Forest of Rope

Chapter 10

Sorry for the long delay in updates but I have exams coming up and a tonne of revision as you'd expect. This isn't much, but it's the most I can do at the moment. 

                                     

Dec 20

'Hello again,' Riley said quietly as he knelt down to face his father. 'Guess I can't find anywhere else to go.'

Riley's father didn't say anything, but then again he didn't have to. He was always special like that, often a listener yet never much of a talker. Before he ran away from home Riley would often have one-sided conversations with him by the fire. Not that his dad didn't care enough to reply to his own son, he just preferred to listen to his problems rather than pretend he knew the answers to them.

'Nice out here today huh?' he made small talk nervously, gesturing to the slopes of well-kept grass and the cloudless blue skies above.

'I got here the day before yesterday, in case you were wondering,' he added when he got no reply. 'Trace- I mean, Mom seems pretty happy about it.' He looked over his shoulder where she was waiting on a bench, patiently watching them just out of earshot.

The park was eerily still today. Riley had expected there to be more activity. Even the playground was deserted. The empty swing-sets across the lawns of green moved with a mind of their own, possessed by a strong current of air, dangling freely back and forth as if there were ghosts of children playing on them.

He supposed that it was too cold for kids to play outside, but when he really thought about it that had never stopped him. He'd seemed to have spent all of his childhood winters with a permanent cold. Tracey would give him hell for it, yet it was always worth the scolding for another snowball fight with the guys, or another jam session in an unheated garage. Back then life was so much simpler, or at least it used to be until he met her...

'So I finally did it,' he confessed solemnly, lowering his voice to the faintest of volumes.

All of a sudden the sky didn't seem so appealing and colourful. The magnificent trees that swayed around him were wasting at an unnatural rate, disintegrating into mould and rot before his cheated eyes. The violent breeze that rifled through his unkempt hair drowned him out but Riley knew that his father could still hear him, he had to.

'I know we said we'd avoid dramatic exits but I, I don't think I had much of a choice,' Riley sounded unsure as he spoke.

He kept his head down and fixed his gaze on the infertile ground, unable to look anywhere else. The swings and roundabouts were decaying too, rusting and deteriorating into crude iron frameworks, squeaking and squealing as the ghostly children continued to play, ignorant to the all-consuming chaos that enveloped the world as it enveloped Riley's mind.  

'I mean, a guy in my condition...' he murmured to the ground dejectedly, tearing out a fistful of grass.

The high wind continued to pick up and threw his fringe all over his eyes which were swelling with tears of fury and frustration. The heavens were now bleeding red, bellowing with hellish thunder and lightning. Just like in one of Alexis's sketches.

'I can't be this alone all the time... I need, I need her to be able to look at me, to give a shit, I need her to care! If she at least acted like she gave a damn that would be enough!'

The ground itself was now shaking, splitting apart around him. Everything was shattering, twisted and warped beyond repair.

Since when did everything get so fucked up?

He was shouting now, loud enough to be heard over the roaring wind, even to Tracey who now appeared hesitantly concerned as she watched from across the park. She seemed to be fighting the urge to come over and interrupt them.

'I can't,' Riley broke off, shielding his reddening face with his hand even though no one could really see him.

'I can't sit around waiting for her to kill herself. I won't let that happen, I won't do that to myself!'

Again, Riley's father didn't say a word, nor did he move, or breathe. He just lay there in the earth, or rather under the earth, just as he'd done for six years.

'I won't watch her die like I watched you!' Riley yelled at his father's gravestone, surrendering to the aching hurt that seethed within him.

Seeing her cue, Tracey rose from the bench and rushed over to where Riley knelt face down, sobbing mutely in the dirt. She knelt down at his side and brought him to her breast.

They stayed this way for some time, a mother and her grieving son, locked in an awkward half-embrace in the midst of a graveyard. If there were anyone in the park to see them it might have appeared as odd, although perhaps not totally unfamiliar and out of the ordinary.

As she comforted him, Tracey eyed the headstone they faced with a sad yet warmly familiar look. She did not see a headstone, but a man clad in a moleskin overcoat, hands tucked smugly away in his pockets, lips caressing an unfiltered cigarette contentedly.

She didn't see a name etched in the polished stone, only her husband.

To her, there was no grave. Only memory.