by Marsden Lyonwahl
While the 29′ Chevrolet 3AC ran best on the paved streets of St. Louis, the car seemed to come alive along the dirt roads of the Louisiana backwoods. The engine block would rattle and bark under the hood, a tinny sound like a small dog straining at its leash. The wheels would either bounce or sink in the muddy grooves depending on the time of day. At this hour of the morning the headlamps had trouble cutting through the underbrush with every twisting turn southwards. Dawn was unwelcome here until it became the noonday sun. Every shadow allowed the human mind to imagine something that wasn’t there. The automobile seemed to shrink in size and bearing as the swamps around it stretched further in every direction. The driver inside was forced to readjust his legs for fear that he would lose his space entirely. It felt to him as though both man and machine were denied entry into such an ancient and unwelcoming place.
While he was gone John-Laurent Broussard told himself that he missed his native Louisiana; until he finally reached Attakapas Parish, where the muggy wall of summer heat welcomed him this late into autumn. He had felt it as he crossed the old wooden bridge at the border, like he had slipped beneath a still pond, humidity and sweat pooling under his jacket, around his hips, and bubbling up from somewhere in his two toned shoes. If he’d whistled he could blow bubbles. The place tried to drown him, that much was clear as he wiped the sweat from his brow. Humidity and memories mixed in a place like this. He’d sat on that bridge years ago, reeling in a bluegill and watching it suffocate on the line.
It did nothing to help his cough either. Three years away and he’d lost any acclimation, much less comfort, he once had for the weather.
What would his father say? Nothing now, of course. He’d been dead two years. With his father’s death, John and his grandfather remained as the main branch of the family. The youngest child and the old man. All the cousins had moved away and lost contact entirely. The young man only had vague memories of his father’s funeral. It was common for the experience to be a blur; that’s what everyone kept telling him. But he still had trouble accepting his father’s face in that coffin. To him it felt like it was a different man laying there. He’d only glanced at the open coffin out the corner of his eye, not wanting to look at the dead man’s face. Perhaps that stemmed from the mourning, that anyone but his Pa should’ve been put on display and lowered into the waiting earth. Yet John couldn’t even remember his arrival or departure. The road he took home then escaped him, the road he drove now was unfamiliar, and the roads he would turn onto were wholly alien. Maybe that’s why he was having so much trouble now.
Everything felt a little different to his senses. Not overwhelmingly, but rather the kind of change that trailed him out of the corner of his eye. Acknowledging its presence was difficult.
The oaks and cypress’ on either side of him were both overgrown and cut back. The roads better maintained yet crumbling. The signage more assertive yet bearing names he didn’t recognize. In short he was lost, but refused to admit such a thing. No Broussard should be lost in Louisiana, they should control it. John could see the land as it should and would be, industrialized by what he’d learned in school, but that mixed with childhood memories of a primeval land, and now they wrestled for dominance in his mind. Neither of them truly realized.
John’s family had been in Attakapas Parish for as long as anyone could remember, so long ago that no true documentation existed to prove the date of arrival. Which in turn was used as proof to their generational claims to the land. The Broussards held old world ideals, most of which John had never truly understood. When he was a child they’d been described as chivalric, with ancient roots to a cloudy European heritage. His grandmother had told him stories of a magical past, pointing out books on her shelf which she claimed proved such tales. She’d said they were special, they knew things everyone else had forgotten. Age, and a respite from Louisiana, had tempered those ideals and fantasies. Now it was about money and legacy. No one worked the fields at the plantation house anymore, but that didn’t stop the family from sowing dollars into investment funds like the true twentieth century farmers they still thought they were. Now that John had finished his studies, Grandfather Auguste had summoned him home “with all due haste” to find what might be reaped from his education.
Pulling to the side of the so-called road, John opened the glove compartment to find the state map he always kept in there, even when he was in St. Louis, and all manner of papers and documents tumbled out onto the passenger seat. The young man had let his cleanliness slide the past few months, but there was too much trash in here. There were maps from his time up north; forgotten textbooks, an address written on the back of a napkin, and a few ticket stubs. Others he didn’t recognize or know how they ended up there such as tax returns and Christmas cards, yet everything that fell out carried the name Broussard somewhere on them. The automobile had been a gift from his father, perhaps the mystery trash had been from him as well. The weight of jingling keys in his palm; the first taste of responsibility.
