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Repose, conclusion
2003-12-13 at 11:57 p.m.

fiction by Indrid Cold

Prologue/Part 1./Part 2.

Repose, conclusion.

Mile 3.

There were, if she was to be finally honest with herself, many rehearsals before Bryan. Too many. To the point where she truly lost all feeling about the act. She knew that her father's raping her had already driven a huge nail in that coffin-taking all she could open her legs for into her bed had fairly riveted the thing shut and she was suffocating by the time the moment and the man were right.

The storm did it.


It was dull yellow day, hot, the air stuck to her cling wrap.

She'd run that morning earlier than usual-to her the heavy air was a challenge to be bested, and there was something thrilling in pushing her limits that way.

She came dashing up the front walk to Bryan sitting on the front porch.

"Hey..." she said, trying to not sound shocked. He never came over to her house.

"Hey." she'd never heard this tone in his voice before. And he wasn't looking at her.

"What's up?" she felt a little silly, standing on the porch in her running clothes, soaked in sweat, peering at his face, looking for some sign of what was wrong.

He was silent.

She sat beside him, both of them heedless of her sweating, trying to pry words out of him with her gaze.

"Bryan?"

"I talked to Billy Southerland last night."

That was almost all he had to say. She didn't know he even knew Billy. They went to different schools. She'd met Billy at a track meet. He'd given her a ride home that ended up a ride on his lap in the driveway. Billy had gone away happy and exhausted.

"How-" she began, but Bryan looked up. There was a knife-edge in his eyes that cut her off. She'd never seen it before.

"Scouting." he bit off the word. "We were old scouting buddies. Saw him at the gameroom at the mall. Got to talking. He was wearing a track team jacket for Hall high."

It was her turn to not look at him.

"So inevitably, somehow, you came up."

"And he...told you." it came out as a whisper.

"Yeah. He told me he fucked you. After you'd met him about three hours before."

The silence that fell was the heaviest she'd ever known. Worse even than the silence that seemed to fall before her father entered her room sometimes, hard as that was to imagine.

She took Bryan's hand in hers.

Mile 2.

Amelia reached the turn onto Bronson Parkway. This was a road she'd run often as a teen. She knew every lump in the pavement, knew every landmark...though now some of them had changed, and it jarred her. A men's discount clothing store turned into a chinese restaurant. A game room where she and Bryan had wasted hours and hundreds of dollars in quarters-just a parking lot.

The sky was a flat dun color, and the wind smelled of rain. That would be okay with her.


She took Bryan into her with a sigh, and never forgot that she heard the rain begin to fall outside as they began to make love.

At first he was utterly resistant, but she knew how to break that down, and did so. As he began to thrust he was hesitant, as if afraid he'd hurt her.

She encouraged him though, sighing heavily, beginning to whisper to him, digging her heels into the cheeks of his ass.

Soon he was thrusting rapidly, as hard as she'd ever felt anyone do. She dimly knew some anger was in his urgency, but there was also pent up need, a good 4 years worth.

She was surprised by herself as well-sex had become less interesting and engaging to her than switching channels on the TV. Something you did idly, with little thought. A reflex. Dad was to thank for that. But this was Bryan...and she felt something. It was rising in her chest. It seemed to mirror a vibrating, heated sensation in her solar plexus, an exquisite white hot sensation that flowed from where he pushed himself into her-Bryan who had first called himself to her attention with his stupid rock through the window, Bryan riding bicycles, Bryan playing chess, Bryan with his ungainly height and silly laugh, his stupid comments blurted at the wrong times-she felt this, dear God, she felt-and something sang through her at that moment...something she'd never felt-at least not like this. She shook uncontrollably, bucking against him, guttural cries coming from low in her throat-then he called out, too, and thrust, and held, his ass jerking...coming deep inside her, no condom, no birth control in her system.

He collapsed against her. Little temblors rattled up and down the length of her body. She played with his hair.

