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He said, “There are things you don’t understand.”
He said, “Things that you’re too young to hear.”
He said, “But I need you to hear them anyway.”
I looked up at him with stars in my eyes. I loved him. He wasn’t like us, but he was my father, and it was all that mattered.
He said, “You have something in you. Something that will grow and grow and grow. It’s a bad thing. You have to fight it. You can’t let it consume you. It’s a monster, Robbie. And it will eat you if you let it. And then you’ll be the monster.”
I trembled in his arms. “I don’t wanna be a monster.”
He brushed my hair off my forehead. “I know. And I will do everything I can to make sure it never happens. But if it does… well.” He smiled. “We’ll worry about it then, won’t we? Can you keep a secret?”
I nodded. “Yeah. Tell me.”
He leaned over, his lips near my ear. He whispered, “There’s a monster inside all of us. But some of us learn to control it.”
The farther away I got from Caswell, the more it pulled in my head.
I was in Connecticut when I pulled over to th
e side of the road and vomited. I retched until I was dry-heaving, a thin line of noxious spittle hanging from my bottom lip. I spit as my stomach rolled.
The air was hot, rising from the black roadway in wavy lines.
I sat back in my seat, wiping my mouth.
“Fuck,” I muttered as I closed my eyes.
I allowed myself another minute before I closed the door and pulled back onto the road.
I slept that night near a field in a tiny village in Pennsylvania with the odd name of Bird In Hand.
I lay in the back seat, overwarm and aching, the moon and stars as bright as I’d ever seen them.
My sleep was thin and restless.
My mother was in the back seat with me, running her hands through my hair as I sounded out words from the book she’d given me. The pages in the book were filled with wild things, great and horrible beasts that raised their claws. I struggled with some of the words, but she helped me through them.
“Good,” she said into my hair. “You’re doing so good.”
She was crying.
When I looked up to ask her what was wrong, why she was sad, why she was blue, she wasn’t there.
I didn’t know if I was awake.
It was early evening when I found it.
As I saw the red wooden sign with LIGNITE in white, I knew.
Lignite was dead. It’d been dead for a very long time.
A few buildings remained, their bones nothing but piles of stone, a vague outline of what had once been.
The forest had overtaken it.
The trees were thick.
