Kealan Burke - Kin

But it was clear now that she needed no one. He suspected if he hadn’t agreed to take her to Elkwood with him, she’d have hurt him and taken the truck herself.

Well, you got her here , he told himself. Nothin’ to stop you drivin’ away now. She looks well enough to fight if she runs into trouble.

But that wasn’t true, and though he was angry, he made no move toward the keys, just slumped over the wheel, his hands resting atop it, eyes watching the road for lights or any sign that trouble was bearing down on them.

The simple elemental fact of it was that no matter how cold or dismissive she was, she was all he had left in the world, and he still loved her. Had to. If he gave up on her, the loneliness would crush him.

The cotton whispered against Claire’s legs, the thorny twigs on which they seemed merely suspended scratching the material of her jeans as she stood motionless, surveying the field for a glimpse of what she knew was there. When it failed to resolve itself from the dark, she began to walk, the flashlight in hand but not yet switched on. For now, she preferred to rely on her memories of this place to lead her. The ground was uneven beneath the cotton, making traversing it treacherous, and the last thing she needed was to fall and twist an ankle, so she carefully made her way along them. A bird rose from the field and took off, flying low. Night creatures scurried away from the unwelcome intrusion of her feet.

At last, she stopped, out of breath from the exertion, damp with sweat despite the chill. It had been a long time since she had pushed herself, or in truth, tried exercise of any kind, and it proved only how out of shape and unhealthy she was. But that didn’t matter. She looked ahead and up, at the spindly branches of a tree so large it blocked out the stars, and turned on the flashlight.

A twisted, bone white trunk rose before her, its surface gnarled and ancient and rotten in places where industrious insects had attended to it. Some of the roots were above ground, tangled together in a chaotic jumble that seemed to Claire to symbolize confusion and anguish, their inability to find the earth from which they wished to draw nourishment, prevented from doing so by nothing more sinister than their own brethren.

She raised the flashlight, aimed the beam upward.

Shadows fled. An explosion of limbs radiated out from the tapering trunk, the branches themselves seemingly heavy enough to force the tree to bend toward her, like a Victorian woman bowing beneath her umbrella, or a jellyfish pushing upward, the weight of the sea forcing its tentacles down and around itself.

Tentatively, she reached out to touch the trunk, almost expecting to feel an electrical charge or a rush of memory as she did so. But when her fingers brushed the dried wood, she felt nothing. Whatever the tree had represented on the day she had stood bloodied and bruised staring at it, eluded her now.

With a sigh, she reached into the pocket of her jeans and retrieved a small penknife, then slowly, painfully got down on her knees and dug the point of the blade into the bark. It sounded hollow, as if she were carving into the last layer of its protective skin before the elements and the insects ground it to dust, erasing it from existence forever.

In the trunk, she etched out:

And underneath:

Then she stood and studied her dead friends’ initials, each one filled with shadow thicker than oil as the breeze made the branches tremble, the wood creaking as the tree swayed.

She turned her back on it, felt as hollow as the tree and wished she could recall why it had meant so much to her. For one fleeting moment it had seemed like the only thing in the world to her, a savior.

I was out of my mind , she thought. In shock .

The breeze grew stronger.

She stopped.

All around her flecks of cotton rose from the field like fireflies, caught in the beam of her flashlight as it carved a channel in the dark. Her hair fluttered around her face, her senses filled with the smell of earth and smoke, and without knowing why, she smiled as the million specks of cotton rose ever upward like souls released to the Heavens to join the stars. It was over in a moment, and to anyone else, it might have seemed a perfectly ordinary thing, something visible on any day of the week.

But to Claire, the significance she’d sought from the tree was there in the cotton, and with it, came the answer to the riddle of what she’d thought she’d seen in the field that day.

There is something else , she thought. Something afterward. Life ends and something follows . In all her years, she had never been asked about her faith, nor had her family ever assumed a denomination. If forced, however, they would have claimed agnosticism as the closest representation. But with that lack of faith came a great fear of death. Without proof of an afterlife, they were intimately aware of their mortality and the limitations of it. The passing of her father and what Claire had endured here eleven weeks ago only reinforced that fear. Nothing follows , they’d thought. You die and you turn to dust .

Standing naked and wounded on the road outside this field, she had known she was going to die. Not of old age, not of some unforeseen event waiting to claim her in a few decades time, but right there and then, bleed to death from wounds inflicted on her by maniacs. The terror had been as potent as the pain and she had looked to the tree, looked to anything that could, to her shocked mind, be compared to a figure of salvation. And she had seen her mother. The tree had held out its arms, beckoning to her, promising a reprieve from the pain in its maternal embrace, and she had tried, wept as the barbed-wire kept her at bay like the restrictions imposed on her by her own lack of faith.

She began to walk. There is something afterward , she repeated in her head. Katy, Daniel and Stu are somewhere else, at peace . It was not yet a conviction, and barring proof of some kind beyond what she had seen here tonight, she doubted she would ever fully believe it. But it was a start, a step forward from pessimism. All that remained was for her to find the same succor.

“What the hell did you do?” Stella asked her husband, daubing the cuts around his broken nose with antiseptic that made him feel as if she were applying it with a heated needle.

“Already told you,” McKindrey said. “I weren’t catchin’ nothin’ down at the creek so I headed up to the far side where the river’s wider. Tried to climb up that steep edge where those Pike boys got themselves drowned few summer’s back, and I fell. Did a real job on my foot.”

“How come you ain’t scratched no place else? That place is full of thorn bushes and stickers.”

McKindrey shook his head, irritated. Not only was Stella being a pain in the ass with her questions, but she was also blocking his view of the TV, so he couldn’t even have that as a distraction. She had bandaged up his foot so heavily he couldn’t fit his boot over it, so instead he’d had her wrap strips of an old shirt around it. It would do for a while and at least he wouldn’t have to be stuck in the house listening to her for God knows how long. He took a long draw of whiskey, felt it numb him and fill his nose with fumes that took the edge off the pain. He was mad as hell, but had reined it in for now. Wouldn’t do to be trying to explain to Stella why he was filled with murderous rage over his own stupidity.

“Oh, damn it to hell anyway,” Stella said now and backed away from him as if afraid he was going to hit her.