Blood

I want the sun to die, slowly. Even with sunglasses on I can barely stand it.

I told Justin that Reid would be late, I told him. Yet here I am, sitting against a fence post at the end of the lane as I have been for the past fifteen minutes.

I shouldn’t complain. After all, it’s not much that I have to do, only twenty minutes of my life.

Spirits, what a whiny bastard I am.

A rumbling assaults my ears, and I painstakingly look up to see my brother’s car coming down the road.

I stand up and watch as the grill of the white beast turns onto the lane and stops in a cloud of dust, all illuminated by the sun.

Reid starts to step out of the driver’s door, which strikes me as odd, since I figured being a tinkerer and all he’d want to drive.

“Oh,” I say involuntarily.

The person now making their way to the passenger side door, the person that I’m pretty sure is laughing at me isn’t Reid. No, it happens to be the very Devil herself.

I take off my sunglasses for just long enough to rub my eyes, and it hurts, which I deserve.

It was a horrible thing to think. Yet I can’t quite find the place in my mind to regret it.

“You can drive, can’t ya?” asks Lorna.

She’s holding the top of the passenger door with her head turned a little, like it’s the first time she’s ever seen me.

It takes me a second to remember she asked a question, so Lorna laughs when I nod. Not the way girls laugh at Justin, but in the way the faeries laugh at me.

This time I dig my nails into the heel of my hand, because I know I’m being beyond awful.

Lorna ducks into the car and closes the door.

After a few seconds of just standing there I walk around the car and get in. Lorna has the seat pulled so far up that my knees are crammed against the bottom of the steering wheel, so I grab the seat adjuster and push it back so I can actually move and then pull the door closed, which Lorna left open.

I push the shifter into reverse and pull out of the lane and onto the road. On the mainland I think most roads are paved, at least that’s what I remember, but here we don’t have as many people on the whole island as the Canadians do in their smallest city, so we don’t need pavement. By all rights we should be a part of Canada, but mainlanders are afraid of what they can’t understand, so they let us be, mostly.

I’d leave island freaks alone, if I were them.

I can see that Lorna is looking at me with her head tilted, which makes my fingers start to drum against the steering wheel.

I guess it’s a bit of a habit I just got to place my nerves in one place so I can still get things done when there are people around.

Lorna turns to her window to watch the sun-golden fields, if that’s what she’s doing, and then she turns back to me again.

“I never took you for the kind to wear sunglasses,” she says, which strikes me as odd, since I didn’t figure she was the kind to notice, and I almost say that before I stop myself.

I watch the road for a minute, realising that Lorna’s turned away again, which makes me figure I’m being just as rude as I would have been if I’d said what I wanted.

“The sun and my eyes don’t like each other too much,” I say quietly.

Lorna’s still looking out the window when she mutters, “I s’pose everything has to have drawbacks.”

This time I can’t stop myself from laughing, at least a little. “I think there has to be a positive…to be a drawback.”

Lorna looks at me the same as she had before. “You don’t like me much, do you?”

My eyes widen a little, making me glad they are hidden. Of course, I remember that Justin said she’s crazier than the sea, and others have said the same thing. Actually, I think George himself said she’s mad.

She turns away, “There’s nothing wrong with it, I was just curious. I don’t like you either.”

It takes a lot out of me not to laugh, which is odd as I rarely laugh in front of people. I figure it’s because she’s surprised me thrice now. “What makes you think I don’t like you?” my voice is quiet and inquisitive, which isn’t at all how I thought it would be.

She turns around again, and I wonder how Reid, even being her brother, can stand to be in a vehicle with her the way she moves around. “First, your fingers,” she says while pointing to where my fingers tap against the steering wheel. “You only started doing that when you had to get in the car with me. Oh, and yesterday when your brother wanted you to talk to us. You were tapping your leg then, too.”

I remember that Lorna had been watching the Wood, really watching the Wood, which makes me wonder why I figured she was so unmindful. It takes a special sort to be drawn to Wanderer’s Wood so fully.

“Do you mind if I smoke?” Lorna asks.

We’re just entering the backway into Kappamor, when she asks. I wonder briefly if that has anything to do with her sudden need for a cigarette, and then I wonder why I thought that. Or why I care.

I shake my head, and almost instantaneously the smell of cigarette smoke fills the cabin, even though Lorna put her window down before she had asked to smoke.

I don’t understand why she had asked permission, either, it’s the polite thing to do of course, but I imagine Lorna Owens doesn’t put much effort into being polite.

I squeeze my eyes shut for a second to get my attention out of my head.

Kappamor is a flood of activity at this time of day, merchants getting ready to set out for Madrick’s Bay, which is up my road, about twenty miles past the farm.

The road system on Faer is shaped like a three-prong pitchfork with Kappamor in the middle. Up to the right leads to Madrick’s Bay, straight up is Ristahill, to the left is the Cove and down below is the Southern Port. The Owens live up towards Fisherman’s Cove, but, like the farm, they’re only a couple miles out of Kappamor.

There’s a sharp turn in the road, one that the little white Ford doesn’t take too kindly to.

I swing to my right a little and Lorna swears.

I glance at her enough to see she’s rubbing her temple and lost her cigarette. “Sorry,” I say.

