Speaker 1: I never thought i'd see half the town show up
to bury a man nobody actually liked. Rickie Helden wasn't
a monster or anything. He was one of those loud,
broad shouldered firemen who made every story about himself, the
kind of guy who'd tell you about a house fire.
He'd put out an at like it was Vietnam. Still,
he'd been part of the fabric of this place. And
in small towns, even the people you don't love feel
like pillars. But the moodas funeral wasn't grief. It was fear.
There were no tears. Instead, people watched on, whispering, glancing
over shoulders at shadows that weren't there. To the side,
Missus Holland kept repeating, it's earlier than last time. Two
older men stood behind me near the tree line, speaking
low as the pastor drunned on. It started again, twenty
seven years, like clockwork, thought we'd get more time. I
pretended not to hear. I grew up listening to this
kind of nonsense, stores about the black cycle, about the curse,
about however twenty seven years someone would die in a
way that didn't belong to the world. To me, it
was always just superstition layered over tragedy. Small towns loved patterns,
even if they had to invent them. But this time,
this time felt different because nobody had an explanation for
Howick burned to death inside an empty grain silo. There
wasn't an investigation, no state fire marshal. Nothing at all.
He got was a closed casket funeral and a quick
burial before any one outside town could ask questions, and
the silo itself. I drove past it and the way
to the service. The whole structure had been reduced to
a perfect black circle of ash on the ground, like
someone had dropped a giant branding iron on it. Rick
had been in the center, what was left of him anyway.
After the service, people lingered in clusters, talking like frightened cattle.
Then the whispering started. It's the vault, The vault's waking up.
That's when I knew I wouldn't sleep if I didn't
see the sight myself. I waited until sundown, until the
sheriff's car was gone and the road was empty, then
drove out to what was left of Hull and Siloh
the fields were quiet, their naturally still. The ash circle
fell wrong It didn't look shod in the way you'd expect,
more like the ground had melted. I crouched, brushing my
fingers across the surface. The concrete was glassy and smooth,
fused into a dark, rippled shape, and in the center,
where Rick had died, the scorch marks curved into an oval,
wide at the ends, narrow in the middle, jagged around
the edges, almost like teeth, a mouth an open one.
I stood slowly, feeling a cold bloom in my chest,
like recognition, though I didn't know why. I left. Before
my mind could make sense of what I'd seen that night,
I dreamt I was underground. I wasn't buried in dirt,
buried in bone and a coffin made of intolocking teeth,
and above me, something massive exhaled, something waiting and hungry.
I didn't go to work the next day. Every time
I closed my eyes, I saw the shape burned into
the silent floor, those jagged edges, that impossible symmetry, like
a fossil of something that had taken a bite out
of the world. So instead of clocking in at my
job at the hardware store, I drove to the town museum.
It was like an overgrown attic, cold dust, full of
things nobody wanted to throw away or remember. I told
the curator I needed to do some genealogy research. Our
archives were downstairs, She muttered, barely looking up. If anything
bites you, it's not our liability. Nice. The archive room
smelled like yellowing paper and mildew. Rows of metal, filing
cabinets containing stacks of old town ledgers and newspaper reels
older than any one alive in town. I started with
obituaries eighteen nineties, nineteen tens, nineteen thirties, nineteen fifties. A
pattern began to emerge before I even wanted to admit
what I saw. Every twenty seven years, the death can spiked,
an old man wiped out and a has fire past,
a found hand in his own church, rough as a
child drowning in a lake during a drout, just like
the stow was. Then I found the nineteen ninety eight folder.
It contained detailed cancel minutes, and they were terrifying. There
were references to selection committee and a recipient list. The
names were blacked out with heavying strokes, but the phrasing
was unmistakable. One entry rate consent acquired, the fault remained sealed.
What fault? What consent? I flipped page after page, hand
sweating until I found a single note, clipped it inside cover.
If the list isn'tcomplete note by the elders, no cycle
can begin without unanimous selection. That was the first moment
I felt something twist in my gut. Something had gone
wrong this year. I pulled an old town survey map,
spread it across the table and started comparing landmarks mentioned
in the minutes. A creeked, it dried up in the sixties,
the road was routed in the forties, an old settlement boundary.
