Blood Kin by Steve Rasnic Tem Read Free Book Online Page A

stream of lost and misplaced sense memories must flow through the hidden layers of the world. He’d felt the sun on her face, and smelled the smell of it, that dust and grass aroma of southwest Virginia, and he’d felt the seize in her heart when the young man had lost his hands, and the blood filling her eyes, and draining her pale and shaking. He felt bad for the slow sacrifice of her youth, he truly did, but he didn’t know how long he could stand to live inside her life this way.
    He couldn’t see across the road, but he could hear things moving out there in the woods. Small animals. Had to be. And occasionally there was a subtle change in the quality of the darkness — a shadow would be suddenly lighter or darker, the massive outline of a tree would shift against the night sky. Michael had a sense that if he had a different kind of light, a new kind of light some physicist might invent someday, he’d be able to pull back these shadows and see the past of this valley laid out before him. He had a notionthat these peculiar night shadows, these dark silhouettes, were the valley’s way of dreaming. And surely there must be some way to see into those dreams.
    At any other time, in any other place, he’d of thought that nonsense. But not here, not while listening to Grandma’s stories.
    He kept wanting to ask Sadie what her choice had been, and what that choice meant, but he knew he’d have to wait for the story to catch up to that. She had her own timing for everything, and she didn’t change it for anybody. When she drew her lines, she drew them firm.
    When he’d been small, and lived here with Grandma, he’d hated that strictness at first. He never would have said he’d grown to like it, but he’d gradually felt safer within its confines, knowing that however badly he might mess up, it wouldn’t be fatal, it would never ruin everything. Grandma would always protect him from that. With his mom and dad there was never that kind of firmness. His father, Sadie’s son, had stayed away from home most of the time. Only a few years ago Michael received the phone call from Thailand informing him of his father’s death. Sadie had said of her son, “People, any sort of people, were always too much for him. He got their feelings under his skin and he couldn’t take that. I kept telling him ‘you gotta set with it awhile and after a time you get used to it.’ But he couldn’t do that. I dont think he liked folks — they bothered him too much.”
    Michael’s mother was another Gibson cousin, so it was a marriage like a lot of others in their family, not illegal, but it still made people talk. Gibsons were drawn to Gibsons. It had always been this way. Maybe they thought another Gibson was the only one who would understand them. Like so many in the family, his mother started in her thirties to lose touch. She’d spent the final two decades of her life in the State Hospital in Marion. Michael’s single visit had been so upsetting he’d come away thinking that he was the crazy one.
    Grandma Sadie had raised him until high school, then she and every other adult who cared enough to have an opinion (which didn’t include his father), decided he needed to be in better schools if he was to make something of himself. So starting at age thirteen Michael had grown up with a succession of Gibson cousins spread all over the country, most of who thought he was wonderful and sensitive. He’d appreciated that, and would have liked to believe it, but most of the time he didn’t know what he was. He felt so many things, and resented feeling so many things.
    When he went off to Chicago for college he was sure he’d find out who he really was. He’d have another culture to measure himself against. He wasn’t exactly embarrassed about being a Southerner, but he’d often found himself struggling to defend the South. Without thinking much about it he’d mention some fellow he’d known in Morrison and then he’d be genuinely