John and the automobile, they were bound by more than just registration and an old bill of sale. The further they traveled the more the young man felt he came to resemble the Chevrolet. The contents of his mind were jumbled like the glovebox, filled with scraps of information that belonged to someone else. Without him the machine was a hollow shell. He’d considered himself the same over the last few weeks. Any passion, agency, or hints of himself had fled the deeper he’d driven into Louisiana. His hollowness worried him, but he couldn’t remember anything of himself from before to compare it to, which worried him even more. He’d once found a chick struggling to be free of its egg, the shell was too tight to let it be born. The only option left was to dutifully follow the long trail back home set out by his grandfather. He felt stuck in the past with dreams for the future, and nothing else in between.
As he took the state map in one hand and a handkerchief in the other, he sensed another fit coming on. Unfolding the map, he carefully ran his fingers along its many intricate lines in the dawn light, and tried to imagine the roads somewhere to his left or right. The rows and rows of cypress’ blocking his vision on either side were little help in orientation.
“Coulda’ swore a highway came through here…” he mumbled to himself, only registering the words after they left his mouth.
Staring down at the map, John could feel the familiar tingle start up in his chest again. It was like something was loose in there. A broken valve in his engine. Some tiny flap of skin fluttered with his every breath. No matter how hard he tried to control himself, that tingle would crawl up the back of his esophagus and into his throat, spreading to his tongue and nose. John caught himself staring through the map, slightly rocking back and forth in his attempt to hold his breath. It wouldn’t work. It never did. A great walloping cough erupted from within him, like a hammer struck the inside of his skull. He barely had time to cover his mouth.
Liquid pooled around his tongue and teeth. The taste was unmistakable. Pulling the handkerchief away, John found a familiar clot of blood splattered across the cream-colored cloth. It had grown darker since these fits had first started. Once a vibrant red, now it was almost purple. He suspected this had started around the time of his father’s death, but he’d made no attempts to be sure. Perhaps that’s why he couldn’t remember the funeral. Perhaps whatever rotted his lungs also rotted his brain. Maybe whatever had killed his Pa would eventually kill him too. He could stare from the open coffin at the mourner standing beside him, but he couldn’t recognize his face. Maybe he was just crazy. Something about the spattered blood reminded him of a face in a Rorschach test. Specifically his grandfather’s face with piercing eyes and bushy whiskers. It was a stupid thought. John stared, wanting to laugh at the situation, but respect for his grandfather colored his delusions. He carefully wiped the last of the gore from his lips, folded his handkerchief, and tossed it out the window. As he sat back John found that small droplets of blood had somehow spattered across the map. The tiny droplets were nearly the same color as the ink. He stared at the map a moment, wondering if he should toss it as well, but instead folded it and set it on the passenger seat beside him.
He told himself that he knew the rest of the way well enough and pulled back onto the road. Grandfather Auguste was still waiting for him.
#
At one time, Auguste Marcel Broussard could have been described as the wealthiest man in Attakapas Parish. Born in the early 1800s, no existing document carried his name and date of birth. It was as if he had simply slipped into existence, as though he’d always belonged, or the years had been waiting for him to take his place. He had been the Broussards patriarch for nearly as long as he had lived. Stories abounded about how the generation before him had died off suddenly and he had lived nearly alone for a time before populating the old plantation house with his descendants. He was lofty and reserved with an undercurrent of fire that kept the Broussards fortunes stable, even after the War of Northern Aggression. To him and his descendents, it was agreed that the Broussards had always been in Attakapas Parish and in the end, always would.
John felt the Broussards presence as he pulled into Saint Lazare. The sleepy town had only six roads that could be considered streets, and five of them bore the name Broussard in varying forms. When he was younger, John had felt contempt for the place whenever he had to enter it. He almost pitied the community compared to his family’s plantation. He’d watched the locals grovel at his grandfather’s feet every time they’d visited. But now, turning onto the main street, he couldn’t help but be impressed by Saint Lazare. It had grown and prospered, cutting away the underbrush that so easily overran everything this far south. New buildings had been erected with fresh coats of paint offering modern services for modern clientele. The old cotton mill had been refurbished, standing alongside a new fish cannery and a lumber yard. This was the kind of future he had come back home to work towards; the dream of a new antebellum. They could scrape and grovel for him someday. It saddened him that he would have to drive on to his family’s plantation house. The more time passed, the more he felt it was purposefully stuck in the past.