Then I found it, a place marked only once in
tiny faded letters boldna. It was deep in the woods,
far beyond the main trails, so remote it wasn't on
modern GBS. A place nobody talked about, a place meant
to be forgotten and, judging by the council minutes, deliberately avoided.
I was stuffing the documents back into the folder when
a chart slipped out, A folded piece of thick, brittle
paper looked like it hadn't been touched in decades. On
it was a family tree of the original settlers of
the town were dozens of names and dozens of branches,
most of them were crossed out with red pencil, and
when I saw my own last name, my stomach dropped.
My family's branch wasn't crossed town. It was circled hard,
several times, deep enough to bring up the fibers of
the paper, and next to it written in the same
red pencil, next to seal the mouth. The room felt
suddenly smaller, the air grew colder, and the hairs on
my arms stood at attention, sending chills down my spine.
I stood there, staring at that circle, that message, feeling
like a hand had reached out of the past and
grabbed the back of my neck. Whatever was happening now,
my family hadn't just been a part of it. We
were at the center of it. There were only two
elders in town who had lived through the nineteen seventy
one cycle, and one of them didn't talk any more.
The other was Dolores Kint. She lived on a faded
yellow house on Burchelane, a kind of place that looked
like it should have caved in years ago, but by
miracle stayed standing. I'd seen her at the grocery store
sometimes pushing an empty cart, mumbling to herself. Some said
she had dementia, but I also heard she watched her
entire family die through a single October. I figured both
could be true. I knocked on her door, but there
was no answer. I was just about to leave when
a shadow moved behind the curtains and the locks clicked one, two,
three four. She opened the door, just wide enough for
one eye. You're the mok of boys, she said. I
didn't correct her. I wasn't sure if she meant my
father or me. Her living room smell like dust medicine
in old damp copper. She shuffled around and slippers, muttering tea,
tea jo I macked tea. When I told her I
had questions about the past, she stopped moving, just stopped.
Her back stiffened, and she turned her head in a
way that made my salivia taste like despair. When I swallowed,
what year is it? She asked, twenty twenty five? She
sucked in a sharp breath that soon she whispered. She
wandered to her recliner and sat down, hard, hands trembling.
I pulled the chair across from her. Dolores, I said quietly,
I need to ask about nineteen seventy one, about your family,
about the deaths. She didn't react until I said the
word walt mouth. Her eyes snapped to mine, clear as crystal,
like the fog lifted all at once. You shouldn't know
that name, she exclaimed. Only the chosen and the choosers
know that name. I found documents, I said, chancel notes
from nineteen ninety eight mentions of a selection committee. She
let out a shaky laugh. No one chooses any more,
she said, That's why it's angry. Then her voice dropped
to a rasp. It doesn't want a person, It wants
the choice. That's the fact I swallowed. What happens if
there is no choice? She leaned forward, cropping the edge
of her chair with white knuckled fingers. If the town
does not give, it takes, and it will keep taking
until the mouth is full. Her eyes suddenly darted to
the window, like she expected something to be peering in.
Then her expression changed when blank fog rolled back in.
She looked lost. What were we talking about? She murmured,
Do I know you? I stood to leave, but before
I could make a two steps, her hand shot out
and grab my wrist. Heart Her voice was clear again, sharp, urgent,
say it allowed her name with intend it listens. Then
like a switch flipped, her grip loosened, and she sank
back into the recliner, staring at the far wall. Her
mouth moved silently, like she was praying to something that
wasn't God. I left the house, trembling as I stepped
onto the walkway. The sound of screeching toward down the street,
then a horn fallowed by a sickening, metallic crack. About
fifty yards away, a car had slammed into a telephone pole.
The front end was crumpled like an aluminium can. Steam
billowed from the engine. But what shot me wasn't the crash.
It was the open driver's side doors, whening gently. No
one was inside. There wasn't a trail leading away, no
blood or body from the impact of Shiver crawled up
my spine. This wasn't the first death. This was the
beginning of something feeding. The map said it was called
Vault Math, but the land around it had no name,
no roads, just a thinning tree line off Rout nineteen
and the path that felt like it hadn't been walped
in decades apart where the road turned to gravel and
followed the rest on foot, shoulder and drew bush, slipping
down embankments, boots snagging on head and routes. The air
got heavy the deeper I when eventually I found the fence,
or what was left of a rotting would post space
and even eight around the clearing, warp of crumbling bobbed
wire and rusted iron nails, half driven in half bend upward.
