Those who have their values in the right place, I know you are out there.
Maybe like me, you got tired of those beastly bumper stickers depicting an iconic comic strip character urinating on the negativity of the day and slapped a Dolly Parton “WWDD” sticker on your car to promote authentic positivity.
Even Dolly though has tough times.
For those who have been there, that’s when what’s truly important - our instilled values - lift us up to face seemingly impossible situations.
Like Sadie, when she finds her brother, Luke.
Cooked Cookies continues.
Trigger warning warning warning.
***
At first glance, she thought Luke was playing a trick, pretending to be asleep, odd because he wasn’t allowed to be out on the beach by himself and she thought how much trouble he would be in for being out alone, the rule was thirteen and even then permission was required, but then she noticed his arms and legs were sprawled in ways that didn’t make sense, splayed in directions limbs did not naturally extend. She bent down and shook him, Luke, hey, what are you doing, get up and his head lolled to one side, his face masked with blood. A sand crab twitched towards him and for a moment, all Sadie saw was the jittery crab, fixating on its stalk eyes and sideways gait, and then the roar brought her back, building in her ears like the rumble of rocket engines. She screamed at its zenith, long and hard for her brother.
Sadie had to get Luke home. Reaching past his cock-eyed arms and around his waist, she supported his head in the basket of her elbows and pulled, moving him a few inches before collapsing backwards into the sand. Standing up, she tried again, only to slip under his limp weight. She laid back and sobbed, her face streaked with sand caking her tears dry, betrayed that the island so loved had seemingly turned against her. Setting Luke’s head on the cushion of powdery sand, she whispered to him, together we can do this, hang on, I’m your big sister, you’re safe now, I’ll get you home and we will make a plan to hunt the elusive junonia, we won’t tell Mina and Lulu, just me and you and our picture in the paper. We can do this.
She dragged him down the beach flailing and falling, her muscles jumpy with fatigue. A crazy kid song Luke loved popped into her head and she sang the lyrics to him as they struggled down the beach, get the fire and get the kettle, I’m going to eat up Hansel and Gretel. Luke would sneak up on Mina and Lulu chanting the creepy little tune and his sisters shrieked, pretended to be scared and ran away from him, begging him to stop. The memory reenergized her and she sang and pulled and fell and talked to Luke about his beloved sand dollar, with its constellation petal center. Resplendent in her determination, they were halfway to the boardwalk when the man Sadie sometimes saw surf casting on her early morning expeditions appeared out of the halo of dawn to take Luke from her arms and carry him home.
He had been dead less than a week before a sixteen year old girl could no longer live with her conscience and confessed to a high school counselor her witness of the beating of a young boy about the same age as her own brother. She and three friends had crossed the causeway in the early morning hours to party on the island. High on angel’s trumpet, the group stumbled across Luke tossing sand dollars into the ocean, their hallucinogenic brains perceiving him as a threat, as some sort of mini snitch. Her boyfriend grabbed Luke as he turned to run and held him while the others took turns pummeling him with a crowbar brought along for protection, breaking his arms and legs and fracturing his skull in two places. Before his killers tossed him aside, the girl stripped him of the leather pouch he carried when shelling. Inside were a couple of cooked cookies and a single junonia.
***
Conclusion next week.
Read:
Cooked Cookies 1 here.
Cooked Cookies 2 here.
Cooked Cookies 3 here.
Thank you for reading.