As the storm quickened outside, they both began, softly, to cry.

Her father came home drunk that night, two hours after Bryan had reluctantly left, and raped her for the first time in two months.

Mile 1.

As an athlete she rarely had her period. So she didn't notice. Until her running shorts fit...wrong.

Her appetite changed, too. She was ravenous much of the time, where she'd been fussed at by her track coach, a black lesbian with a grandmotherly demeanor named Miss Chalifont, for not eating nearly enough to fuel a long-distance runner before.

She began to have fits of emotion. Her father made an overture one night that was more gentle than usual, and she'd collapsed in hysterics. He'd eventually left the house, and not returned until late the next day.

She kept putting Bryan off.

Soon she began to buy clothes that were a bit larger than usual.

The day she took the test, and an extra pink line showed in a window on a little stick where one should never show for a girl her age, living her life, she sat in a hot bath until it became a cold one, staring at her Dad's package of razors.

She kept imagining the water turning rose and then crimson and the sting that would subside to a dull, safe drowsiness before everything faded away and she sank beneath the surface.

She could not do it.

When the thing finally came, she was only barely showing. She wondered later if it had been because of her tight stomach muscles, or just genetics. She knew the mewling little thing that slid out of her in the shower stall in her Dad's bathroom, followed by a remarkable amount of blood and fluid, seemed too small to be a normal newborn-

Home.

It was spitting rain.

Three-oh-four Metzger. A once beautiful Cape Cod style home, once owned by a leading light of talk radio in their city-Amelia's father.

Now owned, since she'd turned 18, by Amelia.

But what she owned was the skeleton of the house she'd grown up in.

She stood on the sidewalk at the end of the cement walkway that led to the front door. She owned a half-acre of high grass, a burned-out hulk of a Cape Cod, a few beautiful trees in the back, sorely in need of trimming, a greenhouse to the side that had gone completely wild. Every glass panel in the side facing the street grown out.

Amelia stood sweating as the rain fell harder.


She killed it.

She was sure it would have died anyway, later. It couldn't make the lusty sound she'd heard newborns were supposed to make-just this horrible, strangled mewling.

She cut the ropy, red and pink umbilicus with some shears she found in her Father's bureau drawer. Wrapping the remainder that pushed itself out of the little thing's belly with a towel, she picked it up and closing her eyes dashed it against the bathroom wall.

Once.

Twice.

Three times.

She dropped it. And sat down in the horrid mess that seemed to have poured out of her body, staring.

Always preserving herself, Amelia snapped out of the spell soon. She wrapped the thing in the towel she'd used to secure her grip on the umbilicus. She sat it with an incongruous gentleness in the basin and set about cleaning up the bathroom. Afterwards the smell of bleach and windex made her sick for a very long time. Seth had asked about it and she never even responded.

She was done after sundown. Though she felt woozy there was more to be done. Her father would be home in at least an hour.


Seth was panicking. Amelia hated that half acre, that burned out house.

It was odd to him that she'd made little effort to sell the land since it became hers legally-as it was it didn't help her at all. No house to rent, and even fees to pay to have someone cut the grass once in a while. Her grandmother would call sometimes from California and encourage her to do something about it, but Amelia would fob her off and change the subject.

Seth didn't know why, but the fact that Amelia had only left him a note stating she was "Going Home" was profoundly disturbing. Every instinct he had told him it was bad.

She never talked about her childhood, certainly not about her Dad. Seth would catch slips in conversations sometimes that spoke volumes-but he had not yet broached the subject. He figured he would have to before they got married.

He felt too her choice of major had something to do with her life before they had met-math was such a clean, perfect subject. He could tell she loved it. It was not a subject that dealt with emotion, in his view.

Seth had his shoes on when he realized he had no idea, exactly, where the house and land his live-in girlfriend actually owned was. He knew it was a few miles south of the city. A few minutes drive. Or an hour and a half or so to run.

