Chapter 11

ISN’T IT A STRANGE DEAL WE MAKE WITH OURSELVES WHEN WE CHOOSE TO TRADE MORALS FOR POWER? FOR WITHOUT MORALS, HOW WILL WE KNOW HOW TO USE THAT POWER? IS THERE EVEN SUCH A THING AS GOOD AND EVIL? OR ONLY POWER WITH MORALITY AND POWER WITHOUT?

-LADY ALTIE LARSTON QC, PUBLIC MUSINGS, VOL. 2.

.•° ✿ °•.
“You’re imagining things. Trust the data, and not your eyes - it’s errant electricity, and nothing else. Random impulses.”

When I was six years old, I drowned. I stopped breathing, my lips were blue, and my lungs were full of water. Mama and Papa weren’t down by the river when it happened so it fell to my cousin Harmony to pulled me out of the unpredicted surge of rapids and onto the muddy shore. It was her lips that breathed life back into me when it had seemed like all hope had been lost.

I remember hearing people panicking, and screaming, and talking about me like I wasn’t even there to hear it. Not words, just bubbling syllables, softened into meaninglessness by the water that filled my ears and mouth and nose and lungs. Mama and Papa would tell me that I’d imagined it; that until I sat up with a start and vomited up water and sand from my lungs after the desperate ministrations of my cousin, it was impossible for me to have heard anything.

“I asked if you wanted another glass of juice, Cadence.”

Mama’s voice snapped me back into the moment and I looked at her as though I’d never seen the woman before. And then recognition dawned, my thoughts caught up with my eyes, and I smiled happily and nodded my head.

“Yes please!”

We called it ABC; Apple & Blackcurrant Juice. I never understood why we needed to ruin perfectly good blackcurrants with apple, but my ten-year-old brain told me it was obvious that BC Juice just wasn’t as fun to say. I watched my Mama refilling the drink and marveled as the reddish-purple liquid gave the clouds stenciled on the sides of the glass a backdrop; like the sky was right there behind them, roiling in waves of red and darkness.

Something didn’t feel right.

“Mama,” I tilted my head with curiosity, “why is the sky sometimes red?”

“Well, Cadie, sometimes during the sunset the sky can take on all sorts of colors. Reds, and purples, and oranges, blues and greys, all different types and shades.”

I pursed my lips in understanding, and then after a long and considered gaze at the juice in the glass, I followed my question up with another.

“What if it’s not the sunset, Mama?”

“Well then the sky has no business being any color but blue, does it? And if it’s any other color, you just tell your Papa and he’ll set it right.”

Mama laughed, and I laughed, and I thought I must have heard Papa laugh as well because it sounded like deep rumblings outside of the kitchen window, and only Papa’s laugh and thunderstorms ever made sounds that made my tummy feel jittery inside. I looked up and outside past the yellow curtains printed with orange ears of corn, curiously at the clear blue sky, and then almost jumped clean out of my skin when my Papa ambushed me from behind and kissed the spot on my head where my hair parted.

“Ope, careful Cadie, you don’t want to spill your juice.”

His strong arms wrapped around me from either side and guided both of my hands to the juice glass, and the curiosity I’d had for what lay beyond the window flittered away the way butterflies do when you chase them.

“Papa, I can do it.” Defiantly, I held the glass with one hand, and tilted my head back far enough that I could look up and see the jagged edges of his silvering whiskers and the kind smile that was given texture by the wrinkles and sunspots on his face. He chuckled, and kissed my forehead, and I felt safe and sound and secure, like nothing could shake the foundations of my world. Papa would never let anything happen to me.

“We need to stop, we’re losing her.”

“It’s gone already. Need I remind you-”

“Stop calling her it; she’s earned her dignity.”

The words sounded bubbly, and gurgled, and like they were just a mash up of strange and different syllables that if presented as puzzle pieces wouldn’t fit together in the slightest. I felt like I was drowning all over again; like my chest was buried under the weight of a body of water, like I was full of fluid, like I couldn’t breathe no matter how hard I tried. Through the window I saw shadows moving, silhouettes that moved slowly and with purpose, into view and out of view.

“You know the stakes.”

“Cadie?”

“Huh?” I looked across the table at where my Papa and my Mama sat. Mama, and Papa, and then off to that side of me was Carmen, sitting motionlessly.

“Your Papa wanted to know if you going to have steak with us tonight, darling.” Mama clarified, and I shook my head as quick and vehemently as I could manage.

“Nuhuh.”

“You know if you don’t eat meat, you’re not going to get any bigger, darling.” Mama cautioned, sending a sidewards glance to my Papa. For a moment there was a brief halation behind Mama, and behind Papa, and then there wasn’t.

“Tha’s fine with me, Mama, I don’t needa be any bigger than this. Me and Carmen are just the right size!” I grinned at the motionless girl, her ball-jointed arms and legs limp and lifeless as though she were a marionette with her strings snipped off cleanly enough to not even tell where they should have been in the first place.

“Right, Carmen?”

My head tilted curiously, and my eyes focused on my friend while I waited with bated breath for her to answer.; for her to speak to me in the pretty way that only she could, for her to not say my name right or for her to trip on certain words and decide to just make the most of the pronunciations she knew.

And if she’d spoken, I’d never have heard it over the world-ending cacophony of glass shattering.

Every single window in our farmstead house exploded inward all at once, and the peace that had been my world up until then shattered with them. I screamed and covered my ears in shock, and my Mama screamed and covered me in her arms and tugged me underneath the kitchen table with her entire will to live wrapped protectively around me.

