Where We Live and Die Read Free

greets them with “Hi.” Then he smiles. Occasionally, he giggles—the same little laugh he does when Cassi and I make faces at him. When I turn to look at who he’s talking to, the driveway is empty.
    I am not crazy.
     

    ENTRY 4:
     

    I guess I should start at the beginning. That’s the only way I’ll make any sense of this. I went back and re-read the previous entries again tonight, after I was finished looking for a short story I could let Stephen Jones reprint for an anthology he’s putting together, and what I’ve written so far is nothing more than the incoherent, self-indulgent babblings of a madman. That won’t do, especially since I’m trying to prove to myself that I’m not insane.
    So...
    In the beginning, I started making enough money as a writer that my wife and I were able to move out of our small home on Main Street in Shrewsbury, and buy a place out in the country instead. I like our home very much. It reminds me of the type of area I grew up in, and those kinds of places aren’t very easy to find anymore. Everything is suburbs now—suburbs marking the distance between the next cluster of Home Depots and Walmarts and Burger Kings. Everything is sidewalks and homeowners’ associations and McMansions and housing developments with names like Whispering Pines that don’t have a single fucking pine tree, whispering or otherwise.
    Our place isn’t like that at all. It is distinctly old school. We have three acres of rural land. There are lots of tall, old-growth sycamore trees growing in our yard, and at the far end of our property, there is a swift, cold trout stream about twelve feet across and knee-deep in most places. In the spring, the creek often floods. We’ve got a neighbor on one side of our property. We share a driveway with him (the driveway is important and we’ll come back to it in a minute). The other side of our property borders a vast marsh. Beyond the swamp is four miles of state-owned game land—a lush, thick wilderness that, by law, can never be developed or forested. Beyond these woods lies the Susquehanna River, which our trout stream also feeds into. There’s an old logging road that runs from the edge of our property and through the woods, all the way to the river. Once, when Tim Lebbon was visiting, I took him for a walk back through there. He proclaimed it one of the most beautiful places on earth.
    And it is.
    A brief aside. I just cheated. It’s late and I want to shut this laptop off and go to sleep, so I took a shortcut. I copied and pasted the description of the house from my novella Scratch into this document, and then changed the tense and a few other things. That’s because the house in Scratch is this house, and their landscapes are the same. Both are beautiful, and I love this place as much as the character of Evan in Scratch loved his. That’s why it concerns me that Cassi has recently floated the idea of buying a house somewhere else. I’m not sure what has prompted this desire. It makes no sense, certainly not in this economy. I have to wonder if she’s seeing some of the same things I’ve been seeing. I know that in at least one case, she has, but I wonder if there’s more. Perhaps she’s keeping secrets from me, just as I’m keeping them from her. Maybe she’s seen and heard more than she’s letting on. Maybe I’m not crazy. Or maybe she’s just as crazy as I am.
    Anyway…the driveway. The driveway is an important part of this story, so let’s talk about that. As I said before, it’s a shared driveway, meaning me and Cassi and our neighbor and his wife all use it. It’s all uphill, and a real bitch to shovel in the winter. It empties out onto a winding, two-lane back road that is frequented all day and night by speeding dump trucks, speeding tractor trailers, speeding teenagers, and speeding commuters trying to find a shortcut on their way to their jobs in Baltimore, Lancaster, Harrisburg and York. The posted speed limit is forty-five