by Gregory Ashe
Chapter 11, Tuesday 23 August
I stepped into the Forest at Home. In case you couldn’t tell, I hated the name. What did it mean? The smell of fertilizer, sharp and dark, filled the air. No air conditioning here; lots of windows and ceiling fans and skylights that made the heat worse in some ways. The plants loved it; even inside, there were rows of potted flowers blooming, although most of the plants sat in the lot outside. Past the aisles of hedgeclippers and weedkiller and bugspray. Here the chemical smell was even stronger, but mercifully dispersed somewhat by the whine of the fans.
“Glad you decided to come to work,” Mr. Wood said. He stood behind the wood counter, working at a computer. A single glance at me from behind ancient horn-rimmed glasses, and then back to the white-light monitor.
“Sorry about yesterday,” I said. “I fell off my bike and got banged up pretty bad.”
“Well, you can get started now.”
“Sure,” I said. Only the clack of the fans. “What did you want me to do, exactly?”
“Exactly?” Mr. Wood said. “Exactly? I want you to come to work like you promised, do what you promised to do. You can start by unloading the sand from the pallet out back. Stack it near the front of the lot, next to the topsoil.”
“Should I clock in or something?”
He froze, hands above the keyboards, as though restraining himself. “I will tally your hours. Now, do I have to tell you how to get to the back, or can you do at least that much on your own?”
I headed out the back of the store; aside from a dumpster and a pile of splintered pallets, the only thing of note were the bags of sand. It was a huge pile. The kind any normal person would move with a forklift.
Not by hiring a teenager to move it.
I went back in the store, avoiding Mr. Wood’s whiplash of a glance, and found my boxcutter and work gloves. Then I set to work. Cut away the plasticwrap that held the pallet together. A few of the bags of sand slid off and hit the ground, but it didn’t matter; they were all going to end up in the same place. I picked up the first bag.
Or, I tried to.
It weighed a ton. Like forty pounds. I managed to get it over one shoulder, and then I staggered out to the front, off-balance, every inch of me already hurting as I strained to keep the bag from falling. After the encounter with Chad, this was just one more humiliating reminder of how much I’d allowed quickening to determine my life. Not only was I not worth much in a fight, as Chad and his friends had proven, but I realized how much I’d relied on quickening in other areas of my life.
I wasn’t strong. Physically, I mean. Oh sure, I’d been on the swim team at my last high school, and we’d had to work out a little bit. But I’d quit the team when it started interfering with my time to practice quickening. I mean, quickening is something else entirely. There’s so much you can do with it, so many ways to use it. Swimming was a joke compared to that; I had something magic.
And now, shoulder aching after one bag, I realized not only did I not have magic any more, I didn’t have anything to take its place. All of my talents had been wrapped up in quickening, all of my strengths. It was like, when I’d woken up from that coma, I’d woken up in someone else’s body, and I was just now realizing how very different it was from who I’d been before.
I went and grabbed another bag of sand, wincing at the flash of pain in my side as I bent to lift it. I may not be strong, but hell, I’m stubborn.
The afternoon progressed slowly. Once or twice Mr. Wood came out to check on me, his mouth set in a line. He was middle-aged, I guess, although the super old glasses made that questionable. Tall, heavy-set, the look of one of those guys who, in their prime, had been star athletes and let it all go to flab. So what was he doing running a garden supply store?
When he came out the second time, he brought out one of those handtrucks and just set it by the door, without a word. I stared at it, then looked at him. I could see the insult hanging in the air between us. If I wasn’t strong enough to carry the bags of sand, then I could use the handtruck. As simple as that. Feeling every bruise, I bent and grabbed another bag of sand and gave the handtruck a last pointed look. Mr. Wood turned and went back into the store without a word.
Why had Olivia thought this would be a good idea? Maybe it was her idea of a joke. Sweat, brown and gritty from the loose sand, stained my face and arms. I didn’t find it particularly funny.
I finished by five. My arms and shoulders were on fire; not quite pain, but that dull ache of working out, magnified a hundred times. Sticky from the sweat and humidity, I took a seat on my newly-finished pile of sand. There wasn’t much of a breeze, but the air stirred every once in a while, and that was enough.
Through the open windows, I could hear Mr. Wood talking.
“—as stupid stubborn as his damn grandfather,” Mr. Wood said. “Wouldn’t use the handtruck I set out there; didn’t ask for a wheelbarrow; just glared at me, the way the old man would.”
