Chapter 2

~Edward~

They say home is where the heart is.

Well, I had no heart, and this wasn't really my home.

But I thought maybe I'd try to fix one of those things.

The faded pink-red walls around me held shadows of missing picture frames. They mocked me, screamed at me to cover them, but I had nothing to share. Certainly nothing I fucking wanted to, not from what I had packed in the boxes I'd shoved deep in the attic. Paint would suffice or maybe an artist's print or some tacky velvet Elvis—some shit like that.

In my former life, I'd go out and create something new, something beautiful, but that thought quickly left me. I had no desire to try to figure out what that "new" would be.

Besides, there were bigger things to worry about in this place than decor.

This place, this white house grayed from age and life, with its damaged clapboard and rusted hinge shutters—it fucking knew it had a sucker in me. Its old-world charm and the surrounding desolate stretches of land said I was its owner, so I bought it right then and there, hoping it would give me something to do now that I didn't do… that.

I wandered around the floors, taking note of what I would fix until my stomach growled, reminding me I hadn't eaten since the rest stop five hours ago. All I had was some canned goods, so I heated some soup in an old saucepan. It was hot and burned my tongue when I gulped too fast from one of the china bowls that lived in the cupboards, the chip in the side telling me it had as many brushes with life and death as I'd had. I was happy to have the marred bowls and set of cracked cups to use.

Besides the ghosts in the attic, I owned nothing, and nothing owned me, and I liked that.

I chose that.

Wandering onto the porch, I tried to find the calming sound of a bubbling creek I'd been told existed on my property, but the breeze was rattling wind chimes that clanked and hid any other sound. I knew those were coming down as soon as I had the chance. I didn't know the house or the wind chimes' owners, didn't know why they chose the ones they did—a lighthouse, a rusted one of a tea kettle with spoons and forks for pendulums—and that was okay. I didn't need to know. I'd picked my first home from a list of five pictures sent my way by email instead of house-hunting like normal people. Rose knew me, knew I needed something to fix that would occupy my mind and my hands, and she found it. Moved me and my pathetic amount of boxes in her Jeep by herself in one trip. My whole life fit in a damn Wrangler with the top down.

Even though I didn't get to meet the previous owners—an elderly couple carted off years ago to a place that would take care of them until they eventually died—I liked the fact that someone had been here a long time. They'd lived here forever, had babies here, possibly on the maroon couch that sat in the front room. I wondered if I'd ever use that area because who needed a "front room" anyway, but fuck if I wasn't happy I could spend two nights in a row in there if I wanted to. In the same damn place.

The only thing I felt compelled to hang, a crisp American flag with its fifty white stars, white stripes, and red gashes, went up as soon as I'd found cord sturdy enough to keep it stretched across the paint-chipped pole jutting out of the soil at the bottom of the porch stairs. It was an impulse purchase in a gas station, the same place I bought the soup.

It flapped outside in a wind that was too quiet. A wind I wasn't used to. This wind was calm, peaceful. The kind laughter rode in on, not the hot kind that carried screams. I watched that flag and thought about why I bought it because you don't have to own one, but now that I did, I let it fly. Even if it burned a hole in my gut each time I looked at it.

I stared at it all afternoon as the wind blew it steadily higher, not from war, not from people waving it above their heads as they celebrated or protested, but from an eerie presence that crept in as the air grew thicker. I thought to take it down just in case, put it with the boxes up above, but family and "honor" and brothers in the ground made me showcase it like the fucking country tells you you're supposed to. Besides, maybe the rain would wash its corrosive meaning away.

I was still on the porch an hour or so later when the wind picked up for real, and I listened to the rustling and crackling from the vast field of corn and weeds that made up my backyard. The constant, monotone din was a foreign sort of lulling sound that hadn't reached my weary ears in a decade. It almost made them hurt like when you ascend in an airplane, and the pressure builds and builds until you can't hear anything at all BUT the silence pressure creates. Taking another pull on my beer and tipping the creaky, wood rocker back, I watched the gray clouds roll in. They were relatively tame to my eye, unlike the brown dust and debris clouds that eat you.

Fucking catastrophe clouds that I knew so well.

The storm was turning into something big, and I welcomed it. The not-quite-there-yet rolling thunder mixing with the whispering fields soothed me, and when the first drops hit, I held my hand out from under the covered porch, testing their velocity. I followed my hand with my tongue, like a child, wanting to taste what pureness was. It wasn't the taste of rain mixing with despair or poison, and I thought of maybe getting a barrel to collect such perfect water in, to do something farm-like, but I didn't know what that might be.

When the lights blinked and the house threatened to lose power, I went to bed. Exhausted by myself, lulled by the howling wind and angry rain falling on the tin roof. I lay there wishing for sleep to come like the dead who filled my dreams.

Mad love to LayAtHomeMom, Hadley Hemingway, and CarrieZM for making us pretty.

Enjoy, and leave us your thoughts!

HB&PB

*This story will continue at: www dot fanfiction dot net / ~ bluemeadow