TORN FLESH

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO: FAINT VISIONS

MARGO'S head was thrumming with thoughts, thoughts that had begun to consume her every waking moment.

She thought of Ronnie mostly, and how his ghost seemed to follow her down the halls of the house, into his room, out onto the beach. He was everywhere and nowhere all at once.

She hated it.

It was her third day with Eddie, and she was sitting in the sand a few yards away from the water that threatened to lap at her feet if she came too close, even outside she could still see Ronnie out in the waves, jumping onto the boat with the bomb. A shiver passed down her spine and without looking over her shoulder, she spoke, "do you still see him?"

Eddie plopped down in the sand beside her and drew his knees up to rest his arms atop them, he shrugged his shoulders, "not as much, it starts fading away after a while."

She turned to look at him, her eyes wide and honest, "did he deserve it?"

Eddie's expression went frigid, and he flicked his eyes out towards the waves, "no, I suppose not, he was just misled."

Margo shook her head, "I mean Dad... did he deserve what I did to him?"

Her brother continued to stare out at the ocean, he knew the answer as well as she did, but now that the answer was coming from him, it would hold so much more weight in her brain.

"No, no one deserves that."

The two siblings didn't speak for some time, all they did was sit in the sand and watch as the sun plummeted beneath the ocean to leave them in the wake of an orangish blue sky, it wasn't until he moved to get up that Eddie took note that his sister had fallen asleep against his shoulder.

Instead of waking her, he gently twisted his body around to wrap his arms around her and stumbled to his feet, for a moment he worried he would drop her, and then he stopped swaying.

Casting one last look out at the ocean he slowly made his way back to the house with Margo in his arms.

He walked slowly with her, trying his hardest to keep her from waking, it wasn't until he'd settled her into Ronnie's bed and turned to go that a small groan left her lips and she reached out to grab his hand.

"Please don't go." she'd mumbled, Eddie had stared at her, her eyes closed, her hair pulled in every direction across her face, and being the brother he was, he obliged and scooted to lay beside her in the bed as his mother had when he was a boy.

He stayed with her long into the night, and when he did finally leave, he felt the cold air slip in under the covers to press against her. With a sad smile, he turned and left the room.

When Margo woke, she found that her brother was not there, she was in the same clothes from the day prior and could smell the sea salt all over, it was a comforting smell, the rush of the sea against her legs and arms, the sand between her toes as she spoke to her brother.

She wondered where he was, she could remember him climbing into bed beside her, but she couldn't remember when he'd left, perhaps she'd been asleep.

She thought it over for a few moments before curiosity got the best of her and she forced herself out of bed and out into the house, there was no noise beyond Ronnie's bedroom and for a moment she feared the worst, that was until she heard the routine banging of something metal outside.

Casting a look towards the sliding glass doors she saw that Eddie was outside working on what looked like...a boat? She wasn't sure you could even call it that, it was so damaged she doubted it would float, much less make it onto the water.

A few seconds passed and Eddie raised his arm to wipe away the sweat that had collected on his brow, at the sudden motion he caught a glimpse of Margo and turned to look at her. A sile swept over his lips and he gestured for her to come outside, reluctantly, she did so.

The humidity was the first thing that hit her when she stepped out onto the back porch, she immediately wished to go back inside, but Eddie was still wiping away the sweat that was dribbling down his forehead and when he finished, he met her gaze again.

"Fixing up the old Menagerie." he mumbled through half panted breaths, leaning down, he grabbed the water bottle that was propped against the exterior wall of the house and brought it up to his lips, she wondered what temperature it was out here, it certainly seemed above the eighties.

"How long have you been up?"

The question bounced off of him like a joke of sorts, "oh just since the crack of dawn." a small chuckle left his lips and she watched as he grabbed the tool he'd been working with before she woke, "you can go down to the docks if you like, I'll be down there in a little bit," he paused and looked up to offer her a smile, "maybe we can even go swimming."

Margo wished she could say the idea didn't excite her, but there was something so interesting about trying something you'd never done, something that she just couldn't tame.

She gave her brother one final glance before she went back inside and dug into Ronnie's clothes to find something more suitable for the weather, and while it wasn't ideal, she found a pair of old gym shorts and a t-shirt he had worn often when he was thirteen, which oddly enough, fit her fine.

Outside didn't seem as bad as it had before when she stepped out and made her way past Eddie, and now she could feel a small breeze blowing across her skin, as she walked, she thought about a few things, she wondered how long the Menagerie had been out of service, why her brother had stayed in a house with so much death surrounding it.

