Finding the Sky by A.M. Burns

Author:A.M. Burns [Burns, A.M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: ya
ISBN: 978-1-63476-338-7
Publisher: Dreamspinner Press
Published: 2016-02-10T16:00:00+00:00

15

THE PREVIOUS night, the distant firecrackers yanked Dillon out of a restless sleep. They sounded too much like gunfire. He’d lain awake for hours, but they’d never come closer to Uncle Bryan’s house and eventually he returned to dreams where his mother was still alive and telling him that her death had all just been a bad dream because he thought he might be gay.

There was no moonlight shining through the curtains, but the light from the fireworks down near the main road cast momentary bursts of brightness and color. It reminded Dillon that it was the Fourth of July. Nearly two weeks since his mother died.

He lay there playing with his knife. The blade gave him a strange feeling of security. Even out in Kerens, he didn’t really feel safe. The Shanks took Mom. I know they did, even if the police can’t find any real evidence to tie them to the shooting. At least with my knife, if they show up, I have a little bit of a chance to do some damage before they kill me.

An overly loud explosion caused him to jump and his finger slipped along the knife’s sharp edge. The pain stung. For the first time in days, he felt something other than fear. He sucked on his finger and the coppery taste of blood filled his mouth. Shit, that’s deeper than I realized. Dropping the knife on his bed, he glanced around for something to stop the flow of blood. He knew there were some tissues somewhere in the boxes Uncle Bryan and Paul and Alex had brought in from the apartment, but he had no idea where they were.

He hurried to the bathroom with his finger still in his mouth.

Uncle Bryan was coming down the hall at the same time. “Something wrong?”

Dillon shook his head and closed the bathroom door behind him. He hadn’t felt much like talking since she passed. Yanking several pieces of toilet paper off the roll, he wrapped them around his finger and looked through the medicine cabinet for Band-Aids. He didn’t find any. The blood soaked through the tissue fairly quickly. After closing the lid, Dillon sat down on the toilet and pulled off more paper to wrap around his finger. He sat there for several minutes as the blood soaked through the new paper. This isn’t going to stop easily. Maybe Uncle Bryan has Band-Aids somewhere else.

As Dillon hurried into the living room, Uncle Bryan was just settling into his chair.

“Where are the Band-Aids?” Dillon asked, holding a third application of toilet paper around his finger.

“Band-Aids?” Uncle Bryan blinked at him. Then his gaze came to rest on Dillon’s hand applying pressure to his paper-wrapped finger. “Oh God. You cut yourself.” A frantic look colored Uncle Bryan’s features as he surged to his feet. “I think there’s some in the first-aid drawer in the kitchen.” He hurried Dillon to the kitchen. “What happened? How did you do this?”

“My knife slipped when the fireworks startled me.”

For the first time ever, Uncle Bryan looked at him with a suspicious glint in his eyes.

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