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I’m neither of those things, and faking it seems so far beyond my capabilities that I don’t bother to try.
Instead, I get dressed, find my shoes, and head outside.
Lily’s drying her hair in the bathroom. The hum follows me outside, getting fainter as I go but never disappearing. At this point, I’m not sure if I’m hearing the dryer itself or just her presence in the cabin.
I didn’t mean for both of us to end up here. I meant for the opposite to happen. Maybe, if I’d agreed to stay with her for a week, it would’ve worked out the way I planned.
Not the way Iwanted,damn it, because I wasn’t in jail five seconds before I wanted her back.
That’s going to be a problem.
It’s nothing I’m going to solve today though.
The sun’s only just beginning to set. Shadows slant over my driveway while I walk out to the road and stand there, listening. Nothing but forest sounds. Crickets chirping. Birds calling. Some general rustling. No cops barreling through the trees. No cars speeding over the road. No gunshots.
Something’s not right about that.
Nothing interrupts the stillness. I can feel the reason it’s wrong lurking in the back of my mind like a weird mist, but it doesn’t become anything tangible.
When the quiet seems steady enough to be boring, I go back to my storage shed.
The cans of accelerant are right where I left them, lined up against one wall.
Calm down. I’m not lighting my own cabin on fire. Yes, I might’ve lost it a little bit today, but that wasn’t the cabin’s fault.
What I’m looking for is toward the back, hanging on a set of hooks bolted into the wall. It’s a joke, see? My skin already feels like it’s on fire. Burning my cabin down would be redundant.
Chopping wood is a way better idea.
The axe gives my body an upper limit, at least. Can’t ascend out of myself when I’ve got my feet on the ground and weight balanced on my shoulder. The air smells like green grass and sunshine, like summer should, and every time I blink I can see the backyard at home, just like it was in that picture Gabriel took of our parents. The main difference is that it was wetter, because my dad put out a billion sprinklers.
I don’t have any sprinklers. Maybe I should get some. But then—I’m never going to have a big spontaneous cookout at the cabin. It would be too different.
Or it would be too similar. I don’t know.
At the tree line, I’ve got a dwindling supply of stacked firewood, a big round stump, and several haphazard chunks of logs, ready to be hacked apart.
I get one onto the stump and scored, then swing.
Thud.
That feels good.
I’ve spent at least three-quarters of my life wanting to run into something that hard.Thudmy entire body into another solid object. This is close enough for now. The swings andthuds vibrate all through my arms and shoot up to the top of my head and run down to my toes. There. That’s my entire existence.Thud. Thud. Thud.
The back door on the cabin opens, then swings shut with acreakandsnap. I don’t hear Lily approach across the grass. She appears in an honest-to-fuck shaft of sunlight a safe distance away from the stump, her hair in one of those shining ponytails on top of her head and a can of lemonade from my fridge in her hand. She’s wearing dark leggings and a pink tank top and all of it is perfect.
This could be real for somebody else. A girlfriend—fiancée?—bringing a lemonade out to the lawn to spectate some wood-chopping.
I swing the axe again.
Thud.
“I didn’t know you had an axe,” she says, after a few more swings. I’m all warmed up. “Should I be worried?”
“Are those two things connected?”
“You tell me.”
