Seed Read Free

word,” Charlie mulled. She yanked on her other sock and slid off her bed. “And I can’t watch my mouth because my eyes are stuck on my head and my mouth is stuck on my head and how do you watch your mouth if they’re both stuck on your head, huh?”
    Aimee exhaled a steady breath and held Charlotte’s pants out, patiently waiting for the girl to stick her scrawny legs through the holes.
    “Hurry up or you won’t have time for Lucky Charms,” Aimee warned. “You too, Abby. Both of you are running late.”
    The girls went silent while they dressed, zipping up zippers and pulling on t-shirts. Charlie fumbled with her shoe laces before throwing them down in frustration. After a minute of letting her struggle, Aimee popped Charlie back on the bed and tied her shoes for her.
    “Momma?”
    “Yeah, baby?”
    Charlie frowned before raising her shoulders up to her ears. “Is Daddy okay?”
    “What makes you ask that?” Aimee asked.
    “The accident,” Charlie shrugged. “He looked really worried.”
    “He was just worried that you and your sister weren’t hurt,” Aimee said with a smile. “You aren’t hurt, are you?”
    Charlotte shook her head no.
    “Good. Now hurry up and eat your breakfast. Grandma is giving you a ride to school today.”

    Charlie was right: Jack was worried. There was the accident and the mangled car—it was enough to worry anyone, especially since it had been their only mode of transportation. But the twisted frame of that Saturn was the least of Jack’s concerns. What was really eating at him was that pair of eyes. They had scared him as a child and they scared him even more now.
    The first time Jack had seen those eyes had been along the outskirts of his parents’ Georgia property. The house was a run-down double-wide trailer and its paint was peeling from decades of humid Southern heat. The siding was rusted over and popping its bolts, hanging from the bottom of the trailer like a silver-lined candy wrapper.
    The property didn’t match the house. It was a great stretch of land; a good two acres narrower than it was long. Those two acres of grassland stretched back for what seemed like an eternity, ending at a wall of trees.
    Beyond those trees and a few hundred paces north, an old cemetery sat surrounded by a rusted iron fence. There were too many headstones for it to have belonged to a single family, yet not enough to have belonged to the small town of Rosewood, Georgia. The day Jack discovered that cemetery, he ran from it in search of his parents, but something kept him from revealing his discovery.
    Gilda and Stephen Winter weren’t prize-winning parents. That run-down double-wide was an accurate representation of the way their household was run: sparingly and with little attention. They had been blessed with those two acres after one of Gilda’s family members had bit the big one, but the shitty trailer was all Gilda and Stephen’s. They’d bought it off an old guy with one foot in the coffin a few months after Gilda got pregnant, and even then that trailer was waiting for the perfect moment to fall apart.
    They hauled that already dilapidated trailer halfway across Georgia and parked it on that inherited land; that was all it took for the Winters to officially become homeowners. A few months later they were homeowners with a kid.
    Growing up, Jack didn’t have much guidance. He ran around in bare feet throughout most of the year, took a bath every few days—Gilda would throw him in the tub when she was no longer able to take the stink—and only brushed his teeth because the TV told him to. He grew up wild; a modern-day Huck Finn. He’d run along the length of that property to the tree line, duck beneath a tangle of branches, and spend afternoons among the dead.
    Despite his youth, Jack knew that spending time alone in a cemetery was weird, but something kept drawing him back. At first it was only once or twice a month, but as time went on he visited with more frequency.