about the fact that I can hunt a wolf down, or gut a rabbit with my bare hands, even if reluctantly. I’m the lone survivor of one of the most heinous murders in the state of Louisiana, where I’m originally from. A life I had to leave in order to survive. One he had to leave, as well, for reasons that still don’t quite add up for me.
“And what about your family? Shouldn’t you tell them?” Once, about four years ago, Russ left the cabin to set some traps in the woods, and desperate for answers, I rummaged through his stuff. Tucked away in an old, worn-down looking wallet, was a driver’s license, alongside a picture of a beautiful blonde and a young boy, maybe ten years old. When Russ caught me, he swiped the wallet out of my hand and sentenced me to two nights without supper. The worst punishment he’s ever issued in the all the time we’ve been here.
“They don’t need to know anything. Better for them, better for me.”
“You wouldn’t know what was better for you if it slapped you upside the head.”
He snorts a laugh that sends him into a coughing fit. Bending over, he holds a white kerchief to his mouth, and I glimpse the red saturating the cloth when he pulls it away.
The sight of him sends a nervous thrumming inside my veins, and I turn away, mentally searching for something else to think about. Something less terrifying than how utterly empty this place will be when he’s gone. And without Noya.
“Shit,” he rasps. “This …. This is my penance. All the bad shit I’ve done.”
“You don’t believe in all that religious crap, remember?”
“Ain’t religion. It’s karma. Bitin’ me in the ass.”
It’s futile asking him to elaborate on what he could’ve possibly done in his life, what horrific events in his past would warrant this shit hand, so I don’t bother to respond to that.
“You still wear that damn thing?”
At his inquiry, I look down the front of me, where I’ve mindlessly pulled out the chain ordinarily tucked inside my shirt. The one I’ve been skating the attached key along, back and forth, back and forth, in habit. “Always.”
The key to a secret place.
It’s the only thing I have left of my true home. My family. The life from before, as I refer to it, but I don’t dare say what it was that broke my childhood into two halves. Couldn’t, even if I wanted to, since I don’t remember most of it, anyway. A blackness that sits on the edge of my memories like a damaged movie reel. But there are these snapshots. Picture frames inside my head that appear and disappear. And I know things, details about that night, from the snippets I’ve read in local newspapers. Except, there’s a strange and inexplicable detachment to them that doesn’t seem to trigger any light inside that dark stretch at the back of my mind. Like I’m reading about someone else’s tragedy instead of my own.
It’s weird.
I remember my real father, the one before Russ, looping the oversized chain over my head and tucking the key in my shirt. In the visual, I see his lips move, but I can’t hear what he’s saying to me, and I don’t dwell on it too much, for fear of my brain changing the narration to something else, entirely. Could’ve been the crazy mutterings of a fool, for all I know. I was certainly old enough to remember that he wasn’t running on all cylinders toward the end. Something I could see even as young as eleven years old, when my suspicions about his mental wellbeing had me second guessing everything that came out of his mouth, no matter how benign. That night, he left a kiss to my forehead, and it was the last I ever interacted with him.
For some reason, I’m able to recall my old address, based on some pneumonic device I must’ve learned as a child. Twenty-nine, three-five-two, Magnolia Lane, in Veilleux. And I remember my last name, Pierce, but everything else about that night is sketchy, half-drawn images that I can’t make out.
Tucking the key back inside my shirt, I return to the task of stirring the stew in the pot.
“Ever wonder what it goes to?”
Wearing a frown, I twist to look back at him. He’s never mentioned, or acknowledged, the key--I’m guessing, because doing so would kick off the slew of questions he’s avoided this whole time. Ones I’ve asked