LOT'S MOUNTAIN

CHAPTER FOUR: PICTURE-PERFECT

After I get out of the basement, I just want to take a shower to peel that crazy guy's blood (and mine, too) off of me, but the power's still out. And when you get your water from a well that's not all that great to begin with, no power means no water.

No power also means no lights.

It's weird not being able to just turn a switch and BANG ... There is LIGHT, ya know? Instead, when I'm upstairs, Tim murmurs something about not having any more flashlights. Leaning over, he snatches up a candle, a lit one, from the hallway table. It's the thick white kind I've seen in churches.

Not looking at me, Tim ducks away, disappearing back down the stairs. For a while, I just stand in the dark with the kitten and that one candle. Every time my breath touches the flame, it jitters a little, jumping up and down, getting all wobbly like it might go out. But it's all I've got.

Trying not to breathe, I walk real slow to my room and then push the door closed with my foot after I'm in. The bare walls usually make it look bigger, but now the room feels like it's closing in around me.

Everything in here is halfway broken. The closet door doesn't shut right. The dresser with the splintered corner sulks next to the bed that's older than I am. Yeah, all of this stuff has yard sale special written all over it. The kitten doesn't care. She just wants me to keep holding her.

Hey, everybody wants something. Even the Stone Men. I'm not buying this protecting me out of the goodness of their hearts bullshit. What do they want? But I'm not supposed to ask questions like that. I'm just supposed to go around and pretend things are normal. It's not like I was standing on a street corner, screaming about how I'm special before all of this happened.

Not sure what else to do, I put the candle on my desk. Sighing, I pull a picture out of the top drawer to show to the orange fuzzball. It's nothing weird or anything. It's just this photograph where I'm sitting on a seesaw with Roger Dodds, my old best friend. We used to be tighter than tight. In the picture we're like six or something, and we're hanging out at my grandfather's house. I'm guessing Granddad Sam took the picture. Or maybe it was Bill.

Whoever it was, they're just a smear of a thumb in the corner. But there I am smiling and so is Roger. We're blurry, almost like we're ghosts fading away. The playset that the seesaw is a part of is one of the metal kinds. I think it was my mom's when she was little. It has one of those old slides, the kind that looks like it's three stories tall and plunges straight down.

I keep staring at the picture, holding on to it too tight so that the corner crinkles.

Roger's into band now or something. Maybe basketball? Yeah, it's basketball. We don't talk that much anymore. But there we are in the photo, best friends. Right after that picture was taken, Roger and me started looking for frogs and salamanders.

We never found many frogs, but we found a lot of salamanders, the black ones with the dark red stripe down their backs. If my mom had known what we were up to, she woulda freaked out and been worried about us getting sick from touching them. There were always bugs and salamanders under the concrete planters in Granddad's front yard. I don't know why he kept them — the round flower bowls with chips out of their upper lips and hunks of concrete missing from the base. Roger and me would turn them over and see what we'd find.

"You'd be surprised at what you'd find living in the dark," Granddad would say.

"Not after tonight," I whisper to the kitten as I look back at that picture. In that square piece of paper, that little snapshot of my life, things were good. They were as perfect as they got.