Dark Screams, Volume 5 by Brian James Freeman

Author:Brian James Freeman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2015-10-05T16:00:00+00:00

The Land of Sunshine

Kealan Patrick Burke

The cracks in his marriage had started to appear ever since the affair, and nothing they had tried in the years since had fully shored up the crevasse. It didn’t help that his wife couldn’t speak, for though it had never bothered him before, her muteness now more than ever seemed like an infirmity destined to compound the inevitability of their dissolution. He had never heard her voice, and so did not have the right to mourn its absence. She had ceased speaking due to a trauma that long preceded their union. But still, it frustrated him. She could hear him perfectly, of course. This he knew. But without the benefit of inflection, her silent nods or shakes of her head, or the slight gestures she made with her hands, could be read only one way, or no way at all, and he needed the kind of closure the quiet seldom gave. She had never learned to sign, and he supposed this was a good thing. If her hands were not raised, he didn’t have to see the pale scars that bisected her wrists, and thus be reminded of how he had failed her.

To aggravate the situation, as they moved like ghosts through the gloaming of their lives together, he also began to develop the nagging sensation that something other than love had gone missing, something other than his loyalty had gone astray. It manifested itself as a vague certainty, a low voice in another room, the persistent conviction that someone had stolen into the house of their marriage and shifted things around just the tiniest little bit, just enough to create a subliminal feeling of violation, of something not quite amiss, but awry.

When he expressed this concern, his wife regarded him as she often did these days, with mute attentiveness draped like a dust cloth over the dark hunkering shapes of pity and resentment. If she felt the same absence of anything but mutual love, it was not evident on her face, but then nothing was.

It was at night, as he lay on his back in a bed that like so many things had seen better days, his back sunken into the valley in the old mattress, that it became clear what he must do. He must find and locate that missing thing, that wrong thing, and return it from whence it came, before he lost all that was left to lose.

After creeping wraithlike out of their bedroom, which seemed cavernous in the dark—a direct contrast to the lives shrinking within its suspiciously wavering confines—he decided to start at Moriarty’s, a place he had frequented enough times that surely the mahogany on his favored corner of the bar must still bear the scuffs of his elbows.

Dressed in a once-black threadbare overcoat and porkpie hat, he shuddered out into the cold and navigated the narrow, dark streets with the same chaotic certainty as a marble through a tilted maze. Here in this forgotten neighborhood, the streetlights had died in time with the idea of prosperity and reclamation.

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