Riven (Riven 1)

He’d gone into the carving with a plan, I was pretty sure, since he’d drawn something on the pumpkin, but as he cut, the thing just got weirder and weirder. Somehow the facial features mushed together and the cuts combined so that his pumpkin looked like the grimacing corpse of a very old man or a very ugly baby. It was actually kind of horrifying.

Theo kept cocking his head and looking at it like he couldn’t quite figure out why it was betraying him. Finally he gave it up for done, and pushed it away. We both looked at it for a minute, and when I opened my mouth, he said, “Don’t say anything. I already know.”

I chuckled and helped him rinse off the pumpkin seeds we’d scooped out because we were going to roast them.

“Do yours usually turn out…better?” I asked tentatively, mostly just to needle him.

He sniffed. “I’ve never carved one before.”

“What? How’s that possible?”

“I dunno, my parents never celebrated Halloween when I was a kid. Too much trouble, too much mess, candy’s bad for you, et cetera. Then, in college, it was like, parties and people getting wasted.”

He shrugged, and started picking clumps of the leftover mac and cheese out of the pot with his fingers and eating them.

I kissed the side of his neck and rested my chin on his shoulder. He offered me a clump of mac and cheese, popped it in my mouth, and then went back to washing off the pumpkin seeds.

“Well, we’ve got to light them,” I said. If Theo had never done this before, I wanted to make sure he got the full experience.

“What? No, it’s fine. Mine will probably collapse and set the whole house on fire anyway. Or traumatize passing animals.”

“So we’ll put them on the bottom step. At worst, if yours collapses and sets things on fire, we’ll get out alive. And those deer need to stop eating my carrot tops anyway.”

He elbowed me, but nodded okay.

So we lit candles in the pumpkins and turned them so we could see their flickering faces as we sat out on the porch for a cigarette. Mine looked normal and Theo’s sinister. He got up and turned his a bit to the right so that we could only see half of it. From that angle, it just looked abstract. A vast improvement.

Theo strummed a vaguely familiar tune on the guitar and I relaxed, enjoying his company, the music, the cigarette, my garden stretching out before us.

Then suddenly, as I tuned out, I realized what he was playing.

“Hey, that’s the song for Rhys. I’ve been trying to figure out the transition there, but that works.”

“Shit, sorry,” he said, fingers skidding on the strings. “I didn’t even realize I was playing it.”

I held my hand out for the guitar and played the part of the melody I’d already written, swapping in the part Theo was just playing for the bridge. It would work. It would definitely work.

“It’s great,” I said, and handed the guitar back to Theo.

He relaxed when he saw I wasn’t offended, and went back to playing, something else this time. Something I didn’t recognize. Something dark and creeping.

“What’d Rhys say about the other songs?”

“He loved them. He’s writing one now to fit with them.”

Rhys had been ecstatic at the songs I’d brought him, and he was excited to get into the studio and start recording in a few weeks. He’d talked enthusiastically about finding a fiddle player, and getting Coney Sparks, who we’d known forever and played with back in the day, on drums. It seemed like everything was coming together.

“What about the other songs?” Theo asked.

“Huh?”

“The songs you’ve written that weren’t for Rhys.”

My pulse sped. “What do you mean, what songs?”

Theo raised an eyebrow and blew smoke in my direction. “I mean the songs that I’ve heard you humming for the last week, or playing on guitar when I was in the shower, that are clearly written by you and also clearly not written for Rhys.”

I grumbled something unintelligible and lit another cigarette, but Theo didn’t say anything more, just sighed and looked up at the moon, strumming softly.

“How’d you know they weren’t for Rhys?”

He paused before answering, but I couldn’t quite bring myself to look at him.

“They’re just different. The other songs feel like Rhys, but these don’t. They’re…grittier, deeper. They feel like you.”

I didn’t say anything, but my heart was pounding. They did feel like me. They felt more like me than anything I’d ever written.

“They sound wonderful,” Theo said softly. “I kind of hoped you’d play them for me? For real?”

I shrugged, my shoulders jerking awkwardly. My palms were sweaty and my breath uneven.

“Don’t know there’s much point,” I said. “No one’ll hear them.”

“Why do you think that?”

Theo’s voice was gentle, sincere, but it pissed me off because the answer was so obvious.