Fhader signs dangled by one hinge words long gum but
symbol still visible. Circles, spirals are muff full of triangles.
Latin esched into the boards, almost browned in none eligium
was carnum, carnum elegant us. We do not choose the flesh,
the flesh chooses us. It wasn't just creepy. It felt deliberate,
like a warning whispered by dead hands. I stepped over
the boundary. The trees stopped, all life absent. The soil
turned ashen. The center of the clearing was perfectly flat,
ringed with pale stones half sunk into the earth, and
in the middle was a hole. At first glance I
thought it was a well, but un closer inspection, it
was a smooth vehicle shaft wide enough to drop a
body into without folding it. The inside was black, no
bottom in sight, and around the rim the stone had
been carved in a tight viral grooves that coved down
would like something had dragged claws around the edge a
thousand times, just clean dressed stone, and the faint hummer pressure,
like the air was breeding in an air. I picked
up a pebble, held it for a second, then dropped
it in nothing. No click or bounced, just gone light.
The earth swallowed it before it hit the bottom. Nearer
the lip of the shaft. Embedded in the ground was
a slab of metal iron gon orange with age, bolted
down with thick rivets. Names asched across the surface in
uneven hand karv rows, dozens of them. Mira my fingers
across the grooves, reading alive. Many I didn't recognize. Then
near the bottom one I did wal to Mokroff, my
f father, the last name and the list. My breath
caught in my throat. He never mentioned this place, never
said a word, but somehow he was part of it,
in you. I left the clearing as fast as I
could without run in like turning my back on the
hole too quickly might give it permission to reach for me.
The sun was starting to set by the time I
got home. I opened the door to my trailer and
that he was sitting in my kitchen, no coll or worning,
just there. His eyes were sunken, shirt still half buttoned,
knees jittering as foss came out, flat and shaking. You
shouldn't have gone there. I hadn't seen him in months.
We weren't estranged exactly. We just moved around each other
like planets on a different door. But he's only ever
showed up when something has gone on, and something had
come very, very wrong. He looked older than I remembered, drained.
His shirt was umbuddoned and crooked, hand shaking, eyes bludge
up with tiredness, like he'd been waiting for something. Sit down,
he said, I did, because the tone wasn't optional. He
lowered himself into the chair, crossed from me, elbows on
his knees, breathing slow and heavy, like he had to
convince his lungs to keep working. I know what you've
been looking into, he said. The archaves Dolores kind the vault.
Hearing him say at lad felt like I swatter poured
down my spine. Dad, What is it? What's in the vault?
He looked away, Joe clenching. Then he said the words
that would ruin everything I thought I knew about this place.
The town isn't cursed. It made a deal. He rubbed
his face with both hands. Back in eighteen ninety, he said,
the founder struck a pack with whichever lies under the ground.
They called at the mouth, the deep, the listener. It
doesn't matter what name ye use. He swallowed. However, we
promised it a life every twenty seven years, just one
chosen willingly through the vote, and in return it left
the rest of us alone. Something horrible was happening to
the settler, something so horrendous it warrant even recorded. The
deal was the only way to survive. My stomach twisted.
You're telling me this town has been sacrificing people. He
didn't flinch. Willingly, as always with could sent always some
one who accepted it a quiet death, a clean one,
and the vault staate silled. I must have made a face,
because he added, you think they wanted to make a deal,
that they didn't try leaving He shook his head slowly
people did leave. In the early years, whole farmers packed
up wagons and tried to off on. It didn't matter
wherever they went, something followed. Things would start to happen.
Their crops were drop, the ground would go dry, children
would get sick. And then he held up one trembling finger.
One death always won. Something final like the mouth needed
to remind them you can't cheat hunger, you can only
feed it. He leaned back or tight. That's why they
settled at in eighteen ninety, not to keep people in,
but to keep something from following them out. I shot
to my feet in shock. I know what it sounds like,
he snapped. I know, but he went here for the
years when the vote didn't happen, when people doubted, when
they resisted, His eyes had gone distant. Those years were hell.
