Lineage by Joe Hart

that led to the river.
    All hope of his father failing to notice him in the gloom cast by the house was forgotten when the footsteps stopped a few feet away. Lance lay unmoving, as the frost from the grass melted and began to soak through the front of his jacket and pants.
    “You can’t outrun me yet, boy, and I don’t think you ever will.”
    Lance began to move to regain his feet when he felt something solid connect with the back of his skull, and then the darkness surrounding him became a deeper shade, and he knew no more.  
     
    Cold light poured through the nearby window, dappling Lance’s face as his eyelids eased open with the grace of a rusted set of shutters. At first, the room didn’t make sense. Not because he didn’t recognize it or the objects therein; it just had a terrible sense of wrongness about it. It was as though he had been away for years and had unexpectedly returned home to visit, spending the night in his old bed, his childhood years plastered across the walls in decorations of an innocence he had never truly known.
    Pain spooled forth from the base of his skull, so thick and whole it was a solid hot stone nestled there waiting to hatch into something even more monstrous. Lance moaned and rubbed the back of his neck, which felt upraised and lumpy to the touch. As he massaged the swollen area, the memory of the night before came flooding back to him, and suddenly he knew why he felt strange in his own bed. The last memory he had was of lying, splayed out, on the ground in the darkness at the feet of his father. Then there was pain. Then darkness.
    Lance tried to sit up but was immediately overwhelmed with dizziness and nausea. He leaned forward and grabbed the trashcan that sat near his bed, and vomited convulsively into it.
    When his stomach tired of trying to turn itself inside out and a tentative calm settled into his core, he released his hold on the soiled wastebasket and lay back down in his bed. Sleep nudged at his mind and pulled him closer. There was something he needed to check, but the urge was fading along with his vision. Soon the only sounds in the room were soft snores and the occasional rustle of clothing as he twitched in his sleep.
     
    When he woke again, his window was a dark eye gazing out at the night dappled with stars. A full moon shone in the silence-filled room and coated everything with a silvery glow.
    Lance breathed heavily as he looked about his room for the second time that day. Each object he inspected threw deep shadows and the only other illumination came from the horizontal slit at the bottom of his door.
    He blinked several times and picked the cutting grains of sleep from the corners of his eyes. When his vision cleared, he sat on the edge of the bed, recalling the pain and dizziness that had assaulted him so viciously earlier in the day. At least he thought it was the same day, but for all he knew a week may have passed. He waited for over a minute for queasiness to rear its ugly head, surprised when none came. A thought sprung into his mind, and his eyes searched for the familiar shape of his notebook. He breathed out in relief when he saw it lying half on, half off his desk. He got to his feet and took several unsteady steps across the threshold until he was able to grasp the gold door handle.
    A glow emanated from the kitchen at the end of the hall, and although the light was dim, Lance still squinted into it. His head felt as if it had been put in front of a semi’s tire and run over violently, but he continued to make his way toward the light.
    When he entered the kitchen, his thoughts had cleared enough for worry, his ever-present friend, to settle into its regular place in the base of his stomach. The room was empty, as he had feared it would be. His mother wasn’t there. He had hoped she would be sitting at the far end of the table, maybe bruised and beaten, but there. Perhaps sipping out of her worn coffee cup that said in bold letters Dance in the