Dearly Departing by Geoff North (book reader for pc txt) 📕

eyes like a slow-motion movie scene. Bruce had something big held between his hands over his head. Not like all the other rocks gathered around them. This rock wasn’t worn and smooth, it was jagged, with sharp edges.

He’s going to bash my head in for cheating. They’re going to murder us and say it was a terrible accident. They’ll say that I fell, smashed my head into the rocks. Stupid, boneheaded Ray. Couldn’t walk and think at the same time.

Bruce heaved the rock into the air with a heavy grunt. It twirled above and over heads.

He missed.

Time came to a practical standstill. Raymond tracked the rock’s trajectory. It hung in the sky for a moment and then started to plummet. One exceptionally sharp edge was pointed at the slough’s surface. The drowned animal. It was going to hit the drowned, beach-ball-bloated animal. Raymond saw the dull grey stripe running down the back of the dead thing. He saw the picked out remains of its eyes, and the bloody pit where its nose once was.

Skunk… it’s a dead skunk filled with rotten water and gas. This is going to be bad. Very, very—

Bruce’s rock missed the swollen carcass by inches and splashed noisily into the slough. Alicia screamed as a gallon of fetid water splashed up and soaked her hair, face, and clothes. Raymond closed his eyes and turned his head away. A cold slosh slapped into his ear. It ran down his neck, shoulder, and arm. The stench was unimaginably foul. When he opened his eyes again, Raymond found Alicia on her knees, making a pathetic small hitching noise. She was spitting black water onto the rocks and into the unsettled slough.

Oh God… she got some in her mouth.

Raymond started to gag, thinking the worst was over. He was wrong. From the corner of one eye he saw the grinning image of David working his way around Bruce. Raymond was too busy attempting to hold his breath and fight off puking to be of any use to either himself or his sister. The sharp end of David’s branch shot out and punctured the hide of the wildly spinning skunk. There was a dull popping sound, like a balloon only half filled being pricked with a needle, and Raymond’s face was splattered with goo. There was no fight left in him. He vomited up his breakfast and lunch in an instant. Through the strains of his own retching, he could hear his sister doing the same. Behind those awful sounds, Raymond heard his brothers laughing.

In the end, no one really won, and no one really lost. Raymond dragged his sister back to the house and the older boys were told on. Alicia and Raymond were scolded mightily by their mother, stripped down, and sent in turn to take hot baths. They never saw the clothes they’d put on that morning ever again. Their father dealt with David and Bruce. It was the last time any of them would ever play hide and seek. None of the children returned to the old slough that year. Alicia never went back there again.

“Those evil little bastards.”

“Be nice,” Ray said. “Those are your uncles.”

They were half way through Saskatchewan. Regina was a hundred miles behind them, and there were a few hundred more to go before the rolling hills of Alberta. Towns were few and far between, with only the occasional grain elevator to avert their attention from the rest of the flat, featureless province. There was plenty of time to tell old stories, and Ray was more than willing to reminisce with his daughter to pass the time.

“Thanks for sharing your memories of Aunt Alicia with me.”

“I should’ve told you more about her while you were growing up.”

“It’s totally okay, Dad… I understand completely.”

They fuelled up in a town called Indian Head. Ray gave Dawn a twenty dollar bill to buy sandwiches and coffee. He watched her disappear into the service station while he pumped gas. An old green pickup with a cap attached to the box pulled up beside him on the other side of the bowser. It looked just like the truck Ray had travelled in with his parents and brothers all those decades before. Its panels and windows were crusted with dried mud. Someone had scrawled wash me into the dirt on the driver’s door. Ray chuckled. Below that he saw something else. It was close to the rusted-out running board, a single word. A name.

Bonehead.

His heart started to hammer in his chest. Ray looked back up and strained to see through the dirty window who was sitting inside. A white skull clunked against the glass and two black empty eye sockets stared back at him. Wisps of grey hair clung to a crack in its forehead, and Ray knew he was looking at the skeletal remains of his father. It lifted its boney arm and tapped a dangling wristwatch against the glass. It pointed to the scratched surface on the watch face and he saw the toothless bottom jaw move up and down. The skeleton was speaking.

Ray couldn’t read its lips—the thing didn’t have any—but he knew, he could sense what it was saying.

Time’s a wasting.

 

 

 

 

Chapter 8

 

Ray took his turn driving. He needed to feel in control of something, to have the steering wheel in his hands—any little thing to keep his mind off what he thought he had seen. The visit from his grandmother hadn’t startled him as much. Ray had still been in full-on suicide mode on the flight back from the Dominican. The image of his skeleton father rattled him to the core. Ray, at least for the last few hours, hadn’t entertained a single thought of ending his life. The time spent with Dawn had opened his eyes to the possibility that his continued existence wasn’t entirely meaningless. Here,