Something Rising (Light and Swift) Read Online Free

shack burnt down was a desirable outcome, or even the shack on fire, interesting as it might be. She walked around inside, periodically stooping down to pound in a nail. A puzzle, the way the nails wanted out of the wood.
    â€œAll hail Miss Misty, bringer of fire!”
    â€œShut up, Bobby Puck, you homo.”
    â€œI’m not watching you kill the frogs, Leroy, I’m going over here and also be quiet about it.”
    Misty said,
rrrbit, rrrbit
.
    The book on top of the stack was called
Mr. and Mrs. Bo Jo Jones
. The cover was a photograph, out of focus, of a boy and girl kissing, only one of them was upside down. Mrs. Bo Jo Jones’s nose was on Mr.’s chin and vice versa. Taken in profile.
She’s sixteen, he’s seventeen, a pregnant bride, and her bewildered groom … playing a grown-up game with adult consequences
. Cassie picked up the red candle and sat it square on the book; this was surely nothing more than treading the edge of events. She walked outside and around back to take a look at the flat platform she’d built between two gnarled-up trees: it was the first project she’d ever finished on her own. She’d built it in case a flash flood came while they were in the shack, and she’d nailed boards into the tree trunk to make a ladder. The platform was about seven feet off the ground—it couldn’t be a biblical sort of flood. She’d come out here and measured and even drawn a diagram in a notebook, then gone back and had Poppy help her cut some tongue-and-groove boards she’d found in the corner of the garage. She climbed up the ladder and stepped on the platform, then jumped up and down. Solid. She knelt down and checked the nails, but they were all snug in, and then she ran her hands over the edge she’d sanded smooth. From here she could see the river slowly moving, and on the shoreline flashes of a white T-shirt. There was a fundamental difference between the shack and this platform, and it could be felt simply by sitting first in one and then on the other, and whatever the discrepancy was made her wonder if maybe she oughtnot skip putting a new roof on the shack. Below her the fire was just getting going and it smelled good; whatever kind of wood they were using smelled good. A blood scent filled the air.
    â€œYou own any guns?” she heard Leroy ask.
    Bobby Puck said, “Guns? Are you talking to me?”
    Sitting up here, Cassie was waiting for Jimmy but also not waiting, she had let go some. Her own house could be on fire, this was a thing she often considered, and she wouldn’t know it until she made the walk back and found the thing in ruins, the trucks and smoke and neighbors watching. She would have no first thought but many at once. Did Jimmy come home, did Laura stay planted where she was, refusing to leave, did Poppy get the dogs out, was Belle out floating around, weeping in the yard in her white nightgown? Beyond that Cassie didn’t care, there was nothing she would mourn. Who set this fire?
    â€œCassie?” Puck was looking up at her from the ground, she hadn’t heard him approach. “Can I come up there with you?” He had a very high voice, like a little girl’s. As he climbed the ladder, his green T-shirt came out of his shorts, and Cassie could see a white stripe of skin. She looked away. “Oh, this is rather high up,” he said, looking over the edge of the platform. “I hope it doesn’t make me dizzy. If we were at the tops of these trees we could see my house, it’s over yonder as Leroy would say, the opposite side of the river from your house, we could see my dad’s blue station wagon in the driveway and my mom’s marigolds,my dad has diabetes. He is a diabetic and never leaves the house anymore, one of his legs is gone and he is now
blind
.” Puck leaned forward and whispered the last word in Cassie’s ear. She turned and looked at him. Mostly she