Post by Jake Cornwell on Dec 23, 2008 20:34:41 GMT -8
Jake and Lisa were sitting together in the kitchen, eating scrambled eggs and ham.
Lisa's blue-gray eyes were scrunching up the way they always did right before she laughed or smiled real big. "I saw you kissin' Carlie Smith behind the shed," she said, with a grin that revealed two gaps.
"You did not," Jake said, but he couldn't remember if he'd really kissed Carlie Smith or if he was just pretending like he hadn't so Lisa wouldn't tell.
"Did too!" she laughed, and throwing down her fork she jumped out of her chair. "Catch me before I tell mama!"
She launched like a dart past the table, her pale dress vividly blue against the backdrop of the red walls. Jake didn't remember his mother covering the old yellow and forget-me-not blue wallpaper with red paint. He got up and chased Lisa out of the house and into the chicken yard.
"Can't catch me!"
"Can too!"
"I'll tell mama!"
"No you ain't!"
She taunted him, telling him he couldn't do this, that she'd do that, and he taunted her right back with a whooping that they both knew he'd never give her once he caught her.
And he did catch her, out by the corn fields that stretched off to the ends of the earth. Breathless, they collapsed in the rows and for a while they stared up at the clouds.
"It looks like a bunny rabbit," Lisa said, drawing an outline of the ears and bump of a tail.
"No, it's a great big lion."
The fluffy white clouds thinned, darkened and spread out menacingly. The robin's egg sky turned into steel, cold and unforgiving. "Lisa, go inside."
"But-"
"Don't argue with me! G'on, get!"
They stood up and Lisa ran in the opposite direction as Jake ran towards the sound of the tractor. Somehow the new paint from the kitchen was leaking into the sky, staining the steely hue like blood.
Halfway between the house and his father, he heard a piercing shriek. It startled a murder of crows; they flew up in a rush of noise and feather, reeling and wheeling against the ominous sky.
Jake turned around as the shriek sounded again, a long, sustained note of terror and pain. It was the kind of shriek that made piss run down a man's leg without him being aware of it.
The crows answered, one by one, until the air was filled with mocking screams.
"LISA!"
The ground beneath him grew sticky as he raced towards the house, sticky with the blood falling from the now completely red sky. It slowed him down, kept him from getting there in time. He heard the shriek one last time, cut off abruptly after only a few moments.
The paint was bleeding onto the scuffed wooden floor in the kitchen when he threw the door open. His father had one knee on the ground beside a body on the floor. A body in a blue dress.
"Lisa!" Jake cried.
His father's hand was on the girl's throat. Hearing Jake he looked up, and Jake recoiled from the blackness that covered his father's eyes. "Yes, son, for Lisa," his father said in a dead voice.
He stood up. The body on the floor wasn't Lisa. The woman was in her thirties. She was crying, begging his father to let her go.
His father pushed a knife in his hand.
"No, dad, Lisa-"
"Yes, son. For Lisa."
"But dad, I-"
"FOR LISA, YOU SACK OF SHIT! FOR LISA!" his father screamed, spraying Jake's face with a misting of spit.
Jake began to cry. "No, daddy, please..."
"DO IT! THIS BITCH KILLED LISA! THIS DEVIL'S WHORE KILLED YOUR SISTER! LISA! MY LISA! KILL THAT DEMON, MAKE HER PAY FOR LISA!"
Blinded by tears, Jake fell on the floor near the woman in blue. She was terrified, the whites of her eyes showing, irises rolling in fear.
His father was screaming at him, right in his ear. Ridiculing him, emasculating him, calling him a little pussy bitch. A worthless son. A no-good candy ass.
Jake screamed incomprehensibly as something inside of him snapped. He plunged the knife into the woman's soft belly. The world stopped spinning. Time itself was suspended in shock from the unimaginable pain, terror and surprise in the woman's strange blue eyes.
"Fucking bitch," his father said, and left the room.
Jake's shoulders collapsed, and with his head hung to his chest, he sobbed. He was still holding onto the knife that was buried in the woman's belly. By the black blood welling up from the sides of the knife, he dimly registered the fact that he'd punctured her liver.
The woman's hand shot out and grasped his wrist.
Her eyes rolled back in her head as her lungs wheezed in a low, rattling gasp.
"Listen carefully, for you walk a fine line between two paths," she said, clutching his wrist tighter. Pain began to spread to his fingers.
"So much pain, so much blood! Continue down this path and your heart will harden. You will not rest until the world is cleansed of my kind, and so many innocents will die before your thirst for vengeance is quenched. Be wary! That path leads to a hell all its own."
Jake's tears were mingling with sweat, his body shaking as the pain spread like wildfire along his nerve endings, each pulse of his heart striking like a drum against his temples.
Still, she would not release him, even though he tried to pull away.
"Redemption lies at the end of the other path; but to find it you must pay with your own blood. Though the cost be high, many innocent lives will be spared, the reward great."
Gasping sharply with pain, she clenched tighter to his wrist and his bones turned to jelly. Sweat pouring down his face, he crumpled at her side, incapable of hearing anything but her voice... and each word was a dagger in his heart.
"Listen carefully," she whispered. "For you walk a fine line between two paths. Vengeance or Redemption, child... the choice is yours."
When her hand fell, limp and lifeless to the floor, Jake sat bolt upright in bed, screaming.
