13
Another day in an endless line of them.
This crummy little life of ours.
Back when we bought our way onto the boat, and I watched the waters split, I was flooded with every emotion my body could possibly contain.
Before Serena burst my bubble, and told me she was pregnant, underneath all the despair and hurt and fear—there was a little flame of hope.
Hope.
In those few moments, just a handful of minutes, sitting at the front of the boat with Serena right next to me, images of our future flashed in my mind.
I blinked, and I saw possibilities.
Pretty stone and moss cottages on a little self-reliant homestead. Villas overlooking white-sand beaches. A modest penthouse in a bright city. A little shop by the sea. A life of breezy, leisurely travelling, drifting from country to country, living off a supply of money that never runs out.
Fantasies.
Delusions.
The reality is, I stock shelves at the general store. Literally, I do that now. Then when that’s done, I sort through the parcels for the post office storeroom.
A pinkie nail snaps off as I move boxes.
I don’t get manicures anymore, but the nail breaks over the skin, and it stings.
My mood is sour for the rest of the shift.
It’s a good thing I’m stuck out back for the bulk of it. For some reason, the customer-facing roles are an unofficial upgrade from storeroom work.
I don’t agree.
Customers agitate me a lot more than a snapped fingernail.
Walker pushes a small parcel across the workbench towards me.
“Check that out,” he says, and his face is pinched, but also twisting with a smirk.
I don’t need to wonder what he’s talking about.
The stink hits me before I can even touch the parcel.
“What is that?” I hiss.
I hide my nose and—with a pen—push it back towards him.
“Probably something dead.” Walker considers the address penned onto the label. “Those Appalachians, man. They order the weirdest shit.”
We all live close to the mountain ranges.
But the ones who live in the forests and the woods, away from the towns, are weird.
They come in to pick up their mail, their parcels, since nothing gets delivered that far out. And those are some krums that pebble my skin with their oozing creepiness—like they were born from rituals, from necromancy, and aren’t altogether real.
I eye over the parcel. “I’m not checking it.”
We’re supposed to.
Part of the job.
But I don’t know what’s in that box, and I am not keen on finding out.
Not with just a few minutes left on my shift.
Walker flashes me a smile. “Hey, if it’s bad, we can plant it in Danny’s car.”
I force a smile back.
But while it’s good to know I’m not the only one who hates Danny, the daytime manager, the smile doesn’t reach my eyes.
I don’t remember the last time I really felt anything, or had a genuine smile, not a performative one.
I don’t remember the last time I felt like I was living.
Walker makes jokes, laughs, smiles, for the last few minutes of my shift—then, as it always does when we’re on together, his face falls when my time is up.
He’s cute for a krum.
Cute for a small town.
But nothing like the handsomer faces back home.
‘Pretty for a villager,’ Grandmother Ethel once called me, and it must be so sick and twisted that I actually miss her at the reminder.
I do miss her.
What exactly I miss about Grandmother, I don’t know. I can’t pick out a single redeeming quality in her.
But I’ve been gone for a long time. Long enough for time to have caught up with Grandmother.
She might not be there anymore.
She might have passed on.
Nonna, too.
What if Nonna’s villa and Craven Cottage are empty now with only memories to haunt them, and the death rituals have been and gone, and I am all the way across the world, hidden in some town out of the way of civilisation?
It’s a thought that weighs me down.
And after my shift ends, and I should head straight to Ms Brown’s, that despair in me takes me to the phone booth.
I pull over, put the car in park, and switch off the engine.
I lean my temple on the car window, and my angle shifts to get a direct view through the open door to the scratched phone inside.
My fingers drum on the steering wheel.
My shoe taps on the floor.
My teeth bite down on the insides of my cheeks.
And I think of Mother.
The rain doesn’t fall today, there is no drizzle to wet the roads, but there is a stagnant dampness in the air.
An eternal humidity in this place.
It murks the plastic walls of the phone booth, makes it harder to see inside.
So I get out.
And I walk into the phone booth.
I stay in here a while.