Or perhaps what truly saddened him was that Saint Lazare was no longer under his family’s thumb. A large cotton mill anchored the northern edge of the community, rising above all other buildings. It was the town’s largest structure, yet it no longer bore the name of Broussard. A small, but notable change from the old ways. If wealth had bore his family name and progress would as well, what could he call this state of prosperity? What could he call these commodities and technology that had moved beyond fading dreams of the antebellum? He kept thinking the new companies in town should be subsidiaries of his family. Was it really a dream of progress if the town bore the name Broussard or was that simply a return to the natural order of things. Was he marching back to the natural order? And if so, where would that put him since grandfather Auguste still lived? As he scanned the storefronts, he found that the place lacked something he couldn’t quite remember. He recalled the town being large; more sprawling. Maybe they had consolidated during his absence?
Coming to the intersection at the edge of Saint Lazare, John found himself staring at a small, squat building labeled J. Winebough Photography Studio. The name was unfamiliar, but the location stirred something within him. Some familiar thought crawled its way up his neck and into his head, worming itself into his brain and settling there as though it had always existed. Suddenly a memory. A talk on the telephone with Auguste. John had to pick up family photos on his way home.
Parking the automobile on the gravel road, John noted the strange feeling that he had forgotten nothing. Instead, he’d remembered it all very suddenly. The task, the phone call, and the conversation even as the words were nothing more than a soupy mumble in the back of his mind.
“Do hurry,” the old man had said. “I need them as soon as possible.”
John took a deep breath as he turned the engine off and peered at the storefront through his rearview mirror. This remembered conversation on the telephone was real, he told himself. He had spoken to his grandfather. They had traded words, dim and vague as they were. He wiped his hand along his lips just in case dried blood still clung there, and took a deep breath before opening the car door.
The interior of Winebough’s was dimly lit and stuffy from the languishing summer outside, compounded by the vinegary odor that wafted from the developing room in the back. Dust encrusted curtains covered most windows, while the light that snuck in was reflected by the variety of picture frames stacked along one wall. On the other side of the room was a stage where various wooden sets were prepared to take the customers to somewhere far away.
“Landry Winebough at your service, friend,” the pot-bellied owner noted, waddling out from the back. “How can I help you?”
“I’m here to pick up some photographs,” John replied, unsure if this was even the right place when confronted.
“The name?”
“Broussard.”
The owner cocked a curious brow at the name as he looked John over, all the way from his jacket to his shoes. Saying nothing, he waddled over to a shelf filled with small packages. John stared at the set decorations in the corner. The Egyptian sphinx, the Forbidden City, and a half-finished fairy tale castle. The one that interested him the most was the front porch of a plantation house. The Broussard plantation house, as it had looked freshly painted several decades ago. The ice cold lemonade chilled his hands on the front steps in the light of the late summer sun. He’d never heard of the locals using his family as a backdrop, but it made sense to him. Grandfather Auguste always wanted to portray the family as the pinnacle of Louisiana culture, and here was the result. Still, to see his childhood home reduced to set dressing was an odd sensation. It made John feel just as flat as the fake porch he stared at. “Been a while since these were ordered,” Landry noted, waddling back and setting the package on the counter. “I didn’t think you’d even come by for ’em. But y’all paid in advance so that’s what matters.”
“When were these taken?” John asked, gingerly lifting the package.
“A couple years ago,” the owner replied vaguely. “Say, you the Broussard’s butler? I don’t recognize you. I don’t even see the rest o’ them much anymore.”
“Not many of us left. I’m Auguste’s grandson. Been at St. Louis University the last three years.”
“Well that explains the air of Missouri you got ’round you.”
John didn’t see the point in explaining that he had lived in Louisiana, not to mention Attakapas Parish, most of his life. Most people here didn’t care, his family included. Leaving the state seemed to break something intrinsic in the identity of the locals, something that could never be regained. Only his father had wished him farewell at the county line.
“And what were you studying?” Landry continued.
“Finance,” John replied, then muttering under his breath added, “Barely.” He’d barely finished school with his cough and jumbled memories. He found they’d only grown worse the closer he came home.
