Authors: Nicole Williams
The Fable of Us
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The Fable of Us
Copyright © 2016 by Nicole Williams
Cover Design by
Paper and Sage Designs
Editing by
Cassie Cox
Formatting by
JT Formatting
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Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products, bands, and/or restaurants referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.
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To Suzanne.
You’re a bright light in what can, at times, be a writer’s dark world.
Don’t ever let that light burn out.
I
couldn’t breathe.
That happened every time I passed by the Charleston city limits sign. I’d spent eighteen years in Charleston—born, raised, and hazed there—but had never really learned how to breathe there.
Maybe it had more to do with the exhaling part of the breathing process. I’d spent my first eighteen years of life inhaling and holding my breath: waiting, enduring, biding . . .
And then I’d gotten out.
Santa Barbara might have been a part of the same country, but it might as well have been halfway across the world, complete with an entirely different culture and lifestyle. Moving there had been like finding my promised land without knowing there was one to find.
I’d spent four years in college and the last few working. My family wanted to know when I would be coming “home,” a question they’d been pummeling me with since the day after my graduation. Three years later, and I still hadn’t worked up the nerve to tell them I
was
home.
Down here, Southerners seemed incapable of comprehending home being anywhere else. Especially when a person came from the kind of family I did, with the kind of history and status mine did, in the suffocating heat that was only outdone by the humidity.
Why my sister had decided to get married in the summer was beyond me, though I guessed it had something to do with making me as miserable as possible.
Oh God. My sister. The wedding. Family. Old friends. My mother’s nitpicking and cloying perfume. My father’s elbow-rubbing and cigar smoke. That house I never seemed to belong in. That city that stifled the life right out of me. That entire part of the world that seemed to eject me from it as quickly as I ejected myself.
Shit. I couldn’t do this. Not after everything.
I knew the taxi driver had the air conditioning full bore. Not because I could feel its cool rush breaking across my skin, but because I’d asked him to crank it up before we’d pulled away from the airport loading zone. I’d thought it would help.
I should have known better.
Rolling down the window a couple of cranks didn’t help either. In fact, it only made my suffocation worse. The heavy air oozed into the backseat, reeking of the same familiar scents I’d tried to erase from my memory. The Charleston air encased me, seeming to cling to my skin and fall into my lungs like a couple of cinder blocks.
I’d taken my first inhale in Charleston, and I’d be holding my breath until I passed that city limits sign in a week. I wouldn’t be able to breathe again until I’d escaped this place, and I’d spend the next three years, or preferably decades, dodging invites home for holidays or vacations.
The blocks of concrete in my lungs weren’t sitting well. I’d gone years without feeling them, and my body was fighting instead of accepting them. That had happened the last time I’d flown back here too, when it had been two years since my last visit.
When the taxi shot by another familiar sign, this one with its fresh yearly coat of paint outlining the words
The Abbott Family Welcomes You to Charleston, Their home for ten generations and growing,
I knew I needed to pull over and give myself a few more minutes to adjust before stumbling up the front steps of that house and succumbing to the whims and wills of my mom and sisters.
I couldn’t pass through those double doors like this or else, like sharks sensing prey in distress, they’d see me as an easy target. Or an
easier
target.
“Excuse me,” I said to the driver, my voice sounding strange to my ears. Probably because I’d been holding my breath for a few minutes now. “Would you mind pulling over? Sir.” I barely remembered my Southern manners and tacked on the address.
Just because I knew this wasn’t where I belonged and avoided Charleston like my very existence depended on it didn’t mean I found it evil in all ways. From an objective point of view, Charleston, and the South as a whole, had plenty going for it . . . for people whose name wasn’t Clara Abbott.
“We’re only a few miles from the address you gave me, ma’am.” The driver had a thicker accent than the locals, more New Orleans than Charleston.
“Exactly. Please pull over.”
If the driver didn’t detect the plea in my voice, he saw it on my face when he glanced at me in the rearview mirror. “No problem, ma’am. There’s a little place right up here I can pull into if you’d like to get out and catch your breath.”
I nodded my thanks but not my agreement. There’d be no breath-catching for me for seven long, gruesome days.
I knew the place just up the road he had in mind. Everyone who’d lived out here knew this place either by reputation or from personal experience. The Hide and Seek was an old hollowed-out train car that had been transformed into a bar of sorts. I didn’t know exactly how a bar was “of sorts,” but I thought it had something to do with the fact that while the place served shots like we were all waking up to the apocalypse, it didn’t follow with the bar trend of playing music or hanging neon lights in windows or offering a dance floor.
It was frequented by those who slithered in and out of society under the cover of night and those with more tar than blood pumping through their veins. You know, from their black hearts. At least that was the story I’d been told while growing up here.
The Hide and Seek wasn’t for my family and its “kind;” it was a haunt for the “other kind.” No Abbott had stepped foot inside it. Until tonight.
When the driver pulled into the rudimentary parking lot, equipped with enough potholes and mud bogs to keep out the expensive imports, I threw open the door before the taxi had come to a complete stop. I was out the door the moment the tires stopped moving.
The driver threw his arm across the back of the passenger seat and twisted around to ask me, “Do you want me to wait or leave, ma’am?”
“Wait please.” I was already moving toward the old train car, rusted out from age and humidity, tangled with vines and moss that had crept its way around it.
“The meter won’t stop running.” He pointed at the meter that was already approaching the triple-digit mark.
I nodded, continuing on my journey. “I know. I won’t be long. I just think I need a drink before I go any farther.”
A silver, untamed brow lifted. “Ma’am, from the look of you, you’re in need of a whole fifth of drinks.” The driver waved, shooing me on my way. “I’ll be waiting. Take your time.”
Firing off a wave at the driver as I powered toward the train car, I fought the urge to decipher “taking my time” as spending the next seven days here before staggering back to the cab and making the return trip to the airport.
It was my younger sister’s wedding; I had to be there for her. The sentiment might not have been returned, and a fraction of my motivation for showing up might have been derived from the fear of our mother sending a lynch gang for me if I failed to appear, but I was going nonetheless. I just needed a shot or two of the kind of courage that came in liquid form. With my family, no one had the right to judge me for turning to a bottle to face them.
After weaving through a brigade of beat-up trucks splattered in mud and hollowing out from rust, I made it to the train car. The entrance wasn’t visible from the parking lot, so it must have been hiding around the back. While most businesses would have placed a priority on putting the entrance in plain view of potential customers, The Hide and Seek seemed to want theirs to be difficult to find.
I hadn’t stepped foot in the place yet, and I already knew I liked it. Nonconformist. Waving its middle finger at the world. This relic of a train car had ten times the courage I did within these city limits.
When I stumbled around the back and almost crashed into a guy answering nature’s call up against the rusty metal wall, my impression fell a few notches. When it came to nonconformism, I drew a hard line at peeing in public, setting aside the fact that the entrance of The Hide and Seek wasn’t exactly the most public of places. Still . . . it was public enough to take your peeing elsewhere. Try behind that tree ten feet away elsewhere.