The Last Thing to Burn by Will Dean

Author:Will Dean
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atria/Emily Bestler Books
Published: 2021-04-20T00:00:00+00:00

16

He’s almost done with the harvest now. I’ve been watching from the front door as grains and vegetables are trucked away, him standing at the locked halfway gate in his overalls, positioned between me and the haulage trucks, between us and the haulage truck drivers.

I’m keeping the Rayburn fire going around the clock. Huong gets cold in the night if she drifts from me and, I’m sorry to say, the pills I’m still taking make me sleep so deeply that sometimes I’m not as physically close to her as I’d like to be when I wake up. One-third of a pill was never going to be enough to get me through each day. My nipples are cracked and the left one’s bleeding. But it’s my ankle. That’s why I can’t come off the pills. Can’t even reduce the dosage. The damp, the October fenland damp creeps into the joints, what’s left of them, and makes them swell and stiffen and throb. But it’s also her. Downstairs. That ongoing horror. Me not doing anything about it, not being able to think up an ingenious plan to help her, to help Cynth. I end up focusing more on Huong, on her needs from minute to minute so I can avoid thinking what it must be like down there in the stinking half-cellar.

Cynth.

Cynthia.

I must think of her name. If I forget her name then I won’t be able to forgive myself. I must offer her that shred of dignity. She still has identity down there in the dark hole beneath this forgotten place. She’s still alive. She is not the woman locked in the half-cellar. She is Cynth.

I’ve never been down there in my seven years on Fen Farm. It’s a rule. But I’ve looked down. When the sun’s low by the front door, at the end of a long summer’s day, it lights up the hole. I’ve only peeked down there twice, in the early days, the lucid days, when I had two working ankles, when the bolts were loose, and it was always dark and shockingly cool, and it smelled of spores and decay and wet cardboard and rot.

I’m feeding Huong upstairs and she’s starting to bite. She has no teeth but I think I can feel something deep in her gum, some hardening. I pledge to look after her teeth when they come and if ever she needs any professional dental care I will somehow get that for her.

Cynth’s down in the half-cellar. If she’s sobbing I can’t hear it from up here and that’s why I’m not in the main room much these days aside from making Lenn his lunch and his tea and keeping the Rayburn fire going. Lenn’s eased up on my chores and it’s helping my leg a little, even with this damp air.

Cynth is tall.

That’s what I keep thinking about: her height. I’m tall myself but she’s taller and that half-cellar is as high as an armpit, that’s what Lenn told me. You have to bow or crouch or kneel down there, there’s nowhere to stand up straight, not even close.

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