“Your finances bring you back, then?”
“No,” the young man noted, turning to leave. “Family.”
Closing the car door behind him as he sunk into the driver’s seat, John set the package on his lap and flipped it over twice looking for names or identification. It only read Broussard – Paid. Nothing more, nothing less. No date or instructions followed.
With his fingers he eased the fold open, running his thumb along the old, brittle paper. Carefully he reached inside and pulled the photographs out. There were three, each laid on a stiff board and covered by a layer of wool.
The first had faded so badly that the subjects were impossible to distinguish. It looked to be a group portrait, all dressed in antique clothes from the last century. John figured it was one of those photographs meant to recapture some sense of the past era. They were quite popular up north in the dormitories of St. Louis, that and imitations of the occult. The second image portrayed two figures, both unfamiliar to John, and both wearing a fashion he didn’t recognize. He didn’t think it was an old photograph as the quality was crisp and clear, but he had no idea who the subjects were even as their faces stared back at him. Maybe they were extended family styled in a foreign dress.
The last photograph took a moment for John to understand. It was a family portrait of the Broussards, likely his generation. His grandfather sat in the middle, clear as the noonday sun. His wrinkled face and curled whiskers were unmistakable, as were the intensity of his eyes. (John blinked so as to not hold their gaze.) Yet everyone else in the portrait was blurry and faded. Their suits and dresses were distinguishable, but each figure’s face was a featureless smudge that obfuscated any personality they might’ve had. Something in John’s mind lurched as he stared at the image. He was supposed to be in this photo. He’d scampered around the front yard with his cousins to the annoyance of his grandfather while the photographer set up his camera. His finger moved to a younger figure at the edge of the group and tapped the missing face. That was him, or had been him, or was supposed to be him. He was certain. He remembered it being taken on a late summer’s day, before he’d moved to Missouri. Before his father had died. Before it all became a blur.
Holding the photo closer, and adjusting it under the noonday sun, John found that his smudged face flickered in the light. It momentarily mirrored his own face, then his father’s, mother’s, aunts and uncles’, cousins’, grandmother, and finally his grandfather. Each portrait appeared and disappeared in an instant, like flipping through the pages of a book. John’s heart fluttered along with each image, nearly climbing up his throat. He didn’t know what to think of the sight. The photo suddenly felt leaden in his grasp.
Strangest of all, a thought nagged in the back of his mind for a long while as he stared: he remembered them taking the photograph on their front porch. Yet the image before him was so flat and warped that he might have been looking at the set dressing back in Winebough’s Studio. Had they copied it off of this photo? Or had the family’s fortunes already become so thin that they had to resort to cheap mimicry in Saint Lazare while he was but a child?
These questions distracted John so much that he didn’t notice the familiar tingle in his throat. His malady seemed a punishment for seeing something he shouldn’t have. When that walloping cough erupted from him he barely had enough time to grab the crumpled state map in the passenger seat and cover his mouth with it. The map was ruined; blood dripped from his nose and down his chin; but worst of all a droplet had splattered on the family portrait, landing squarely in the blurred smudge that had replaced his face.
“Lest the sins of the father,” the priest had said at the funeral, “Will be visited upon the son.”
#
“What do you mean a storm?” John asked, leaning out the window of his automobile. “A storm, sir,” the hunter replied, standing at the side of the road, “Thunder. Lightning. Rain. It all came rolling through here several months ago. Nearly flattened everything, but for the grace of God, sir.”
They’d waited out the hurricane in the cellar while his grandfather stood at the windows watching the lightning.
“And the Broussard plantation? What happened to it?”
“I don’t know. No one knows, sir. The main road washed out and no one from the state’s come down to fix it. No one’s come out of the house either as far as I’ve heard so there’s no hurry in the matter.”
The building had been fading since his youth. If what was said about the storm was true, John wouldn’t have been surprised if it was little more than a shell now.
“I’m just trying to get there,” he noted.
The hunter stared at him silently, measuring him from the waist up. It took John a moment to realize that droplets of his blood had stained the front of his shirt. “You’ll have to take the backroads then, sir,” the hunter finally replied. “No other way around it.”
