Dearly Departing by Geoff North (book reader for pc txt) 📕

the house. She wasn’t in the old garage where their father parked the broken farm machinery. It was one of those places even Raymond didn’t like exploring on his own. It smelled of old diesel fuel and dirt, and there were no working lights inside. The remains of a monstrous combine sat there in the shadows. Raymond didn’t think it was entirely impossible the thing could roar to life at any moment and run him over. Alicia would’ve chosen the slough before venturing inside here. He called her name again softly and waited by the big sliding door a few seconds longer.

Again nothing.

Raymond went to the tool shed next. He fumbled in the shadows and threw up a light switch. Alicia hadn’t been in here. Raymond didn’t need to be any kind of fancy detective to figure that out. His little sister was a lot like him, as in she didn’t care much for the farming part of growing up on a farm. Unlike David and Bruce, Raymond and Alicia didn’t help their father out that much. They were too young, and too disinterested. He turned the light off and backed out through the door without calling her name.

There was a chicken coop attached to the east side of the shed. Maybe Alicia had gone to gather eggs and stayed longer to visit the hens. His sister was famous for talking to animals and getting her clothes filthy by sitting in the dirt amongst them. Raymond looked for her there but came up empty handed again. A group of brown hens pecked at bits of seed and shit on the ground. One or two clucked at him suspiciously and fluttered off when he shook the wire fence in frustration.

That only left one place—the abandoned pig barn. Raymond made his way slowly towards the big building. It had been built back in the early sixties by a small consortium of local farmers, including Raymond’s father and grandfather. The barn had been constructed on Wallace property, and the partners had bought the livestock to fill it. There had been a few years when things went very well. It could accommodate up to three-hundred animals, and it was always full. Everyone profited, and the building was quickly paid for. But the market eventually crashed and all of Thomas Wallace’s business partners packed up and left, heading back into the fields to grow wheat and canola. When the seventies rolled around there were only a dozen or so pigs left in the barn, and Raymond’s father was the only one left looking after them.

By the time Raymond turned ten, the pigs were all gone.  The big, empty barn was now just that—big and empty, a hulking grey shell of peeling paint with an interior skeleton of rusting rebar pens and rotted straw. Alicia wouldn’t come here, he thought.

Raymond pulled on the wooden door handle and entered the structure. He called his sister’s name softly. More silence. To his right were four large storage bins where the feed had been kept. They were all empty now save for a few blackened corners where the rats and mice crapped. Raymond looked to his left, into the dusty mechanical room. Two giant water heater tanks loomed over him, a third had fallen over onto its cylindrical side. It had been pushed over by David and Bruce in an attempt to frighten Raymond and Alicia during one of their hide and seek games a few years earlier.

There was an electrical panel box with its door half opened next to the water tanks. Raymond opened it further, studying the vertical rows of dusty black switches and the corresponding labels written in faded blue ink. He used to imagine them as controls to some mighty space ship that traveled from galaxy to galaxy. He clicked a few of them off and on again. They made a satisfying snapping sound, but nothing more. The power had been cut years before. The pig barn had been abandoned of its original purpose to raise livestock, but it still served a secondary function well—to fuel the fear and imagination of those that visited it afterwards. It was the ultimate place to play in.

He closed the power-box door. It made a loud, dry squeal of protest.

“Raymond?”

It was Alicia. She sounded far away, her voice was muffled. Raymond left the mechanical room and pushed through another heavy wooden door to his left. This was the heart of the building—the pens. Raymond walked down the center corridor towards the end of the barn. He spread his arms out and felt the corrugated bars of iron running along his fingertips. It’s where the pigs used to live. And after the pigs had gone, Raymond used to pretend it was where the intergalactic criminals were held aboard his space ship. He was like some kind of space sheriff, jumping from star to star, wrangling murderous aliens into his prison-pens along the way.

“Alicia... you in here?”

The barn was dark inside. There were only two windows, and both had been covered over from the outside with plywood. One of the plywood sheets had fallen partially, allowing a triangular slit of light in along the west side. The remaining light came in from behind Raymond where he’d left the door open.

“I’m down here.”

He found her sitting in a pile of straw inside the last pen on the right. Something wasn’t right. It was hard to see much of anything in the gloom. Raymond sensed she was hiding something, but the strange squeaking sound had frightened her. He pushed through four-foot high pen door and stood in front of her. “What’re you doing in here?”

“Nothing. I was just gettin’ ready to come back to the house.”

“What are you waiting for then?” He asked. The girl hadn’t moved. She remained sitting cross-legged in a patch of dusty concrete where the moldy straw had been swept away. “Let’s