The Half That You See by Rebecca Rowland (best summer reads .TXT) 📕

grew and ran away on the walls of the ruined building behind us. It was some kind of old warehouse made of corrugated iron, ferric blood seeping through the old paint. There were sealed and barred doors at its front and on its upper floor, and at the side, a smaller one, which a group of us had kicked through last summer. We’d pulled an old sofa in there and cleared a space.

I took a swig from the bottle Jude handed to me and I coughed and I looked up at the red sparks flying from the fire and cracking into the night. Someone shoved me drunkenly, and I staggered forward, suddenly dizzy, feeling my weight move sideways too much. I flung out my hands to steady myself, but met in the grass something that ruffled and swelled beneath my touch. I swayed upright. Was it alive? What was it? A bird? It bustled towards me, humped, faceless, distorted, and I backed away, startled by a piece of plastic which seemed to have come alive for one moment, in that hectic light.

I couldn’t see Jude. I pushed past some boys I’d known for years, but not well, and wondered who the older men were they were talking to —who’d invited them? —and I went around to the side of the old warehouse, holding onto the wall.

There was a light at the far end of the long dark room, a yellow pool, and two people hunched together. In that cavernous place, so otherwise dark, there was no sense of where the walls or the ceiling started; the light was an island, a glowing desert camp. In the foreground, on the arm of the rescued sofa, a stump of candle guttered on a battered tin lid; a squalid sitting room stranded in outer space. Where was Jude?

“Come up here, Dan,” someone said. Was it Lenny, up there? I moved towards the voice and the light, skirting plastic sacks and barrels, breathing the stench of grease and dirt and damp.

“We want to see you try this,” someone else said. What was he doing up there, with Lenny? Did they know each other? But was it anyone I knew? The flickering light made puzzles of their faces, and I couldn’t seem to concentrate. Their eyes were shadows, their expressions indefinite. I took the joint from one of them, wary, yet hoping that the stuff they were smoking so secretively, so far away from everyone else, was old school astral, stellar. That they’d bought it from my dad.

“Look at his face,” a voice said.

Distended masses caved in upon the room. Magenta cups, drowned velvet swarms, crimson clutches. Overripeness split, releasing hammerheads of purple. Flesh cords and kaleidoscopes, spilled ink, marbled blood, crimson unfurling.

“I knew he’d get it straight away,” I heard. “I’d say he’s been here before, wouldn’t you?”

Damask leaves. Verdigris, violently spiraling, and spidered claws hanging scarlet, and white enfolding sweet rot. The smoke steps, moving inwards.

“Perhaps he’ll never go back though,” the other one said. “Look at him.”

“Christ, he’s really lost.”

I was staring at my hand, now so small, and held within another hand, much larger and with a blue swallow tattoo between the first finger and thumb. “Sepia grass,” I said between breaths. “Sepia grass.”

I awoke at the bus stop, propped awkwardly against the sloping bench and the toughened glass. I held my hand in front of my face to see how unsteady it was and saw its new translucent state, light shining across and through the thin, toad-colored skin. Behind it, wavering, lay the road, buff-colored, pebble-strewn, unsteadily held between the scrub and granite verges. Ahead, the river bled into the land and the land bled into it, at once liquid and solid, all awash with and part of the soft brown endless light.

I took it all in slowly, not believing.

My father thought he didn’t have a choice when it came to the decisions he made in life. Guided by an ineffable power, he took the routes left open to him, and they took him where he was meant to be. The universe, he said, had always looked out for him, and it seems that the universe was looking out for me. That power, not a place but a force, had blocked off all my roads but one.

When I saw keys on the ground, I stooped and picked them up, and then I crossed to the open door of the old Ford Cortina. Inside, I put on the hat and then the coat I found there, and I let the door slam shut. I didn’t know how to drive, but how hard could it be? I put the key in the ignition and set off.

Prisoner

T. M. Starnes

“Those damn wolves,” Virginia mumbled, covering her ears with both hands, “Can’t they just for once, just once, shut up!”

Virginia stared up at the round hole in the roof of her prison. The moonlight was bright tonight, calling the wolves to howl louder and closer than before.

The men who had taken her as she left an Edmonton coffee cafe hadn’t been back in at least two weeks, maybe three, maybe more. They had brought her far out into the wilderness to a cabin.  Behind the cabin, they dragged her down a slippery rough-hewn stone staircase to a deep, circular, stone-walled storage area with an opening to the sky. It might have been a smugglers’ hideout. Or a dried well, or…or…or…Virginia had wracked her brain trying to imagine what this place was.

Ten steps wide.

Nine steps long.

At least several meters high to the round opening in the ceiling where the goddamned wolves’ howls echoed down to her. Every single goddamned night.

After the three men had…

After they…

“Shut up!” she screamed. “Stop howling, you bastards!”

The men had left her a few days’ worth of food and plastic water containers. They had shoved her in her prison behind a large medieval-looking wooden and iron door that they chained behind them, threatening to return for more “fun