Second death

The cabin in the woods had been abandoned for years, but one night, a candle burned in the window. Ally would have turned on the bulb inside the mustard-colored ceramic dome in the entryway, but evidently the light switch was still just a dull thump switch. The sunlight was fading away as it succumbed to nightfall, and Ally patted herself on the back for making it to the cabin early for this very reason.

Louis swore the power would be back on by the time she got there, and Ally swore under her breath at her brother’s false promise. She also could have sworn dad’s old lighter would have been right where her hands met only a stone hearth, cold and dusty from its abandonment. Her fingers continued drumming a few inches to the right, and soon met the sleek metal shell of the lighter.

The dilapidated cabin sat at the end of a dirt road a few hundred feet behind the only gas station for twenty miles in either direction. Ally and Louis spent their childhood here, along with their dear drunk dad. Though he described himself as a functional alcoholic, the term he and other free-falling addicts used to describe themselves, Ally and Louis preferred other F and A words. School work sent in every week from the closest school district blended with book keeping and business management as they kept the gas station barely profitable enough to make sure pops brought home more than just liquor after his weekend benders.

Ally flicked the lighter’s lid back and brought her thumb down to strike the wheel. In the warming glow of the flame, she spotted the candle that always sat by that window in case the power went out, right by the hearth and below where the lighter sat on it. Ally held the flame to the wick, watched the flame hop over, then closed the lighter. She turned and beheld the dingy interior she had once sworn never to return to.

Their whole childhood they watched cars and people come and go as they refilled their tanks and emptied their bowels. Slowly, Ally and Louis found peace only with each other as the hope that one of these cars would be their mother dwindle away to nothing but the corpse of hope. An old familiar sting.

When Ally turned eighteen, she told Louis about her plans to leave. There was no home here, not with a dad who had done nothing to fill the title since their mother left. He was far from loving, with little room for caring in between grumpy drunk tirades and passed out drunk snoring. Though Ally hated her life there enough to want to run away, Louis was the one that hated him and the childhood he stole from them. Ally knew how much it would kill Louis to leave him, but she promised Louis she would come back for him. She did just that a week later, right after their father drank himself to death.

Ally and Louis posted a small obituary with the town paper, ran fully and solely by Old Miss Baumgartner, along with the address and time of the funeral. Even though she was the closest to a neighbor Ally and Louis ever had, they were not surprised to be the sole attendants of his funeral. The whining mechanics of the hydraulic lift was the only cry heard that day as Ally and Louis quietly were stranded between likely orphaned and at the very least abandoned. The debt collectors were the only ones to offer their condolences, along with their sorrowful need to request for several past dues balances to be addressed immediately. Louis went to work at the gas station, Ally went back to the city to work in the service industry.

Eventually they settled his debts and earned back the full title to the station and the cabin. Louis took full ownership of the station, modernizing it and improving it to capitalize on its utility and location. He lived in the storage room of the station, preferring the cold linoleum over the memories of the cabin, until he met Eric and fell in love. Together they rented out an apartment on the outskirts of the city, a few miles from where Ally moved to and started to attend a community college.

The cabin they let rot, and Ally only now regretted that as she crinkled her nose at the stench of the bile and beer-soaked floorboards. She grazed her thumb over the side of the lighter one more time before slipping it into her pockets.

She leaned in the door way watched the light slowly retreat down the driveway as the sun sank further down. She kicked herself for being mad about the power, especially given the reason Louis had asked her to meet him there to clean it out.

When Louis called to tell her that Eric, now and forever his fiancée, had been accidentally shot and killed during a hunting trip, Ally’s cries echoed the static sobbing of her brother over the line. The sheriffs still had no idea how Eric’s gun had gone off, or how the bullet managed to make mincemeat of Eric’s jaw as it pierced his skull.

Louis had to move out of the apartment and back into the old cabin, and though he asked Ally to help him clean it out, she knew he need much more than that. Ally made her arrangements and left immediately.

They had agreed to meet after the funeral and grieving with Eric’s family, though that should have ended about two hours ago. Ally knew the time without having to look at her phone or her watch, both essentially the same tool out here without reception. She watched the sunlight slowly roll down the splintered roof planks, paint the log walls with the ashen colors of night as it fell, then draw back away from the cabin. The sunset was beautiful, but Ally felt nothing in this ugly place.

Ally glanced at the steady glow of the candle in the window growing brighter on the deck, a beacon of hope in this darkening world. Before she could reach for her purse by the door to grab her phone and keys and head down the driveway, she heard the low growl of Louis’ truck.

The last dregs of sunlight were seared away by the sickly amber glow of the low beams of the truck as it stumbled along the dirt road. The door popped open as the truck grumbled to a stop, and Louis stepped out and braced himself on the door for a moment, as if to steady himself, before shutting it. Ally was far too concerned for her brother to notice the tingle of fear that ran down her spine as an old alarm was triggered.

“Hey Stranger.”

