The Elementalist (28 page)

About the Author

Melissa Cunningham (also known as M.E. Cunningham) was born in Oregon but grew up in Utah, where she was raised on a steady diet of fine literature from Charlotte’s web to the The Trumpeter Swan, and then plenty of romances in her teen years. She now lives with her husband on a little farm in northern Utah where all she can see out of her back door is miles of pasture and stunning sunsets. Not only does she raise horses, dogs, cats, and chickens, but her five kids also.

When Melissa is not writing you can find her spending time in the outdoors with her family or dancing wildly to rock music in her living room. She loves running, camping, and all things fiction—scary, mind-numbing stories preferred.

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If you enjoyed The Elementalist, we recommend you check out The Last Orphans by N.W. Harris. Read the first chapter here. 

Dad twisted away from the steering wheel and glared, the veins in his leathery neck and temple bulging.

“You can’t keep carrying on about it, Shane,” he yelled. “She’s dead! That’s the short and sweet.”

“Bill! Look where you’re going!” Jackie, his dad’s girlfriend, put one hand on the roof and one on the dash, bracing for a collision.

Spinning forward, Dad jerked the wheel. The tires screeched, and the car veered into its lane. Shane’s six-foot-tall body whipped hard to the left, and then right, his head slamming into the upper part of the doorframe with a loud thunk. A lifted four-wheel drive almost flattened the ancient station wagon. It swerved toward the opposite shoulder, roaring by with its horn blaring and the driver hanging his finger out at them. Cursing and rubbing the lump growing on the side of his skull, Shane almost wished the truck had put him out of his misery.

By the time Dad got his window down and hurled a mouthful of slurred insults back at the truck, it was already a quarter mile down the road.

“Such a tough guy,” Shane muttered under his breath.

“What did you say, boy?” Dad shouted, his knuckles white from gripping the steering wheel so hard. At least this time, he kept his eyes forward.

“Nothing,” Shane replied and looked out at the rolling hills covered in brown fescue, pastures separated by stands of twisted pine trees and rusting barbwire.

Jackie lit a Virginia Slim with trembling hands. She took a deep drag and rolled her window down a crack to pull out some of the disgusting smoke.

“You have got to be the worst driver alive,” she seethed between puffs.

“Well, it’s that one’s fault,” Dad retorted with a defensive whine in his tone, like he always did when she laid into him. Pointing his thumb at the backseat, he glared at Shane in the rearview mirror, the car drifting across the centerline again. “You still cry’n?”

Shane was, but it wasn’t like he sobbed inconsolably. Silent tears clung in his eyes for two very good reasons. One—Shane loved Granny. She was the sanest person in his jacked-up family. She had always been there when he needed a place to run to, a place where he could find a minute of peace. And now she was gone. It felt like a round bale of hay—those big ones full of moldy thistle they fed to cattle—sat on his chest. Reason two—Shane’s boiling anger towards his dad made him want to punch something. With each passing moment, the pressure of his bottled-up rage increased. Dad getting drunk and being a prick to him in private was one thing. Spewing so much crap about Granny at the reception—for that, he deserved to have his nose busted. And he didn’t even have the decency to wear a suit to the funeral, showing up in his greasy, blue work Dickies with his stupid name above the shirt pocket.

Dad slammed on the brakes and swerved off onto the shoulder. Gravel tinged against the corroded bottom of the musty, old car, and a cloud of dust engulfed it as it skidded to a halt. He jumped out and ran around the front to get to Shane’s door, leaning over so he could glower at him the whole way. He pulled it open so hard that it was a miracle it didn’t come off its creaking, thirty-year-old hinges. 

“Get the hell out!”

Shane stared up at him, unsure how to proceed.

“I said get out, damn it,” Dad repeated, spittle flying from his mouth. “I won’t have a sixteen-year-old boy bawl’n like a little girl all the way home. Man up or walk.”

Too much wine had left Dad’s teeth and lips stained red, and Shane could smell the alcohol, even over the foul stench of Jackie’s cigarette. His aunt had whispered an apology to Shane at the funeral reception, saying she’d only put wine out because she didn’t think his dad would drink it. What she didn’t realize was Dad had become such a raging alcoholic that he would’ve drunk turpentine if it were on the table.

His father’s eyes widened, and his fists balled up. Shane thought he would grab him and try to drag him from the car.

“You know what?” Shane shouted. Gritting his teeth, he climbed out. He had grown a lot in the last two years; he wasn’t the little boy scared of the big man anymore. Speaking quieter, Shane put all the meanness he could into each word, “I hate your stupid car.”

Standing there with his arms crossed over his chest, Shane stared down at his father’s sunburned baldhead. Dad pulled his oil-stained hand away from the door and straightened up in an obvious attempt to be taller. He huffed, his breath smelling like another DUI in the making.

