Chapter 48 Grim
Outside didn’t seem to truly exist. Just me, the hut, and the small figure occupying the straw bed in the corner.
Every time I tried to leave the house, the hut’s lone doorway would take me straight back in instead of out.
It didn’t matter how the dark outline of the forest waited at the edge of the farm, visible through the door’s frame.
Nor did it matter that the light of the shining full moon beamed through the open shutters of the only window.
I knew that small sleeping figure, that sick child—that boy. But at the same time, I didn’t want to know him. Rather, I didn’t want to remember him…
It hurt too much to remember him.
So I walked out the door again, straight into the cold and starry night.
Except that night morphed back into the interior of my simple house with its low, raftered ceiling and dirt floor.
The boy slept under the wool-filled blanket made by his mother—my sister.
My late sister…
Damnit.
I didn’t want to remember her, either.
I didn’t want to feel. Any of this.
Turning on my heel, I rushed out the door again, as though speed could somehow break me through a hidden barrier, whatever invisible veil existed that kept returning me to this house, that room.
To hell…
My hell.
My efforts failed me like they had before. Like they undoubtedly would again.
But then that now-familiar sensation of dread crept over me, soaking into my skin before whittling its way between my ribs.
Memory. That’s right. I was in a memory. Stuck in a memory—and it was about to start. All over again.
I shook my head, tears burning in my eyes as I stared at that bed, and my nephew, whose breathing had turned unexpectedly shallow.
That afternoon, the boy, who had seen six winters with hardly a cough, had been fine.
He’d helped me out in the field with the crops, and for the first day in weeks, he hadn’t cried for his mother.
Finally, he’d started to adjust to being away from the city.
To being with me. A makeshift and ill-fitting parent, but the only scrap of family he had left.
Just as he was mine…
My throat closed up as I fought the draw of the memory, and I swallowed hard against my unshed tears, trying to force them back.
But then, like a drug-induced sleep, the memory took hold of me, overriding my awareness that I wasn’t really here, and that I hadn’t already relived this moment a thousand soul-shattering times already.