Part I – Salt and Venom

(The War That Was Foreplay)

August 2023 – First Blood

The heat was a living thing, thick and wet, pressing down on the hollow like a hand over a mouth. Cicadas screamed in the laurel thickets. The creek ran low and brown, smelling of iron and sun-baked stone.

Michelle Brennan arrived in a cloud of dust and Chicago arrogance, city boots crunching on gravel that hadn’t seen a new tire track in a decade. She stepped out of the rented Jeep, auburn hair twisted up in a knot already coming undone, and stared at the cabin she’d inherited from an aunt she’d never met. The place sagged like a drunk against the hillside, tin roof rusted the color of dried blood, porch boards soft with rot. She laughed (short, sharp, city laugh) and told herself she’d fix it up, sell it, be gone by winter.

That night, she found the mason jar, upside-down, nailed above the door. Inside: iron nails, graveyard dirt, a single black feather. She unscrewed it, sniffed, rolled her eyes, and poured the contents into the creek. The water turned red for three hours. Every dog in the valley howled until the moon bled out.

Clarita Bailey watched from the ridge with night-vision binoculars and a mouth full of wintergreen chew. She spat a brown stream into the duff, wiped her lip with the back of a calloused hand, and whispered to the dark, “That one’s gonna hurt to keep.”

September – The First Clash

Michelle wanted photos of the old tipple upstream (rusted bones of the coal days, vines swallowing the trestle). She sent her drone up on a morning when the air was so still it felt like glass.

Clarita stepped out of the laurel thicket with the 12-gauge loose in her arms and murder in her hazel eyes.