Aletheia: A Supernatural Thriller by J.S. Breukelaar

Author:J.S. Breukelaar [Breukelaar, J.S.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, QuarkXPress, epub
Publisher: Crystal Lake Publishing
Published: 2017-03-23T18:30:00+00:00

25. BALLS

Thettie’s concentric circles paced around Lee’s studio get smaller and smaller, but never small enough to get her to the heart. Her bare feet crush the tiny markers of the pet cemetery. She trips on a home-made cross and it catches in the hem of her nightgown. Bones of a lab rat rattle in a shoe box. She cradles the skeleton in her mud-streaked hands, strokes the strange boney studs growing on its skull, rocks it back and forth in her arms. ‘Here kitty,’ she weeps. ‘Here kitty-kitty.’

She wants to get to the studio. She needs to get back to that warm place, huddled on the hill in the dark, the reflections of the lake on its windows. Something or someone is stopping her. But she can see the island now, of course, from the headland. It’s bathed in moonlight, so close she can almost touch it. She reaches out to Frankie, her shadow magnified across the lake.

‘Frankie, it’s me. Thettie. Come home.’

***

‘All my life, I’ve felt like everything I am is just what other people have put in me or taken out. I can’t see myself without looking through them.’

‘I see you,’ Lee said. They are still in the Winnebago, the night that keeps happening.

‘What do you see? There I go again, see?’

Thettie laughed. That such a fine man could fill her with an alien joy. So much waiting in his eyes.

‘So, it doesn’t matter what I see,’ he said. ‘What do you see? In yourself?’

He was getting hard again, which also made her laugh. He hadn’t had a proper lay in a coons age. He made her feel nineteen again and in a good way—it had been so long since sex had been funny-haha and not funny-strange. He laughed back. The trailer was chilly, but the bed was warm. The scratched skylight blurred and distorted the stars—but she could see Libra on the rise. Her and this fine man bubbled in the grimy dome of night and forever coupled in its floating fragile truths.

‘Tell me,’ he said a little thickly. ‘What’s alone inside you?’

‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘Everything.’

‘Before you had Archy and Grif?’ he said, passing her the beer, and watching her face. ‘Before you got all messed up in this?’

‘You mean Doc?’

‘Yes. And before that too. Before your sons.’

‘I don’t know.’ She got that he was asking her, but also asking himself. ‘I don’t know if I want to remember that person. I was a piece of work, I guess. Ran wild. Me and my cousin Cassie used to give hand jobs up at the Motel 6 at the highway, where she worked. Salesmen, farm boys, professors from the college. Then we had a scare, some jerks spiked our drinks at a party in one of the rooms, and I stopped. Me and Cassie didn’t see so much of each other after that. And then she went to LA. For a while I went even wilder, then I went straight more or less.’

Lee said. ‘Did you miss her?’

‘I couldn’t forgive her for leaving me.

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