I paced the room, trying to process it all. So
what happened this time? I demanded? Why did the fireman die?
Why are people disappearing? What changed? My dad leaned back
and stared at the ceiling as if the answer was
written there. This year, he said quietly. Nobody could agree.
I started moving. The council argued for months. Half the
Elters died off the younger generation doesn't believe. They think
it's all folk tales. He let out a bit of luff.
Turns out belief doesn't matter, responsibility does there softly there
was no vote, no selection, no name of it. I
felt my mouth go dry. So the fireman was taken.
Dad said, but it doesn't count. It wasn't a will
and offering. He leaned forward, eyes burning. It as to
be chosen, not just to death. The words sunk into
me like its because suddenly the pattern made sense. The
random vanishing is the crash, the way the effelt charged
and wrong, that act have been broken. The vault was hungry,
and there was no offering to stop it. I sat
back down slowly. He watched me something unreadable in his gaze. Okay,
I whispered, So what now? If the sacrifice was made,
what does the vault do? For a long moment, he
didn't speak. Then he inhaled, sharply like the next part
heard to say, then it's up to the collector. I frowned,
What does that mean? He didn't let me finish? He
looked at me with an expression I had never seen
on his face before, terror, grief, in something like an
apology The collector isn't a person, he said, It's a
roll passed down a blood line every generation has won.
His voice cracked and at the time won't choose the
sacrifice the elector must. A cold pressure settled behind my ribs. No,
I said, da, No, you're not saying. He closed his eyes,
and then he said it, voiced barely above a whisper,
the words I didn't want to hear, it's you. After
my father left, I didn't sleep. I sat at the
kitchen table thinking about the name etched into that rusted
eyron plate, Walter Mocroft, my father at the previous collector
now passed on to me. And I couldn't stop thinking
about the way he'd looked at me, like I was
something he was sorry for, not something he loved. I
knew he hadn't told me everything, not even close. So
I broke into the lot foot locker he kept under
the guest bed. He always kept a boltage out, like
he thought someone would try to steal his old hunting gear.
But I knew the combination, same one he used for
everything inside, not weapons or chuwols, just journals, stacks of them,
whether worked in yellowing page After page in my father's tight,
careful handwriting. Most of it was nonsense at first, whether reports,
council meeting notes, obituaries with names under lined encircled. He'd
been tracking every cycle since I was born. But then
the language changed. He stopped writing like a man and
started writing like a witness. One page read it speaks
in symbols, now dreams. The hum in the trees isn't
the wind. It's waiting for its name to be spoken. Another.
When the collector is called, the chosen cannot offer themselves.
The collector must choose. This is the pact, the old way,
not by death by right. The words collector and vault
mouth appeared again and again, sometimes capitalized, sometimes underlined and red,
and next to them crude diagrams of the vault, the shaft,
the spiral, the concentric rings of trees around it, marked
with strange glyffs. Some look like runes, others like teeth.
One diagram showed a person standing at the edge of
the vault with errors pointing inward, as if their presence activated.
Something opened. Something then came a section I hadn't expected.
Returning back to the style of a journal, detailing date
by day, beats at a tense time in the town.
It spoke of apocalyptic symptoms, the lake changing color, the
sky casting strange hues, and the wildlife losing their minds.
People disappeared and families were torn apart, all because Walter,
my father, could not choose. It mimicked the current time,
the council not choosing, and the decision falling to the collector,
an impossible choice of life and death. One to die
for many to live. That night, the vault came to
me again in dreams, but this time I wasn't inside it.
I wasn't falling. I was standing above it, at the edge,
looking out. A crowd of people, kneeling, hands gasped, heads bowed,
whispering something I couldn't hear, and I was speaking. My
mouth moved, my voice was not my own, and the
vault opened. It started with the birds. Every morning, my
poor trailing used to be dotted with crows, the smart,
spiteful rascals that lined everywhere in the town like little
black jodges. Then one morning they were all just gone.
That same day, a field of cows in the western
of town was found standing in perfect formation, heads lowered
toward the ground. A moving, every single one of them, dead,
bloodless organs, folded inside out like paper crafts. Two nights later,
I heard something boil, but not from the kitchen, from outside.
I looked out and saw it was the lake. An
entire body of water, rolling like a pot left on
tul wigs Pond, the old reservoir where we used to
swim when we were kids, steamed for ten hours straight.
