BooksBarbecue
Back Phantoms
Chapters (16)
  1. Title
  2. Chapter 1
  3. Chapter 2
  4. Chapter 3
  5. Chapter 4
  6. Chapter 5
  7. Chapter 6
  8. Chapter 7
  9. Chapter 8
  10. Chapter 9
  11. Chapter 10
  12. Chapter 11
  13. Chapter 12
  14. Chapter 13
  15. Acknowledgments
  16. Also by Christian Kiefer

“Just get away. Get away.” And she was coming for him now, her hands out, open-palmed but swinging so that he had to raise his own hands to keep her from battering his face, all the while retreating down the final step and into the grass again. She did not pursue him onto the lawn but remained above him, breathing hard and fast, the image of her in the hot slanting sunlight amidst the dappled shade like some creature of myth, the avenging mother, the avenging wife, Onryō or Ame-onna or something equally terrible, and yet what did she have to avenge? Did she not recognize him? Could she not see that it was Ray, Ray who had spent nearly every day of his life in her presence, whom she had fed at her own table as many times as his own mother had fed Jimmy and Helen? And yet now there was this moment, this moment of confusion and, yes, of terror.

“Mrs. Wilson?” he cried. And then her first name, a name he had not dared call her in all the years he had known her, years which had spanned the entirety of his life, a name which he said now in a kind of desperation, for recognition, for understanding: “Evelyn.”

But already she was gone, her small, thin frame rotating back to the house and swallowed by its cool darkness, the door banging shut behind her and then all the world, the grass, the sun, the orchard suspended between, fell back into silence. The soldier stood for a long while there in the yard, hoping and perhaps even expecting the door to open again, for Helen to appear or for Jimmy, his friend of all the years before, or even for Homer Wilson himself, friendly patriarch, expecting it all to be some kind of misunderstanding. But the door remained closed, the house silent, and at last he turned upon the grass and headed south again, across the lawn and into the orchard so that he could see the lit stripe of the road through the shadows of trees so heavy with plums that he might have simply reached up and plucked one down to his waiting mouth. Maybe he did just that. Or maybe he only walked on, hungry and alone and already pining for a life that he knew he could never again claim as his own.

Chapter 2

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