Past
There is a little boy in the garden, white fairy foxglove petals caught in his muddy curls and blood clotted on his tongue.
A gash crevices the side of his scalp, matting hair down like he’s been swimming in sticky cherry syrup, and beside him on the ground lies a shovel.
The edge is slicked red. He doesn’t remember anything before this.
Before he was face down in the soil.
Before his head felt too heavy to hold.
Before agony was chewing through his body.
The world is a cracked-open glass globe, shattered edges cutting him each way he turns.
He can’t get up, can’t see through the streaks of vicious red slashing his vision and making his eyes roll to the sky.
This is what it is to be awake: pain that eats.
He is a hollowed-out gourd of a boy-shaped thing, pawing at the soil as he drags himself away.
He must get away. That’s all that matters.
Then two small hands wrap around his ankles.
The little boy screams, mind condensed into a rabid, animal thing, all teeth and terror as he snarls and thrashes, and he is at odds with the gentle calm of the garden, the trill of bluebirds and finches and the soft hush of the wind through the laurel hedgerows.
Stone walls woven with ivy and honeysuckle box them in, and everywhere green grows in slashes of furious life, the color so loud it hurts his ears. Something is wrong.
Or perhaps it is him who is the discordant note, his blood pooling in the dirt of a place that is meant to be lovely.
It doesn’t feel lovely.
The ground feels like it’s full of teeth.
He is dragged ruthlessly toward a shallow grave by a boy with hair of butter gold, his face dirty and tear-streaked. It is just the two of them out here. Though somewhere in the distance he hears the shout of “Laurie? Laurence.” As if this golden boy is not where he should be.
The little boy’s head is a gnarled, root-locked mess of pain and fear and nothing else, nothing else, as if everything he knew has bled out the gash in his temple.
Blood stuffs up his ear, his nose. He chokes, snot and tears racking his small chest, and he must look a pathetic creature as Laurie rolls him into the hole he dug.
The little boy curls in the hole as his screams turn into a thickened, wet slurry and slide sideways out his mouth.
Laurie is a smudge of gold in his periphery as he grabs the shovel and struggles to scoop soil. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I just—I wanted to play with you.”
The first scoop of dirt hits the little boy in the face and he cries out. He should stand, fight, claw out his enemy’s eyes, but he doesn’t know how to get his legs underneath himself.
Laurie is all scabbed knees and a runny nose, his hair fluffy as clouds and his skin sun-kissed by summer. He gives up with the shovel and kneels by the grave, breathless as he surveys the wretched tangle of the bloody little boy.
There is no guilt on his face.
He is as luminous as a fallen god.
“Sorry,” he whispers again, and shoves more dirt into the grave, his hands slicked to the elbows in blood. “I can’t let Grandfather see you.”
It’s too late. The voice booms from over the garden wall again, and Laurie jumps and casts a wide-eyed look of terror over his shoulder.
“Laurie! If I have to call you one more goddamn time—”
And then again,
“LAURENCE.”
It is an unforgiving voice that cracks like river stones slammed together. Footsteps crunch gravel, moving fast, and it seems they are about to be found, both of them, in this terrible game they play.
The little boy hauls air into his silt-filled lungs, his body loose and serpentine as he puts all his energy into struggling once more. He screams.
Laurie flops onto his stomach so he can reach into the shallow grave and pin the little boy down. He leans in so far their foreheads nearly touch.
Their eyes lock.
The fairy foxglove is all in the little boy’s mouth now, green tendrils framing his face and pulling at his bloody lips. Around him the earth has grown moist, the smell of rich loam suffocating as Laurie presses him down, down. Mud sucks at his spine and his skinny ankles tangle with old roots.
It feels as if he’s being pushed into a mouth, consumed.
He whimpers, a hand flailing uselessly. He is looking for something to hold on to. Something to save him. He wants to get out.
Old rusty hinges yawn, a gate opening. Quick footsteps crunch across the gravel.
“Answer me when I call for you. Where are you?”
But Laurie is focused only on the grave and he leans in even farther, his breath like sun-warmed strawberries and fresh-cut grass.
“No matter what happens,” Laurie whispers, blood freckling his round cheeks, “remember your name is Evander and you love me best.”
He is foolish to use love, as if a word like that can hold truth when someone else’s blood is in his mouth.
The little boy is full of decayed, windswept rage as he lunges, sinking his teeth into Laurie’s arm.
It isn’t a simple bite. It is ravaging and deep. It is thorns hooked under soft ligaments, it is veins ripping like wriggling red worms.
Tendons tear between the little boy’s too-sharp teeth.
Laurie is screaming and screaming.
A pleasant, warm buzz begins in the pit of Evander’s belly. He is mollified, he is sated. His jaw locks and wrist bone crunches and the tip of his tongue coils around a luscious, slippery tendril. All he thinks is how he didn’t want to be left alone and now he won’t be. Laurie can’t get away.
He is still thinking this when a tall shadow snatches up the shovel and looms over the grave. There is a growling shout, Laurie’s shrill cry, then the blotting out of the sun.
The shovel comes down, brutal and swift.