Alex Bledsoe - The Hum and the Shiver

Bronwyn laughed. “Good Lord, no. Dwayne already tore up the yard when I sent him packing; Daddy would have a fit if somebody else drove all over it.”

“Well… I’ll check in with you tomorrow.”

Bronwyn did not look back. “Sure. Thanks for the ride, Bliss.”

As Bliss drove away, Bronwyn opened the gate enough to squeak through and slowly climbed the hill. By the time she reached the porch steps, she had to sit down and catch her breath. For a moment she watched things only a Tufa could see in the night, and smiled as they recognized her as well.

Why did she care about the First Daughters, anyway? She understood their purpose, but didn’t share their belief in its importance. So what if the “true Tufa way” died out? The Tufa themselves would remain, maybe diluted into the general population but still there, ready to awaken when the music was right and the night wind called them to ride.

She slid the dress up her thigh and ran her hand along her injured leg, feeling the little bumps of scars. They would fade with time, but she didn’t really mind them. She knew that if she wanted a man to find her attractive, he would.

She slowly opened the screen door, pausing just before it squeaked. She’d learned that trick as a preteen, and it had served her well all through high school. The inner door opened without a sound. She stood in the darkened living room and was about to move forward when something made her freeze.

She turned toward movement in the shadows off to her right. Something was on the couch, moving slowly, the fabric creaking as it did. Bronwyn stared, trying to resolve it into a shape she could recognize.

Then a head popped up, tossing black hair back from a face shiny with sweat and effort. A face she recognized as her own.

The face turned to her. It wasn’t her, of course; it was her mother, naked and astride her father. They moved together as silently as they could, since Aiden and Kell were asleep in the house. Apparently her father had not heard Bronwyn enter, because he continued to nuzzle Chloe’s breasts as his hands roamed over her skin.

Chloe’s eyelids fluttered, and she gasped. Bronwyn wanted to look away, but couldn’t. She watched her mother have an orgasm, silent except for a sharp exhalation, and then curl around Deacon like she was molding her limbs to him. She looked again at Bronwyn, and their eyes locked for a moment. I am alive, her mother’s defiant gaze seemed to say. See? I’m not dead by a damn sight yet.

Bronwyn ran into her room, the first time in months she’d moved that quickly. She fell halfway onto the bed and began sobbing, clenching her teeth against the sound. She didn’t want to wake either of her brothers, and she sure didn’t want her father to know she’d seen anything. My God, what were they thinking, carrying on like teenagers? They were both in their forties.

She crawled onto the bed and curled up clutching her Dollywood souvenir pillow. Everything she’d counted on was changing into something else. The First Daughters, until now mainly a ceremonial thing that meant nothing, actually expected something from her. Her parents, those solid, reliable figures she’d always counted on even as a wild-child teenager, were humping in the front room. Even Aiden was on the verge of turning from a boy into a young man, and Kell would soon have to decide if his song led him away from Cloud County or back to it. And then there was Craig the minister, and Terry-Joe, and Dwayne. There was nothing left to hold on to, she thought grimly, except this stupid pillow with Dolly Parton’s face embroidered on it.

Finally, long past midnight, she fell asleep.

Bronwyn’s eyes snapped open. A sound had awakened her. She blinked into the darkness, and listened intently, hoping it wasn’t more noises from the living room. It came again: a light tapping at her window. Her dream-fuddled brain’s first thought was, Dwayne? Then she turned and saw the face beyond the glass.

The haint.

She blinked, and suddenly the ghost was in her room. She sat up and snapped, “This is a really bad night, Sally.”

“It’s time to remember,” the haint said. “You can’t avoid this.”

Bronwyn started to fire something back, but instead she sat up, crawled to the edge of the bed, and without her cane, stood up to face the haint. “So what, then, is so goddamned important that I need to remember?”

“What happened to you.”

Bronwyn’s bad leg trembled with fury. “You think I didn’t read what happened to me? I know what all those words mean, honey, especially the really good ones like ‘sodomize.’ I don’t need to remember what that felt like.”

“You’ll face more challenges soon. Your strength will come from knowing you’ve endured these things.”

“I do know it!” Bronwyn bellowed. She no longer cared who heard her. “I know that I was blown up, cut up, ass-fucked, and stitched back together. I know I took down nearly a dozen of those bastards before they got me. I know that if it wasn’t for being a Tufa, I’d be dead by now, okay? I know all that! What I’m real fucking tired of is people, alive or dead, telling me what the fuck I need !”

She turned her back on the haint. “Go away, Sally. There’s nothing for you here. I don’t hear you anymore, and when I turn around I won’t see you.”

Before she could say anything, her bedroom door opened and Chloe entered. She was wrapped in a bathrobe, and her black hair was disheveled. “Are you all right? I heard shouting.”

“Is there anyone behind me?”

“No.”

“Then I’m fine,” she said, and sat heavily on the edge of the bed. Then she scowled up at her mother. “And how are you?”

“You could’ve… I don’t know, knocked or something.”

“At my own front door? You could’ve stopped.”

“Not at that moment, I couldn’t.”

Brownyn shook her head. “Man, that is so much more than I need to know.”

Chloe closed the door and sat down beside her daughter. “I recall walking in on you and Dwayne once. Believe me, I had no desire to see that, either.”

Bronwyn couldn’t repress a smile. “Yeah, and he got stuck going out the window.” She looked over at the glass, expecting to see Sally outside it, but there was nothing but darkness. “Everyone’s telling me what I have to do. Not asking me, even, telling me. I’m not in the army anymore, I don’t have to take orders.”

“They want things to be safe if something happens to me.”

“Things. They want a song to be safe. A stupid song.”

“A song that’s ours. That we brought across the water on the night wind. That’s been kept as a treasure ever since.”

“Just because something’s old doesn’t mean it’s valuable.”

“Spoken by the young.”

“Yeah, yeah, whatever.” She fell back on the bed. “I’ll learn your damn song, Mom. I promised I would. But I won’t have a damn baby just because people want me to, and I won’t dig up things out of my own head just so a ghost can feel useful.” She put the Dollywood pillow over her face.

“You’ll do what you want, like you always have,” Chloe said sadly. She stopped as she opened the door. “You should probably try to figure out why that is. You didn’t get it from me, and I’m pretty sure your father’s not like that. But there’s a word for people who only care about what they want themselves.”

“Sociopath?” Bronwyn said sarcastically.

“I was thinking ‘asshole.’ But whatever works for you.”

Don Swayback found himself walking through a graveyard in the middle of the day. He knew it was a dream, but he couldn’t help but admire the vision his subconscious presented. The cemetery was on a mountainside, and below it stretched a beautiful valley bisected by a meandering river. Except for the headstones, there was no sign of civilization. The valley was covered in unnaturally green grass, and the sky was wincingly blue. He leaned on one of the headstones and slowly took in the view.