the killing of a sacred deer - carl grimes

IX

-

ix.

whiskey lullaby
"she put him out, like the burning end of a midnight cigarette"

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"Sleep well last night?" My father asks the next morning after I've trudged into the kitchen and went about making a bowl of pathetically dry cereal at the granite island.

I shrug in response. "Yes. Slept fine." I tell him, despite not sleeping at all.

"Interesting." He responds, hands on the counter across from me. "I never knew you were one to sleep walk."

I pause.

"Or, you know, sleep take a gun, sleep steal a car, sleep drive it away."

I've never been caught in a lie before. Mostly because I simply don't lie. Especially to my father.

"Dad-"

"Listen, Carl. If you want to visit Enid so bad we would have let you go. We're actually going to Hilltop here soon. You don't need to sneak out every night thinking we don't hear your very loud feet trying to scale down the side of the house."

Tell the truth. Tell him who you've been seeing in the woods. Who you visited last night and held in your arms and cried over like some heartsick fool.

"I haven't been visiting Enid." I inform him, because I know there's a chance he might ask around when we visit Hilltop and I'll be caught in yet another lie.

His thick, gray eyebrows pull together but he doesn't press and eventually he gives a small nod.

Because he trusts me.

He shouldn't.

"Well, someone left this on the gate," He pulls a small, folded scrap of paper from his pocket. My name looped in cursive across the front of it. "Maybe she's trying to get ahold of you."

I take it from him, perplexed as I open it.

Inscribed in perfect penmanship is:

C.G.-
Channel 13 - Line 7

"She's a nice girl." He offers, giving my shoulder a squeeze. "You know where I keep the radio."

Unfortunately, I know the actual writer of the note is not a nice girl at all.

But she obviously really, really, wants to talk to me.

-

The note and radio stay on my nightstand for several days, reminding me with every glance in their direction of the sins I committed. The taste of her skin in my mouth. Her coils of hair woven between my fingers.

We have passed the point of no return. There is no way to come back from what we've done.

And one afternoon, the intense overwhelm of my uncovered inclination that I have denied myself so attentively for far too long, becomes too much. I take my father's spare walkie and hide in my bedroom closet, encasing myself the thick jackets and flannels that hang there in hopes of muffling out the conversation.

After adjusting the settings and sending out a greeting, it takes several moments—wherein which I almost succumb to nerves and toss the radio away—before her voice crackles through the dusty pores of the speaker.

"Carl?"

My heart leaps into my throat, restricting my breath for a moment. I fumble with the buttons before finally hitting the right one and forcing my lips to form a proper reply but all I can muster is a broken: "Lucy?" I swallow, squeezing my eye shut and finding a heavy resolve.