Blood Kin by Steve Rasnic Tem Page A

wordless.
    “You get tired of livin, keepin the feelin what it should be, stoppin it from goin bad. You get tired of ownin that. You just wanna lay it all down and rest.”
    Sadie had started down the steps, trying hard not to listen.
    “Other people’s got the feelin, too, Honey. Their turn now. Me an Addie, we done our part.”
    When Sadie got to the path she started to run, but the old man’s words came too fast for her. “Body shouldn’t have to live forever! ” he shouted in a breaking voice. “Time for some of this new blood!”
    Either Addie began to scream, a throat-rending screech followed by a rattle, or it was the tearing of Sadie’s own thoughts as she stumbled down the steep path.

 
    Chapter Five
     
     
    G RANDMA HAD DECIDED it was time to take a break from the stories, whether because she was tired, or because she’d seen the deep lines of exhaustion in Michael’s face and was takingpity on him. He made himself stop shaking. His hands felt weak, and as if they would surely float away if he didn’t watch them.
    He didn’t understand what was happening to him. When she talked about her first period he’d felt a dampness, a rawness between his legs, and a stiffness in his lower gut. When her father, Michael’s great grandfather, bit into the mouse, he’d tasted what she tasted and what her father had tasted: the sharp salt of blood and the dryness of hair fiber and the crunch and grit of bone stuff. There was danger in those stories, and it was beginning to touch him as well.
    When Sadie talked about the men she knew as a child Michael felt disjointed. Each storied male brought a face, and the need to enter into another’s feelings, to infiltrate his voice. Again and again he saw his own face in her memories, as if all the stories were about him. He asked if she had some photographs he could look at. She promised to come up with some by the afternoon.
    Michael went out on the porch for some cool mountain air. It was the closest thing he had now to a tranquilizer. If he’d been back in his old neighborhood he would have gone to see Bill the Pill Guy by now, an old hippy who would sell you a pill to correct any pain or trouble or anxiety described to him. He couldn’t tell you the names of any of these pills, just their benefits. Michael hadn’t believed that the fellow knew what he was doing but he’d still gone to him because his pills always seemed to work. Of course he’d been foolish, risking his health that way, but listening to his grandmother’s stories, preparing for god-knows-what, felt even riskier. He’d studied History in college — for a long time it seemed the most real, the most important discipline there was. Now he felt he had far too much of it. The past had overstepped its bounds; there was no more room for the present.
    He needed someone like Allison in his life. But although he needed Allison, it would be unfair to call her now, to put her through more, to put her through any of the bad things that might come from being around him again. The last week they had been together he had been so tense, and consequently, cruel. He’d picked arguments over insignificant things — the cereal she’d bought, the clothes she wore, a damp towel left in the wrong place. Every afternoon he would make himself go outside so he wouldn’t have the opportunity to say more mean things to her.
    He remembered that one of those afternoons he’d been sitting in the alley watching as a skinny gray cat made its way down the narrow lane lined with cans, bins, and boxes. Most of the cat’s fur had been shaved from the left side of its head so that its face looked almost human from that angle. An ugly scar ran from under its left eye down the side of its face almost to the mouth. Michael had assumed it was recovering from some sort of surgery. At one point it had put its paws together, looked up at the sky, and made a screeching noise.
    Michael stood up suddenly and had to grab the post by the