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The minute.
The memory of the last time I left the property flares in my head, so vivid it makes me stagger, and I use the axe, thrusting the head to the ground to stop myself from falling forward. Squeezing my eyes closed, I let the haunting images fill my brain.Pain lashes my chest from the inside out until I can barely suck in a breath without the agony threatening to suck me into the black abyss I’ve fallen into so many times over the years.
Don’t let it take you.
I’ve told myself the same thing every time the past tries to come back to haunt me.
It rarely works.
But I do my best to lock it away before it gets to this point, to redirect my focus to something more productive than dwelling on my torment—like the stack of timber I’ve been breaking down into manageable firewood.
The house doesn’t need it.
Not with the solar panels providing enough energy to run it and everything else up here without my ever having to lift a finger. But there’s something about the smell of fresh burning wood, the heat of it radiating from the central fireplace that rises three stories through the house, that always reminds me of simpler times.
Before my life went to shit and the curse consumed me.
So far back that the memories come to me more like a hazy dream than anything that actually happened before my world went dark.
I’d much rather focus on those snippets of time than the ones that keep me on this mountain, but it always seems the things I want to forget won’t let me move on from my mistakes.
No matter how many logs I split.
How many fences or pieces of furniture I build.
How much time I spend just trying to kill the curse.
Nothing will ease the agony—and that woman back there is only going to complicate things further, twist me up inside more. Make my past rear its ugly head in the present. Unlock the very real beast inside me.
Unless I do what I can to keep it caged.
I grab a log and stack it on the giant stump where I do all the splitting, then spit into my palms and swing the axe, driving it down as hard and fast as I can, digging the blade into the center of the wood. Pieces go flying in either direction, and the thwacking sound reverberates through the clearing, bouncing off the tree trunks and dissipating into the air.
It disappears eventually, just like people who come onto the mountain do.
But I can’t just make that girl back there vanish.
That would cause even more trouble, make the situation more untenable, which means I have to figure out another way to deal with my current predicament, another way to handle the beauty upstairs.
Even I know I can’t keep her locked in there forever.
Her father will come for her eventually, and if she has any hope of surviving what she’s walked into, she needs to regain her strength—and pray to whatever god she believes in that things don’t go in the direction I see them heading.
Straight to my own personal fucking Hell.
Here, I thought I’d been living in it. Then she stepped onto my porch in those heels…
I grab another log, set it up, and split it.
Moving by rote.
The motions so ingrained in me after all these years that I don’t have to think about what I’m doing until the hair on my neck stands on end.
I’m not alone anymore.
Ignoring the eyes watching me, I set, swing, split; set, swing, split, over and over again until the pile starts to add up and my palms begin to burn.
Every muscle in my body aches.
