Free The Lurking Man by Keith Rommel

Maybe he shouldn’t have let you, but he did.”
    â€œHe took everything away from me. He told me to leave. I was discarded like a piece of trash.”
    Sariel remained in the same spot he had been in before she descended into her memory. His skinny, crooked legs appeared as if they would break underneath his large upper body. His gnarled hands and long, wiry fingernails hung by his side like the tangle of a small bush.
    â€œYes, you were told to go and deservingly so.”
    â€œI was hurting and needed support and understanding—not the cold shoulder. I don’t know. There is a part of me that wished Wilson would have told me everything that happened to our marriage and Beau was my fault.”
    â€œEven though it was, you know he never would have done that.”
    â€œI know he wouldn't and you couldn't imagine how annoying that was. Maybe if he did, maybe it would have made things easier.”
    â€œFor whom?”
    â€œFor me!” She threw her hands up and shook her head in disgust. “Having the world hate me in return might have justified the way I felt inside.”
    â€œYou know that his verbal charge would have done nothing for you. The way you were is the way you have been since you were a child. You thrive off of negativity and you are cunning, devious, and manipulative. Search within and you might catch a glimpse.”
    She didn’t want to look for it. She wanted to leave it alone and get as far away from it as she could.
    â€œI could never imagine that death would be like this,” she said. “Being locked inside of a prison constructed of light and dark, forced to face the terrible choices of my life in interrupted sequences. It is infuriating.”  
    â€œYou are yet to reach your breaking point, Cailean. But I assure you, it will come.”
    â€œAnd you are a bastard like the rest of them!”
    She watched the smear of gray with wide, expecting eyes. Ready for his penalizing words or even physical contact, she waited. But instead, he bent down and picked up the thing that was the stain on the black and lifted it over his head. And in an instant, Sariel’s light was gone.
    â€œNo, don’t leave me,” she said, and became desperate. “That’s what my father, Wilson, Beau, and Emerson did to me. Please, not you, too. I didn’t mean what I said.”
    An overpowering aroma of flowers filled Cailean’s nose and visions of trumpet lilies—pink, white, yellow, and orange—occupied her head. Suddenly, she was a young girl at the age of nine. She ran through a field with her arms outstretched, holding firmly onto something unknown in either hand, and she batted the four-foot tall flower stems with focused anger and private joy.
    â€œCailean!”
    The sound of the angry man’s voice frightened her. It had come from behind and she ducked down to elude it. She discarded the things she was holding in the thicket off to the right and crawled on the ground for several feet. She turned left into the heavy foliage and quickly settled. The sound of her own pounding heart and heavy breathing brought her hands to her mouth to try to stifle the gasps.
    â€œCailean?”
    The sudden nearness of heavy footsteps filled her with a growing fear and she regretted her decision to hide.
    â€œYou know I’m going to find you sooner or later so you might as well come out now and save me the trouble,” he said. “Things are too thick down there so you won’t get very far. Now, I’m going to give you to the count of three to come out on your own and face me.”
    Mr. Hagen was a mean old man who drove an old truck and grunted at everyone around him.
    â€œOne,” he said.
    She hadn’t noticed the rust bucket in the driveway when she decided to trespass and execute her crazy idea.
    â€œTwo.”
    He farmed like her father did, but he always did it better. The product her father put out was inferior to