Otherworld Read Online Free Page B

His teeth ached, and he wondered why he was drinking iced tea on a freezing winter night.
    The sun drifted down and vaporized, and Mike sat alone in the darkness. He gazed at the sky and the few stars that were visible. The landscape of infinity before him, Mike’s mind drifted. Mike thought of his life and how empty it had become since Molly left. The last year was an eternity. Eyes fixed on the firmament above him, he mentally connected the dots, creating his own constellations, and dreamed of his wife. He remembered lying with her on the cold roof of their Colorado cabin on the first night of their honeymoon. They watched the stars. The night sky outside Colorado Springs was an infinite panorama. Endless space and endless time. Molly reached out and clasped his hand, and they felt so close to heaven and so close to each other. A light snow began to drizzle down, so they cuddled.
    Their love felt primeval, primordial. Love did not seem to exist anywhere but between the two of them. And yet in the gnaw of this memory for Mike, in the draining flood of many memories, many aches, buried in the endless onslaught of moments both precious and regrettable, he could see the germination of his possessiveness and thus his inevitable neglect. He’d made an idol of his wife, and she’d withered under the weight. We always neglect the gods we presume to possess. Now he was sure he’d fallen from grace.
    Time flew.
    When Mike began to shiver, he tossed the chair into the back lawn and shimmied down the ladder. He left a “thank you for dinner” note for his mother, who had long since turned in, and had started for the door when his father’s gun cabinet caught his eye.
    As a kid, Mike had spent countless hours staring into the cabinet at his father’s weapons. He’d always wanted to touch them, to cradle them in his hand, to somehow soak up their power through his skin, but he never did. They were forbidden fruit. He did not have the kind of father who wanted to pass on the interest to his boy. The cabinet stayed locked, his father’s hobby a solitary pursuit. He often warned Mike about the dangers of firearms. “The only time a policeman draws a gun is when he intends to take a life, and that’s what guns do, Mikey,” he said. “They take lives. Guns make death. Don’t ever forget that.” Mike never forgot. Even before he saw a dead body in the river by his home, he had seen death in his father’s gun cabinet.
    He peered into the cabinet, much like he had as a child, eyes wide and mind racing. He wanted to hold one of the guns. He threw a guilty glance over his shoulder to his parents’ bedroom. They slept soundly. He could hear the drone of his father’s snoring. Mike tried the latch to the cabinet and found it unlocked.
    Of course. No kids to worry about anymore.
    The hinges on the cabinet door squealed. Mike tensed. Immediately he was angry that he should be thirty-six and scared, ashamed to hold a piece of a collection his father had begun when he was much younger.
    He opened the door further, but slower this time, and winced, waiting for it to creak again. It didn’t, and the opening of the door felt like the opening of a tomb. The smells of oil and leather and metal wafted out. Tentatively, he reached out and touched one of the pistols. Its sleek silver looked like it would feel hot and slippery, but it was hard, dry, and cold. He slipped his hand around the gun’s grip and lifted it from the cabinet, plucking the fruit from the forbidden tree. He read the words on its side: LLAMA 45. He wanted to look down the barrel but could not bring himself to do it, to peer into its death eye. The gun sat heavy in his hand, and he admired it. He assumed it was loaded, and he pushed it carefully into his inside coat pocket.
    He closed the cabinet and walked to his car. The lump in his coat pocket swung against him on each step, and he felt strangely powerful,