Blood Moon – Part 1

This is an unedited free-write novella. Please do not reproduce.

The day of her sister’s funeral, Kayla packed her belongings in a battered blue suitcase and two cardboard boxes, loaded them into her ancient yellow Subaru, and headed west. She didn’t look back. The last shovel of dirt hit the grave as she passed through Cleveland. Grey storm clouds gathered in her wake, an ominous shower to water the flowers and turn the grave to mud. Every hour put another eighty miles between her and Rochester, with its abandoned row homes and broken cyclone fences, unwashed children playing in trash-strewn empty lots, bitterly cold winds that ripped through chinks in the duck-taped windows, crack pipes and doped-up whores. Desi.

Desi lay under six feet of rocky ground, her dreams of escaping Rochester laying cold and dead beside her. With only a one-way ticket to heaven or hell, if you believed in that sort of thing. But Desi knew hell: she lived in Rochester. She’d slept with the Devil and he owned her soul. He’d welcome her in with open arms, a needle in one hand and a pipe in the other. Heaven had given up on Desi a long time ago.

Kayla hadn’t, which was why when she’d got the call she’d shed no tear. She’d lived with the fear clenching in her gut for too long not to know, every time the phone rang, that this one would be it. So she’d said “thank you sir” to the police officer who’d called, and drove down to the coroner’s office to id the body, dry eyed and clear-headed. She walked into the small dark room, metal on the walls and metal on the floors, metal tables and metal chairs, dead like the inhabitants it kept, and pulled back the sheet to see her sister.

No, not her sister. Her sister was young and carefree with a wild spark and a bubbling laugh. She’d say, “Kayla! Let’s go!”, grab Kayla’s hand and run down the sidewalk, jumping over cracks and weeds like a gazelle, singing Down down baby, Down by the rollercoaster, Sweet sweet baby, I’ll never let you go, Shimmy shimmy coco puff shimmy shimmy wow…

Her sister had beautiful chestnut skin and chocolate eyes that turned up at the corner in laughter. Her sister didn’t have blue lips and mottled skin, skinny arms and cheekbones that stuck out, gaunt and malnourished. This person, this body lying on the cold metal table was someone else, someone who had slowly taken over her sister’s body, like the alien infesting Signorney Weaver’s stomach.

Kayla didn’t cry until Minnesota and saw signs for Rochester and suddenly the fear and pain came back like a tsunami, flooding her heart and her head until it flowed out her eyes in big salty tears. She pulled off to the side of the road, where she dry heaved in the bushes. There was nothing in her stomach to spit out.

She drove into Rochester, Minnesota, just to convince herself that it wasn’t the same Rochester, that she wasn’t driving in circles, chained to place like Sysiphus in Hades, doomed to push the same rock uphill for all eternity.

It wasn’t.

An hours rest in a cheap motel where cigarette butts decorated the floor and the ashtray turned upside-down said “no-smoking”. A cup of searing hot coffee, black. She was back on the road by five, after she cleaned off the autumn leaves that stuck to the old car, one brittle friend to another.

Plains and prairies through South Dakota gave way to thick evergreen forests of Montana, the mountain passes still open before the first snow, then desert in eastern Washington, with tumbling tumbleweeds. She drove till she could drive no more, I-90 finally gave out to the dark blue water of Puget Sound and the Pacific Ocean. Grey snow capped mountains ringed the city on either side, an encampment in this lone outpost of loggers and tech geeks. Seattle.

She stopped driving, found a coffee shop with Internet and after a quick search of craigslist found a roommate and a small apartment to call her own. She was home.

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Tags: Blood Moon, free write

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