by Andi Loveall
“You have such an active imagination,” people would say. But that was the problem. He could imagine too many different possibilities. His fascination with these endless possibilities always drowned him, and his original vision was lost.
There was, however, one story he was still proud of. It was called Wilson, the Revenge Artist, a brutal tale inspired by real-life tragedy. Wilson, the protagonist, loses all faith in humanity and goes on a killing spree after his dog is murdered. In the story, the dog was called Jackson Pete. In real life, his name was Drake.
Drake’s arrival had been one of the most meaningful occurrences of Devin’s young life. The memory was still clear in his mind. He was sitting there on the couch watching cartoons with Michael and their aunt Cathy, his mother in the kitchen clanking stuff on the stove. It was his sixth birthday, and she was making tacos for dinner, which he was pretty excited about until Leon walked in the door with a cuddly puppy, and all else was forgotten.
“I found him on the side of the freeway,” Leon had said, as if taking him home were some duty he was forced into. The next day, Devin found the adoption paperwork from a local animal shelter on the kitchen counter. At the shelter, the puppy was called Stitch. As soon as he was placed in Devin’s arms, he was called Drake. His mother was curious why he chose that particular name.
“I didn’t choose it,” Six-year-old Devin replied with a roll of his eyes. “Drake just told me.”
Drake was a great dog and an even better friend, always down to go anywhere and do anything. He remained in perfect health until the day he was poisoned by an unknown assailant, not six months after Devin’s mother died. Devin sat by his side all night, watching as his gasping breaths grew fewer and farther between. Hours passed before he could bring himself to bury him.
For the following three days, Devin remained locked in his bedroom, only coming out to piss and gather enough chips and soda to keep his body alive. That was when he wrote Wilson, living vicariously through his slaughter.
When he was done, he printed the whole thing out and turned it in as his midterm. His teacher, Mrs. Holloway, took this as an indicator that he was soon going to come to school with an AR-15 and destroy everyone, immediately calling a parent-teacher conference. The school board got involved, and despite a brilliant argument about how kids were exposed to horrific violence every day on the news, in literature, and even in their history books, Devin was suspended for three days. They claimed such threats of violence were “flat out unacceptable,” and he needed some “time to cool off.” He would have thought being labeled a future mass murderer would have hurt his reputation, but the controversy got copies of the story passed around school, and the goth and punk kids all loved it. It was during this time that he realized how much writing could affect the world. At the same time, it reaffirmed that life was rich with everlasting cruelty.
He climbed to his feet, starting back down the trail and whistling to the dogs, who were still frolicking in the water. One of them barked and ran after him, and the other followed. They passed, quickly leaving him behind. He silently thanked them for their company and headed back to the cabins, his head beginning to throb from the hangover.
***
“Go shower it off.” Devin’s mother always used to say that. She commanded it at times, halting a temper tantrum or a squabble between the boys with a stern look on her face, a pointed finger directing the troublemaker toward the bathroom. Other times she suggested it gently, promising that upon emerging clean, life and all of its troubles would no longer seem so bad. Her theory was that the few minutes it took to scrub down in the shower was all the time a person should need to get over a bad mood or figure out the answer to a problem. Most of the time, she was right.
He stood in the stall, letting the cool water pour down his body. Being hungover always made him think too much about the heavy stuff. Memories of Drake’s death led to thoughts of his mother, fate, purpose, and the grand design. One particular thought struck him with a maddening intensity: What if he hadn’t come up with the idea to travel? Would he still be slaving away at the restaurant? Was it happening right now, to a much less fortunate Devin out there in some other dimension? The idea made his stomach turn.
Then, there was this place. Had he moved his finger slightly to the left when picking out his first stop, would he now be at some other farm with a different girl driving him crazy? Or, was it always this particular place that he was meant to find himself? And if so, why?
Thinking about the heavy stuff wasn’t helping his headache. Anyway, it was a waste of time, especially when he could be thinking about Cora. Scratch that. India. When he could be thinking about India.
Two days down, twenty more to go. He couldn’t forget the mission. Sure, Cora was beautiful, but at the end of the day, she was just a girl he would know for a minute of his life, and then she would be gone. This was irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. A distraction. It was time to take back his focus.
For the next few minutes, taking back his focus went well. He dried off, climbed into fresh clothes, and started down the hill, whistling merrily along the way. No one ever whistled when caught in an obsessive crisis of lust and emotion. They whistled when they were exuberant and nonchalant, and nonchalant was what he was going to be from here on out. It sucked being a romantic at heart. Lucius was right; it was better to seek enlightenment.
As he rounded the corner by the vegetable gardens, he spotted her sitting on the pasture fence, facing the opposite direction. He slowed his pace, watching through the trees. She looked like a little bird, perched with one leg crossed over the other.
If he could get to the house without attracting her attention, he could hide there until he cultivated the willpower to resist her sexiness. He couldn’t talk to her. Talking to her meant looking at her, which would lead to touching her, and if he touched her, he was pretty sure he wasn’t going to let go. She was a seven hundred dollar box of artisan chocolates to a binge eating diabetic; delicious and potentially deadly. If he wanted to go to India, he was going to have to run like hell.
