(Are you just joining the story? Go back! There are 2 short parts before this one!)

The sun was fully over the edge of the earth now.  He decided against more coffee and in favor of socks and shoes.  He slipped through the screen door, closing it gently and purposefully rather than letting it bang shut.

Sera has been working very hard in the new garden.  “She deserves to rest,” he whispered to himself.  She is a good woman, a good wife.

When Webb and Sera left North Carolina, Webb was able to buy ten times the land in West Virginia without even noticing the money gone.  They settled on ten acres of property on the river bottom of the Ohio in Mason County.  Huge bright blue skies, the sparkling river, rich soil, charming wildlife, four seasons, and tremendous privacy all made the decision simple.

For awhile, Webb could not understand why more people weren’t relocating to this gorgeous, cheap land.

I got it first.  Sera doesn’t read the paper, and she won’t even turn on the computer any more.  I had to figure it out on my own, but it wasn’t hard to do.  I should have done more research.  It was such an urgent mission for change, for a new place.  I only looked at acreage and price. 

Rural life has a dark side. 

I hate the darkness.

Image by Max Frear 2008

(This is part 2. You did read part 1, didn’t you?)

Sera was beautiful in the way all women are at twenty.  She had thick brown hair that she wore in a pony tail most of the time because she didn’t really know what else to do with it.  Her slight slender simplicity was what drew him to her.  That night his eyes fell on a young woman wearing garden boots and a kitchen apron as she volunteered to serve the meal in the fellowship hall.  She had a strange transcendent quality that rendered him mute, and when she said hello to him, all he could do was nod and look away, confused and almost ashamed.

Webb invited her to his house to talk about life, God, and love.  He knew it was manipulative, but he couldn’t stop.  He even invited the preacher’s son to come over with her on several occasions to extend the illusion of a chaperone to her father.  The first time Webb kissed Sera on the mouth in the kitchen the other fellow was thumbing through Garden and Gun magazine in the living room, oblivious.

Webb could still see the e-mails he found on his computer between his wife and that same boy, the boy she’d known from childhood.  The words glowed off the screen with passion and affection, ripping Webb’s guts and leaving him catatonic from grief.

He held his temples tightly, his eyes pinched until stars came into the blackness of his thoughts.