Maybe because it was where they'd been supposedly buried, and where their mother and father had been buried, it only now made sense to her that he would stay to remember them, to be able to visit their graves whenever he pleased.

That was another thing, had he buried their father himself? Or had the police simply cleaned up the body and kept it to identify the man of so many crimes? She'd probably never know, and a part of her told her she didn't want to.

Very quickly her toes were wound into the sand again and she found herself approaching the docks her brother had spoken of, no boats residing along their moors, as she walked she tried picturing the ones that had been there years before. Once she'd reached the edge of the dock, she seated herself and let her legs dangle over the water, the only sounds were the cries of seagulls in the distance and the waves lapping against the poles that supported the dock.

Margo sat there for a while, so long that she eventually realized she was going to be sunburnt, but when Eddie came strolling down to meet her at the end of the dock, she forgot all about it.

"How's the Menagerie?" she questioned, he'd only shook his head, "I'm not sure how long it'll take her to sail again." she frowned, was the Menagerie going to permanently be out of service? It seemed so unlikely earlier when she'd thought about it, her brother seemed to be able to fix anything, and the Menagerie would be the one thing that proved that statement false.

"She'll sail again." Margo stated, she only hoped that was true, with a shrug of his shoulders Eddie plopped down beside her and leaned his head against her shoulder as she'd done the night before, "I hope so." he mumbled back.

They didn't swim that day, but they did talk a lot. Margo asked him more questions about their childhood and questioned if he'd ever gotten their father's body back, he'd only chuckled at first, slightly taken aback by the question, but still wanting to answer it.

"There wasn't much to give back."

Margo stared out at the waves, slowly shrinking back into herself from the response, it was her doing, her havoc, her very own hands that had taken her father's life and so many others, Eddie seemed to sense this new tension in his sister and slowly removed his head from her shoulder, "I didn't mean it like that Rav."

A sigh fell from his lips as he wrapped his arms around her and pulled her close against him, "I'm sorry." he mumbled, Margo didn't reply, and instead let the tears that were brimming in her eyes silently slide down her cheeks. And even though Eddie could feel the hot tears dropping onto his shirt, he didn't say anything, he knew it was the last thing she would want people to remember about her.

That she had cried.

When all of her tears had finally dried up, they'd decided to go back to the house and have a somewhat late dinner, which consisted of fish and some pasta Eddie had found in the kitchen cabinets, but neither complained. Instead of going to bed, he pulled her off into the living room and told her to wait while he escaped to some other part of the house. When he returned, he had a large box settled in his arms and a smile on his face.

As soon as Eddie set it down, she knew what it was, a box of photo albums.

After a few minutes of him sorting through the photo albums, Margo joined him on the floor and reached into the box to pull out a photo album, it was a small thing, with a green cover and brown flowers following the stitches of the spine. She opened it and found herself smiling at the sound of the cracking spine, her eyes caught on the first image, a blonde woman accompanied by a man not much older than her with a baby in her arms.

Eddie glanced over at the book and smiled, "that's Mom and Dad holding Ronnie, he was a grumpy looking baby." Margo smiled down at the photo before shifting her gaze to the next one, it was a photo of the same woman holding the same baby, only now she looked far more comfortable and the baby looked up at her, almost as if he was bored.

Her brother offered no commentary on this photo and as she flipped through the pages of the book, she watched Ronnie grow up before her eyes, his first birthday, his first baby tooth gone, his first day of kindergarten, his first bike.

She tried to remember if she'd had one at some point, but nothing came to mind. And just between his second and third birthday, photos of Eddie had begun to show up in the album.

It was then too that she watched her brothers grow up in a matter of minutes, and when Ronnie was close to turning six, she was born.

A single photo of her and her mother had been included in the album, both looked as if they were sleeping, she knew that wasn't the case, her mother had been dead long before she had gotten the chance to meet her. The next photo was of Ronnie and Eddie peeking down at her in her crib, she was a bit chubbier, and her face seemed more developed than before.

If she'd had to guess, she would say she was three or four months old in the picture.

She watched her childhood fill the dingy once white pages of the photo album, each one taken longer ago than the previous one until she found the last photo.

A small date was sprawled across the small white strip at the bottom of the old polaroid photo, she stared at it for a few moments before her eyes flicked up to the actual photo.

She was holding a sheet of target paper marked with three or four holes, upon closer examination she realized that there were not three or four holes but rather she'd hit those same holes time and time again.

7. 18. 2002.

The same year she would've started high school, the same year she'd turned fifteen, and the same year she'd murdered her father. 

TORN FLESH

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO: FAINT VISIONS