“She’s sick. She got bit by something out in the hills over by the train tunnel. Take a feel of her forehead.”
Memory pushed his shirt sleeve up past his elbow. It was a light yellow chambray workshirt with a hole in the chest where a pocket used to be and a collar so stained from sweat it looked another color altogether. One eye, sometimes the right, sometimes the left, was milky with large cataract and directionless. Some play of the light. Mostly people saw him at dark by firelight. He leaned in and placed the underside of his forearm on the little girl’s head. Her hair had been bowl cut, two inches of flaxen hair cut straight across. She turned her eyes up to him when he took his arm away. There was a shiny blue tint to them even here at night. Maybe the fire, Memory thought. He turned to her father.
“This’ns about’es sick as I’ve seen one. A bite you say?”
Harold bent down to his daughter. He took her shoulders and turned her face to him.
“What was it there, Avalene? Like a snake?”
Only her father called her by her full first name, and he mispronounced it when he did. To everyone else she was Ava.
“Lil bigger?” Memory said.
“Don’t think a snake,” Ava said. “It wasn’t anything. Told you.”
“Well that sure don’t make a lick of sense,” Harold said.
He walked off from the fire away from the two of them. He pushed his fingers through his hair fast and over and over.
Memory leaned close to Ava’s ear. He could feel the heat coming from her blister-flushed cheek.
“I knows, youngun. I knows it ain’t nary a snake. It’s your heart. It’s right here.”
Memory placed the palm of his hand on Ava’s chest. He could feel her youth there and wished there was another way. The worry had him miss the thumps of Harold’s footsteps until it was almost too late. When he saw Harold coming, saw the man’s countenance darkened, take a mean turn the same as any father’s might, seeing what he was seeing right then, Memory sent the old power out to him.
Harold stopped, but not only stopped, he seemed to force himself against something unseen but strong, as if dangling from a rope, pushing forward without gravity behind him, his arms swinging for momentum that was never going to build.
“What…,” He struggled, tried to lean in further, to move his legs. He dug at thin air with his fingers. “What…Whaaaa…”
He wouldn’t speak until Memory allowed it. Until the old power allowed it.
With that, he placed the palm of his hand onto Ava’s breastbone again. It would’ve been a lot easier without the extra effort of keeping Harold cornered off, but nothing like this had ever been done under the best of circumstances. He began battling Ava Hall’s burning heart.
/
SHELDON LEE COMPTON is the author of more than a dozen novels and collections. His novel Oblivion Angels is due to be published by Cowboy Jamboree Press on January 7, 2025. Right now he's reading Dead Man's Walk by Larry McMurtry and None of You Shall Be Spared by Brian Evenson. He is the publisher and editor of Poverty House.
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