by Sarah Smith
“Uncle Charlie? Richard?”
“Lord God,” her uncle said thickly.
She was terrified of Uncle Charlie but she held out her hands to him. She had loved Uncle Charlie all of her life. She laid both her hands across the gun, loosening it from him while keeping hold of his hand. She laid the gun on the bridge. “Uncle Charlie,” she said.
He did not shrink back from her. He held her hand for a moment, and then knelt down by the man he had shot. “He is not Richard,” he started to say to her, but the words died on his lips. He felt for Richard’s pulse; in the white light from the lantern she saw his hands blurred and red.
“What did he tell you?” Charlie cried out to her. “How did he make you believe him?”
“I told him—” It didn’t make much sense, but Uncle Charlie understood.
“Richard?” he said, and repeated in a terrible gasping voice, “Richard?” He tried to gather Richard up, take him in his arms, but Richard seemed too heavy for him, and suddenly Uncle Charlie slipped and fell down on the ground. He didn’t get up. He said a few words indistinctly and she thought she heard Richard say something, but she didn’t know what.
She knelt down beside Charlie and touched him to help him get up, and he half rose, but at that moment she felt him die under her hand. He grunted something, his hand jerked once as if she had given him a shock, and then he fell toward her, but what she caught was butcher meat, old bones sliding under loose skin. She eased him to the ground, feeling no pulse under his old frayed collar, no Uncle Charlie there at all.