The water turned thick and red fish floated to the surface,
split open. The air changed after that, smelled rawn, sweet,
but spoiled, like wadded peaches or burnt heath. Something was opening,
and I wasn't the only one who noticed. The few
remained in town elders, the one who still remembered how
this thing worked. Cold Seeker Vote. They held it in
the old stone house outside Mill Creek, the kind of
place built with no insulation and too many locks. Only
six of them showed up. They tried to vote, They
tried to choose a name, but the vault didn't care
any more. It had waited, been ignored, denied its due.
Now it wanted me, not as a meal, as a mouthpiecet.
I didn't hit a second hand. One of the elders
I retired judge named Halvesa came to my door at dawn.
His eyes were bloodshot, his knuckles scraped, like he'd punched
something harder than he expected. He sat on my port's wing,
hands trembling as he lit a cigarette. We failed it,
he said. I didn't speak here the last stop, you understand,
I just stared. He flicked ash on to the ground.
The collector exists for a reason in case of breakdown Tan,
when the people can't choose the blood mass. You're not
a sacrifice. You're the priest to speak a name with intent.
That's all you have to do. If you need coggestions,
I can. I told him to get off my property,
told him I wasn't killing anyone for a town too
cowardly to face its own history. You're offering that's different.
I slammed the door, but the ground kept humming. That night,
it got worse. The sky turned the color of ole bruises.
The cloud spiraled low and fast, like water being sucked
down a drain. My neighbor's trees, blood sap that smelt
like iron. Dogs stopped barking, In fact, dogs stopped moving.
A low bell began to ring from nowhere, no visible source,
just there, vibrating through the soles of your feet. Something
was uncoiling. The vault wasn't sealed any more, not fully.
At three point twenty one am, my phone lit up
with a message from an unknown number, just one line shoes.
By morning, the lawer's Kim was dead. She had been
found in a bed, peaceful, no winds, no trauma, but
her face was smiling, hands folded like kinnechurch pew, and
between her palms a yellowing card, handridden, addressed to me
name the Chosen. I knew where they kept the records.
It wasn't a secret it The room was beneath the
old ten Hall, not in the modern wing, but in
the original limestone foundation, with a smell of meldy soaked
into your tom and the light was like and insect
was trapped behind your eyes. It was still unlocked. They
hadn't even tried to hide it. Maybe they wanted me
to find it. The Selection Ledger was a thick cloth
bound book that looked like it belonged in a court
house or a church, heavy freight, smelling of dust and
smoke and human oil inside, names page after page, each
androten in the concursor sundated over a century ago. I
flaked forward to the most recent year, this year. The
first few pages were normal, just names, birthdays, occupations, handrid
and summaries of each candidate's commune, city standing, financial status,
and family size. Then I started seeing the red circles
suggestions for choice, a short list for them to vote on.
Alongside them were stirring judgments marked with phrases like approaching
end of life or minimal surviving kin or historically low
civic contribution. And then added on were notes not from
the elders. No, their handwriting was firmer, direct, but younger handwriting,
softer language directional. Even Marling Gailloud eighty four, she still
tutors at the library. Her great granddaughter just got accepted
to college. She brings hope to the family. This would
destroy them. Thomas Harvey fifty eight, disabled, It still teachers
would working mentor's trouble kids as PTSD wouldn't be ethical.
Alicia Norris forty one chronic illness, started the Grief Circle
after the nineteen ninety eight death. Still manages the town
website would send the rum message to others with chronic conditions.
George Amlin, seventy one. Ex convict, he served as Time
runs the food pantry. His death would confirm every stereotype
the town's trying to grow past. Every single name was
paired with the counterpoint. Every sacrifice was dismantled by empathy.
The deeper I read, the angrier I felt, not at them,
but how familiar it was, How easy it is to
rationalize in action when action feels monstrous. This was in corruption,
It was blood lust, it was compassion. They had tried
to be better, but better didn't stop the vault from waking.
Better didn't boil the lake. Better didn't spare Dolores. Or
was it ignorance? A new wave of leaders who wrote
off tradition as ignorance, something to move past. The final
page wasn't even finished, just a handful of names with
writing scratched through, like someone had grown furious and thrown
the pen across the room in a margin, one line
of near handwriting, there are no perfect deaths, another in pencil.