Was he daring Shane to hit him?
Why not?
It
might do him some good
, Shane thought. And if he could knock him out, he’d be keeping him from driving drunk. It’d be a community service.

Dad leaned back. The whiskers of his thick, red-and-gray mustache pulled down on the sides and twitched. The muscles in his forearms, swollen from twenty years of work as a mechanic, rippled. His big, scarred knuckles protruded outward as his fists clenched tighter. Shane braced himself. He’d taken a thousand hits on the football field; he could handle one from this old man.

“Don’t come home ‘til you’re done blubber’n,” Dad growled with faltering bravado.

“I wasn’t planning on it,” Shane replied, slamming the door so hard the car’s decrepit suspension complained with loud, reverberating squeaks.

Dad hesitated and then he pivoted away, stomping back around the front of the car. He hopped in and must’ve floored the accelerator, because the engine groaned for a moment, threatening to stall. With a noxious puff of black exhaust, it roared to life and spun the rear tires in the dusty gravel on the side of the road.

Shane turned away and covered his face just in time. Once the rocks stopped pelting him, he picked one up and threw it with all his strength at the smoke and dirt cloud into which the car disappeared. Dust stinging his eyes and nose, he stumbled away from the road to get out of the choking plume and fell. Rolling to a stop at the bottom of the ditch, he lay there on his back in his Sunday finest.

Granny bought him the black suit to wear on special occasions, getting it a little on the big side so he’d get use out of it for a few years. She’d be sad to see it abused like this. It upset Shane something fierce. He felt more important when he wore the suit, felt like he was going places, like he could escape Loserville and see the world. Of course his dad had to ruin it, just like he ruined everything else.

After Shane calmed down and caught his breath, he decided it felt good just to lie there on the cool ground for a minute. Granny had always loved dirt, saying it strengthened her connection to God when she touched it. She liked to walk barefoot around her small garden where she grew most of her food. He remembered sitting next to her on the strip of grass that grew down the center, listening to crickets and counting the stars. How could he have known Saturday was the last time he’d ever get to do that with her, that she’d be dead two days later?

Biting the side of his tongue and rubbing his nose, Shane suppressed the tears. Granny was in a box, in the dirt, and there wasn’t jack he could do about it. The idea of being buried after he died gave Shane the heebie-jeebies, but it didn’t bother Granny. On that last night, sitting in the yard, she said she didn’t even need a coffin, that she’d rather have the cool soil right up against her skin. It was like she knew she’d die soon, even though she seemed more fit than Shane at the time.

Against Granny’s wishes, his aunt flew in from New York, bought the finest box she could afford, and spent a mint on the reception. He knew it was just her way of doing something nice for Granny, but he wished she hadn’t provided booze. Dad wouldn’t have acted like such an idiot if it weren’t for the wine. In this small town, it seemed everyone knew everything about everyone else. Shane expected the commotion Dad created would be popular gossip for the next few months.

Before, when Dad was being a jerk, Shane would go to Granny’s house. She’d feed him some fried green tomatoes and buttermilk biscuits the size of a cat’s head, or sometimes a fresh cucumber sandwich, and listen to him vent until he’d calmed down. Then he’d help her in the garden or they’d play board games, until Dad sobered up and called sounding all apologetic, on the downside of one of his rollercoaster rides.

Standing up and making a futile attempt at brushing his suit clean, Shane wished he could go to Granny now. The smoldering heat called for a few glasses of her sweet iced tea. He took off his jacket and his light blue, clip-on tie and hung them over his arm, cursing at the sight of a tear in the left sleeve.

He’d been dropped off in front of a creepy, kudzu-covered lot. The vines blanketed a deserted structure so completely that he couldn’t tell if it was a house or a barn. The kudzu also engulfed a couple of trees, making them look like giant, green ghosts looming on either side of the unidentifiable building, warning all to stay clear. Shane heard a long time ago that the stuff grew a foot a day. He could almost sense the creepers stretching out toward him, wanting to entangle and strangle him. A hot breeze rustled the kudzu’s broad, dusty leaves, and it sounded like the wicked plant was hissing at him. In a hurry to get away from the desolate lot, he started down the side of the pothole-riddled road, heading in the opposite direction Dad had gone.

Might as well stop by Granny’s
, he decided. There was nowhere else to go. Regular clothes and shoes awaited him there. And he reckoned the fridge still harbored a pitcher of sweet tea. Tears welled up in his eyes knowing she wouldn’t be there, and his heart ached realizing how lonely her little, white cottage would feel. An image of her vacant property ten years from now, swallowed by the kudzu, struck him. The thought made his skin crawl and the knots in his gut cinch tighter.

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