Hungry Ghosts by Kevin Jared Hosein

Author:Kevin Jared Hosein [Hosein, Kevin Jared]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2022-10-28T00:00:00+00:00

17

A Tiny Leaf Above Us

Wednesday morning, already past 4 a.m. Are they going to kill Dalton tonight? Marlee wondered. Are they coming to kill me tonight? She left the music on, as she had the past few nights. Glenn Miller’s ‘In the Mood’. She thought it best to stay beside her bedroom window and wise to stay sober this time. On this important night, it was easier to rationalise her decisions, not that she had ever believed any of them to be diabolical. She saw it as putting a trapped animal out of its misery. What was in her and Dalton’s future but a series of ritualised assaults?

Dalton Changoor, the man whose trunk was brocaded with bloody scars. Looking like Prometheus, caught stealing fire from the gods. Picked apart. Picked raw, like he’d been put up for the crows. Perhaps adjured from his mother – God damn her painted soul. Dalton, a wretched pile of secrets. Maybe generations of secrets. He built a fortress to contain them all, filled it with pretty shades and textures. Marlee among them, as well as the heir he never had. Even with all of this, it was never enough. He didn’t have everything he wanted, nor did he want everything he actually had. Always eating yet always famished.

In the end, perhaps what he needed was what every troubled man craves. Rest. Repose. She was giving it to him. Gifting it. It was a gift to herself as well. He would become free of his own plan. And she would too. Ground up by his own schemes. No more suffering or sorrow. Dreamless sleep now.

From the window, Marlee had an obscured view of the grounds and a clearer one of the homestead. Hans was also within eyeshot, shifting his weight on a stool, a slight hunch, getting up every once in a while to inspect noises coming from the dark zones around him. He reminded her of those Hollywood cowboys standing tall in the picture shows. Jawlines sharp as buffalypso horn. Voices lowered into a gritty drawl. Hummingbird hands fanning over gunmetal hammers. Eyes that gleamed with the sternness of judges. Yes, those cowboys were judges. Harbingers of judgement and justice, stamping their feet and holding onto their hats as doom came riding in.

She felt safe with him.

She went downstairs to change the record. Shuffled through the pile of vinyls like it was a deck of cards and ultimately decided on ‘We’ll Meet AGain’. She put the record on, closed her eyes and let Vera Lynn’s voice rinse the air. In the lyrics lay the dusty remainders of her former self, shards of the past that seemed so real yet so unreal, like images captured on an old ambrotype. She as a little girl in her seaside village, using warm soot from lamps to paint moustaches and sideburns on her face. Pretending to be a sailor who cared about nothing but the seven seas. Nobody in this damned county could imagine her in that manner. That little girl was gone.

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