LITMIR.BIZ

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opened her mouth. The air had thickened like cotton, closing her throat.

      One was taller than the other. The short one was heavier. Bulkier. Dressed in jeans and a black button-up shirt. The tall one wore a faded white concert T-shirt, jeans and blue hightop sneakers with the red laces untied. The short one felt more dangerous but it was hard to tell because the only thing Samantha could see behind the masks was their mouths and eyes.

      Not that she was looking at their eyes.

      Hightop had a revolver.

      Black Shirt had a shotgun that was pointed directly at Gamma’s head.

      Her hands were raised in the air. She told Samantha, “It’s okay.”

      “No it ain’t.” Black Shirt’s voice had the gravelly shake of a rattlesnake’s tail. “Who else is in the house?”

      Gamma shook her head. “Nobody.”

      “Don’t lie to me, bitch.”

      There was a tapping noise. Charlotte was seated at the table, trembling so hard that the chair legs thumped against the floor like a woodpecker tapping a tree.

      Samantha looked back down the hall, to the door, the dim halo of light.

      “Here.” The man in the blue hightops motioned for Samantha to sit beside Charlotte. She moved slowly, carefully bending her knees, keeping her hands above the table. The wooden handle of the hammer thunked against the seat of the chair.

      “What’s that?” Black Shirt’s eyes jerked in her direction.

      “I’m sorry,” Charlotte whispered. Urine puddled onto the floor. She kept her head down, rocking back and forth. “I’m-sorry-I’m-sorry-I’m-sorry.”

      Samantha took her sister’s hand.

      “Tell us what you want,” Gamma said. “We’ll give it to you and then you can leave.”

      “What if I want that?” Black Shirt’s beady eyes were trained on Charlotte.

      “Please,” Gamma said. “I will do whatever you want. Anything.”

      “Anything?” Black Shirt said it in a way that they all understood what was being offered.

      “No,” Hightop said. His voice was younger-sounding, nervous or maybe afraid. “We didn’t come for that.” His Adam’s apple jogged beneath the ski mask as he tried to clear his throat. “Where’s your husband?”

      Something flashed in Gamma’s eyes. Anger. “He’s at work.”

      “Then why’s his car outside?”

      Gamma said, “We only have one car because—”

      “The sheriff …” Samantha swallowed the last word, realizing too late that she shouldn’t have said it.

      Black Shirt was looking at her again. “What’s that, girl?”

      Samantha put down her head. Charlotte squeezed her hand. The sheriff, she had started to say. The sheriff’s man would be here soon. Rusty had said they were sending a car, but Rusty said a lot of things that turned out to be wrong.

      Gamma said, “She’s just scared. Why don’t we go into the other room? We can talk this out, figure out what you boys want.”

      Samantha felt something hard bang against her skull. She tasted the metal fillings in her teeth. Her ears were ringing. The shotgun. He was pressing the barrel to the top of her head. “You said something about the sheriff, girl. I heard you.”

      “She didn’t,” Gamma said. “She meant to—”

      “Shut up.”

      “She just—”

      “I said shut the fuck up!”

      Samantha looked up as the shotgun swiveled toward Gamma.

      Gamma reached out, but slowly, as if she was pushing her hands through sand. They were all suddenly trapped in stop-motion, their movements jerky, their bodies turned to clay. Samantha watched as one by one, her mother’s fingers wrapped around the sawed-off shotgun. Neatly trimmed fingernails. A thick callous on her thumb from holding a pencil.

      There was an almost imperceptible click.

      A second hand on a watch.

      A door latching closed.

      A firing pin tapping against the primer in a shotgun shell.

      Maybe Samantha heard the click or maybe she intuited the sound because she was staring at Black Shirt’s finger when he pulled back the trigger.

      An explosion of red misted the air.

      Blood jetted onto the ceiling. Gushed onto the floor. Hot, ropey red tendrils splashed across the top of Charlotte’s head and splattered onto the side of Samantha’s neck and face.

      Gamma fell to the floor.

      Charlotte screamed.

      Samantha felt her own mouth open, but the sound was trapped inside of her chest. She was frozen now. Charlotte’s screams turned into a distant echo. Everything drained of color. They were suspended in black and white, like the bachelor farmer’s picture. Black blood had aerosoled onto the grille of the white air conditioner. Tiny flecks of black mottled the glass in the window. Outside, the night sky was a charcoal gray with a lone pinlight of a tiny, distant star.

      Samantha reached up with her fingers to touch her neck. Grit. Bone. More blood because everything was stained with blood. She felt a pulse in her throat. Was it her own heart or pieces of her mother’s heart beating underneath her trembling fingers?

      Charlotte’s screams amplified into a piercing siren. The black blood turned crimson on Samantha’s fingers. The gray room blossomed back into vivid, blinding, furious color.

      Dead. Gamma was dead. She was never again going to tell Samantha to get away from Pikeville, to yell at her for missing an obvious question on a test, for not pushing herself harder in track, for not being patient with Charlotte, for not being useful in her life.

      Samantha rubbed together her fingers. She held a shard of Gamma’s tooth in her hand. Vomit rushed into her mouth. She was blinded by tears. Grief vibrated like a harp string inside her body.

      In the blink of an eye, the world had turned upside down.

      “Shut up!” Black Shirt slapped Charlotte so hard that she nearly fell out of the chair. Samantha caught her, clinging to her. They were both sobbing, shaking, screaming. This couldn’t be happening. Their mother couldn’t be dead. She was going to open her eyes. She was going to explain to them the workings of the cardiovascular system as she slowly put her body back together.

       Did you know that the average heart pumps five liters of blood per minute?

      “Gamma,” Samantha whispered. The shotgun blast had opened up her chest, her neck, her face. The left side of her jaw was gone. Part of her skull. Her beautiful, complicated brain. Her arched, aloof eyebrow. No one would explain things to Samantha anymore. No one would care whether or not she understood. “Gamma.”

      “Jesus!” Hightop furiously slapped at his chest, trying to brush off the chunks of bone and tissue. “Jesus Christ, Zach!”

      Samantha’s head snapped around.

      Zachariah Culpepper.

      The two words flashed neon in her mind. Then: Grand theft auto. Animal cruelty. Public indecency. Inappropriate contact with a minor.

      Charlotte wasn’t the only one who read their father’s case files. For years, Rusty Quinn had saved Zach Culpepper from doing serious time. The man’s unpaid legal bills were a constant source of tension between Gamma and Rusty, especially since the house had burned down. Over twenty thousand dollars was owed, but Rusty refused to go after him.

      “Fuck!”

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