Member-only story
Bogles and Caves, Bairns & Staves
The continuation of ‘When the Tattie Bogles Come,’ an FLF-prompted story.
Nicole stood at the patio doors, the ones in place of a wall from the social room, not the double patio doors adjacent to the flower room, and watched her husband talking with Sam. She knew something was very wrong; not the missing ponies-wrong, or the straw under the girls’ pillows-wrong; not even the knocking on the walls and roof-wrong — which she’d heard each night but hadn’t so much as opened her eyes to alarm Todd. Something was Todd-wrong.
She had witnessed the posture he wore now, standing in his dead potato field, talking with Sam only twice before: the day Natalie was born and the day his father died. Sunken shoulders. Head tilted to the left. His chin up. Questioningly.
She understood at once what it meant. Her husband didn’t know what to do.
If it could be called a superpower, Todd had it — self-assuredness. He never rushed. Panic wasn’t in his makeup. He didn’t act without knowing the outcome. While his high school classmates sprinted off to college or university, into a trade or military, or loafed around, all without a purpose, Todd began working to find out what he was supposed to do.
