Read Online The 14th Day by K.C. Frederick - Free Book Online

expectation.
    That sense of expectation has returned. At the same time Ila remembers driving into the countryside after work not long ago and stopping by the side of the empty road. Then too she was looking from a high place, this time at the land that fell away in green hilly waves to a pond shining in the distance, a red barn, as far away as the stars. It was then that she spoke the words from the language of her childhood. At the time. she’d felt that pronouncing those syllables was like flinging a few small coins into the alien landscape. She felt her own puniness then, she remembers listening for something—she didn’t know what—and hearing only the soft rustle of the trees in the breeze, a dry, desolating hiss. Her bright coins had fallen soundlessly to the earth and were lost in the grass. And yet, remarkably, at the same time she experienced a surge of elation. Even standing there acknowledging her smallness, she was alive. Even then, that was enough for her.
    But she realizes now that those coins worked their magic after all; she had cast a spell, only it had taken time. It was after she spoke those words, she believes, that the whole world changed, changed because she’d wanted it to change. Or maybe what’s changed is her awareness. Now she can feel the motion in things, she feels herself being pulled toward something. What was it that started that motion? Was it Jory’s coming here?
    Across the table, Miss Lorraine knows all this. Ila looks at her intently, aware that everything she’s thinking is communicated to this woman, she can feel the weight of her thoughts being lifted as she hands them to Miss Lorraine. Ila is calmly expectant, knowing that Miss Lorraine will be directing the next moves. She leans further forward, she’s aware that underneath the smell of herbs in the room there’s a sharp, astringent tang of camphor. She looks at the candle flame that twists violently without any obvious source of agitation.
    â€œI see a man,” Miss Lorraine says, “I see a tall man.” Ila nods: of course it’s Jory. “The man limps,” the woman adds and Ila is suddenly more attentive. “Only a little,” Miss Lorraine goes on, “but you can notice when he gets up. His first step isn’t steady.” Ila’s breath is pulled out of her. “Stipa,” she says aloud, surprising herself. “He’s holding flowers in his hand,” Miss Lorraine tells her and Ila sees her half-brother, his head bent over the bunch of lilacs he’s brought her. She sees the complex blue of his eyes, the icy sadness just below the cheerful surface, she sees the way he smiled with half of his mouth. “This man is a lover from the past,” Miss Lorraine declares and Ila nods. She listens gravely, thinking, yes, he’s a lover, and in the space of a breath she remembers the two of them as children hunched together among the clothes in the closet under the stairs while the shouts of her father and mother came to them from a distance, in the darkness that smelled of wet wool with a trace of camphor. She was very young then and when she told him the darkness frightened her he instructed her to close her eyes so that it would be her own darkness she inhabited. Years later, under the farmer’s hay while the soldiers searched the barn, she occupied her own darkness once more and tried to touch that earlier one, desperately preferring any darkness to her imagination of what they’d done to Stipa’s face.
    â€œStipa,” Ila says again. She misses him overwhelmingly. “Is his soul resting, is he happy?” she asks. Stipa, who went into the world before her and invariably came back to report on it. She sees him in a white shirt with an open collar on the night of a Constitution Day party, a young man in his early twenties with the air of somebody much older, somebody, it’s clear now, who uncannily guessed that he had