Blood Kin by Steve Rasnic Tem

was always something he’d believed about himself. You looked like him and talked like him — he felt you in his bones. He couldn’t handle all that, I dont reckon.”
    “It’s okay, Grandma. I think I’m beginning to pull some of the pieces together.”
    “Just remember that the way you feel their voices is just like real good guesses — you’ll never get them xactly right so dont start gettin too cocky.”
    “I’m trying, Grandma.”
    “Gettin stronger every day.”
    “That I am.”
    “When you feel somebody you have to give yourself away to them, and that’s a real hard thing to do, Michael.”
    “A real hard thing, Grandma.”
    “Dreamin makes it better.”
    “Yes, ma’am, dreaming makes it better.”
    “You’re a survivor, Michael. Just like me.”
    “Just like you.”
    “So now you’re ready to handle some snakes?”
    He hesitated a second or two. Then he lied. “That I am, Grandma. Set them loose.”
    Michael looked out the window. Clarence Roberts was beating a stick against the weeds, calling out Benny’s name. It was the second time today the boy had gotten lost out there. Michael knew there probably wasn’t any danger, but he didn’t want to watch.
    Numerous long streamers of kudzu now hung from the branches of the trees on the other side of the ditch. It seemed highly unlikely that any plant could grow that much in an afternoon. Michael’s best guess was that bunches of it had gotten caught up inside the boughs, and then a little wind must have unsnagged it all to make it drop down out of the trees like that.
    The kudzu was green and deep, and he was remembering voices in the valley he had heard only once, from a twelve-year-old farm girl, and some voices he had never heard before at all.

 
    Chapter Six
     
     
    S ADIE DECIDED THERE was one thing she needed to do before church that night, and that was to go apologize to her granddaddy. It didn’t matter if he saw the change in her, she reckoned. After tonight she was likely to be changed even more. It was a peculiar thing. She was just going to church, which was supposed to be something good folk did, but she felt like one of them condemned prisoners fixing to walk to their final judgment. And what if she got bit and died? The preacher was always saying that some did get bit, but the ones that had the right kind of faith survived. Sadie doubted she had that kind of faith. She didn’t trust nobody. And if she was going to die, she wanted things right with her granddad first.
    She knocked on his screen door but he didn’t answer. Of course when he wasn’t sitting there reading one of his books he was out working somewhere, so she went around the side of the house to the barn. Granddaddy’s barn was something special — he built it pretty much all by hisself and he took pride in it. It was the straightest barn she knew of in the whole county. Most of them leaned this way and that like a lame fellow or a drunkard. But Granddaddy’s barn had all kinds of bracing inside, and to show it off even more he painted it bright red like they did in the nicer parts of the county, and he repainted it every other year so that it was as red as red can be. Whenever Sadie saw that red barn behind his bright white house she thought of a candy cane.
    He was just inside the barn, sitting on a bale of hay, bent over with his head bowed like he was praying, both arms stiff on his knees. He had his hat off, so that the bottom part of his face looked red as a tomato, and his forehead that had been covered by the hat was white as flour. She almost never saw him with his hat off, not even inside the house.
    “Granddaddy? You okay?”
    His head went up a little but not all the way. “That you, Sadie?”
    She came closer. “You see me now okay?”
    His eyes squinted a little, and the lines in his face got deeper like he was in pain. “I reckon.”
    But Sadie suspected he was covering up. “You want me to go get somebody?”
    Granddaddy made a little