#SampleSunday Kawilara 2, chapter 14 excerpt

Keeping the excerpt short this week as I didn’t get a lot of writing done…but here it is!

 

He didn’t think he would remember where his mother’s grave was, but just like so many other things, he did. A piece of wood still sat on it, though it was different.

Milene Eagle, tragically murdered and justice never served. Devoted mother to Billy…may he find peace after tragedy.

It took no time for tears to fill his gloomy eyes, clouds of memories and gruesome sights he only yearned to erase from his memory that alcohol never could. Time and time again, he wished it were some awful nightmare he would awake from any time. Reality always knocked him down from that delusion. There was no way out of his solitary life, no escape from the daily agony and no real way of forgetting anything. It was simply there, like the ocean turned bloody and the sky collapsed to some oblivion he would never get out of.

“I miss you, Mom…” he said out loud to the grave, though he knew no one would hear him. He thought it silently to himself every day, knew it deep down in his shredded heart, but saying it out loud brought on a whole new set of tears that streamed down his face. As stone cold as he seemed to the rest of the world, his heart was anything but stone within. It was a ship sailing in the morose fog, with no light from any ports ahead, not even a clear moon to tell him there was a light at the end of wherever he was. He was just sinking beneath murky waves, no hand reaching out, no warm touch, no words to make it all better. Nothing would ever make it better. He was at the cruel world’s mercy, where anything could have happened to him.

Sitting in the long summer grass, he could almost feel her touch on his shoulder again, yearned so badly to hear her words, whispering things would be alright again. There was just the whimpering wind in the trees, the stark silence more haunting than any ghost could have been.

“Come back to me…” were the only words in the graveyard, ones of a son long alone and kneeling in turmoil that kept him near the bottom of the ocean he was drowning in every day.

Billy didn’t know how long he sat there for, just staring into words on his mother’s 11 year old grave, finding it hard to believe it had been over a decade since Gary had torn his young life apart for good. Anger surfaced beneath grief, like storming waves beneath the deathly calm. He knew killing Gary wouldn’t bring his mother back, but Billy didn’t want Gary to do to anyone else what he had done to Billy and his mother. He never wanted another little boy to feel the way he did.

Contemplatively, Billy pulled out one of his pistols and let it sit in his hands. His finger caressed the trigger, looking from his mother’s silent grave and back to the gun in his trembling hands, his face soaked in tears. Billy wondered if living was even worth it, or if the bullet in his pistol was better off in his own head than his mother’s murderer.