Officer Studer was just pulling onto the street, looking forward to the end of his shift and a decent day's sleep, when the pretty runner's boyfriend stopped him.

"Oh shit," he muttered. The guy was big and mean looking-Studer had noticed him before and wondered at the pairing. The gorgeous, long-legged girl who chatted with him sometimes in such an unaffected way, and this brutish looking guy with the big shoulders and thick legs.

"Officer-I don't know if I have problem or not, but I'm worried..."

And Seth began to tell him.


Beneath the silver poplar, her favorite tree in the back yard.

She lay the bundle on the wet grass and hunted around for the spade.

Dad's anal-retentiveness had made it easy-all the gardening tools kept on pegs attached to the wall the greenhouse shared with the main house.

She was a strong girl. Even feeling woozy, vertiginous, she managed to dig a hole. It was perfectly situated between two protruding roots. Their runners were easy to hack through, and she made the hole about 2 feet deep.

Rain. By the time she lowered the bloody damp bundle into the ground the rain had begun.

For a long time she stood in the dark, carefully tamping the sod down over the thing that had slipped out of her in her father's shower stall. Long after it needed any more tamping.

She was still standing there, soaked, wearing only her houserobe, when her father's headlights slashed the front of the house.


"Listen, Seth-" Officer Studer was firm, "I'm sorry-but I saw her heading off on her run. She wasn't carrying anything unusual, looked like a normal run. I can't do anything based on a vague little note she left you, man."

Studer had to hand it to the guy. He looked a lot more intimidating than he was. The person he was speaking with seemed a lot more sensitive than he looked.

Seth looked almost as if he was going to stamp his foot. "Twenty-four hours?"

Studer nodded. "I'm afraid so, man. Just like in the movies. We can't really justify helping you until then."

Seth muttered "Thanks." and turned away.

Studer pulled away slowly. He hoped the pretty girl was okay. He liked talking with her. It was probably just him, but she even seemed to put off a 'vibe.'

He glanced at the boyfriend, Seth, in the rearview mirror. He stood on the sidewalk, his head down. Studer wondered if he was crying.


She felt her father's arms around her.

"What?"

"Amelia, what the hell are you doing?"

He sounded unnerved. She smiled.

"Just planting."

"What?"

She passed out.

She woke on the sofa. Her father was standing over her, staring. His eyes were flat as always, but there was a different vibe. "Amelia, what were you digging for?"

"Mmmm...baby."

There was a long silence. Idly, as if removed from it all, she noticed the shushing sound of the rain outside. It was a lovely, comforting sound.

"Who are you calling baby?" he asked. Something she'd noticed long ago, when she was still 13, was that her father preferred they behave like father and daughter at all times except when he was fucking her.

"Buried...baby."

She held his gaze then.

She watched his handsome face crack. Her father, always so stony, so arrogant. Something odd happened. When she read up on his kind of personality later in life she understood that her father had lacked something, but he had not been a psychopath. That explained what he did next, because at the time he surprised her. He began to weep.

"You had-you mean?"

She only nodded.

He collapsed to his knees beside her, tears streaming down his face. "Where-" his voice broke-"where I found you?"

"Yes." it came out as an airy whisper.

Something else crowded in over the grief and he rose. She was sure in that moment that he would beat her. He'd never done that, but what he had done was bad enough-why not just add that now?

He turned. And ran.


Twenty-four hours. Seth felt like a fool. He didn't even know where this property was. He didn't know where to start. It was raining now, and he headed back up to their apartment.

The next logical thing to do was call her grandmother on the west coast.

He began hunting for the number.


She found him on his knees in the grass. Her father. The face on the side of buses. The face of talk radio in that town. Arch conservative with a heart.

He was down to his dress shirt. He was covered in mud. He probably had gone to find the spade, and not seeing it in the precise place he was accustomed to, just run outside to do whatever he had to.