John nodded with a strained pleasantry, sat back in his seat, and turned the automobile back onto the dirt road. As he drove away, he could see the hunter watching him through the rearview mirror. A man like that would’ve worked for his family decades ago; now John was forced to beg him for directions. He sighed. Perhaps he could’ve been kinder; the hunter had told him what he knew after all. But to John he felt like yet another obstacle stacked up before him; like his automobile which had trouble climbing steep inclines, or his weakening constitution.
His memories continued to trouble him as well, gnawing at the back of his mind with insights and revelations that were vaguely outdated or premature. He remembered the bridge leading to the Broussard plantation to be sturdily constructed, yet it had washed away in one measly storm. The backroads however were a muddy tangle of trails that emerged and disappeared into the brush. They were completely overgrown when he explored them with a childhood friend who smelled of rosemary.
While Attakapas was no stranger to storms the land around John looked to have barely suffered. He hadn’t even heard anything about the gale while in Missouri. Few trees had fallen and those that lay uprooted looked to have been so for a century or more. He had crawled over those trees as a child. It was as if the land had sucked the moisture from the sky, and now it
pooled in the surrounding acres of marshland, just as it pooled in John’s shoes. Whatever terrible wind had once howled now seemed trapped within the overgrown swamp, seemingly alive and thrumming with the songs of unseen insects and birds. Each tune slipped through the cracks of the automobile and filled the hollow machine, in turn filling John’s jumbled mind with a deep thrum. He couldn’t think in such noise and was, in truth, grateful to be distracted. It was the same feeling of entering a primordial landscape as when he first crossed into the parish. This was counteracted by the fact that the Broussard plantation did not sit on a swamp and never had. It had been fertile land once, decorated with rows and rows of cotton and indigo. Even now the little blue flowers grew freely in the untamed fields. Tiny blue reminders of what had once been. Bouquets of indigo had filled the plantation house at his father’s funeral.
Eventually the road and landscape merged, becoming a single sodden carpet of overgrown weeds and oaks. John didn’t dare try and drive the car through it, instead coming to a stop and stepping out. A strange smell struck him, an overwhelming mix of aromas that dripped from the damp leaves, bubbled in the small ponds, drifted from branches in the breeze, and underneath all of it was rot, a decomposition that had claimed every inch of the land around him. His stomach churned at the scent, threatening to add to it. The plantation house itself, once cream colored and three stories tall, looked to have sunk into the dirt while the land had risen to meet it halfway. John thought it resembled a headstone now. A fitting representation of the family. Paint peeled from the walls, moss grew up the front porch, and all manner of animals had made their homes in the roof. Any structures built beyond the house were simply gone, swallowed whole by nature. Part of John felt as though this is what the house had always felt like some days when the family was in a dour mood. The storm had only made it physical. This had all been pristine once, long before John had been born, but he swore he himself could remember its better days. He could close his eyes and see the stories he’d always been told play out on the inside of his lids. Part of him felt as though he’d told those stories, he knew their embellishments and secrets, while the kaleidoscopic truth swirled around his memory for him to grasp at.
The sight saddened him, but rather than reject it he felt compelled to enter. As though he belonged there, no matter what the locals said. This was his house after all. Coming to the front porch, John could feel the itching in his throat and the rattle in his chest begin again. With difficulty he managed to swallow it down, not wanting to scare his grandfather with whatever malady he’d contracted. Still, he could feel it buzz about in his lungs like a fly in a bottle. Turning towards the front doors, John slid his key into the lock with ease and turned. At least that still worked.
“Welcome home, John,” the butler had said; neither of them knew it would be the last time.
He found the inside of the house was dark and silent. The scent of mold covered everything and a stagnant air oozed out past him as he stood in the doorway. “Grandfather?” John called, swallowing his fear and his cough. “Grandfather, I’m home.” Taking an old kerosene lamp from the wall, and lighting it, the young man let the dim, flickering light dance down the foyer and into the front room. Relatives had lined up here to offer their condolences for his father’s passing. The wooden floorboards had warped and the flowery wallpaper bulged and peeled, revealing ratholes and rot that spread throughout the foundations. On the floor was a letter, the handwriting stained and smeared, the message unknown, but signed by some distant relative. Standing there, damp paper between his fingers, John felt as though he could feel a slight breeze rush past him, shaking the peeling wallpaper, followed by a pause, then an inhale which made the walls contract, and another pause. It was like ghostly fingers ran through his hair or held his hand. He waited a moment, trying to feel the experience again, trying to convince himself that what he had felt was real. Some itch in the back of his mind told him he walked in a set of lungs. The itch in his chest made him think he walked in his very own.
