Shadow Season Read Online Free PDF Page B

two or three times, but she won’t chat with him at all. She’ll just hand him the styro-foam cup and retreat back to her office, and return to her vigil.
    Instead of heading home, Finn walks toward the cemetery, feeling the urge to push himself. It’s about a quarter mile behind his cottage, down a dirt path that follows the naturally twisting grades of the area.
    This is the last chance Finn will have to get out and walk for a while before the storm comes down in full. He needs to move. If he doesn’t move, he’s afraid of what might happen.
    He’s got to test himself constantly. It’s too damn easy to grow complacent and docile, to stay within readily defined boundaries. Others always want to grab him, lead him, aid him, lock him down, hold his hand. He’s always this close to becoming a cripple.
    On the job he’d met two blind shut-ins. One hadn’t been out of his apartment for forty years, completely cared for by his wife. When the old lady died, the blind geriatric left her on the bed for three weeks, bloated and black with flies, because he was paralyzed with the fear of what might happen to him afterward. He lived on watered-down cans of soup and dropped twenty pounds until the stink alerted the neighbors and Finn showed up.
    The other was a seventeen-year-old kid who’d been homeschooled all his life. He’d never been outside his apartment unless his mother was latched around his throat, and then only to the small garden in back of the building. Even when one of the windows got blown out by a stray gunshot from the street, the mother lied and said it was a golf ball. Like people golf in the East Village alleys every day. The kid was happy and well cared for and smiled like a doofus, intentionally kept stupid, with no idea of what he was missing out there. When Finn left, the mother was having metal shutters put in.
    As he got used to counting off steps to his classroom, to the dining hall, to Roz’s quarters, his front step, Finn realized that a couple hundred square yards could become his entire world. The safe embrace of it is too appealing to him. He thinks of that petrified old man and it gets him moving. He wanders, gets lost, sometimes calls out for help, fighting to keep the terror from his voice. It’s better than the alternative.
    The snow drives against his face and he feels it building up on his glasses. What a bad joke that he has to clean them off.
    He slows his pace, unsure of why. Something is distractingthe hell out of him. He focuses past the warble of the wind through the trees. The snow lands on the back of his neck, but he’s already gone cold.
    Finn’s always been a man who trusted his instincts, but now he relies on them almost entirely. He has to. He’s a slave to his remaining senses. It makes him want to scream. It makes him want to scream right now.
    The graveyard is one of those half-hidden places. It’s pitted, choked with weeds, and filled with crumbling tombstones and uncleared rock.
    He takes another step, then another. He swings his cane. He’s close to the first grave. By running his fingers in the grooves of the stones, he’s memorized the names on many of the markers. He knows their distance from the path.
    This is how he can still be a man, standing on his own.
    This here, this is just a chunk of rock. Another dozen steps down the aisle and he reaches out with his cane and strikes a statue. It’s a kneeling angel, with her wings partially unfolded. Her hands are clasped together in prayer. She’s missing her index fingers.
    He walks on. A part of him expects the next tombstone to ring like a bell when he hits it. He opens his mouth to say something but has no idea what. Who is he calling to? Who does he want to respond? He wonders where the hell Roz is. He thinks of Vi but he’s always thinking of Vi. His shrink tries not to sound judgmental, but his shrink is really fucking bad at hiding her feelings.
    This stone. This is Abbie Waylon, beloved mother, struck