Lorna doesn’t say anything, which is a small relief since I’d thought she would have sworn at me. When I think about it, though, it’s not very fair of me. The only unpleasant thing she’s done so far was say she doesn’t like me, her and the rest of the island. At least Lorna’s brave enough to actually say it, unlike me.

Eddie Hannagan, the butcher, stands outside the door of his shop, yelling at his son, Jamie. Seeing him reminds me I have to stop on my way back to talk about the yearlings again. He and my father ended up getting too caught up in visiting to actually decide on a price.

When I was little, not much more than five, I’d say, we used to have our own slaughterhouse back behind the house. He never came out and said it, but I always figured my dad tore it down because of me. What I’ve never been able to figure out is if it was fear for or of me.

It only takes a minute or two until the little Ford is pulling back onto another mostly-empty road, surrounded by fields dotted with ponies and sheep. There aren’t many of the animals, as we aren’t really a place focused on livestock. Most men go to work on the boats or the docks when they’re old enough. The girls probably could as well if they wanted to, but island girls are of a lazy variety where most think they should just be housewives, cooking, cleaning and bearing more children than they can afford. Either that or they want to leave for the mainland and work at a strange trade unfathomable here.

That sounded awful. Of course there are enough girls and women that work in the shops, or own farms or boats, just those aren’t the ones I’m used to seeing much of. Justin prefers the stupid ones that are impressed by his ability to serve alcohol and talk at the same time, something that in their drunken states seems marvelous and foreign.

It passes through my mind that I’m probably sitting beside one of the girls that has it in her mind to do something other than slave after an unfaithful husband, and I consider asking Lorna what she does, or wants to do, but think better of it. It’s her business and I have no place enquiring after it.

I continue to tap my fingers against the wheel to the rhythm of some mainland song I have at home. It’s an older song, maybe ten or twenty years. I was around ten when my father took me to the mainland with him, so all the music I have is from before then. Every few years he goes and gets some knew cattle to keep the bloodline clean and not all muddled with inbreeding. Six or so years ago, he took me to first Newfoundland, because it’s closest to us, then through Labrador to Northern Québec, where he made a deal for some Shorthorns, then to Ottawa. We really didn’t need to go there, but it’s the capital and all, so he wanted to show me. After Ontario we went across another couple provinces to Alberta, where they’ve got the most cattle, he said. Dad had given me some spending money for our trip, which he normally wouldn’t have, but since I’d never been out of Faer’s waters, and I haven’t left since, he gave me a little, which I spent all on books and cassettes, where my father had thought I’d spend it on the strange imported fruits and candies.

I squeeze my eyes shut and reopen them to try and get my mind back on the road again. I reckon I’m a bit tired today, or something like that. It could just be the sun’s screwing with my brain.

I let my eyes dart around as they do naturally, taking in all the normalities of dusty, storm-bitten Faer. Lorna was a little wrong about me taping my fingers. Most of it is the sickness I feel around people, but a little bit is just my inability to not move. I don’t understand why people would even want to be still, you might as well be dead.

I consider briefly trying to get a mainland station through the dust-covered radio between the seats, but people tend to not like music around here. Music belongs to the Wood dwellers. Except, of course, when the tourists come in June and July, everyone who can tends to pull out a fiddle or guitar at some point in time, while those that can’t find something else to do. Anything for money.

I watch a fly crawl across the dashboard and then fly across to the passenger window, buzzing all the while as it batters itself against the window over and over. It finally rushes through the little gap Lorna has for her cigarette.

The fly is lost among the autumn struck fields and dust dragged out from under the tires of Justin’s white beast.

“You can just let me off here,” says Lorna.

I glance back up at the road, where I figure my eyes should have been to start with, and see what must be the Owens’ drive ahead on the right.

“Uh, is there a place to turn up by your house?” Really, I’d be fine turning here, but then I would feel bad about making Lorna walk.

“Mm-hm,” she says, and that’s the end of that.

Reid and Lorna’s house is one of the larger ones on the island, two stories with yellowy clapboard siding and a screen door, sitting upon a cemetery of dead and dying cars.

“Thanks,” says Lorna as she opens the door and steps out of the car, which is now stopped. A child with bright red hair runs up to Lorna the way that only kids under ten can.

“Lorna, I found a faeries!” says the little boy.

Faeries, I think. Call them by their names and they’ll come.

I take off my sunglasses and rub my eyes.

“Lorna! It’s a faerie!”

I glance up at the child, who’s pointing one of his disproportionate fingers at me.

Well, shit.

Lorna takes his wrist and pulls it back to face her as she lowers herself so they’re eye to eye. “You’re gonna say sorry to Mr. Mallory.”

If I wasn’t having as minor mental break-down, I’d likely have laughed. I don’t think anybody has ever, ever put the word mister before my name. Albeit, I have got miss, missus and a couple worse than that.

The little Owens looks over at me with big brown eyes, not unlike Lorna’s. “Sorry,” he says and then looks back at Lorna.

She smiles at her brother and says, “Mallory ain’t pretty enough to be a Wood Dweller.”

He looks confused, and looks at me then Lorna, “But boys ain’t supposed to be pretty.”

“Well we won’t tell George that, eh?”

The little boy giggles and pulls on Lorna’s hand, “Come on!”

Lorna’s still smiling when she thanks me again and closes the car’s door to follow after her brother, and I realize that I’d forgotten how pretty she is, not that it matters.