Page 91 of The Initial Insult

She is young, and warm,

blood close to the skin with sleep.

It doesn’t have to be spilled. For me

To smell the memories, best and last.

If I took her she would be

mother / rain

I huff, her pelt billowing under my breath.

Deeper is her last meal

still in her blood,

death mixing with her life, quiet as it fades.

warm / poison

A possum passes the cage, coat dripping from the wet grass.

Quiet and cold, blood not talking.

He is not my kin.

Or my meal.

Today the girl, in the sun, blood brought by wood,

a strong scent on the breeze,

Felicity / hate

Chapter 4

Tress

“The Allan house, really?”

“Yep.” Ribbit nods, his toes flicking in the pond water as bluegills nibble on them. “They’re tearing it down.”

“Huh,” I say, rolling up my jeans and joining him on the tailgate of his truck, backed up to the pond so we can dangle our legs in.

The Usher house looms behind us, built by Ribbit’s ancestor to show the world what he could do. What the world did in return was eat his fortune, and now the rocks he took from the ground are working their way back to it, tumbling down in a stiff wind. When we were kids Ribbit’s dad wouldn’t let us play near the foundation, said a stone could come down on our heads and we’d be done for. And now the old Allan place is going the same way. Something to nothing.

It bothers me, for reasons I can’t say.

“Why, though?” I ask, instinctively pulling back from the first fish that comes in to investigate my feet. “Why tear it down now?”

“Stay still,” Ribbit instructs. “It’s like a free pedicure. People in the city pay money for this.”

“That’s why you spend so much time at the pond?” I ask. “Pedicures?”

“I don’t know why now, with the Allan house,” he says, ignoring my jibe. “But it came up at the last township meeting that it’s an ‘attraction for the youth.’”

There’s always got to be an Usher on the township council, same with the school board. Nothing is official until the oldest family in Amontillado weighs in. Right now Lenore—Ribbit’s mother—fills the chair, her maiden name a strong enough pull to count. Nobody had blinked when she gave Ribbit her name, his dad—an easily swayable Troyer—bending to her will. Ribbit likes to go with her to all the meetings, a little Usher apprentice on her heels from the moment he could walk. His devotion to her has never faded, his presence in local politics now an assumed. It makes him feel needed and necessary, which doesn’t happen much.