Sun Kissed Innsmouth
Part 118
Taryn interrupted, he did that a lot and besides the frequent smoking it was the thing Felecia liked about him the least. “Oh, screw your ghosts. So, what if you’re tetched…I’m a damned she/he, what does any of that matter out here?”
Felecia turned away from Taryn and dropped the cigarillo before stomping on it. “You were the one who played connect the dots for me, remember? The one who had to fill me in.”
Taryn stepped back onto the porch proper and advanced on the spot nearest Felecia without brushing against her in such a tight space. “Yeah, I did, I told you what you missed, so what?” He stooped and picked up the crushed stub of the cigarillo and grimaced. “There was still good tobacco, the stuff isn’t cheap you know.”
Felecia ignored the complaint and considered the first time Taryn had to fill her in on what she had missed due to injury and illness of a whole other nature.
The meadow, that same night as Felecia’s fevered observations had in the cellar of the big house before she ran off into the cold, still woods. Something happened there, something Taryn witnessed but only at the tail end, something she needed to know, something else he had to tell her about, using his limited vocabulary.
Taryn picked the remains of the cigarillo off the deck and pinched the burnt end off before pocketing the rest. “All I’m saying is, I need you here, I love you…”
“Stop!”
Felecia nearly howled the word, she couldn’t hear him say it, not again. She couldn’t stand the acceptance and the love he felt for her. No one should feel that level of love, not for a murderer. No one should have to suffer loving a monster, or at least being the unwitting accomplice to one.
Stop.
Felecia let the wind from the east stiffen for what needed to be said. Something about everyone being better off if things stayed the way they were, something about him being let off the hook. Something that might break through Taryn and his precious rational. Something she couldn’t find the words to say so she did what she always had with Taryn, Felecia walked a few paces away and let silence do the work for her.
Eventually the ensuing silence proved too much for Felecia and she nodded toward the interior of the hovel, “I’ll say my goodbyes to Phillip and I’ll come back next week.”
Taryn didn’t say anything, his usual bravado and easy way with cussing all vanished behind a veneer of staring at the uneven floorboards of the porch. Just once Felecia hoped they would argue over the future, and maybe Taryn would open his mouth and get the last word. Maybe the day he proclaimed his love a second time, a moment when he decided not to let her finish talking at the right time instead of the wrong one.
Then again, was Taryn born to be a mind reader? Was the older boy who once hated her or at least acted like it supposed to be full of grace and smooth words all of a sudden.
Felecia hated herself around Taryn now. What happened to her and the world around them wasn’t his fault. None of it. Taryn had been the one who saved them, the one who saved both her and Philip. Taryn had tried to defend them after that, he was the one who tried to keep things together as his father slipped into the constant twilight of dementia. All the youth wanted for his sacrifice was a life with her, after all, he saw her there out in the woods, stubbornly clinging to life and got and stayed angry about it. Felecia was someone else he couldn’t or didn’t have the means to take care of, over time she had become someone else he loved who refused to acknowledge him or love him back.
Only she did love him, so much so that it hurt to be around him and know so that she didn’t dare to show it. Felecia had made a promise that night out in the meadow. She whispered a curse out in that field of constant, stubborn flowers and went on to feed that over fertile ground with truly precious fertilizers.
The interior of the hovel stank as always. Years upon years of charred meat and wood smoke, years upon years of unwashed smallclothes and hides left to cure by any means available.
Phillip was where he always was when Felecia came to visit. Stuck to his position in the old rocking chair, covered in dirty blankets inside the interior of the already stifling hovel. He sat by the constantly fed fire, always at rest but never resting. Just then as Felecia looked at him as her eyes adjusted to the dim light, she saw him clenching his jaw and rubbing his bony fingers along the worn wood hand guards of the old rocking chair. The old groundskeeper was already deep in his mind, deep down in the dark of the past. Felecia would come and sit and glean nuggets of desperate old family knowledge by sitting a spell while the old ruin held his ground teeth séances for what was and what could have been.
The old man held a long desperate breath for reasons unknown until he finally exhaled, whispering to himself, to the fire, to someone who wasn’t there. “Jackie, you know I can’t. I have Ann, our boy is in diapers by God. You know I hate your sister, near as much as you, but I can’t.”
Felecia leaned against the doorway and waited while Phillip ground his teeth and rubbed his hands together, building the tension of the moment. Finally, the old man continued his conspiratorial whispering, “After what she did to you, what my father did for her. Murder is the least you’re owed, but it can’t be me.”
Another very long moment of silence followed as the fire burned and reduced to glowing coals in the hearth, Taryn would be done with the long day’s chores soon and Felecia knew she didn’t have long to wait for anymore old, dead words. “Stuff your witchy portents, that empty headed girl can’t get a man in her bed, not one with a brain anyway. The line dies with her, let that be your revenge.”
Felecia was ready to turn and leave when Phillip kept right on talking to no one at all besides the smoldering fire. “You’re evil, Jackie, or it is, no matter. We’ll all pay a price for this, just you watch.”
There were no more whisper words spoken to the ghosts and the dwindling fire, the sun light was beginning to disappear behind the trees to the west as Felecia began to hear Phillip softly snoring with his head slumped against his chest. She wanted to shout at him, to howl about how and when he had known the swamp witch. Had they known each other for decades? Jacqueline only ever referred to Phillip as Yoseph’s boy or get, never by his name. Phillip spoke to the ghost in the room like a familiar, someone he knew and well. As well as old sour Marge maybe? The old bastard has his secrets, Felecia had always expected but knowing then, for certain that he and Jacqueline had known one another, had talked.
Was any part of my life my own? Was any of this hell not written out carefully for me to endure?
Felecia practically fled the old hovel and jogged away from the place, only once looking over her shoulder to see Taryn’s slim figure leaning against the edge of the porch watching her walk away once more.