“I know you thought he was a mean bastard,” a different voice answered. “And I don’t think many people were sad to see him go.”
“Bad business, them coming back,” Mr. Wood said. “I told the mayor and the sheriff as much. The way he disappeared, just gone one night, right when all those people gone missing.”
“Look, Jared, the sheriff said—”
“I know what the sheriff said back then,” Mr. Wood said. “And Bill Logan is no smarter than his dad. He said it to me again, word for word, when I went to talk to him last week.”
“Then let it go; even if they’re wrong, there’s nothing you can do about it now.”
“They should know people don’t forget,” Mr. Wood said, his voice falling into a grumble. “They think they can just waltz in here, not a care in the world, and pick up like they were normal folk.”
“I’m not saying you should forget,” the new voice said. “Just that you shouldn’t hold it against them, necessarily. These are different people, and we’re different people. Things are different.”
“Alright, Keith, that’s alright.”
“How much do I owe you?”
The sound of keys clicking, and I realized the interesting part of the conversation was over. So they had known my grandfather. It surprised me for some reason. I guess I had assumed that, since that part of my grandfather’s life was so mysterious to me, it was equally mysterious to everyone. Not to Jared Wood, apparently. He must have been a teenager when my grandfather had lived here, but that didn’t keep him from still hating my grandfather.
And from suspecting him of something. But what?
In any case, it explained some of Mr. Wood’s hostility toward me. Rolling my shoulders to ease the ache in them, I stood and made my way back inside. Mr. Wood’s customer, whoever he had been was gone now, so I stepped up to the counter.
“All done,” I said in the politest voice I could muster. “What would you like me to do next?”
“Nothing; took you long enough, don’t have time for you to start working on the next thing now.”
“So . . .”
“Go home. Be here tomorrow, if it’s not too much inconvenience. If you can stay on your bike.”
Two modifying clauses. It was overkill, but then, he was a fat, old jock, so I was willing to cut him some slack.
“Yes, sir.”
I returned the boxcutter and gloves and left through the lot; I didn’t really want to have another interaction with Mr. Wood, even one as simple as saying goodbye. He had decided to dislike me from the start; that was fine. I wasn’t someone who deserved to be liked, and Mr. Wood’s dislike for me, rooted in my family and in things out of my control, was the kind of neutral, swaddled hatred that was practically comforting to me, compared to my own self-hate.
Lilburn Street was busy at 5:30pm; I hadn’t expected that. People leaving work at the government buildings; people stopping in at some of the specialty stores after work in other parts of town; even a few people out on the town, getting an extremely earl
y dinner. Sweaty and dirty, and now fully aware of how the people in town saw me and my family, and I had never been so aware of their looks. I tried telling myself it was the sand that had dried and clung to my face and arms, but that couldn’t account for the suspicion I saw, for the hate. In spite of myself, I was glad to leave downtown behind and reach the quieter section of the street where Lion House was located.
Up the stairs, past the stone lions, through the always-unlocked door. The clatter of typing met me like a swarm of locusts, threatening to devour the house around me. And then it ceased.
One foot on the stairs, I stopped and looked back.
Dad opened the door. “How was work?”
“Fine.”
We both hesitated; there probably should have been more to that exchange. I took a step.
“Dinner’s at six.”
“I’m not very hungry.” Two more steps.
“Alex, we’ve talked about this.”
I just nodded, taking the stairs two at a time. “Fine.” And then I was in my room, the door shut behind me. We’d talked about it alright. How I wasn’t eating enough. They were worried about me. That last part was the lie that hid under our silences. It wasn’t worry about me. But I knew their threats were real enough; if I didn’t eat, they’d hospitalize me. So I’d make an appearance at dinner, chewing at the fatty spaces between our words, until they let me go back to my room.
The bathroom mirror caught my gaze; I hadn’t realized exactly how dirty I’d looked. Like something out of a children’s story. A zombie, maybe, clawing his way up through the soil, driven by relentless hunger. Something about it nagged at me. Probably the irony of it all. Being a zombie wouldn’t be that bad; I was doing my best to become one, I just didn’t have their appetite.
Not until I was in the shower, the hot water easing the ache in my shoulders and lower back, did I realize what the mirror had reminded me of. Something my grandfather had told me about, just once. Something he had not wanted to talk about, to judge by his eyes and the tremor in his hands. Something that all quickeners, their infighting aside, were united against.
Something that quickening could destroy. The way I had seen quickening destroy what I had mistakenly assumed to be a sink.
A grower.