She never knew what impulse drove him. What he thought he was doing. Why.

She found the spade in the grass where she'd dropped it.

She was a tall, strong girl. Weakened by giving birth earlier that day, she wasn't sure she could do it, but as she raised the spade over her head something as elemental as the storm that was beating down on them at that moment seemed to pulse up her spine and into her arms. It was as if she'd had this reflex in her all her life.

As she swung it, a huge overhead stroke toward her Father's head, he looked at her. She watched the edge of the spade slice through his chiselled cheeks, his famous mouth. Watched his body stiffen. She jerked the tool away from him and swung again, and this blow took out an open, staring eye.

She swung again, this time the flat of the spade, and his face was pressed into the mud.

She swung again, and again, and again.


The final thing, the hardest thing physically, was dragging her father inside. It took over an hour. Things were coming out of his head. Eventually she made it into the mudroom. The rest was easy-placing the spade in a place that made sense, and setting the fire.

The hard part was Bryan.

He opened the door looking scared, then when he realized it was her, pissed.

"What the fuck? You don't talk to me for what seems like months, then-"

"Please," she gasped. She felt dizzier than ever, and sick to her stomach. "Please, I need your help. House is burning..."

That got his attention.


How could that tree have grown so much taller in such a short time?

Amelia stood beneath the silver poplar. The rain seemed to be singing down through the leaves. They showed their silver sides to the wind.

Amelia sighed. The grass was very high in the back yard. She toed around a little till she found the little lump she recognized as the resting place for the thing.

"Child." she said aloud to herself.

The dream had been her signpost. Her leading. It told her there were times to reap. She hadn't recognized the hymn sung by the veiled people, but she had awakened knowing it was about home.

Going home. Time to laugh. Time to die. Time live. Time to die.

Red sky at night.

Red sky this morning.

There was even a heavy storm unloading over her now, making the poplar sing it's hushed lullaby. To her and the thing-child-nestled between it's roots.

She looked at the lowest limb for a long time. This run had been longer than her usual. She wasn't sure if she could do it.

After several runs at it, she caught the branch. Feet scrambling against the slick bark she hoisted herself up, feeling a little sense of victory. In spite of the rain and slick white bark, she had caught the branch, made a foothold. Now she could climb.


Bryan helped. He called the fire and police. He lied to his mother, getting himself in serious trouble. Telling his mom the most ironic of lies for a teenage boy-that yes, he did have a girl in his room after curfew, and they were doing that.

Maybe she shouldn't have come to him, but she didn't know what else to do.

After the police questioned her and seemed satisfied that she'd been at Bryan's when the murder and arson occurred, she fell asleep in the guest room.

She slept for 14 hours.

There was no in-depth investigation that she knew of, in spite of her father's public stature. It was as if they'd chalked it up to one of those things her Dad himself had always railed about-the criminal element infecting everything at some point, because society was too damned soft on crime.

She laid out of running for the rest of the year and went into counselling. Her grandmother came from California for the following 9 months after the fire and was her support, along with Bryan, through finishing school.

Dad had left her cared for, ironically-insurance as well as money in the bank. Until Amelia's 18th birthday her Grandmother was the trustee. Then when it came to Amelia she did tend to handle it wisely, not even buying a car when she entered college.

It was strange, and Amelia was grateful, how things seemed to smooth out for a while.

Until she told Bryan.

They'd made love, her first time in 4 months. It felt so good to touch him again. She wondered what the hell she had been thinking, shutting him out during the pregnancy. He was so kind, so loving, and their trust went way back.

Then again she never told him about her father's actions, either. Perhaps she was afraid he would not be able to handle it. That he might try to do something rash.

Amelia lay against Bryan's chest, still hairless, something she teased him gently about at times, when she began to tell him.

He never replied through the whole tale, though she could feel his breathing change-shorten, hitch.

When she reached the point where she came to his door to tell him her house was burning, she knew he was crying.

