Something Rising (Light and Swift) by Haven Kimmel Page A

“They’re tight enough, I bet.”
    â€œWhat are you doing?”
    â€œYou need gas.”
    â€œI’ve got plenty of gas, look at that, there’s probably, is that a fourth or an eighth?”
    â€œNeither one.”
    â€œWell, it’s still plenty, let’s go.”
    Cassie pulled up to the pump, put in ten dollars’ worth of gas, paid the skinny woman behind the counter who’d been there for years, smoking and looking like a chicken, a smoking chicken, then got back in the car, where Emmy was applying orange-scented lip gloss, and eyeliner to the inside of her bottom eyelid.
    â€œCassie, you about filled my tank up. I don’t have any money.”
    â€œI don’t need your money.”
    â€œYeah, well, that’s true. You know my mom was all raggin’ on Belle because she couldn’t say what she really wanted to.”
    â€œWhich was what.”
    â€œâ€˜So, Cassie, I hear you’re quite the billiards player. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, does it. You’ve turned out exactly like your dad, haven’t you. A charming man, as I understand it.’” Emmy’s imitation of Diana was perfect. “‘Is this, now, is billiards going to be the way you—’”
    â€œEmmy.”
    Emmy looked at her.
    â€œI don’t give a shit about what your mom thinks of me.”
    â€œI know.”
    â€œNo offense.”
    â€œNone taken.” Emmy looked out the window.
    Cassie turned on to the highway, headed out of town.
    The house had been in bankruptcy for a year, and there didn’t seem much of a chance that anyone would buy it
today
, Puck wasfond of saying when Emmy fretted about them getting caught. Someone might eventually buy it, but not
today
. It was a gruesome little place on a floodplain; a gruesome house, that is, but anyone could see why the people who owned the land would be tempted to build there. The lane leading back to it was a quarter mile long, a straight lane traveling down a hill and into what looked to be a thirty-acre bowl surrounded by old hardwoods. You couldn’t see the house or anyone visiting it from the road, and from the house there seemed to be no other world. When Cassie and Emmy arrived, there were already four or five pickup trucks backed around the big fire ring they’d built as a group, the fire was just getting started. Somebody was playing a Lynyrd Skynyrd tape in his truck—this was the usual fare, along with the Stones, Little Feat, Grand Funk Railroad. Cassie parked the car, and Emmy hopped out barefoot because Brian was there and she was compelled by the baroque and unyielding urges of mating, according to Laura.
    Cassie walked around the perimeter of the house. It looked the same as it had last week, an ugly, ugly dwelling. It was a cube made of cinder blocks trimmed with cheap pine painted to look like California redwood; one corner of it was windows that looked into what had been the living room. The flimsy screen door would no longer latch, and after the house flooded, the storm door wouldn’t close, either. Cassie stepped inside. Something here never ceased to be interesting: the fishy, moldy smell, or the brick floor unevenly laid, the freestanding corner fireplace wrapped in a metal bell like a woman’s skirt. There must have been a rug on the floor, and maybe bookcases. Probably not bookcases. The couch would have sat here, facing a television. Life, Laura would have said, faced the television. But not at her house. It had beenallowed when Cassie and Belle were little, but it had since become Forbidden, and had been given away. Cassie didn’t walk into the kitchen. There was a gap where the refrigerator had been that glared like a missing tooth, and the cabinet doors had swelled and now hung open on their hinges. But here, in the living room, she could see again the interesting thing—The Line—all around the room and only six inches