The Bully Killers Serial Novel
by Michael Engelby
Chapter 1
The Dalingers
October 1st, 1975
My brother Jerome died when he was little, but then he came back to life again. Talks to angels, chases demons. Makes the seasons change while he sleeps. I know it’s true because I watch him at night.
Tosses and turns when he turns winter to spring. You can hear the chunks of ice and driftwood on the river break up and crash against each other in water that looks like old coffee and cream. Sounds like thunder.
It’s different for summer. He twitches and mutters and only sleeps a little. In the summer it gets so hot that the trees around the edges of the cornfields start to wobble. Annie says it’s because your eyeballs are boiling inside your head. I don’t believe her though.
When he changes it to fall he sleeps like he’s dead. Nothing, except drool out of the corner of his mouth. Only the tree branches scratch against our bedroom window. Don’t like the cold. Jerome says he likes getting goose bumps, but he doesn’t understand why the feathers won’t start growing.
When winter comes, and everything is so cold it turns to black and white, and at night I can’t tell if I am asleep or awake, and the wind pushes so hard the house creaks, and Jerome screams and kicks until Josie runs in and holds him until he stops. He says he is suffocating. I don’t know what suffocating means.
She kisses him on top of the head and whispers over and over again, “It’s okay, it’s okay.” I feel scared until she looks at me and says, “It’s alright Charlie. Go back to sleep, it’s just the changing of the seasons.”
“Charlie! Get down out of that tree and come here.”
“Yeah, okay.”
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