Running Scared

After finding the bullet in the woman’s skull, I clutched her journal against my chest and started running through the forest, trying to ignore the laughter of the crow I knew still followed me. My intention was to show the journal to my father, to take him to the house, to show him the skull, to ask him to tell me what had happened in the years before I was born, the years no one really talked about. But by the time I got to the house a million brown freckles crawled over my legs. My mother was the first to see them.

“Luke!” she called out. “Amanda’s legs! Look at Amanda’s legs!”

“Did you get into the chiggerweed again?” Dad looked up from the book he was reading.

I looked down and saw a swarm of moving dots. “Oh God, they’re bigger now.” I started brushing the dots off my legs.

“Don’t brush them on the floor!” My mother cried. “What if we all get them?”

By this time Dad had kneeled beside me and was helping me brush off my legs. “Bleach’ll kill them.”

Mom disappeared.

“Are they chiggers?” I asked. Now the tops of my legs were crawling too.

“Seed ticks,” Dad said. “They’ll itch, but they won’t blister like chiggers.”

“They’re everywhere,” I said.

“You’d better go take a bath.” Dad turned to Mom, who was pouring bleach into a steaming mop bucket. “Give her a cup of the bleach Julie.”

My mother and I both stopped what we were doing and stared at him. “Bleach?” we asked in unison.

Dad handed a measuring cup to Mom. “Put a cup of bleach in your bathwater. That’ll take care of them.”

“Use the old towels, not the new dark blue ones,” Mom said.

The tickling crawling feeling was everywhere now. I took the cup of bleach and hurried to the bathroom. I was soaking in the tub before I realized I no longer held the journal.