Summer Sons

by Lee Mandelo

Only Eddie could’ve grasped his point, understood from experience the gulf between the two and the questions it raised.

Eddie, he thought, what happened, what the fuck happened to you?

There’s a cost the user has to pay to pick up the curse/gift. The earth has to be paid

Facts: (1) I see dead people (2) I didn’t before that summer (3) The closer I get to home the worse it gets (4) Andrew too, but not as much as me So time to find out: why? —and scrawled in the margin next to the damning number four was the notation, he’s gonna be so pissed at me.

Revenants appreciated the vital spice of terror when leeched from the living. If he hadn’t been shaken before, he was now. Message received. The creature was not gone, nor resting.

There were a hundred impulsive, destructive things Eddie might have chosen to do in the face of such heady provocation, without his other half riding shotgun.

the scuffed red Converse he’d been buried in.

“For fuck’s sake, Andrew. Is there anything in this scenario that feels heterosexual or well-adjusted to you?”

Dangers stacked onto dangers, but provided no clear answers. The tomb of the bedroom above him filled him with a miserable, childish yearning: his head hurt, his hands hurt, his soul hurt, his hangover was monumental, and he missed Eddie.

On another page he read a single line, but what if we’d died there?,

my best friend is dead, and I’m out of my fucking mind.

Had he known Eddie at all, in the end?

The tree branded with Eddie’s initials would survive for more generations than Andrew had a sense of, roots stained with his death, even if only the afterimages of it.

Sam Halse drove with the confidence of a man who knew he was a king.

On some level Andrew had forgotten, spending his years as a teen and then a young man in northern Ohio, that histories had a longer and uglier reach where he was from.

But the land’s alive, after that, because his sacrifice woke up whatever thing had been sleeping there.”

“And deals with the devil aren’t ever equal, which is where the curse comes in,”

The land’s hungry, and it gets its due, one way or another.”

I don’t want to share not even with a dead man

“Don’t say dumb shit. You’re one of mine, Blur, and we’re going to get you sorted out fine, okay?” Sam said as the engine growled to life. Andrew shut his mouth. One of mine—that had a ring to it, and so did the promise of safety, of being taken in hand. If Riley had tried to slap a label on the thing budding between them, he’d have rejected it out of hand, because nothing encompassed the particular set of feelings he might sum up as owned. What did it mean that he found that comforting, still, now that Eddie was gone?

He had become a passenger in his flesh, one half of a whole, as he’d thought of himself for so long.

Having been loved wasn’t the same as being loved.

Come on. I love you, but this is no life.

Knowing it was the right thing to do, to preserve the memory of Eddie as he’d really been, rather than what he’d become, didn’t fix how bad it hurt to be well and truly alone.

Possibilities swirled in the smell of gasoline and the crisp October night.