Then maybe we stopped pretending it's wif choosing, and under
that scrolled in dark pen pressure piercing through the paper.
Then we died together. I closed the book, the vault
was right. This wasn't a sacrifice any more. It was
a failure. That night, I dreamed of the spiral again,
only this time I descended. No ladder, no rope, no fording.
I just fell gently as a fee. Air below me
had turned to water. The stone walls pulled away as
I went, becoming rips than roots, then rows of open mass,
all breeding together in rhythm. And at the bottom, where
Sancha vanished into nothing, there was light, soft, living, like
a heart beat underskin. I didn't hear anything, but I
felt it behind my eyes and my gums, in the
mirrow of every bone. The town agreed to the cost,
it said. I turned, and around me were reflections, other towns,
other timelines. Each one was different, and in all of
them the vault had gone unceealed. One showed spirals of
fire coiling up into the sky, turning birds inside out
in flight. Another at a town square full of kneeling people,
mouths sown shut with golden thread, trees grown backwards through
their skulls. In one, the vault was gone, not sealed,
but absorbed, as if it had eaten the line around
it and kept growing. They were all worse than anything
I could imagine, and every one of them had something
in common. No choice was me. I woke up with
my pelisse hooked and sweat and my tongue heavy in
my mouth, like it had been speaking without me. Despite
all I had seen and what I could call more
a vision than a dream, I still couldn't pick one name.
I didn't call a meeting, but they came anyway. One
by one, the elders filed into my living room. Some
look resigned, some looked angry, some looked like they hadn't
slept in days. I'm behind them. The younger council members
slunk him, with a stink of guilt on their faces.
No greetings, a small talk, just expectation. Judge Vressor was
the first to speak. It has to be now, he said,
We've run out of time. Another miller ran her hand
through her hair, shaking. You've studded the list, You've seen
the sky. Ye know what happens if we don't. My
throat hadn't. I'm not choosing, I said, not one, not
any of them. A long silence. Then something changed in
the room. The faces of the younger members, those who
had written all the gentle notes in the margins all
the reasons why each circled name shouldn't be chosen shifted,
the sympthy drained, the humanity dimmed. A man named Devon
stepped forward, jabbing a finger at the ledger on my
coffee table. Just pick someone from the marked list, he snapped.
Any one. Marlene is old, Norris is sick, our is
basically retired. It doesn't matter, Just choose. These were the
same people who'd written She's a pillar of her family.
He volunteers more than anyone. She gives hope to the community.
Now they spoke like accountant's balancing a ledger. It's between
them or us, Devon said, don't act like it's complicated.
Something inside me curdled. I shoved the ledger away, sending
its getting across the floor. If you want a name
so bad, I said, through my teeth, pick one of yourselves.
We can't Bessa whispered. It won't listen to us any more.
It only listens to the collector. Well, then you're all screwed,
I said, because I'm not playing priest for a monster.
The idea of getting blood on my hands to save
these people, ready to condemn another with a responsibility, I
didn't ask for was too much. The room went dead quiet.
Everyone stared at me like I had just set the
house on fire. But nobody said a thane. Nobody argued
or moved. They just stood there, waiting, hoping fear would
make me fold. And then the door exploded inward. My
father storned him with the force of a man who
had been running for miles as wide, hair slicked with sweat.
His voice hit the room before he did. You stupid boy,
he roared. You think this is a joke. You think
he get to refuse. I thought he was just going
to yell, maybe should me, maybe try to scare me
into it. I did not think he would tackle me
to the floor. My head hit the hard wood so
hard starsburst behind my eyes. Before I could breathe, his
hands were on my collar, dragging me up and slamming
me back down again. Say a name, he barked, Just
say the God I name. At first I thought he
was bluffing, losing control and panic. But the weight of
my chest didn't lift and his fists didn't stop. My
vision blurred white At the edges mighty threttled with each blow.
The high the alder stood frozen, not intervening, not helping,
watching things play out, not knowing which side to take.
Some horrified, some relieved, watching action. They must have dreamt
a doing, but didn't have the guts. My father lean close,
breath hot on my cheek. You're supposed to keep it sealed.