John found loose papers scattered down the halls, in doorways, and crumpled into the corners of the parlor. His family had sung Auld Lang Syne here every New Years; John never knew the words and only hummed along. He paused at the sight, confused, wondering who had scattered them all. Had someone robbed the place or was this his grandfather’s doing? Most of the papers were illegible, sodden and drenched through, crumbling the moment he picked them up. Pieces stuck to his skin like flecks of paint.The further he went on he found more papers fused together, dry and cracked, as though part of a long interlocking piece of paper mache, a trail that led John on as he tried to read each one beneath his feet. They were documents of all kinds: birth certificates, marriage licenses, tax returns, jury summons, holiday invitations, love letters, driver’s licenses, state identification cards, diplomas, doctor’s notes, notes on the backs of photographs, and death certificates. All of them bore the name of Broussard somewhere on their surface.
The house had always been so orderly, even if only for the veneer of prosperity. John couldn’t understand how his home had devolved into hallways strewn with trash. He could only assume the worst had happened in his absence. His confusion crumpled into a knot of trepidation lodged somewhere in his lungs. A cough could dislodge it, along with everything else.
It was in this mess that he felt the breath again. Yes, a breath, he was sure of it. It made his hair stand on end. The breeze had a familiar cadence to it. A familiar scent. The hint of brandy and Virginian tobacco in the air. John followed the retraction of the breath as best he could through the winding hallways. He had played hide and seek in them with cousins one Easter. Part of him knew the passages hadn’t been this warped before, another was surprised it wasn’t already just rubble. The further he followed the paper trail, the more his lungs itched and writhed in his chest, begging for a chance to clear themselves of blood. He wouldn’t allow it. Not here.
Finally he found his way up the staircase and gingerly entered the second floor master bedroom. His grandmother had given all her grandchildren their Christmas gifts here while she was bedridden. The room was dark, the floor entirely covered by paper that cracked and crumpled under his feet, and the smell of rot was staggering. His grandfather’s canopy bed lay in the middle of the room as it always had, the thin curtains barely clinging to the railing. John inched closer, dreading to find what might remain of his grandfather among the sheets. He slowly raised the lantern, the light creeping over folds and wrinkles, casting long shadows in their valleys, and revealing nothing of his grandfather.
John stared at the empty bed, unsure of what he’d been expecting, and wondering if emptiness was better than a tragedy.
“Grandson…” the familiar, strained voice came from his right.
John spun around, paper crinkling under his weight, lamplight flashing across the walls, as he came face to distorted face with his grandfather. There, protruding from the wallpaper like some cancerous tumor was what remained of Auguste Marcel Broussard. His intense yellowed eyes peered out from behind flowery decorations, his nose just two small slits, his mouth hanging like false teeth embedded in a rathole, while his familiar whiskers sprouted like clumps of weeds from the paper. His arms reached from the wall, spaced unevenly and wider than human shoulders would allow, drooping downwards like willow branches. Long, chipped nails adding another inch to his reach. He looked as if half-consumed and half-born from the very foundations of the house, unable to wriggle free of his flowery, amniotic sac. “Welcome home, grandson.”
John coughed. Blood erupted from his mouth and vanished into the gloom, splattered across his hand, and dripped down his arm. A shudder ran down his back and into his knees to remain as a slight wobble. Feeling like he was about to collapse, John grabbed the bed frame for support. His gaze fell to the floor, onto the overlapping papers, then slowly climbed back up the wall to hover below the ghastly shape of his grandfather. John hoped he had just imagined it, that the rot in the walls made him hallucinate. But he knew that was a wishful lie. He saw the wallpaper wriggle out of the corner of his eye.
“Grandfather,” John mumbled, finally looking at the old man’s deformed face. “It’s good to see you, grandson,” Auguste replied in a raspy tone. “Pull up a chair, make yourself comfortable.”
“What… what happened here?
“Just a little bit of weather, I see Missouri’s made you go soft.”
“What happened to you?”
