Free Grave by Joan Frances Turner Page B

again.
    It had stormed during the night and my first thought was that somehow lightning hit the trees while I was sleeping and I didn’t hear it, hit them so hard it fried them from the inside and then all the land around them too. Except lightning didn’t work like that and the trees didn’t look scorched or heat-blackened, they were just gray and bare and dead. And those trees had been living just seconds before, living and covered in tiny pretty green leaves like those salads they used to serve in the lab refectory, bushes exuberant with tiny pink and white bits of lace, branching sprays of deep red berries, maples letting off winged seedlings like candy thrown from a parade float. Gone. The grass, the unmown weedy grass almost up to my knees, that was still living, but the deer who’d gone right back to its lunch after it saw us was lying there in the clover and dandelions. Lying still.
    The lab man whose name I couldn’t remember, his arm was reaching in vain up to the trees, the wall of sticks that’d been trees, like he could entreat them not to do what they’d gone and done. His face was drawn and white. “What’d y’all go and do?” he asked softly. The southern in him was coming out stronger now he was really frightened, hillbilly drawl, those families that came up here a hundred years ago or more to work the steel mills and still sounded like they’d barely left Alabama. “The hell did you—now everything’s getting sick.” He started to laugh and the laughter was a scary sound, scarier than the wall of sticks. “Wasn’t enough just to kill people , now everything everywhere’s getting sick, I can’t believe you went and did it again—”
    “You shut up,” I whispered, Halloween-mask hissing, and then I was running toward the deer, the green grass it should’ve been bending down to eat. It just lay there on its side, big pretty liquid stupid deer-eyes wide open and a mouthful of clover, torn-off bits of creeping Charlie, still wedged in its teeth. I pushed at it with my fingertips, ready to jump back, in case this was some sort of prey-animal trick and it might any moment spring back to its feet. Playing possum.
    It just lay there.
    Those things my man said to me, back in my room, they were lies. The thing about everyone suffering because of me, because I had his secret and I wouldn’t leave. I knew lies when I heard them, nobody ever said anything to me but lies. Except him, a long time ago. He was lying, and even if he weren’t he couldn’t have meant things like flowers and deer. They never did anything to him. Trees. He couldn’t stop me, couldn’t stop our work, trying to scare me with a few dead trees.
    He was lying! It was all a trick!
    The deer felt cold and stiff when I touched it, like it’d been lying there for hours. I got up, my bent leg already cramped beneath me, and brushed the dirt off my shins. “Hey,” I shouted to Lab Man, Hillbilly Scaredy-Boy. Jerkface pronouncing Miss Beach so precise and proper, over-enunciated, trying to make it sound like another word. “Come help me carry this back in. You wanted me to look at your stupid friends, okay, fine. But this first. Come and help me!”
    No answer. Because nobody was standing there anymore.
    I walked back to where we’d both been, slow as you please, because all that happened was he got disgusted standing there waiting for me, went off down the hillside, still whining and crying about how I cared more about some dumb animal than his buddies. That’s all. Because I know lies when I hear them. I’m no fool.
    The other bodies were still there and he was next to them, curled up on his side just like the deer, one hand on his holster though his gun wasn’t drawn and the other arm still stretched out, full length, like he was grabbing for a dandelion from where he lay. Eyes wide open, liquid-clear with fright. Cold and stiff. Like he’d been there for hours.
    No more dandelions. In the time it took me to walk from