Rob Thurman - All Seeing Eye

I never saw it coming.

Pretty ironic for a psychic, isnt it? People would say it was what I was paid the big bucks for. It was my job. I shouldve whipped out my damn crystal ball. I shouldve known, but I didnt. Sometimes you dont. A sky that turns from blue to green in a heartbeat, while a tornado with your address lands like the hand of God to swat your house to pieces that scatter half a mile away. A simple cough shows up on a chest X-ray as the future shadow of a grave marker. The ocean inexplicably retreats miles from the beach, only to return at a thousand times the fury and blot out the sky itself. And there are days you wake up surrounded by family, and by the time twilight creeps in, youre alone.

For the rest of your life.

No matter how careful you are, sometimes the bad the horrific, they sneak up on you. Sometimes they come boiling out of the shadows, out of the dark corners, and there they are. There they goddamn are.

There were no shadows today, but there was darkness, the kind you bury six feet under-in the dirt and in your mind. It doesnt do any good. That darkness never stays down. It digs its way out, handful by handful. It may take years, but it always comes back. You feel the bloody fingerprints of it on your subconscious as it rips its way free. You hear its choked and gleeful laughter at how you thought youd left it behind-that youd dare imagine things could be different.

Because in the end, it would always be the same as before.

It was the same as before.

Right now. Right this moment.

That guy who said you can never go home again? What an asshole.

The sky was the same blinding blue. Exactly the same. The air still with the same choking heat. The grass an identical faded green splotched with crisp dead brown. Id lived every summer of my life until I was fourteen with that sky, that heat, that ground. Id lived every day of every year since then knowing Id never see it again.

Wrong.

Unlike the sky and the earth, which belonged although I didnt, not anymore, the knife and the shotgun shouldnt have been there. Couldnt have been.

It didnt stop the bright sliver of metal lying on a dusty kitchen counter. It didnt stop a hand from yanking a shotgun out of a closet with a warped wooden door. Everything in its place-just as it had been the first time.

I saw the slash and spill of blood as the knife-her best knife, her meat knife-hit a throat and sliced. I felt the lead pellets rip into my ribs under my arm as I lunged at a man who had lost his mind to carry the mind of a dead boy instead. It hadnt done much good. I was on my feet, and then I was falling. I went from the sight of the worn boards and dirty window glass of a rundown shack to that of a stained ceiling. I wished it had been blue summer sky.

From standing to lying in a house as dead as the people whod lived in it.

From whole to a little less than.

I touched the pain, a player all its own in this game, and my hand came away red. Who knew agony had a color? It did, though, and it made sense that it would be the same as blood. Crimson as the ever-present Georgia dirt turned to liquid mud, the kind to run like a river after a hard rain. I closed my eyes, but the red remained.

The knife had happened before.

The shotgun had happened before.

I didnt like guns. I didnt have to be on the receiving end of one to realize that oh-so-fascinating bit of news. Id recognized that since I held one for the first and last time sixteen years ago.

I heard the shotgun being pumped again. An echo of the past. My past.

Id known this whole nightmare would end in violence, Id known it would finish in a pattern of blood and brutality, but I didnt imagine that it would end here. My own place of violence-my own personal hell.

Home.

And I never saw it coming.

A lost shoe. Thats how it began.

It was nothing more or less than that. A shoe, just one small shoe.

At first, I didnt recognize it, although I should have. Id seen it hundreds of times on the front porch or lying in the yard, its shine dulled by red dust. Tess was a typical five-year-old, careless with her things. Not that she had many things to be careful with. The pink shoes had been her only birthday present. Id been with Mom when shed picked them out at the secondhand store in town. Shed paid two dollars for them, but that didnt stop me from thinking shed gotten ripped off. Pink patent leather with bedraggled ribbon ties and rhinestone starbursts on the sides, they were ugly as hell and louder than Aunt Graces good church dress.

Tessie loved them, of course. She wore them everywhere and with everything, even when we went blackberry picking. With hands stained berry purple and hair in lopsided pigtails shed done up herself, she would skip along in denim overalls, shirtless, ignoring the thorn scratches on her arms, and beam at the sight of those damn awful shoes.

Thats where I was walking home from, selling the blackberries. I had a stand up at the main road. It wasnt much to look at, a few boards Id clapped together. A strong wind could take it down and had once or twice in a good old Georgia thunderstorm. I sold paper bags full of plump, gnat-ridden berries for a dollar to people driving by. Sometimes Glory and Tess hung around and helped, but usually not. Five-year-old twin girls dont have much patience for sweltering in the sun in the hopes of making a couple of bucks. Besides, today was a school day. Glory was at kindergarten. Tess, with a bad case of chicken pox and spotty as a Dalmatian, was stuck at home, and I was skipping. Id get my ass busted for it, no way around that, but it was for a good cause. A skinny teenager, I was two years away from my license and probably four years away from filling out. If I ever wanted to date, money was all I was going to have going for me. Cast-off clothes and home haircuts werent the way to any cheerleaders heart, not in my school, anyway. Not that cheerleaders were the be-all and end-all of what I wanted out of life. They werent, but theyd do until graduation.

Mom worked bagging groceries; it was the same place shed worked since she dropped out of high school pregnant with me. Boyd, my step-dad, worked on holding the couch down. He was on disability, a bad back. Yeah, right. I remembered when hed gotten the news. It was beer and pizza with his buddies for a week. You wouldve thought the fat bastard had won the lottery. That bad back, along with a near-terminal case of laziness, might have kept him from working, but it didnt keep him from other things. I rubbed the swollen lump on my jaw as I walked and then fingered the four dollars in my pocket. I liked the feel of that a lot better.

Dirt poor wasnt a new phrase, not in these parts, but it was a true one. That wasnt going to be me, though. I sold blackberries, delivered papers in a place where most houses were at least half a mile apart, and had an after-school job at the same grocery as my mom. It was hard work, and there wasnt much I hated more than hard work. But I did like money. One day I was going to figure out how to get one without doing too much of the other. I had plans for my life, and they didnt involve rusted-out cars or jeans permanently stained red by Georgia mud. I had plans, all right, and plans required money. But it wasnt going to be made by sponging off the government like Boyd. No, not like that sad sack of shit.

He was lazy. I could swallow that. No one knows lazy like a fourteen-year-old kid. But if I could make myself work, so could he. Instead, he squatted on the couch, scratching his balding head and blankly watching whatever channel happened to be coming in that day through our crappy antenna. He yelled a lot at the girls and me, during the commercials. And on occasion, if he was drunk or bored enough, he would lever himself off the worn cushions to back up his bark with some bite. He was careful not to break any bones. Boyd might not be smart, but he wasnt stupid, either. Coyote-sharp cunning lay behind the cold blue eyes. That same cunning held his large fists from doing the type of permanent damage that would draw the eye of the police. He hadnt touched the twins yet, and he wouldnt. I wouldnt let the son of a bitch get the chance. Girls were different. Girls were good well, I amended as I scratched the bite on my calf, mostly good.