"Matthew D." (propatria) wrote in repose, @ 2017-10-09 19:57:00 |
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Entry tags: | *narrative, matt devlin |
narrative: maryland; six months ago
Where: Maryland.
When: Six months ago.
Warnings: Dark imagery.
What she should be doing is putting on lipstick, talking to boys, taking pictures of her food on snapchat, doing her homework.
What she is doing is paying the bills. She’s sitting in her room in an old shirt that belonged to her older brother. It hangs almost to her knees. And she’s paying bills, online, checking the balance of the family bank account after each one. She’ll make it, this month. She’ll scrape the bottom like a bungie jumper, touch it with her fingertips before she snaps back.
She should get to be sixteen, but she doesn’t. And her father? He’s burning down houses.
**
It started when her mother died. Six months in the hospital, breathing on a machine. She was conscious for a while, then she wasn’t, and still they paid. Drugs flowed into her day by day on an IV line, and cash flowed out. The hospital punched a needle into that scraped thin bank account. A drop, a drip, a flush of cash, a flow. There was no stopping it once it started, and when it was over, her mother was dead, and they were going to lose the house.
The trouble was knowing. She always knew, because she could hear them through the wall. She could hear what they were thinking. It started as a trickle too, just as mom was getting sick, a whispered voice, and she thought she was going crazy. It was like a movie, like hearing voices of the past, like talking heads spinning around her all the time. But the voices said true things. They were her father’s voice, wondering how he would go on. They were the silent echo of her mother’s empty mind, sleeping into death.
She knew he would burn the houses down before he did. She heard the crackle of his skin burning through his own ears. She heard him thinking about the promises he’d made to his own mother, when he wasn’t much older than her: never again, mama.
She heard his blurry thoughts when he came home drunk, while she lay awake in bed, listening to her little sister, Lucia, have a bad dream in the next room. She heard him the night he came home smelling like smoke.
**
Her parents bought the houses as investments. They were the family’s future, before mom got sick. They were fixer-uppers, like those fun shows on HDTV. They were going to do the work themselves, save cash on contractors.
She knows her dad thought the houses made mom sick. One of them had black mold, and they were tearing out drywall when she was drenched in dark dust. She started coughing not long after that. The houses were a hail mary. They spent what had been saved for years, the last of dad’s unemployment checks, the last of the money she made selling handmade candles and lotion at craft fairs in the county. All the money was in the houses, the three of them, and the houses weren’t ready to sell. Mom was sick, and the money went up in smoke.
They sold the house they lived in, the one the girl had grown up in. It was the only one really worth a dime. They moved into a cramped apartment near the hospital. The money from the sale would pay the bills, but only for a little while. The house with the mold couldn’t be sold. The other two wouldn’t pay the rent and the hospital both.
But there was insurance. And dad could set a fire nobody could trace.
She knew it would happen before it did. She’ll always remember that.
**
He took Lucia with him to the second house. The girl was at her drama club after school, her only time away, so she couldn’t watch her. Her older brother was long gone, left for California two years ago, he barely called. There was no one to watch her sister, so her father took her with him.
He told her to wait in the car, but she wanted to follow daddy. She never got to see daddy anymore.
**
The police were after him now, the police and something bigger than police. He was madhouse, crazy, burning anything he could find. After Lucia was caught in the second blaze, he was ready to die.
She knew where he would go. The black mold house was already burned to a crisp, so he was going to scorch their old house with the new owners in it, these people who moved into the shell their family left behind.
It was night, and she tucked herself against the porch across the street. The new family had already fled, and her father was a torch on the roof, burning himself into the night sky. He wouldn’t come down. He didn’t want to. She could see him smiling, hear his thoughts like singing birds. Joy. He felt a joy that burned. He didn’t think of her or her sister at all.
There were people on the lawn, just three or four, but she could hear more on the rooftops. Someone fired at her father, but the projectile evaporated on contact. He wouldn’t be put to sleep. He wouldn’t be placated. The flames leaping through the house stretched and strained for the houses beyond.
He was growing brighter. He was a supernova. He would blow the neighborhood, the town, the state into nothing. She could see it in his mind so clearly. He had forgotten there was anyone else.
The shot that killed him was fired from a rooftop, just over the girl’s head. Dad cooled. The flames died. He turned from torch to ember, scorched black skin, teeth dark with ash, and he rolled down from the roof like a stone, forward somersault, hey presto, kiddo.
The girl placed her hand flat on the side of the house, and she felt up, up, for the person on the roof. She tipped her head back.
There was a monster there. Its mind exploded inside hers like a firework of blood. When the men and women in the black cars were gone, she felt the print of the monster on her heart. She felt its claws pressed against her chest. That dark shadow over her head yawned bigger and louder and thicker with worm-white entrails and copper-dark blood than her worst nightmares, than her sister's worst dreams, before dad made a cinder out of her. She glimpsed an evil bigger than the world.
She would not be put down.