Semper Prixus (pt 4).

Kyle drops down heavily on the cement front steps, bruised from roughhousing with the little boys that had no problem kicking the shit out of his ribs. He’d like to be as drunk as his father, who is passed out and farting on the couch inside, but he’s wide awake.

There are the skeletons of houses across the street now – when he was a kid this neighborhood was a hundred years old, filled with steel mill workers and the sons of steel mill workers and their sons too, and when he was ten years old the Smoke River flooded so badly it sunk half the town. And all the time he’d come to visit his sister and her now-ex, who couldn’t grab the house fast enough when dad abandoned it after mom died, there’d been nothing but fields grown wild summer after summer. Great place to play in, his sister always said. Great place to raise kids.

Now there’s going to be a lot of kids, Kyle thinks. Rain City’s on the move.

And though he meant it bitterly, he’s glad for his nephew; it was lonely here by himself after his sister ran away, just him and his dad in their leftover house on the half-edge of town and the ghosts of lost opportunity all over the place of what people would still have if not for that god damned flood. Sometimes he thought he could understand why his mother killed herself, a little bit at least.

His sister comes out and sits next to him, and they watch the last glow of the sun slip down behind the skeletons while the bloated moon rises at the other end of the street.

I’m glad Stevie likes you, his sister says, I was scared he wouldn’t.

I wonder if being told I was going to molest him had anything to do with that.

His sister shudders a little. What do you want me to say.

There’s nothing to say. Kyle pats her on the knee, and feels dumb for doing it. He seems like he’s handling it okay, he says. Stevie, he’s really something.

She swallows. I don’t know.

Through the open window they hear their dad fart resoundingly, and helplessly they collapse into each other, snorting laughter through their fingers.

Hey, Kyle says when he’s recovered, why don’t I take Stevie to do something. We can go shopping or swimming or something and you can get a break.

Her look of gratitude hurts him; the kiss on the cheek cuts him. She goes inside the house, closing the window, and then the lights begin to darken one by one like candles being blown out.

Kyle hears a rustling across the street: a raccoon comes into the streetlight, rising on its hind legs for a second. It stops when it notices Kyle, and then it waves at him happily and flees into the dark. Kyle looks after it; he doesn’t care anymore if the things he sees are real. That’s not important.