Sun Kissed Innsmouth
Part 163
Felecia didn’t recollect arriving at her dim little shack, she didn’t remember depositing her goods inside or tying up the animals in the grim hope of keeping them nearby while she disappeared from consciousness. There was no stray collection of memories that imported the choice of leaving the cart out at the edge of the tree line and certainly no recollection of making so many trips back and forth until the damned thing was empty.
Felecia woke atop her makeshift bed inside her shack and shivering with the sun out and clear above the tree line. She woke to Taryn making a fuss outside.
“I said…are you alive in there!”
The youth was already shouting and ready to bang on the thin door once more while repeating himself as Felecia leaned up and shouted. “I’ll be out in a minute!”
“Where’d the goat come from?”
Felecia ignored Taryn as she stepped out of her shack and stretched painfully. She could have slept longer, maybe a day, or two. She felt like a meal pulled too soon from the oven, and she wasn’t in the mood at all for the youth’s accusatory tone.
“I would think the cart would be a larger concern.”
When Taryn didn’t look to the cart she was waving at or rise to the occasion Felecia shrugged and looked in the direction he had come from. “The trip took longer than I planned, I was going to rest for one day and then come by.”
“I waited three days, four most like.”
Felecia scoffed and looked around; the sky seemed different than when she last saw it. Things were colder, damp, the ground crunched lightly under her feet as frosty blades of grass were crushed under foot. Felecia’s body ached from head to toes, it was the same sort of hideous,
slow awakening that she had after that night in the village. How long was that bout of unconsciousness, two days, three?
“Well, like I said, it took longer than I hoped.”
Taryn was angry, that much was obvious, but he was also acting like a pouting child now that the object of his scorn wasn’t playing the appropriate part.
“You get what you needed?”
Felecia started to nod, she stared out at the cart which was leaning out in the small field near the shack and then over to the goat and the chicken who were both miserable and huddled up by the shacks front door next to a nearly empty bag of feed.
“No. I didn’t. I stole some things from a farmer close to town, took the stove and some goods from the cave, but no, I didn’t get what I needed.”
Taryn walked over to the goat and ran a hand along its side. “So, you going back then?”
Felecia walked back into the interior of the shack and began to disrobe. “No, I’m not, I have nothing to go back to, and nothing to look forward to either.”
The youth stood outside, shuffling his feet and making the ground crush relentlessly under his feet. He wasn’t going to come in, he wasn’t going to do anything or take advantage of the moment. That was good news, it should have been anyway.
Felecia felt discouraged and angry too. She didn’t want to do those things, didn’t want to complicate her life, did she?
No.
She wanted Taryn to come in, but not for that. She wanted him to be angry, good and angry. Angry enough to slap her, to grab a handful of her hair and pull at it. Felecia felt like that was the least she deserved, not because she hadn’t come back in time to help look after Phillip, but because she had dared to be born at all.
Let the youth come in and leave bruises, drive his boney fists into her guts, grab viciously at her exposed nipples and twist until she howled.
No.
Felecia sighed her resignation to feeling nothing at all instead and finished changing. “Let’s go see Phillip, it looks early enough so that you can salvage part of the day still.”
Taryn shook his head and finally seemed to take notice of the cart Felecia had already made mention of. “Naw, Pa’s up and around, been that way for coming on two days now. I came to let you know you don’t have to come by.”
“Up and around?”
The youth squinted and shied away; Felecia didn’t realize how accusatory she sounded until the words were already spoken. “I mean, come if you want, it’s just…he sort of came too while you was gone. Woke up, I guess.”
Felecia dug around in the mess and found some of the dried herbs and mushrooms she had packed from the cave, pushing them into a small sack before closing the door to her shack. “Let’s go pay Pa a visit then, I want to wish him well.”