AllFreeNovel
Share Us
1
Moonlight onblack water, shininglike dark glass in the night. Tree branches reflected on the surface, silhouettes on shadow, silent sentinels of the swamp, draped in moss that swayed in the whispered breeze.
A shallow boat glided over the surface, the engine barely running, its low, throaty purr swallowed up by the wilderness with only nature there to hear as the boat slipped deeper into the night.
—
Fingers clutching the steering wheel, the mother sat in her car, staring at the house. A narrow, rickety little shotgun shack that had somehow stood there for more than a hundred years. A sagging roof to match the sagging, postage-stamp front porch. Narrow clapboard siding that hadn’t seen a fresh coat of paint in a generation. The front windows were not quite square in the wall. No light shone through the dirty glass.
How had it come to this?
Her son’s life had begun in comfort and security. A big house in a good neighborhood. A respected family. A bright future. Little bylittle that foundation had eroded, corrupted by things she knew now were beyond his control—mostly—though she had judged him and blamed him. Fought him instead of fighting for him, which would be a stain on her soul for the rest of her life, no matter if he forgave her or not—which he did, or so he said. Sometimes she thought he only said it because he was too weary of the battle to say anything else.
Her heartbeat quickening, she got out and looked all around, still clinging to the car door, just in case. This wasn’t a good place to be. On the ragged outskirts of town, this was a neighborhood that quickly gave way to dirty blue-collar businesses—a welding shop, a scrapyard, a rusty corrugated metal warehouse that stored Mardi Gras parade floats. The old abandoned sugarcane processing plant was just down the road.
A row of small houses like this one squatted like toadstools, side by side on weed-choked lots, forgotten by everyone who didn’t have to live this way. Those were the people who lived here—people not wanted anywhere else, people without the means to live anywhere else, the marginalized, the outliers, the forgotten. Her son.
There was no one around that she could see, although she was sure she felt the crawl of eyes on her. Just her imagination, she tried to tell herself. A train whistle wailed in the distance, a mournful sound echoed by an owl in a nearby tree. The sound of the owl unnerved her and stirred a long-dormant memory of a timeworn superstition that she would have said she didn’t believe in. A folktale about owls being harbingers of death. Her stomach clenched, and a chill ran down her back just the same as she hurried to the front door.
She knocked and waited. And waited…And waited…
The mother’s trembling fingers tightened on the doorknob.
The owl called a second time.
—
The wife reached out with trembling fingers and pinched off the blackened wick of a candle.Happy birthday to me—a thought steepedin sarcasm and sorrow. She was angry and sad and alone. Nothing new there.
This wasn’t what her life was supposed to be. This hadn’t been part of the deal. Not at all. She had fallen in love with the man of her dreams—handsome, smart, full of fun and promise. They had planned and plotted a life in a better place with a brighter future. They had had so much to look forward to, so many promises their dreams had held out for them, like shiny brass rings on the beautiful carousel of youthful romance.
But there she sat, alone in her kitchen, drinking warm chardonnay in the glow of the under-cabinet lighting, in a backwater town in south Louisiana. A place she didn’t belong. A fact she was reminded of daily by people she didn’t like and who didn’t like her. People who had pulled her husband back here on the leash of obligation and loyalty, dragging her along, an unwanted accessory. She often wondered if he thought of her the same way and resented her for it. Was she the constant reminder of what he could have had, could have been, if he hadn’t come back here and settled for so much less?
Of course he resented her.
No more than she resented him.
This was what her life had become, and she was sick of it, choking on it.
She didn’t want to live like this anymore.
She wouldn’t.
She wiped away the tears that clung to her eyelashes and reached across the kitchen island for her cell phone.
Happy birthday to me…
—
A predator attacked. Prey screamed. The swamp was alive at night, a tableau for the drama of life and death, survival and loss. The circle of life turned continuously, naturally, without sympathy or sentiment. One life fed another, which fed another, which fed another.The choreography of nature was graceful, brutal, and honest, a dance carried out in moonlight and shadow.
The engine died. A spotlight swept low across the water.
Eyes glowed back.
The apex predator had arrived.
—
