Dying for Dominoes by Jane Elzey

Author:Jane Elzey [Elzey, Jane]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781734642803
Publisher: Scorpius Carta Press
Published: 2020-04-07T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Sixteen

Rian felt the air kick up like it always did the moment before the sun set as if the earth needed to fill her sails to make the journey to the other side. From her dock, she watched the sun catch in the deep vee of the valley and then hang over the horizon like a brilliant red ship, the reflection in the water now turning copper-red.

She sat still until dusk took over and the whip-poor-wills took up their chant. The chimney swifts congregated over the old house ruins on the other side of the lake, whirling and fluttering their wings like bats in the evening air. Overhead, the birds hunted the sky for one last feast before disappearing into the remains of the crumbling chimney.

When dark closed in around her, she rose, reluctantly, and at the edge of the dock, she grabbed the shovel she had brought with her from the garden shed.

She had a task to do.

Jamming the shovel into the ground, she lifted out a spade of dirt, tipping it onto the mound piling up beside the hole. The miner’s lamp made a bull’s-eye of light on the surface of the dirt at her feet, casting beams into the woods beyond when she lifted her head. She leaned forward on the shovel handle, took a deep breath, and blew it out sharply. Just a little deeper, she thought and plowed the spade into the dirt again.

She dug near the little pet cemetery that rested under a sour cherry tree about halfway between her cabin and the dock. The path between the two veered off to a bench where she could sit and look at the lake in the shade and talk to a whole generation of dead dogs and cats, even a dumb old chicken that fell off a Tyson truck. She had contemplated a meal out of that chicken—waste not, want not—but she brought her home in the trunk of her car and let the hen peck for ticks in the yard until she met her mortal demise sometime later.

There hadn’t been a new hole dug for a pet death in quite some time, but last winter after a period of paranoia, she buried her coveted starter seeds. These were not just any seeds. These were the descendants from Bangladesh she had nearly risked her freedom to smuggle in. She flew over as part of a vacation tour with a group of Episcopalians, and while they were collecting trinkets at the local bazaar, she was buying seeds to start an undercover career in cannabis. Not just any cannabis, this Cannabis sativa seed was from a family who had been growing this particular strain for generations. She had made this connection in college, and their friendship held fast over the years even though there were many miles between them now.

The seed she brought back to her farm was perfect as it was, but with experimentation and her knowledge of botany, she created a hybrid strain for the North Arkansas climate that had become her signature crop.

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