Michael Malone - Weebly

He remembered how he had been so surprised, so
surprisingly sickened, to see it blasted and seared into
his former property. The image had jammed in his head
as the doctor spoke, so that instead of hearing Scaper's
words, Ransom heard the crackle of leaves on an
autumn Sunday back in 1972 when he had worked his
way through the marshes alone, setting out from an
unfinished strip of highway.
Instead of seeing the safe, rich green of the Dingley
Country Club's golf course, he saw that black,
scorched, pitted earth onto which he had stumbled out
of thick foliage. That image was stuck in his head today,
like, he thought, a slide caught in a projector, the same
slide appearing click after click on the screen. Through
tonight's dinner party, and now after it, as he walked
along the rain-polished flagstones between the rainshiny
flower beds, that image kept flashing, of land as
wasted as the moon and black as an oil slick.
The banker stooped to pull up a grass clump
shoving through a cracked flagstone. A threshing noise
of snapped branches lashed into the night. Then loud
grunts and labored breath. Ransom felt his heart jerk.