Far Cry: Absolution by Urban Waite

Author:Urban Waite
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Titan Books
Published: 2018-05-17T04:00:00+00:00

There was a showmanship to this. A resonance that was somewhere between tent revival and southern Baptist snake handling, and Mary May was trying to understand it all. She was trying to make sense of this being she saw before her, John or her father, and she could not distinguish between the two. She listened to the rise and fall of his voice, and she wondered about a thing like the afterlife and whether a soul could cross back in time of need, and what that soul in all its infinite knowledge of life after death would see in her—whether she would be declared saint or demon, burned or saved.

He looked her over. He looked up and away from her to where the skins hung pinned against the wall. And in her mind the skins were moving and there was the sound of them rustling on the wall like snakeskin, spent already from the body, artifacts that showed the secession from one state of being to the next.

She didn’t believe it. She didn’t believe it was her father. There was no coming back from death. He was gone. He was gone from here and this could not be him.

John brought his eyes back to her. The gaze he cast upon her was almost predatory, like a cougar looking out of the darkness at its prey. The realization of where she was and who she was with and the danger she was in suddenly came rushing back to her. She tried to pull away, but his hand held hers firm in his. And when she looked down it was not John’s hands she saw but her father’s once again. Aged and callused. Loved. Hands she could not hate. Hands she wanted to hold to, as if holding to them would prevent him from ever leaving her again.

And when she looked again he was caressing that hand of hers like a father might the broken hand of one of his children. “Together,” he said, his voice now tender. “Your hands in mine, in the greater fold of this family there is only warmth, only understanding, only the true gift of potential we see for you. But without that gift you are alone.”

He held her fingers for only a beat longer before he dropped them. What he said to her was true, she felt the cold of the room. She felt the decay in the air, not just skin, but dust, and loss, and solitude.

“Do you understand?” he asked. “Do you understand your sin, and the way it stands before you, blocking you from the gates of heaven?” He stood now in the light, his skin illuminated from above, her father. His hair seemed almost gossamer. She looked around now, as if coming out of some dream into the waking world, knowing the feel of danger, but not seeing it. She could see only her father and she wanted very much to go to him and to hold him and to never let

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