Daniel lay curled in a ball on the floor, his hands over his ears as the blows rained down. As with any beating, any storm, the best idea was to hunker down and not fight back. The tornado of his stepfather’s rage would blow itself out. The anger would ebb away little by little with each strike. It always did. Or, Gary’s fifty-year-old arm would tire, which amounted to the same thing.
Daniel stared at his stepfather’s work boots as the buckle found its mark against his shoulder, his arm, and his ear—setting it ringing. Even from down here on the floor, he could smell the vapors escaping with each huff of breath. Jack Daniel’s. He’d hate the sweet, sharp smell of the stuff until the day he died.
There was a sound in the hall behind him, the swishing hem of a skirt, and Daniel managed a single, small “Please” as his mother walkedpast the doorway with her head down. She hesitated for half a step, but did not stop, and the beating went on.
It was vicious, terrifying, and yet the pain was somehow far away. It didn’t quite reach him, coiled there on the floor, or maybe he had drifted out of his head and detached from it completely.
The work boots took a step back as Gary reeled the belt high over his head for another blow. Daniel gritted his teeth, squeezing his eyes shut as the buckle came whizzing down and struck him squarely on the back of the head.
Pain; real, honest, searing pain tore through his skull, and he opened his mouth to scream, but no sound came out. He was trapped in his silence and the blood was pouring, pooling around his head.
Enough. Surely Gary had had enough. Surely his wrath was appeased now. But, no, he was raising the belt again, higher, higher—when, without warning, everything around Daniel went black.
There were three seconds of blind panic, then relief washed the feeling away. He couldn’t see, but at least he was alone. Thank God, it was over, and he had somehow managed to regain his feet.
Through the darkness, his eyes were drawn to a bulky shape across the vast black room, tall and glowing and hissing steam. The furnace. The great red-bellied monster that had frightened him out of his wits when he was younger.
He was in the basement. The place where he had been sent as a small child and made to wait in the dark for punishment. The place he was tucked out of sight so that Gary could forget he existed for a few hours.
Water dripped onto the concrete floor beneath his feet, and Daniel looked down. Through the darkness, he could just make out the shallow puddle and the empty plastic water bottle beside it. He raised his left hand. In it, inexplicably, was his pocketknife, clutched tight.
Heavy footsteps creaked overhead. Someone was walking across the kitchen, toward the cellar door.
“Nico!” a voice called out, low and angry.
Daniel raised his right hand. In it were wires he didn’t rememberfraying, the sharp ends snapping with electricity. Live and deadly, just waiting for a bare foot, human skin, to act as conductor and executioner. The cellar door opened, white light spilled down the stairs, and Daniel cried out in his sleep, startling himself awake.
He sat bolt upright in the dark and scanned the room, wild-eyed, but quiet seconds ticked past, and he came back to himself, to the boathouse. He opened and closed his damp hands and took a slow gulp of clean, night air.
A nightmare. It was just another nightmare. Another terror ride through his subconscious that had left him drenched in sweat and breathing like he’d raced a mile.
It wasn’t real. It wasn’t real.
Daniel slumped back against his pillow, aware of a sound in the night, a sound his sleeping brain had translated as the sparking of electricity, but really, it was a scratching, dragging sound—the sound of restless branches tearing at the outside wall.
Daniel rose to his feet and walked to the kitchen.
Stiff wind was blasting the windows at the front of the boathouse, rattling the panes in their frames. The storm was here.
He filled a cup at the tap and drank it in the dark, then another, and set the empty glass in the sink. Without bothering to put on shoes or clothes, he unlocked the side door and stepped outside in his underwear, greeted by a mighty gust of wind as it tore across the lake.
The forest howled with it, the voices of the trees joining in one ceaseless rush, while behind him, the dock whistled as wind streamed through the old boards and water slapped at the pilings.
The tarp he’d tucked around the stack of firewood was already loose and flapping noisily, and Daniel secured it again before walking around the house to check on the trees.
The cherry tree at the back corner was flailing in the wind. Its limbs, laden with thin leaves and young fruit, attacked the outer wall, while behind it the alders danced for their lives—slender arms lashing in all directions.
Sharp pebbles nipped at the soles of his feet as Daniel walked to the center of the clearing, the wind whipping his hair around his face and peppering his bare torso with gravel and dirt.
He closed his eyes and threw his head back, letting the gusts buffet him forward onto his toes and back onto his heels.
He had always loved windstorms, even as a kid, but especially up here, when the forest moved and sang with the power of it.
Windstorms reminded him of the words he had memorized years before when he was ten. He had pulled down the never-opened Bible that lay gathering dust on the brick hearth of the Redmond house and flipped it open to somewhere in the middle, reading through forty pages in their entirety before deciding that the God of Abraham wasn’t for him. But in those forty pages, he deemed one passage worthy of memorization, just one, from the book of Job, when a broken man cursed the day he was born and threw the injustice of his trials back into God’s face. God himself answered, his voice bellowing out of a mighty windstorm:
Who is this who darkens counsel by words without knowledge? Now prepare yourself like a man; I will question you, and you shall answer me.
Daniel lifted his arms out to his sides in the moonlit clearing, welcoming the wind like a human embrace. He filled his lungs with air and cried out at the top of his voice, long and loud, the sound vanishing into the ferocious pitch of the wind, torn from his lips and whisked up and away, into bright, undiluted stars.
