The Heart of the Thicket by Kennedy Sutton

Author:Kennedy Sutton [Sutton, Kennedy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Kennedy Sutton
Published: 2024-08-22T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

EMPTY HOUSES

I stand in the center of what feels like a very familiar space. It is the house that Henry built for me as if Fallow has plucked the memory clean out of my head and made it real. Before he did so, I wouldn’t have been able to imagine the place. It is like I’ve been on a trip just long enough to have forgotten the way home smells, and now rich soil, cedar wood, and coffee mingle together into something so familiar I never paid them any attention before now.

Like the house knows my needs, a pitcher of clean water rests on the table and I pour some into the cup resting beside it. Suspicion over the water battles with desperation until the sandpit of my parched throat can be denied no longer. The water is cool and fresh as it fills my mouth and glides down my burning throat. Even though I have poured glass after glass, the pitcher never runs low. What was a debate to begin drinking becomes a battle to stop as I worry my stomach will ache if I drink too much too fast. Thirst quenched at last, I can better focus on the details around me.

Even the furniture is the same. There are a few strange things about it, though. The pattern on the blankets is skewed. The handles on the pots that hang by the hearth are not the lengths or widths I remember, though they are in their places. The boards beneath my feet are of a different cut than those Henry created, but they are a near likeness.

It is like someone described my home to Fallow and he recreated it. It is a dream of a place, close enough to be convincing to a tired mind. I can almost picture my daughter here. She would be getting ready to peacefully sleep if she were not trapped in a walnut tree somewhere in the rift. Scanning the room, I try to imagine how her footsteps would sound on the floor or how her voice would bounce off the walls. It’s impossible. Even her name eludes me.

At least the place is familiar. It helps ease some of my frustration that I haven’t lost everything about myself yet. “Why does this place exist?”

Fallow’s body drops into nothing again, all the bits that made him up falling to the wood floor with a clatter of debris and dead insects. The single cricket hops away, vanishing beneath a cabinet. Fallow reappears in the hearth where embers bloom with light. Approaching, I put a log on the fire and he comes to life in the flames. In the shifting colors of red, orange, and black, he paints his face with light and shadow.

Glancing around myself again, I take in the details of the house and a profound sense of loss and hopelessness crests over the wall in my mind that I have been trying to build since arriving here. No matter how fast I stack bricks, the grim reality is always too strong a foe.

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