Running Wild

near-invisible stranger in the dark.”
Silence was his answer, which Seamus took as a yes, and he reached for the lamp by the couch. When it produced its circle of light, he squinted at a man standing across from him, long arms hanging at his sides, shoulders bent with grief, face set to receive bad news.
The intruder guessed Zachariah was dead but somehow hadn’t heard it officially. He needed confirmation, perhaps hoped for a reprieve. A reprieve was not something Seamus could give.
He swallowed and spoke bluntly. “I’m sorry. Your grandfather passed away three months ago.”
The man jerked his head in pain before taking three long strides away to gaze out the black window. His chest heaved twice and then settled into more regular breathing. Otherwise he made no sound.
Seamus turned to grant him some semblance of privacy, but he kept the stranger at the edge of his vision, since he still didn’t know who the fuck he was or what he might do. If this was a grandson, why the hell hadn’t he been taking care of Zachariah in his last lonely years? Why didn’t he know of Zachariah’s death? And why was he in this house at three in the morning?
Minutes passed as Seamus allowed the stranger to process Zachariah’s death. While he was considering whether or not offering coffee was appropriate, the stranger walked out of the house, in bare feet Seamus noted mundanely. The door slammed shut behind him. The night swallowed up the intruder as he vanished.
Seamus followed him outside and stood on the back porch.
“Well,” said Seamus out loud to the crickets, unsure what to make of the whole encounter. Unsettling, yes, but he didn’t exactly feel threatened.
However, for the rest of the night he didn’t sleep. He kept expecting the man to return, and it didn’t happen. At five a.m., Seamus accepted that he was awake for the day.
While he stalked around the house and the barn area, searching for clues of his mysterious night visitor, he found nothing. So he tackled the barn, with its rotting piles of straw. He was going to clean it out, reinforce some beams and paint the entire thing before it started to fall apart.
By midday, his endurance gave out, and he decided a short nap was in order, to be followed by a trip to town to buy paint and other supplies. As he tried to ignore how the late-night encounter had unnerved him, he entered the house and yelped at seeing a man—the same man from last night—standing in the middle of his kitchen.
The man turned to stare at him, his midnight-dark eyes wary, perhaps assessing.
Assessing what? Christ, Seamus’s mind hadn’t gone to the inheritance and what this meant, if there was a grandson around.
Also the man looked different—he’d shaved and cut his hair. He’d been pretty shaggy last night, not that Seamus had given it much thought outside of everything else.
There was something familiar about the face. Maybe that was family resemblance, though this man was much taller than Zachariah had been.
Said stranger didn’t speak, just regarded Seamus, and Seamus did the same—beyond the dark eyes was almost-black hair and a raw-boned face. There wasn’t an ounce of fat on the man. He was all muscle and sinew and long limbs.
Seamus didn’t want his mind going there in an already complicated situation. Sure he needed to date more, but now was not the time to think about it.
“Who are you?” he demanded.
“Zachariah III.”
“The third?” You’re shitting me , thought Seamus, though the guy appeared to think it was normal to introduce himself that way.
“Yes,” he answered earnestly. “Zachariah called me Ri.”
“Right.” Seamus began to feel like he was being scammed. It was all so…odd. The man appearing out of nowhere, staking his claim as a relative, staking a claim on Zachariah’s old-fashioned name.
“He called you Seamus,” Ri added, which surprised Seamus. So this man recognized him in some way.
He crossed his arms and tried to recover his composure. “Strange that we haven’t met, Ri .” He’d never encountered anyone with that nickname. “Where are you from?”
Ri cocked his head, considering, and Seamus was expecting a substantive answer, not “I can’t answer that in a useful way.”
O-kay. “What can you answer?”
“Not very much, to be honest.” Again delivered with a straight face.
Seamus rolled his eyes, something Ri observed but didn’t comment on.
“I know he was fond of you,” Ri added in a puzzled tone. “I’m glad you