Episode 4 — The Moon Owes Us Nothing

The storm broke at midnight.Florida rain doesn’t fall — it pounds. The kind that makes you believe the sky is washing something off the earth. Jimmy Gillmore Jr. sat on the porch of Al’s shop, watching the water flood the gutters, cigarette between his fingers, that old photograph still burned into his head.

Al. In Culling. Standing right there beside his father.

He’d looked younger, yes — cleaner, sharper — but those eyes didn’t age. Those were the same eyes that had told Jimmy to keep the lights soft. The same eyes that now watched him from the doorway.

“You saw it,” Al said. Not a question.

Jimmy nodded. “You were there.”

Al stepped out into the rain, letting it soak him. “I’ve been a lot of places I shouldn’t have been. But Culling?” He laughed low, almost a growl. “Culling’s a place that never lets you leave clean.”

Jimmy’s hand tightened on the photograph. “You knew my father.”

“I knew what he tried to do,” Al said. He lit his own cigarette, rain hissing on the flame. “He thought he could stop it — the Annual Culling, the blood tax, the old rituals. Thought he could bury the town’s ghosts the same way he buried its people.”

“And you?”

“I helped him.”

Silence. Just the rain, thick and heavy. Jimmy could barely breathe. “Then why didn’t you save him?”

Al’s voice cracked, but only once. “Because your father didn’t want saving. He made a deal. A bad one. Some debts outlive the dead.”

Jimmy stood up, anger shaking through him like lightning. “You were there when he died.”

Al looked away. “I was there when he chose to die.”

The words hit harder than thunder. Jimmy wanted to shout, to throw the photo, to demand every answer Al kept locked in his head — but something stopped him. That same ache that had followed him from Culling. The one that whispered, You don’t want the truth. You want the reason.

Al walked back inside, slow and quiet. “Tomorrow, we drive north,” he said. “There’s someone who’s been waiting for you.”

Jimmy stared after him. “North?”

Al flicked off the porch light. “Yeah, kid. Back toward where it all started.”

The door shut. The only light left came from the moon, reflected in the puddles. Jimmy crushed the cigarette under his boot.

He didn’t want to go back. But something deep down — that haunted blood in his veins — already knew he would.

He looked up at the dark sky and whispered,“The moon owes us nothing.”