“A setback, nothing more. There’s always a price to pay for love.”
“Love? Grandfather, you’re in the wall, the house is in ruins, and you’re acting as though I’m home for Christmas. What the hell happened here?”
“I tried to help the family.”
“The family? It’s just us, Grandfather. The others are dead or moved on.” “True enough,” Auguste sighed. “There are so few of us now. We’ll need a smaller table for dinner.”
John held a finger up to the sagging wallpaper, wanting to touch it but daring not to. He watched it wriggle just inches from his skin as though the wall itself wanted to reach out for him. “How do I get you out of there?” he asked, trying to hide the fact that he pulled his hand back. “How did this happen in the first place?”
“It’s just a small setback, isn’t it, John?” the old man repeated, looking from his grandson to the lantern he carried. “Tell me it’s only a little setback.”
“What do you mean?” the young man asked again. “What the hell is going on?” “The house. The fortunes. The bloodline. It’s all been failing for a long while now. I couldn’t just let it wither away into dust. I had to do something, even as material options dwindled. Our debts grew and investments dried up. You and your father should’ve been able to help, but time moved too quickly.”
“I’m back now. I’ll cut you out.” Was this why he’d been summoned back home? “Too late,” Auguste muttered, trying to shake his melted head. “A boy of your age wouldn’t understand. Your world was born by the almighty dollar. Mine was born from… older ideals.”
“Is this about my schooling? Or what? God?”
“No Gods here, boy. I was forced to turn to writings and theories our ancestors brought from the old world. I tried to use them, but I have no practice in magic and even less understanding of it.”
“Magic?” John snorted, incredulously. Yet before he could even finish the word, part of it made perfect sense to him. He remembered both hiding away such works himself and finding the very same tomes on his grandmother’s shelves. They were a special people. “You’re serious?”
Auguste stared back at him. No words were needed. The sight alone was proof enough. John glanced down at the piles of familial documents.
“The pages are down there somewhere,” his grandfather noted. “I can’t see them anymore. But documents, certificates, and deeds bind the spell. They keep the family name together when our memory grows thin.”
Crouching on the carpet of papers, John found his grandfather spoke the truth. The documents, rather than just being a jumbled pile, were set atop each other so that the name of Broussard always met the same name on a different piece of paper. It was one long interlocking ink web.
“Was that why you needed these?” John asked, pulling the photographs from his pocket. The many faces shimmered under the lamplight.
Auguste only laughed; a hacking laugh that sounded like the foundations of the house splintering with each breath.
“Those?” he sneered. “I needed those years ago! Perhaps if your father delivered them to me when I’d asked, the ritual wouldn’t have gone awry!”
“Like the state of the house? The storm?”
“Those were an intercession. The old world falling on the new.”
“An intercession?” John asked. “You’re speaking in riddles. You always do. Why didn’t you just talk to us? Everyone suspected things weren’t going well. Why not trust us?” “Don’t you think I did!?” Auguste snapped, his loose hanging teeth clacking together. “You’re father and I talked about this countless nights. I told him we were losing time but he still thought things could be fixed by his hands. That’s why he pushed you into finance, not for you but for us. But when he died I knew things were dire and began my work. Our work.” John felt like he was back at the funeral, standing next to his father’s open coffin, waiting for strangers to console him one by one. He had always felt like another presence had taken the place of the cadaver and now here it was, speaking to him. Belittling him. “But it all went wrong,” Auguste continued. “Everything I’ve worked for. Everything I hoped for. You have to understand.”
“What’s happened besides all this?” John asked, motioning around the decrepit room and ending at his grandfather’s fused body. “Besides you?”
“Every family expects great things from the next generation. I do as well. Now our hopes, possibilities, fortunes, and expectations of every kind have fallen, as the spell dictated, on the youngest child.”
John had always been the youngest of his many distant cousins. Now he could remember being the youngest of every generation before and after him.
“It’s me,” he said, touching the blood still on his lip, his heart beginning to pound in his chest. “What did you do to me? What did you take from me?”
