There are rules here.
Myra didn’t care about rules when Daddy Steve told her not to run too fast down his Aunt Rose’s hallway when they went to San Francisco to visit, so she’d do it anyway because the hallway was one long run of old, varnished redwood, polished to a high shine and slippery. It was catnip to a precocious little girl who didn’t know the word tomboy and wouldn’t call herself one anyway; she just liked the way she could run for a minute then slide all the way to the end of the hall, bouncing her hip off of the stout oak end table holding that heavy glass bowl that needed three movers to place there.
It’s safe to say she’d never cared about rules, period.
Daddy Steve wasn’t her daddy but was her mommy’s husband so she did what he said. He hadn’t liked the way Cole Berke had come sniffing around when her fifteenth birthday coincided with an impressive growth spurt, turning his tomboy beanpole into a curvy young lady before he knew it.
So when Daddy Steve caught her with her dress off and Cole’s head between her thighs, things didn’t go so well after that. It was after his birthday party held at his brother Denton’s barn, where half the town showed up even though everyone knew Denton was a drunk who hadn’t turned over a decent crop in five years but somehow got by ("It’s sour mash," Cole had whispered in her ear as he slipped her dress off her shoulders, "Man’s been running hooch upriver since the last drought.") She didn’t care about Daddy Steve’s brother, though – she wanted Cole’s golden stubble against the equally golden hair coiled at her center, and which was now slick with her wetness and excitement.
Thus, she and Cole were completely preoccupied when Daddy Steve walked behind the milking shed and found them. Myra and Cole were torn roughly apart, the boy’s dutifully pumping cock yanked suddenly and painfully out of her.
Daddy Steve shoved Cole into a corner of the barn. He turned on Myra, his face blank and frightening. Myra calmly pulled up her bloomers and stockings, giving him a long look at her underthings. Daddy Steve was clearly in a rage, his face flushed, his cheeks glowing red beneath his blond-brown beard.
"I never thought you a whore. I thought you were a good girl," Daddy Steve said, his voice quaking.
Myra just stared at him.
"You got something to say to me, girl?"
Myra shook her head.
Daddy Steve stood exactly where he was for a very long moment, his entire body trembling. Myra waited for it, for Daddy’s fist to come whirring toward her, for the impact to crush her jaw and send her flying against the plank wall a few feet behind her. Instead, he turned and walked out. She felt a sort of awe at this – she never imagined he could control himself.
Later, she would have time to think that it would’ve been better if he’d have just hit her.
There are rules here.
She can see that past life of hers, can watch it unspool from any angle and from anyone’s point of view. She cannot, may not, feel the pain she originally felt. It’s an actual rule.
She may cross from After to Before (as many on her side think of those two planes of existence, although that’s a very basic and inaccurate way of distinguishing life from what lies beyond life), but only at certain key points in time. Only when it mattered. But mattered for who? And who makes the rules?
And where is everybody else? And where has she been?
She didn’t know. Had she been alive, she might have cared. Now, though... she understood that she simultaneously existed now as a formless, nearly invisible mass of conscious energy but also as a rage-filled hag trembling with fury inside a tiny fishing hut on the banks of a river, as well as a beautiful seductress who craves wicked sex and requires living blood and flesh.
She is all of these and none of them. She’s just a corpse weighed down with stones and tossed into a river, having long-since rotted away to an expanse of bones scattered across miles of riverbed by the current. g!