Каарон Уоррен - The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror 2018 Edition

Was there a correlation? Was this a nerves thing to him? Did pressure or getting pushed around activate something in him that was already going wrong?

I drilled inky dots into the corner of the page, trying to think it all through, and finally decided I needed more data.

I was just getting started on the next page—on the scary silhouette of a fancydancer I was going to tell Mom was just anybody, just something I was making up—when Dino was standing in my doorway.

“The show,” he said.

I sighed my best big-brother sigh, made a production of setting my notebook aside, and pulled my way across the room, down to the living room.

His show, he was right: there was a fuzz of static over it now.

“Tell me when it’s better,” I said to him, and went out the back door, sat down on the ground to twist the base of the tall antenna, try to find the signal, the door open behind me so Dino could call out when I found the sweet spot.

Mom came out and sat on the back steps and smoked a cigarette, watched the horizon, and, I think, me.

“You were talking about your father,” she said.

“ Better yet? ” I called out to Dino, because I’d nearly worked the antenna all the way around in its base, and the wire was going to wrap soon.

“He’s playing with his heroes,” Mom said, shrugging like what could you do.

I gave up on the antenna.

“It’s only natural,” Mom said then, narrowing her eyes at a pair of headlights out on the interstate, maybe. Or just to get her words in order. “You’re—the age you are, this is when you start really needing to have a dad around.”

I pried a clod of dirt up, lobbed it at the propane tank just to watch it explode against all that silver paint.

“I’m all right,” I told her.

This is the lie, when you’re twelve. And all the other years, too.

You never tell your mom anything that might worry her. Moms have enough to worry about already.

“You do need a man around,” she said anyway, then smushed her cigarette out on the second step from the top and deposited the butt in the coffee can she kept under the stairs, like hiding it.

Minutes after she’d gone back inside to get Dino started in his bed process, it hit me, what she was saying—no, what she was asking: What if that sheriff’s deputy came over for dinner one night? Or to drag a harrows across all the packed dirt, so maybe something could grow up from it?

I lobbed another dirt clod at the propane tank, missed altogether, and then came down to my knees fast, scrabbling all the dirt clods and rocks to me that I could, to sling right into the heart of that propane tank.

Hit, hit, miss, hit.

I was breathing hard.

The skirt of the house, it was right behind me.

I turned, regarded it up and down its whole fourteen inches of long triangular darkness, and finally, like a trade, picked all Mom’s old butts from the coffee can and pushed them through one at a time. It was an offering.

Then I put the can back but tipped it over like the wind might have blown it over, so it could get a last drag on all those cigarettes.

In my head I was walking the floor plan in my science notebook. I was a stick figure pacing the halls, looking in every room. On patrol.

The television wasn’t working, you say?

Could it be because there was somebody under the floor right exactly there? Not because he wanted to hear that show better but because his youngest son was sitting right in front of that screen.

Indians, we don’t have guardian angels—if we did, they’d have been whispering to us pretty hard when some certain ships bobbed up on the horizon—but we do have helpers. I think usually it’s supposed to be an animal.

Maybe when you need more, though, maybe then you get a person.

Maybe then your father gets special permission to come back, so long as he stays hidden.

So long as nobody tries to rat him out.

Meaning, yes, it was me who’d killed those four dogs. It was me who laid that torn-in-four black dishcloth over their eyes.

And it was my fault the cartoon wouldn’t play without static.

Just for luck, I dug up one more dirt clod, a big flat one, and aimed hard, slung it as hard as I could into the side of the propane tank.

It exploded exactly as I’d wanted it to: a big dusty cloud, billowing out and thinning.

Then that plume took on a dim glow.

I stepped one step up the back stairs, my hand to the knob of the door, and then I saw the glow for what it was.

The neighbor’s back porch light.

He was home from jail.

Instead of asking the deputy sheriff over for dinner right away, like all the cop shows said would happen, the deputy sheriff drove me and Dino to school the next three days. He’d heard what happened at the bus stop.

I just stared out the window on my side. I was playing the prisoner. I was being transported to my next holding facility. An armed guard was transporting me. He was under orders not to talk to me. Not that I was going to try.

On the way back from school, in the big empty space before you got to our clump of houses, he let Dino flip the switch that fired the sirens up. Later, while Mom was warming spaghetti and then forgetting she was warming spaghetti, I told Dino to shut up so I could hear the television. He was playing with his trucks in front of the couch and making siren sounds with his mouth.

Dino did stop, and then I had to watch the show I hadn’t even been watching.

I just picked at my burned spaghetti.

That night when I was standing at the window, I was in my pants, not just my underwear. I was watching for the deputy sheriff’s truck, now. To do what? I had no idea. Just to prove it to myself, I guess.

I tried not to blame Mom. She didn’t know Dad was back, and she wouldn’t believe me if I told her, and if I told her, it would make him leave, anyway. So, all I could do was watch.

I fell asleep with my head leaning against the glass and the wall, and when I woke, I jerked around, to try to see a shape just stepping past.

The living room was empty.

But you’re supposed to be getting more solid, I said inside.

Not more invisible.

Nothing invisible could have done that to the four dogs.

And—and Dino. He hadn’t had a seizure for days now.

I pushed away from the window to go to bed, because nothing was working, because everything was stupid, and I nearly had my eyes pulled all the way away when I saw motion out front.

I’d thought the wheel at the base of the tetherball pole was going to be a truck with a thrown rod.

What I saw now told me maybe it was—that maybe the truck hadn’t been dragged down here, but parts of it had come down all the same.

The wheel, maybe.

The football was going around the tall pole.

I smiled.

Because the front door squeaked and squealed—Mom said it was the best alarm—I went out the back door, by Dino’s room. He could sleep through anything.

The football was just tapping into the pole by the time I came around the side of the house, having to test each step for sharpness before giving it my weight.

I let the football hang there for a few breaths, and then I picked it up, handed it around and around the pole until I had to walk it around.

It was my turn.

“Watch this,” I said, and flung the ball at a spot in the dirt maybe six feet in front of me. The string grabbed it in a perfect parabola, flung it high and around, so I had to fall away from getting hit. I kept on falling, too, caught myself on my elbows.

That was why the headlights didn’t spear me in place.

I stayed down, turned over onto my stomach.

The truck was just coasting, not turned on.

When the headlights turned to wash across the front of our house, they cut off just in time. Just the brake lights flaring in the barely there dust the tires had coughed up.