“Take?” Auguste sneered. “Nothing! I tried to give you everything but it was too much. All of your ancestor’s skills and experiences funneled into you, to make you a pinnacle of the Broussard family. Put us back on top. But they were supposed to join as one, not squabble and tear at your brain like some sorry schizophrenic. If you stayed in St. Louis you would be safe but useless, I wanted to see the result of my work in the flesh. But I know that look in your eye. You’re weak, you can’t handle all the responsibility. Now you are the family, all of us, what was and what could’ve been, bound together and following after you. An inconsiderate boy.”
The hopes and aspirations of generations past and future had been given arcane bindings and weighed on John’s psyche. But they didn’t fit well. They lodged in odd places, cutting flaps of skin loose, filling his lungs with blood. Dreams, promises, tragedies, and memories stormed through his thoughts, overshadowing anything that had been him. John stood there, looking up at the face of a dead relative he’d only ever seen in portraits as he was scolded for tracking mud onto the antique rug. He blinked. He stared at his own aged face as he scolded the child he would never meet for leaving his toy cars on the stairs. Blinking again and he returned to the present and stared at the warped face of his grandfather, his words faint and distant as the echoes of so many other’s memories flooded his mind.
“How could you do this to me?” he stammered, his voice wavering. “You stole my life from me and replaced it with everyone else’s!”
“I stole nothing-”
“Answer the question! You owe me that! You’re acting like this isn’t all madness!” Auguste sneered, face twisting in anger at the insult. It was an insult of course. If John had learned anything, it was that everything his grandfather did was meticulously planned out. This was not madness. This was the last few notes of a song begun so very long ago. “I do what I do for love,” Auguste retorted. “I’ve sacrificed everything. Can’t you see what I’ve suffered? What my love for the house and our family did to me?” “Damn the house!” John coughed, blood splattering across his chin as he tried to catch himself. “We could’ve sold it. We could’ve moved somewhere smaller. That’s what they taught me in school; that’s what you sent me to learn!”
“Your education in finances is nothing but a crutch when the true solution is respect and blood.”
“But we could’ve had a future!”
“I want no future that diminishes our name. That fate is for lesser families and weaker men. We are Broussards. I’ll die before we have anything less than what we deserve.” John’s cough sent another rattle through his frame, this time knocking his feet out from beneath him as he crumpled to his knees like any other piece of paper, blood dribbling down the front of his shirt. Dark red droplets stained the documents. His blood had taken on the blackest of hues. It was no longer blood but ink, and he had ruined the carefully placed ritual. He knew it. He had, after all, remembered writing this spell himself a long time ago.
“At first I feared you coming back home,” Auguste noted.
John wanted to curse, to scream and howl and tear his grandfather from the wall with his own two hands, but he wasn’t able to produce anything more than a retching sound. Ink-black blood streamed from his mouth and with it came his tongue, transmorphed into a sealed envelope addressed to Auguste Marcel Broussard. He knew all of his anger and fear and betrayal was scrawled inside. Damn you.
“I worried you might disrupt everything I’d done and ruin my bindings,” his grandfather continued, emotionless.
Sliver by sliver John’s skin began to peel and slough from his frame, each becoming a document of his own life or one relating him to the family. His feet burst into tax forms and pooled in his shoes; Christmas cards from distant family fell from his knees; his birth certificate peeled loose from his chest; his bottom lip curled free into a love letter from the girl who smelled like rosemary; and the diploma he attained slipped from his scalp.
“But now I see that you wouldn’t be able to handle such responsibility once I’m gone.” John’s thoughts and memory flitted free from his vanishing frame only to be replaced by those of relatives. His clothes became empty as he ceased to exist within them, cloth falling upon nothing but paper. The room lurched uncontrollably as color drained from his vision to be replaced by nothing but black and white which became little more than a grey haze. John’s very identity escaped him, existing only in the stained memories of his grandfather. Finally his right hand separated at each knuckle, his flimsy fingers dropping the lantern which spilled its kerosene across the floor and let the hungry flames leap free, eagerly consuming every piece of fuel strewn across their path. He couldn’t even feel himself burn.
“For what it’s worth,” Auguste shouted over the roar of flames, “I’m sorry, but I’d rather it end this way.”
#
© Marsden Lyonwahl 2026
Marsden Lyonwahl lives in his head. A graduate from the University of Washington, he’s been published in 7th-Circle Pyrite, Altered Reality Magazine, and Piker Press, with a forthcoming piece in Apocalypse Confidential. This is not the last you’ve heard from him.