You're supposed to be better than this, he snarled. I
had to do this too, Just do it another blow.
My skull screamed, No wonder your mother left, No wonder
I left. You were always weak, always a disappointment, Just
like now. He was trying to scare me any more.
He was trying to kill me. My ears ran, the
blood filled the back of my throat. The world tilted
sideways ways. I felt myself slipping, consciousness, lipping, dissolving, like
the vault was already tugging at me. And in my delirium,
one thought surfaced. I didn't have to choose from the lists.
I could choose the one trying to kill me. My
lips moved. Before I fully realized what I was saying,
I whispered my father's name, barely audible, pracked, broken but true.
The second the consonants left my mouth, the weight vanished. Done.
My father was sprawled over me anymore, softest, like a
heart attack or stroke. He wasn't in the room, he
wasn't anywhere. A moment ago, he was beating me into
the floor. Now there was only air in silence. A
few of the elders gasped, One crossed himself. Another woman
looked away, trembling. No one said a word, because they
knew what I had done, and worse, they knew what
it meant. The room emptied in minutes. No goodbyes, no reprimands,
no condolences, just fear. They fled like they expected the
house to collapse. The second they crossed the threshold. I
was left lying on the floor, staring at the ceiling,
my heart beat hammering in my teeth. Eventually I stood,
walked to the window. The sky was clearing, the clouds unraveling,
colors returning, the hum in the earth finally quiet. It
was over, Just like that. My father was the sacrifice.
The town was safe for now. The town healed fast.
That was the strangest part in the weeks I followed.
Life returned to rhythm, not the same rhythm maybe, but
something close enough to pass for normal. The sky lost
its bruised hue, the trees stopped leaning in, the power
line stopped whispering. People got up and went to work.
The butcher reopened, The school held a BIG's ale. The
lake was still red, but no one talked about that.
The selection committee resumed their meetings quieter, now, fewer members
and fewer words spoken. When they left those rooms. Once
I used to see them as elders, guardians, wise men
and women holding ancient truths. Now they looked like exhausted survivors,
scared of what might come next. I never went back
to their meetings. They never asked me to. But there
was one thing left to do. One door I hadn't opened.
My father's house sat just off the main square, topped
between two identical ranch style homes. I driven past it
a hundred times without thinking. I don't know what I expected,
but when I stepped inside, it was exactly what I'd feared.
Spas for anigh, a sink full of old dishes, frozen
dinners stacked like brooks in the freezer, or klino with
an ass crow too deep to ron jew facing a
TV tune permanently to the sports channel. It was a
life half lived, lonely, eat mechanical gray. I stood in
that room for a long time. It smelt like dust, coffee,
and a man who didn't know what to do with silence.
And then I saw it, A folded piece of paper
sitting on the coffee table. My name was written on
the front of my father's blocky, stubborn handwriting. I opened it.
If you're reading this, then I went through with it.
I'm sorry you had to see it. Sorry you had
to be a part of it. I didn't want that
for you, not ever. That's why I left. But I
had to make sure you dear it. I couldn't risk
you freezing up the way the others did. I know you,
I raise you. You were always the good one. Even
when you were little. You gave away your Halloween candy
to the kids who were too scared to trick or treat.
You used to cry when you saw rokil That's the
kind of heart you have, it honest kind. But a
heart like that won't save this town. It never has.
I said things I didn't mean, did things I never
wanted to do. You have to know that I needed
to make myself into the enemy. I needed to give
you some one worth condemning. If you hated me enough
to speak my name with weight, then you'd survive. I'm
the town would too. That was always the deal. One
name spoken with intent. That's how the mouth knows offering
is real. It had to be me. I was already
half for gun anyway. I've been watching the sky for
years now. I could feel it, the teeth behind the clouds,
the pressure in my bones. It was coming. I knew
were going to be the one A turn to, so
I gave you something to aim at me. I'm proud
of you, not because ye did what I wanted, but
because even after everything, I think you hesitated. Don't let
this town break you. You're not like the rest of them.
Keep being the kind one, even if it hurts all
My love Dad. I sat down in his chair. It
didn't feel right, didn't fit me, but I sat there anyway,
and I cried harder than I had in yours. Not
because he was gone or because of what he did,
but because I understood, and I hated that I understood