He fixed his gaze on the house and took off. Fifty paces. Twenty paces. Almost to the garden gate.
“Devin!”
Crap. He skidded to a stop, looking around and pretending he was surprised to see her.
“Oh hey,” he said, coming over. “What’s up?”
As he got closer, his eyes moved up and down her form. Every curve was perfection, from the tips of her painted pink toenails to the glow on her freshly scrubbed cheeks. Her hair was wet and tousled, and she had a cluster of carrots in one hand.
“What happened?” She twisted around, looking back up the trail. “Something chasing you?”
“No. I was just running.”
“Really? You were running really fast and frantic. Like something was chasing you.”
“No,” he said. “Just running. You know, for—”
“For practice,” she said, laughing a little. “I know.”
She smiled, holding them out. “Would you like one?”
“Um. Yes. Don’t mind if I do.” He took it from her, letting his fingers rest on her hand a beat longer than necessary. If she noticed, she didn’t let it show.
“We just dug them up from the greenhouse this morning. They’re good. Raven doesn’t believe in peeling them because why waste the resources, you know?”
He stuck the carrot between his teeth, secured his foot on the log fence, and hauled himself up. A sweet scent wafted over from her wet hair. It was pure and natural, like the earth after a rainstorm.
She looked over at him and narrowed her eyes. “Welcome to the fence.”
He laughed through the carrot and leaned forward, dropping it from his mouth into his hand. “Thank you, thank you.”
Judy was lumbering over. Cora leaned forward, holding out a carrot.
“Come here girl,” she said, feeding it to her. “Come here Rainbow.”
“I thought her name was Judy.”
> “It is,” she said. “But I call her Rainbow. We were here visiting when Walter and Raven brought her home. They said we could name her — my sister and me. But we couldn’t agree. She wanted Mrs. Jenkins and I wanted Rainbow. We got in such a fight about it that Raven decided to name her Judy. It was this huge scandal, and I cried for like three days. Then, I realized I could just call her Rainbow.”
“How old were you when this happened?”
“Maybe six.”
“This is good, by the way,” he said, chewing a bite of carrot. “Kind of outrageously good.”
“Told you.”
“Carrots are such an all-or-nothing thing, too.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well … ” He swallowed. “Take garlic, for instance. It might be a little green in the middle, or a little too dry, but for the most part—obvious reasons such as spoilage aside—garlic is garlic. Onions are onions. And potatoes? Hard to go wrong with potatoes. If nothing else you can mash them up and you’re good to go. But with carrots, they’re either bitter and awful or completely amazing. There’s absolutely no middle ground.”
“What kind of weird carrot experiences have you had?” She laughed. “They’re almost always good.”
He made a grim face. “If only that were true. After being hit by a carrot truck and bashed in the head with a can of carrots by an unknown assailant, I can only assume the position the carrots have taken. This carrot here? It just might be a sign the war is over.”
“Maybe it was fate,” she said. “You having so many bad carrots. Now you can really appreciate the good ones.”
“I do appreciate,” he said, gazing at her.
She smiled and looked away. “I was—”
“So I—”
They turned to each other.
“Sorry,” he said. “You go.”
“No, you.”
“No, no. I already forgot, but it was probably another thing about carrots, and that joke has clearly come and gone. Thank God you stopped me. Really, go on.”
She slapped a mosquito on her arm. “I kind of want to tell you something, but it’s really dumb. And I don’t mean normal dumb.”
“Sweet. I love abnormally dumb things.”
She hesitated. “I lied to you before … When I said I was a stripper.”
He stared at her. “Go on.”
She let out a huffy breath. “It’s just … It says a lot about a person, you know? How they react when you tell them you’re a stripper. If they get all high and mighty and start judging you for it, that’ll tell you something. And if they start drooling and staring at you like a piece of meat, that’ll tell you something too.”
“What did I do?”
She ignored the question. “And I was gonna tell you I was just kidding, but I waited too long, and what was I gonna do? Walk up and tell you hey, I’m not a stripper?”
“Is that not what you’re doing now?”
She giggled and covered her face. “Don’t make fun of me.”
“You know what?” He narrowed his eyes. “I think you just wanted me to picture you naked.”
“Please.”
“Don’t worry,” he said, holding up his hands. “I would never do such a thing.”
“Of course not. Why would you?”
“Gosh. I have no idea.”
“Gosh,” she said. “So, did you tell Lucius about it?”
“No … I thought maybe you didn’t want everyone to know.”
“You kept my secret?” Her face lit up. “See? This test always works. Now I know I can trust you.”
“And now I know I can’t. You fully-clothed liar.”
“I didn’t lie. I just misled you for a short time.”
He gazed at her, admiring the way her cheeks flushed when she laughed. Not a stripper. There was both relief and disappointment. Mostly relief. It could have gone the other way. She could have said she was actually an escort.
