Final Scream by Lisa Jackson

jerked backward. His legs wobbled. With a horrid gasp, he clutched at his chest. “Oh, God,” he whispered. “Sweet Jesus, she’s crazy. Save me.” His knees buckled and he fell to the milky floor, his face turning blue, his hand over his heart. “Call an ambulance!” he sputtered, but the chanting continued and Lily stepped forward, through the spilled milk, crushing the beans with her bare feet, the knife still held aloft, the intonation rhythmic and endless.
    “Sunny—help me!” her father cried. “Damn you, help me!”
    She couldn’t stand there and watch him die. She ran to the phone and dialed for help. “My pa’s dying,” she screamed into the phone. “Please! Help us!” She was sobbing, her words garbled. “My pa’s dying.”
    Lily didn’t move to stop her, nor aid her, just watched as her husband struggled for his life.
    “You did this,” he cried. “You cursed me!”
    By the time the volunteers from the fire department arrived in the red ambulance with its shrieking siren and flashing lights, Isaac was dead. No one could bring him back to life.
    “He knew he had a weak heart,” Lily said calmly, not even pretending grief as she held Sunny tightly, “but he was very upset today, he lost a cow and calf. When he came into the house, he became angry with Sunny for spilling a pail of milk—I was out in the garden at the time, picking beans, and he had the attack. We called immediately, but there was no way to revive him.”
    “Is that what happened?” a tall, thin man smoking a cigarette asked Sunny. Still crying, Sunny nodded, knowing that she was lying, knowing that God would probably strike her dead or make it so she couldn’t talk ever again, but lying because she knew the men would send her mother to jail and she’d be all alone.
    Lily’s story never changed, and Isaac Roshak was laid to rest in the family plot three days later. But Sunny had never forgotten how powerful her mother had been, and from that point forward she’d held new respect for her visions, for the vials of powder in her mother’s closet, and for her own Cherokee and Gypsy heritage. Because she knew, without a doubt, that her mother had killed her father—as surely as if she’d plunged that wicked knife through his failing heart.
    Now, some forty-odd years later, as she stood in the sweltering trailer with only a small fan to move the hot air, she gazed through the windows to the heat shimmering against the trees.
    Her heart pumped a little faster, her blood circulating to pound near her temples. She reached for the back of a chair to steady herself, and the vision she hadn’t been able to see for Belva came clear to her.
    But it wasn’t a glimpse of Belva’s daughter or failing crops; it was much more personal. And chilling.
    The image before Sunny’s eyes was of her own sons, naked as the day they were born. Their skin shimmered in the heat as they stood on a ledge of sheer granite cliffs, the path at their bare feet much too narrow to walk upon.
    Yet they moved. Slowly. Rocks and stones falling into the dark, bottomless abyss below them. They constantly tried to find higher ground, to scale the rocky precipice, their fingers clawing, their hands and feet bloody, their bodies covered in dirt and sweat as they strained, helping each other, inching upward to a darkness they couldn’t see, a danger that lurked…waiting.
    Sunny’s heart froze.
    “Don’t!” she tried to cry, but her voice was silent, her warning a whisper that they couldn’t hear. Ever upward they moved, trying to scale the treacherous precipice, and the clouds above them turned dark and stormy, swirling with malevolence.
    The ledge became mere inches and still they strained, reaching up, hands nearly reaching the crest.
    The earth shuddered. Violently.
    The darkness swirled angrily above them. Growing near, a faceless shadow that was death itself.
    Sunny’s heart stopped.
    She saw herself, on the other side of the crevice, trying to