Author’s Note: This is something I started a very, very long time ago, but I didn’t get past the opening scene. I looked at the words for this week’s Three Word Wednesday, and I thought it would be perfect to use them to get the scene finished at last. Also, it might just be a new serial I can keep for the prompts rather than use something in progress or something with spoilers. 🙂

Today’s words: cumbersome, morbid, and rampage.

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Some Inheritance

He’d always wanted to inherit something, though if he was perfectly honest about it, he had hoped it would be more like money or a valuable antique, not this. Dear Carson, love you. Have everything in the barn.

The barn. Great. Moldy hay and rusted old equipment. Some inheritance this was… He was going to spend weeks cleaning this out, and it wouldn’t even be worth it when it was done. Maybe the money from the scrap metal would be something, but not much.

Sometimes it just didn’t pay to be the favorite grandson.

He looked at the barn again. Someone shoot him. He should just pay someone to take it all away, not even bother to try and sort it out. The place looked like the nearest junkyard had been hit by a tornado and its rampage had dumped everything it picked up right here. For him.

Why had he been the one to get this crap? His brothers weren’t going to appreciate anything they’d gotten, but he had special memories of everything on the farm.

“Dude, I thought the old man liked you. You got screwed.”

“Thanks a lot.”

His older brother laughed, clapping him on the back. “Everyone thought he was going to leave you the farm, not just the barn. You’re the one that put the most time into this place.”

“It is not about time. It was about Grandpa, about being with him. I didn’t come here and log hours or anything like that. It wasn’t so I’d get the farm.”

“Still sucks that he gave you this. I mean, his farm truck is a piece of crap, but I at least got something that moves. You got… junk.”

“Why does this matter so much to you? You got what you wanted. You will drive that old truck until it dies, and you’ll love it. Why not harass Nick about getting the dishes?”

“Because we all know that Nick got the dishes because of his wife. She wanted all that china. You did not want this.”

“I might have something in here that’s better than anything you two got combined. Besides, it’s not like any of us would really have gotten the house or the land. That’s all Uncle Tim’s because he still carries that oh so important name. We’re Mom’s kids, yeah, but we have Dad’s name.”

“Which makes no sense. Dad took off when you were born.”

“Gee, thanks for reminding me that I’m the reason our family broke up,” Carson muttered. He knew it didn’t really matter, that his brother didn’t actually mean it like that. Larry was still angry with their father for leaving and their mother for being unable to move on. She used to wait up nights for her husband’s return, but he never came back. He may as well have been dead for the past twenty-nine years, since none of them ever heard from him again.

An image of his father’s face, one Carson had only ever seen in pictures, lying dead on the dirt floor of the barn came to him. He thought it unlikely that there was a skeleton hidden back in the barn, but it wasn’t the first time that crossed his mind. What if someone had decided his father should never come back? Maybe it was just that last bit of denial, a childish hope that his father had not abandoned them talking. He didn’t know why he cared. He had never known the man and could only regret the fact of not knowing him. His brothers and grandfather and even his uncle had nothing to say about the man except that he was a bastard for leaving.

“What is that look?” Larry asked, frowning a little. Carson turned toward him.

“What look?”

“That one, the one where you’re a million miles away. You’re being morbid again. For the last time, Dad did not die out here; no one in our family killed him. He was just a bastard who ran off and left us. You know that as well as I do. You’re not going to ask the sheriff for cadaver dogs again, are you? We already did that once.”

“I know.” While he’d never felt like he was in danger, not once when spending time with his grandfather and he wasn’t afraid of the farm, the words did little to ease the cumbersome weight of those old fears. He didn’t know why he seemed unable to let go of that image of his father or the idea of the man being murdered.

Morbid, yeah. The sooner he emptied out the barn and dealt with his “inheritance,” the better.