Page 52 of When the Night Comes Knocking

and higher…

Jim hangs his head inside the frozen foods section, propping the door open so the cool glass presses against his cheek. Sweat clings to his receding hairline, tumbling down his cheeks in fat, salty drops. He washes down the taste of bile stuck in his throat with another sip of lukewarm PBR.

His aunt Judy’s face appears in his mind again, sun damaged and ever withering beneath wisps of long white hair. She was the last thing he and Billy talked about together, out in the same dirt parking lot that they’d been smoking in since they were teenagers. They were meant to have Thanksgiving lunch with her at the nursing home, twelve o’clock sharp; Billy had even bought a new button-down shirt for the occasion.

I want to look real nice for Mama tomorrow, Billy told him, only moments before he’d cease to be. He leaned against the side of the truck and lit up a cigarette with grease-stained fingers that Aunt Judy would never allow near a table of food. It always makes her real happy seeing us dressed all nice, Jimmy. She’d appreciate it, don’t ya thi—

Jim squeezes his eyes shut, pressing harder against the glass until he thinks his face and skull might give way against it. He can still hear it, the sharp inhalation of Billy’s breath as the Mimic first charged them—that shallow, shocked little gasp that would end up being one of his last.

“Idiot,” Jim mutters as traitorous tears sting his eyes. “Idiot, idiot, idiot.”

When he pulls away from the freezer, he wipes his face and downs the rest of his beer before crushing it up tightly. The can clinks against the linoleum as he grabs the shotgun. Then he walks down the aisle, back toward the front of the store, now that the other idiots have locked themselves into Kimi’s office.

He can feel Billy there before the lump on the ground becomes visible. The cheap table cover has been long soaked through with crimson, dotted and spattered in uneven swipes and patches like the finger paintings Grace used to make for him when she was a little girl. Jim sits down next to it, staring at the muddied work boots sticking out from beneath.

“You bastard,” he whispers, placing a hand on his younger cousin’s boot. “You weren’t supposed to go first. Neither of you were.”

A bead of sweat drips down his face, mixing paths with a tear. He hums a song he used to hear in church when he was a boy; he can’t remember the lyrics, but he can still hear his mother’s lovely voice singing it, leading the swaying choir till the day she died. He had been only twelve years old then, his mother not even forty.

Jim stopped going to church after that, no matter how hard Aunt Judy tried to get him to put on a suit and join her every week when Sunday rolled around.

He takes another long sip of beer as his lip begins to tremble. “I know you sure as hell wouldn’t want me singing to you, Billy,” he says, patting his cousin’s boot a few times.

The store is quiet except for the low hum of the brutal overheads and the wind knocking the blinds against the doorframe every so often. He looks up from his beer and stares out of the gaps in the barrier covering the left-side door, where the blinds are too ruined to lower all the way.

Outside in the shadows, he sees a pair of legs.

“Shit.”

Jim closes his eyes, rubbing them until spots dance. When he reopens them, the pale, slender legs are still standing there, facing toward him. The feet are clad with a pair of white Converse, doodled over with Sharpie drawings of flowers and shooting stars.

“Jimmy.”

The soft voice is a knife to his chest. Warily, he crawls to his feet, keeping his eyes trained on the legs until he is fully standing, wide eyed.

She is wearing the same dress he last saw her in.

—

There are some people who are born to be runners. Their minds stretch out restlessly toward vivid rose-pink skies, and they view Time not as a measure of increments, but as a living thing, breathing down their necks and whispering make-believe urgencies.

Jim’s youngest cousin, Grace Meadows, was a runner in both the metaphorical and physical sense. On the occasion she’d fall into a disagreement with her mother—which was an occasion nearly as frequent as the moon rising in the sky—Grace would bolt out the screen door and take off toward anywhere that was away (i.e., anywhere Kimi Blackwell was).

Jim had watched the song and dance of Aunt Judy tearing down Grace’s whims and dreams enough times to recognize when these conversations were about to really take off flying. On one especially humid night in August, he’d practically heard the electric current in the air buzzing when he stepped into his aunt Judy’s home off Slaughter Road.

Tuesdays were Pork Chop Night in the Meadows’ house, served with all the fixin’s, and it was a tradition that Jim rested most of his lingering faith in. Any other belief he had, he had for Grace.

“Are you trying to kill me, Grace? Is that what you’re trying to do?” Aunt Judy said, waving a fistful of photos in one hand.

The prints were glossy, eight by ten inches, and Jim could just make out a flash of his cousin in them. “What’s going on?” he asked by way of greeting, letting the screen door slam shut behind him.

Through the kitchen and into the living room, he saw Billy walk by with a beer. They briefly caught each other’s eyes, only long enough for Billy to shake his head in mock warning before going to sit in front of the boxy TV set Judy refused to upgrade.

“What’s going on,” Aunt Judy began sharply, “is that Grace let that pervert up the road take erotic photos of her.”

Jim cut a quick glance to his cousin as her cheeks flushed red. “They’re just headshots, Mama. They’re for agencies and auditions—”

“And what kind of auditions need to see this?”