me with tear-filled eyes. He raises his hands in apology and shakes his head.
“You believed in this shit!” I cry, raising to my knees. “The entire time! You got your wife and daughters killed! And, for what? For this?”
His shoulders fall.
“You are just a product of my imagination. A coping mechanism. I know this. But I’m glad for some reason my brain decided to allow me to see you but not hear you today because there’s nothing you could say that I want to hear.” I laugh, bitterly. “I’ve mourned for you. I’ve made myself sick, thinking about the night I lost you. I went along with everything you asked me to do for all of these years, and for what? So, you could parade your picture-perfect white family around to these pieces of shit?” I shake my head. “You know, I used to think you were the smartest man in the whole world.” Tears prick at the backs of my eyes, but I refuse to cry for him. I refuse to shed one more tear for the man responsible for the death of my mother and sisters. “I thought you weren’t emotional or feeling or lovey-dovey with us because you were the intelligent type. The kind that didn’t think of those kinds of things, that it didn’t come naturally to you. But, I know now it’s because you were a hateful person, and you just didn’t have it in you to show love. You were everything to me growing up, and now? Now, you’re nothing. You infected so many people with the idea of hate, and they spread it to so many more, leaving lives and people broken and lost all because they caught your plague.” I walk up to the ghostly image of him, frozen in place. I point a finger through his chest. “You are not my Papa anymore. You never were.”
I storm right through his image to the door. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to find Mindy and get the fuck out of this hell you created, while you can disappear, and go back to the hell you belong in.”
The human sense of smell is closely linked with memory, more so than any of our other senses. The smell of jasmine conjures long ago memories of my mother’s perfume, the expensive one she only wore once a year on Christmas or her birthday. The smell of the salt in the air or sunscreen always reminds me of our family summers here in Logan’s Beach and hours in the sun with my sisters. I can still hear them squealing as they splash one another in the water, the sound of the beach ball being volleyed back and forth into the air. The sound of the seagulls fighting for scraps of bread that Mallory always fed to them even though my father warned her not to. But, not all smells conjure good memories.
The compound of The Fourth Reich, the headquarters of hate, is located in the middle of an overgrown, wooded lot on the edge of town. It’s the smell of pine trees, a thick, sappy odor that sticks to the inside of your nose. That smell used to remind me of this place every time I got a whiff of floor cleaner or a car air freshener. The memories were neither good nor bad, just research. And now that I know the truth, the scent is downright nauseating, each crunch of my footsteps over the pine needles, infuriating.
Half of the uneven grounds are dry while another part closer to the compound is flooded, courtesy of the very recent Hurricane Polly.
The building itself is an old elementary school that closed when the new one, a combination of both elementary and middle schools opened up on the other side of town. The outbuildings consist of trailers in the back of the property that were formally portable classrooms used for student overflow. Now, they house the occasional visitor or the Reich member who partied too hard to make the trip home.
One of them contains my sister.
When I arrive at the trailers, I quietly pass under the trailer that belongs to Percy. I keep myself as close to the siding as possible, side-stepping under the windows. I am clear of the trailer by a single step when the door swings open. A brunette steps out wearing a short, leather skirt and black fishnet top over a magenta bra. She’s holding a silver case-style purse under her arm. She looks