“The mosquitos are biting,” she said, climbing down off the fence. “You coming in?”
He jumped down, landing right next to her. “If you give me a piggy back ride.”
“I can’t carry you.”
“Come on,” he whined as they walked. “I’m hungover.”
“Why did you drink if you didn’t want to be hungover?”
“Ah, the eternal question. I don’t know—don’t you ever drink?”
“Nope,” she said.
“Not anymore, or never in your life?”
“Never in my life.”
“But you smoke pot.”
“Once in a while,” she said. “And that’s beside the point because pot doesn’t make you hungover.”
“Whatever,” he said, dumping himself on her back. “I still want a piggy back ride.”
“Why are you so heavy?” She giggled, struggling to drag him a few steps. “You don’t look this heavy.”
“I’m really a robot-human hybrid sent from the future,” he said. “Crap, I wasn’t supposed to talk about that. Now I’ll have to kill you.”
“Damn. I really liked life too.”
“Consider yourself lucky. Forty-nine years from now, sex will be illegal.”
“Too bad for you either way.” She giggled, twisting out from under him and skipping ahead. “Robots can’t have sex.”
“You obviously don’t know much about the future.”
She laughed and disappeared into the kitchen. He followed her, the last of his resolve melting away.
***
Walter had a few blank notebooks and pens he could spare, so Devin was officially out of excuses. He snuck away while everyone else was down at the house using the Internet. He fixed himself a cup of coffee and lit a few candles in the bunk. He got comfortable on his bed, laying the notebook in front of him.
Part of him was in the mood to write something gritty and realistic, especially after thinking about the Wilson story. Maybe he could write about a pair of lovers—a beautiful dancer and a rugged outdoorsman—who go off camping and end up lost in the woods. There would, of course, have to be some sort of negative force, stalking them and preventing their escape. He could come up with the details later.
Then again, maybe fantasy was a better option. He could write about a land so magical that butterflies spoke telepathically and dragons flew across the sky like slow-moving starships. There would be a beautiful princess and a vagabond, destined to save her. The two would meet by a waterfall. She would tell him she was lost. He would offer to escort her back, hoping for a hefty reward from the king. She would accept his offer, but after their chemistry became apparent, a quick roll in the grass would leave her with child—thereby forfeiting the reward.
Of course, he could also just quit kidding himself and jump straight into erotica. It was probably the most profitable approach, and it didn’t really require much thought. All he needed was a gorgeous woman, stripped down to her socks and pleading for a fuck, and a protagonist who was more than willing to give her one. It was a bit much, but he’d never been this horny, and he might as well use it for something. Plus, life imitates art and all that.
He wrote down notes on all of these possibilities and also gave himself an assignment: aside from working on a story while he was here, he was going to start a journal.
A journal, not a diary—there was an important difference. Diaries were places where girls wrote about boys they liked and bitched about other girls liking the same boys. They were places where people confessed deep and damaging secrets, thereby creating an atom bomb of potential humiliation. In the eleventh grade, Devin’s friend Abby had her diary stolen right out of her locker. Within a day, the anonymous assailant had transferred its contents to the web. Within two days, the dirty details of Abby’s embarrassingly private health condition became high school headline news. She dropped out of school and had to seek therapy to calm the panic attacks.
This was different. This journal would be a place to describe the many things around him that he loved, like t
he smell of the gardens, the green of Cora’s eyes, and the sound of the river in the distance.
After twenty minutes, he had blown through three pages, and he didn’t stop until Lucius walked in, chattering away.
“Where you been, brother man? We were looking for you.”
Devin smiled and looked down at his small, wobbly print. He blurred his eyes, watching as the words became a dark fuzzy block against a white sky.
“I was writing.”
***
The first morning in the kitchen, Raven went over all the rules, most of which involved keeping everything clean. She showed them where she kept the supplies and demonstrated her preferred methods, scrubbing well into the corners. All the cleaning supplies were homemade and contained things like cinnamon, mint, or lavender. By the time they were done, it smelled amazing.
“This is our home,” she said. “It is a place of dignity and light. Not only must it be kept free of toxins and allergens, but free of energetic impurities as well—meaning no lingering negativity and emotional turmoil.”
Devin and Lucius watched as she went over to the shelf and pulled out a cluster of sage, lighting it with a match and blowing to get it going. She began to twist and spin, the smoke surrounding her in a beautiful spiral.
“Smudging is an art that has been practiced for centuries,” she said, handing the sage to Devin. “Visualize clearing negativity as you clear the smoke with your hands. Feel what it does for the vibrations.”
He held it straight out in front of him, moving it around through the air as if he was painting a picture. Raven guided him with her hands on his shoulders. They did this all around the kitchen, underneath the table and even inside the cabinets. It was a little overwhelming and he struggled to keep a straight face, especially when Raven began to sing. It wasn’t that she sucked or anything. Her voice was actually really pretty, the way you might imagine some beautiful orphan child singing. But he had always been plagued by the tendency to giggle inappropriately in such situations.