Amelia spent the rest of the night licking the tears as they streamed down Bryan's face.


She had not climbed this tree in 9 years. It felt good, even in the rain. She kept stopping to look around. It was amazing how little height you needed to see so much more of the world. From three-quarters of the way up the trunk of the tree she could see the long parkway she'd run, the last long leg of the trip back here.

Home.

Amelia looked down. A shattered, overgrown greenhouse. A burned out Cape Cod-the visual scourge of the neighborhood. She'd received more letters than she could count from various private and public interests about selling the property, or tearing down the house at least.

Using her work at school as an excuse, she ignored them.

After Bryan, she just wanted it all to go away.


Bryan woke early the day after Amelia told him everything and apparently ate a decent breakfast, for such a thin young man. Oatmeal, three slices of toast, coffee, and an orange.

His mother did not hear him leave the house.

He walked down the street, wearing his usual outfit-a mostly black concert t-shirt, saggy black jeans, and Doc Martens, probably feeling a chill in the air. There was still mist on the lawns of their pleasant neighborhood.

Amelia was back at the apartment her Grandmother had rented temporarily 2 miles away.

Bryan walked about a mile down Bronson Parkway before he found what he wanted, apparently. It was an 18 wheeler driven by a jazzed-up Texan, going at least 20 miles over the posted speed limit of 50 m.p.h.

The Texan swore later the tall, black-haired kid smiled, waved, and leaped.


At this height even the solid silver poplar swayed uncomfortably.

The rain blew daggers into Amelia's face. She surveyed everything, taking it in with a kind of avarice. Then she looked down. She took a moment to note how the raindrops looked so different falling around her body and downwards.

She judged the height-probably 60 feet.

Amelia smiled to herself.

"Child." she whispered.

Spreading her arms like a champion gymnast completing a difficult routine, she pushed away from the trunk of the tree.

Epilogue

Seth could think of only one thing as he and Studer pulled up to the house-a skull.

He hesitated getting out of the car. Studer sensed this and went ahead and opened his door. He was just doing the guy a favor. Seth had come running out this morning with the address scribbled on a post-it and said he was sure they'd find Amelia there.

They'd not talked much as Studer drove the surface streets she must have run. Seth seemed on a razor's edge of nerves and Studer felt it-felt like he was picking it up.

He could get in trouble for this anyway-it was pseudo police business and he was in the cruiser, supposed to be heading home.

Studer's reaction to the house was it looked out of place in the neighborhood-the other houses were too nice. Seemed to him a neighborhood association or something would have done something about a burned out hulk like this a while back.

The grass had not been cut in a while, and Studer felt that this was enough of a wild goose chase that he didn't want to get out in that, and looked in the cab at Seth.

"Look, Seth-I'll wait here. You go check it out, satisfy yourself, and then if she's not here, I'll drop you at the station so you can file a missing person's."

Seth only nodded. His eyes looked hollow. Studer wondered if he'd slept.

Seth got out of the police cruiser and began to walk, a wide circle around the house.

He felt numb, for a lot of reasons. He'd spent the night going through the possible reasons for this. He couldn't find any.

Now here he was at this burnt out house, feeling weird in too many ways. Feeling unreal. The cop looked at him like he was crazy, Amelia's grandmother had even seemed less than disturbed.

He was coming down a slight slope in the thickly overgrown back yard when he saw the first divot in the grass. His eyes followed what looked like two more, to Amelia.

She lay nestled almost against the base of the beautiful silver poplar tree. Her neck was bent at an impossible angle, and it appeared a tremendous amount of blood and other fluids had gushed from her nose as a result of the fall. The autopsy later would conclude she'd landed on the top of her head, shattering her spine, and turning her brain to mush.

She was staring straight up.

The thought that occurred to Seth, as he stood there, frozen, staring at the woman he thought he knew and loved, was truly bizarre.

She looked...relieved.




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