Fair Warning by Patrick S. (popular e readers txt) 📕

feels like. I’ve tried it on others, but since you’re my step-sister, you’re the one I really want to try it on. I thought you’d like it.”

“No! Why, Scotty, why?”

“Just come here and let me have you, bitch!” Then he was running at the pretty girl with a feeling of immeasurable satisfaction lodged in his gut at what he was about to do. Those textures, those feelings, so magical...!

He leaped at the girl but she sidestepped; he hit and rolled on the ground, whirling back on his feet with the nimbleness of youthful muscles. Krista stood with her hands up, tears along her face and shaking as completely as if with chills.

“Why, Scotty, why?”

He let out a growl and lunged forward again. Reached for her throat, missed. Caught a piece of her shirt.

Without warning, Krista screamed and shoved him back. With his balance already compromised, he
teetered back and fell.

The sun arced above him. Chants of crickets and frogs rose to a thunderous roar.

His head smacked against something hard, then he slid down against what must be the cab of Red Wing Tower. Pain shot through him. Daggers of red and white tore at his vision.

Krista appeared over him, her head eclipsing the sun. She was saying something, but his ears were useless. He was sinking to oblivion, down, down...

Then the body below him was gone, and Scott found himself back in the well of vague shapes and silhouettes like crude, enlivened pencil drawings.

He thrashed his arms, and found that he now controlled his own body once more. Slowly, slowly, sounds came back to him--the pitter-patter of rain, gurgling streams, whispered scratches of autumn leaves.

With a flash he was on his knees in the thicket of trees beside his house. Kneeling in the sludge, he covered his face in dirty hands and cried.

Rain, rain, rain, from all around.

After all the medicines, the money, the crying, praying, specialists, herbs, it was this boy-who-was-not-a-boy that brought Scott Lueck’s memories back to him in a hurricane of brutality. What he saw was not at all what he wanted to see: he remembered the day with Krista, remembered hitting his head, then waking up in a hospital several days later, alone and confused, being talked to be various specialists and cops and others who all claimed to want what was best for him. He remembered watching as he left the hospital with strangers, looking behind and seeing Krista in the arms of her parents and knowing that she told them what he did, how he acted, and he remembered feeling overwhelming fury at the girl that she should incriminate him to those miserable losers she called parents, thereby forcing him to leave to go to another orphanage, another pitiful shell of existence until a suitable family could be found.

Of course no family was ever found. He ran from the first orphanage, hoping to escape and live on his own off the streets until he was old enough to find someone to take him under wing and show him the ropes of life. He was caught, of course, brought to another forsaken shelter with other kids that were without love. He evaded even the introductions of that place, and ran away that very night, but not before stealing a bottle of pills from one of the adults’ coats. In the alleyway, Scott tried to kill himself by popping the entire bottle of unknown pills. He swallowed them all, hoping that he could just die with the satisfying feel of Krista’s skin on his fingertips, the elation he felt when he touched every part of her, and the way she had been immeasurably better than the other girls he’d experimented on. Beside the orphanage, alone, he slept with the nameless pills swimming through his veins like piranhas, eating away his flesh with each pump and surge of his heart.

It didn’t work. The pills only made him block out that which had made the young boy what he was--the fetishes he harbored, the thoughts he entertained and the way he used families for his own twisted boy-fantasies. Thus, born from that bed of failed death and misery, Scott Lueck of the present was made, freed from the malevolent thoughts of his former self.

“No!” he cried out now, on his knees in the wet grass and twigs, the boy of his past standing stoically beside him.

“You wanted to speak with me, Scott Lueck. Now you have been shown who you are.”

“But...I don’t want to be that! I’m not that person!” In his mind, with his entire life now before him, the young boy’s perverse thoughts and dreams were once again let loose. Mixed with the new memories and values that made Scott the reclusive-but-able-bodied citizen he was, the fresh desires nearly made him wretch his stomach up on the muddy earth below him.

He didn’t want to be that boy, who felt girls and did other things that were just as sick, but he was. Krista, the vision in his dreams, had not been calling out for help, but as a plea against him. Scott burst into another round of tears as the realization of who he was blossomed in his mind.

“Now you must make a choice, Scott Lueck,” the boy said. “Who are you going to be?”

The boy stooped and touched his shoulder. The previous slicing of his emotions, that feeling of being known so well, disintegrated into something less precise but ten-fold more heart-stopping. The neurons, molecules, cells and cytoplasm in his body all seemed to revolt with the boy’s touch, but though he felt uncontrollable spasms building within him, it was impossible to pull away.

“Who do you choose to be? Which of us will die?”

He was unsure of what exactly the boy was asking, and he was finding his chest constricting more and more, a hundred hands pressing on his lungs and heart and throat.

Krista’s pain was his fault. He had abused her.

He was a terrible boy, terrible beyond words.

But the truth was that he no longer thought like that boy. Amnesia had allowed him to discard those shackles and live a peaceful, if not a bit tedious, life.

He was who he was now--Scott Lueck, twenty-eight years old, nearly broke, no girlfriend, and with a healthy supply of books to pass the time spent alone. He enjoyed eating steak and green beans, despised the traditions of Easter and Christmas but loved Halloween. Every Sunday he took a five mile walk around the country road and picked dandelions for no other reason than to set them in his vase on the kitchen counter, and when he woke late at night he liked to eat peanut butter and watch infomercials until he fell asleep. He never disobeyed the law, and owned only a singular traffic ticket for a broken tail light.

Even with the newfound feelings of the boy he had been--haunting, perverse thoughts of pleasure taken from the touch of young girls’ flesh--he would never allow himself to be that boy again.

He was himself. Now and forever.

“Ah, yes, that’s it. I sense you have made a choice,” the boy said, and released his hand. As if that one little palm kept Scott upright, he fell forward and had to catch himself on his hands. “I am the one who dies, then. I am what you used to be, and you have chosen not to kill what you are now and embrace me. Goodbye, Scott Lueck.”

Then the boy turned and walked away, leaving Scott alone in the narrow circle of trees ringing his house from the outside world.

The storm, caught on a slight wind, whorled the raindrops in jigsaw paths down the sky. The boy was nowhere to be seen in that sparkling, quiet inundation.

Scott Lueck had his memory back. With it came a new world of regrets and rights to wrong, places and people to look up and speak with, but once more he was a full person. No longer a husk of himself. He knew what his life had become, knew that from a tainted grain of sand, he had built a pearl that was his to mold and do with as he see fit.

The boy he used to be was dead. Never would the nagging, devilish thoughts teasing his brain overcome him again.

Scott sat under the trees for a long while, listening to the cadences and jumbled voices in the chorus of the storm.

Rain, rain, rain, from all around.

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Text: Cover image from Google Images
Publication Date: 06-12-2011

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