text: Recumon (Story #1): Love Apidae by Michael R.E. Adams by Michael R.E. Adams - Read Online
  Publisher: Enchanted CipherReleased: Nov 8, 2015ISBN: 1310907064Format: book
  Recumon (Story #1) - Michael R.E. Adams
  LOVE APIDAE
  ©2015 Michael Adams
  Abel Carraway carried the head of a lamb. It hung from his grip, swaying about, smacking against his leg. He walked down the middle of the street, treading on the double yellow line.
  The neighborhood disturbed him. Its quaint houses were white with red front doors, tidy gardens, and freshly clipped lawns. Ghosts­­, those who pretended to be alive–to feel–inhabited White Swallows. These humans managed to be more otherworldly and more animal than the lamb demon, the daemil, he had spent his afternoon hunting.
  He saw the occasional face faded in the kitchen window. The children wanted to see. He saw every curtain pulled closed. Their parents did not want them to be believers. They said he was a lie. He wondered who was the truth. Who knew how to be alive without waking up? Once you awoke, you became aware that you had been asleep. If you awoke only to awaken again, then when was the final awakening, the true Truth? They prepared for lunch with determined zeal. He gripped the lamb's head with dogged resolve. Breadcrumbs dropped on their paper plates. Blood stained his leather jacket, drying into a crusted powder. He caught a whiff of its sulfuric scent and was grounded in the truth that mattered. You lived until you died. To live meant to struggle... for love, for peace, for justice... for something. Only he struggled.
  He had already passed through the trailers of Yellow Robin Park, hearing chained dogs bark. In White Swallows, the homeowners' association did not permit animals in order to maintain serenity. In Yellow Robin, everyone stood in front of their rusting homes parked and stationed on dirt patches. Men in plaid hats and wife-beaters spat tobacco and nodded approvingly. A woman in a dress decorated with blue peonies bounced her little boy in her arms, whispering in his ear as she pointed at the hunter. Abel never negotiated the line between stupidity and bravery, ignorance and caution. They were all idiots.
  One road ran through both communities. Signs marked the street as Delaney Road at the intersections of Yellow Robin and as Delatour Drive at the intersections of White Swallows. The neighborhood with white houses ended at a crossroads, the main road continuing unnamed under an iron gate. A lion's head had its halves spiked on the end rails. As Abel approached, the gate opened inward, splitting the hollow head. The brick end posts towered high, upholding a glittering gold sign that read Kingfisher Gardens.
  He crossed the threshold, a line of transformation. The concrete street turned into cobblestone, rocks of gold foil, royal violet, and charcoal gray carved and cemented together into a path that wound through gardens staged before a backdrop of weeping Snow Fountain cherry trees against a towering wall of giant emerald arborvitae.
  As a child, the contrived paradise aggravated him. He sensed in his gut that this spectacle begged for adoration. He refused to recognize its desperation disguised as natural glamour. Now, at seventeen, he sighed and slackened his pace, stumbling over the uneven trail with his eyes half-closed. He did not see the sunshine sparkle in the golden stones. He did not hear the cicadas screech an agitated symphony. His phone vibrated, and he stopped in the road to read the incoming text: Ilanya was waiting for him at the house. He fell once more into his dazed saunter, leaving the garden lane to cross over a cherrywood bridge that stretched over a moat. He landed on his driveway, the final path to Lion's Bluff, his home.
  Gravel paved a flat path through the lawn of rolling hills. A gray rabbit darted across the grass, zigzagging over and through the dips, disappearing behind the crests. Abel walked the trail, the mounds rising feet above his head.