The Echo of Grace

David's hands remained clamped at ten and two on the steering wheel, his knuckles white. Every impulse in his body screamed at him to put the car in reverse, to find the interstate, and keep driving until the horizon flattened into something unrecognizable. He had told himself this was an obligation-a final duty to a woman he had systematically erased from his life for a decade. But as he looked at the sagging porch, he felt the hollow center of his chest expand. He wasn't just here for her. He was here because he had nowhere else to be, and because the city had finally stripped him of every last layer of armor he'd built to keep this place out. He opened the door. The air smelled of drying alfalfa and the sweet, cloying scent of late-summer rot. It was the smell of his childhood, and it made him physically ill. His boots crunched on the gravel driveway, a sound that felt deafening in the stillness. He walked past the rusted tractor that had been his father's pride, noting the vines that had wrapped around its axles like shackles. He reached the porch steps. They groaned under his weight-a protest, he thought, or perhaps just a reminder that he didn't belong to this structure anymore.

Pages: 210, Paperback, Independently published