I didn’t know if my Papa screamed; but I was vaguely aware of his lips moving noiselessly and making the same motions as they did when he was very cross with somebody.

Papa didn’t get cross all that often.

With terrified determination, I squirmed free of my Mama’s arms and scrambled to my feet.

Carmen wasn’t in her chair, and I couldn’t see her, and that meant she wasn’t safe!

My eyes went from the chair to the living room door to the refrigerator to the oven and then to the basin.

And outside the broken windows, past the billowing corn-printed curtains, I could see the sky roiling in waves that crashed over one another, each one a different shade of red, or orange, or crimson, or purple, or other colors that my ten-year-old brain could only name by referencing the Crayola box.

“Carmen!” My lips moved and my lungs provided but no sound came out.

I looked frantically around the kitchen again, at each seat of the table, at all the broken glass everywhere that cut into my tender little toes, and no matter where my eyes darted there was no sign of my friend.

Papa marched back into the kitchen with purpose, the long rifle that he used to handle pests that poison wouldn’t deal with was clutched in his hands with white knuckles that gripped tightly.

“Carmen! Papa, where’s Carmen?”

My voice came accompanied without sound like I was trying to speak underwater, and so did Papa’s, and Mama’s, too, when she’d gotten to her feet and pulled me back into her arms. Papa gestured to the cellar door and Mama hoisted me into her arms and I wailed and bawled and squirmed as best as my body would allow.

I couldn’t see Carmen anywhere and she must to have been so scared, because I was scared and she was so much more of a ‘fraidy cat than I was. Papa slammed the cellar door shut behind Mama and Me, and Mama half stumbled, and half tripped, and half fell down the stairs. Not for a moment did she let me go, though; not for a second was her grip of me any less tight and absolute than it had been since she’d swept me up.

“Mama...” I sputtered between sniffling, heaved breaths, and realized that with the sound of the deafening roar from outside muffled by the house above, I could hear myself crying even past the ringing in my ears.

“Where’s Carmen? Where’s Papa? Mama I’m scared, Mama what’s happening, Mama- “

“Shh, shh, Mama’s here, Mama’s got you, it’s going to be okay.” Her words did everything in their power to be soothing, but it was hard to bring calm to a world in chaos with only syllables and sounds.

“Mama, Maaamaaa... where’s Carmen? And Papa, Mama!”

“Papa’s gonna make it all okay, my sweet girl, close your eyes now, Mama keep you safe.”

It was easy to do as Mama urged, it was easy to close my eyes, and it was so much harder to believe her that things would be okay. It was hard to put faith in the idea that my Papa even with his very long gun, or my Mama with her very tight and shaky cuddles, could ever make everything okay again.

But if they couldn’t, then nobody could.

So I closed my eyes, and I stopped thinking, and felt instead what my other senses told me.

I could feel the ground around us rumbling unhappily.

I could hear roaring and raging and anger.

I could smell the fire as it boiled the blackcurrants.

I could taste the smoke in the air as the house above us burned.

Mama played with my hair, and even with my eyes squeezed as tightly closed as could be, there was very little her words do. I longed for the world to be still, for it to be quiet, for the smells of summer and the taste of blackcurrant jam.

Even then I tried to imagine it, even then I tried to put myself anywhere else but here, as though wishful thinking and active imagination could do a thing to change reality.

For a moment, it felt as though my heart would be allowed to slow down.

My eyes shot open with a start as the heavy iron storm door crashed open, and the cacophonous choir of living flames poured in and filled the cellar the way that water fills a bathtub. I could see my Papa at the top, silhouetted by the red sky behind him, as he urged us with silent shouting and fervent desperation to follow.

Before she could ever get herself to her feet, my Mama pushed upward and away with force like a wind- up toy, and not wanting to squander her gift I ran with all the speed and stumbling inelegance that my shaking legs and adrenaline filled heart could muster.

From Mama’s arms, up the stairs, and into an alien world with only the safely of my Papa’s soot-stained blue overalls to bury my face in and shield my eyes from the heat that had replaced the air itself. Papa stumbled back as part of the ceiling began to collapse, and he set his gun down on the ground and pushed me further still behind him.

Where was Mama?

Where was Carmen?

As the house began to crash and rumble and creak and collapse in on itself silently, my Papa disappeared with panic and determination down into the cellar.

I couldn’t see him! I couldn’t see Mama! I couldn’t see Carmen.

And with the most abject horror my young mind could ever imagine witnessing, I watched as the entire house collapsed and crashed down into itself where the cellar had been only a moment ago.

“MAMA!! PAPA!!”

Silently, muted by the world around me, I knew I was screaming; I was crying, bawling, sobbing, heaving, and the fire that burned the sky and boiled the blackcurrants and blazed across the collapsed ruins of my home had little compassion for my hysterics.

On the horizon, dark silhouettes moved through the burning sky the way that fish moved through the water and made otherworldly sounds of gurgling and bubbling.

“That’s brain activity!”

“It’s random impulse.”

“That’s fear! There’s nothing random about that, Carmine!”

The sounds got louder, the silhouettes like living storm clouds in the fire, and I did the only thing I knew I was very good at. I did the only thing I had left. My first instinct, and my last resort.

I ran.

As the sky burned, and my home burned, and my parents burned, and my past and present and future burned.

I ran just as quickly as my little legs would carry me.

Even though I knew, deep down, it wouldn’t be long before I burned, too.