a flare of light and I start: Aunt Lydie, seated beside me in one of the two Adirondack chairs.

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