Ally said with a small smile that could barely be seen as the last of the sunlight blinked away,

“Long time no see”

As kids this was the prompt for their favorite game. Despite seeing each other constantly, the “Stranger” would be forced to reply with a story about the far-off adventure they had been on, everything they had done and seen.

Louis met his sister’s old call to play with blood shot eyes that made her flinch as they burned in the dense darkness. It was somewhere between a glance and a glare, but Ally was far more alarmed by the nostalgic terror that washed over her as she smelt hot bitter breath as Louis shouldered past her.

Ally shook from more than just the chilly night settling in as she closed the door. She tried to hide her searching sniffs as she sat down across from where he had plopped down at the table. Ally knew he hated the idea of becoming a drunk more than he hated our paternal drunk, and had always been staunchly against drinking. Terrible trauma makes stricter judgements than innocent experimentation. Ally wondered if Louis even realized which chair he had half into, but before she could point it out, Louis cleared his throat.

“Remember that thing I asked you to do after the bastard drank himself to death?”

“That whole thing about not saying dad’s name?”

Ally flinched back in her seat as Louis winced violently at the tainted moniker. He leaned forward on his elbows, nodded to confirm but said nothing else. In the new proximity, the oozing odor confirmed all of Ally’s suspicions. She leaned back in double edged disgust and horror.

“Louis that’s so cruel. He’s dead, regardless of whether or not we say his name. Saying it won’t hurt you.”

Louis scoffed, sat back in his chair before slamming his hand down in a fist on the table.

“Every time I hear it, I see red, and I can’t let that happen anymore. He can’t be able to do that to me!”

Ally froze in place, acutely aware of her stiffened spine and growing panic.

“Louis, when did you start drinking?”

Louis grinned like a kid who had been caught with an extra cookie.

“Not soon enough” he grunted, as he pulled out the flask Ally had faintly heard sloshing in his jacket pocket. He extended it to Ally, chuckled, then pulled it back and unscrewed the lid, a cheer to her shocked silence.

Louis’ hand wavered, holding the flask by his lips as his smile fell.

“Remember that old hag, Baumgartner?”

He chased the vile words with a long swig, as Ally chased her revulsion with a breath to calm her screaming nerves.

“Drowned in her tub, sometime last year. Louis, what does this have to do wi-“

“She came in to the station a few days before that, kids were getting ready to finally shove her out to some retirement home.”

Louis pushed the chair back as he stood up and walked over to the candle on the window ledge. Baumgartner was the closest to a neighbor Ally and Louis ever had, and though Ally stayed quiet she couldn’t hide her anger at his belligerent belittlement of that sweet woman.

“She just kept asking. Kept asking who it was that ran the gas station before me. Kept trying to remember his name. She probably just wanted to have someone to talk to.”

His glassy gaze was filled with flames as he mumbled just loud enough for Ally to hear.

“She did tell me once she wanted to die at home.”

Ally turned her hips under the table to begin aligning herself with an exit as the tension of potential danger seeped out of the booze and bile-soaked floorboards and filled with her lungs with its choking stench.

“Louis, did you do something to her?”

Louis broke his stare with the candle and wheeled around to face Ally.

“Eric asked me that too, wanted to know why I had been off, why I had been so on edge.”

Tears rolled down Louis’ cheeks, foreign on a face that was desolate of all emotion.

“He knew me too well. I couldn’t hide it away, shove the rage down like I had all my life.”

It was too late anyway; Louis had already let it out.

Louis took another deep gulp from the flask, panting and wiping his lips as it burned its way down.

“I didn’t even know he knew his name”

Louis voice was almost a whimper,

“He must have seen it on the receipts of purchase from the bank. As soon as he said it…”

The words held in his throat. Louis still couldn’t bring himself to tell Ally what he had done to his one great love to satisfy his one great hate. He didn’t need to, and Ally sat in silence as she watched Louis’ index finger curl inwards as it twitched by his side, subconscious declarations of his guilt.

“Grabbed this on my way up here”

Louis shook the flask.

“Figured it would make the pain go away, that it would make me forget.”

He scoffed, then emptied the flask down the hatch as he turned back towards the window. Ally could barely make out the doorway she had turned her body towards.

“Really, it just fuels the rage, justifies the pain,”

Ally looked from the door to her brother, still standing by the window though no longer looking at the candle. Instead, Louis was looking to his left at the hearth, something like disappointment tinged with pain painted on his face.

“I was going to make you swear never to say it, really swear it, then let you go.”

Ally stood, moved two steps closer towards the door as he followed with his eyes.

“I really was Ally, but you just can’t do it. Can’t give me the one thing I need because you still have what, love for him? Care, about him, like he never cared even a little for us?”

“Louis, you are scaring me. Let’s just talk in the morning, but I promise I won’t say his name.”

Louis went stone cold, sober and otherwise, as he held Ally’s eyes in an aggressive stare.

“Where’s the lighter Ally?”

As the insignificant weight of the lighter in her pocket became a significant implication that she could not quickly deny, Louis leaned down, a short puff of his whiskey breath making the flame flare for a moment as Ally’s scream were swallowed by the darkness.