Bury the Children in the Yard (16 page)
Read Bury the Children in the Yard Online
Authors: Andersen Prunty
The sun was just going down, the sky was clear, and the lake glowed a hellish orange.
He was surprisingly calm. This was the second most traumatic thing that had happened to him and, in a way, he didn’t even feel a part of it. He owned the cabin where it took place. He’d had sex with Ashley but what did any of it have to do with him? What would happen if he
did
call the police? He would be questioned, for sure. But he was convinced he wouldn’t be found guilty of anything. Which he wasn’t. And then what? And then life would go on exactly as it had before.
He might as well be one of the corpses in the house.
He stayed on the porch until night bloomed, black and moonless.
He went into the house and cleaned his wound and bandaged his leg. He thought about burning down the cabin. But that didn’t seem poetic enough. He went out to the tool shed and found his shovel, probably the same one he’d used to bury his imaginary children. He could now hear some of the families around the lake, kids shouting, adult conversations. Laughter. Full lives. Where were they earlier? Maybe they were so turned inward they didn’t hear much of anything happening around them. And maybe that was only because they were on vacation. In Steve’s experience it seemed like most people paid way too much attention to things that didn’t really have anything to do with them. Maybe that was it. Maybe they turned away when it was anything that might demand some kind of involvement and chose only to focus on minutiae.
Who knew?
Who knew much of anything?
Steve was sure he didn’t. He was going to dig a hole. The sun would be coming up in about seven hours so he thought he had some time. Then he would drag the corpses from the house and put them in the hole. Then he would fill the hole and go into the cabin and clean up as best he could, but not perfectly. He didn’t think he wanted to remove all the evidence of what had happened. He would know
some
thing had happened. He wouldn’t tell anyone about it no matter how much he might want to. It would be his.
He broke the ground with the shovel and some dark cloud broke within him, filling him with thunder and lightning and rain. He listened to the families around him play and continued to dig the hole.
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