Round Three: Hannah and Shay

Prompt: Cosmic horror

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Hannah

From the moment that Lydia had slid from Deirdre's womb, shrieking in the attendants' half-masked faces and grasping at their sleeves with nubby, viscera-streaked fingers, the nurses had thought the both of them hysterical. Of course, this had originally seemed a vast improvement from the long hours before Deirdre had been born—then only Deirdre had shrieked and clawed, embroiled in the throes of a drugless delivery, and she had borne the brunt of her nurses' judgment alone—but now, with the gazes of a dozen attendants tracking both Deirdre and her shapeless child through the aged maternity ward, she wished, futilely, that Lydia could have remained inside her body for a few days longer, that she could have been spared the scrutiny of a hospital staff that seemed determined to disconcert them as a pair.

She paused near the nurses' station to readjust her infant companion, and it was only when a crimson silhouette slowed beside her that she remembered that she and Lydia did not leave the hospital alone. In the splintered, yellow glow of the fluorescent lights, her husband Broderick tugged at a rumpled shirt sleeve and tucked an errant lock hair behind his ear; he'd been wearing that scarlet eyesore of a dress shirt for two days, and yet he'd sat in the corner of their hospital room so silently that Deirdre had intermittently forgotten his very presence. Had Deirdre possessed any of her usual strength, she would've chastised Broderick for his lack of comfort now, while she was still thinking about it. But Deirdre had been strung thin over the previous two days, for reasons that she could only partially explain, and all she truly knew was that she was bone-numbingly tired and that she desperately needed some form of support.

So Deirdre chose to seek commiseration from her husband: "I don't know why they're staring like that."

Then Broderick lifted his head, and he eyed the nurses and attendants who lined the narrow hallway of the maternity ward, who scrawled on rattling clipboards and wrote hasty instructions on whiteboards and paused, every so often, to glance sidelong at Deirdre and her newborn. The staff were not particularly brave or overt about their observation—their gazes seemed to slide off of Deirdre whenever her eyes met theirs, and they only resumed monitoring when they felt as if they were "safe"—but the heightened furtiveness only made Deirdre feel smaller, as if she had done something so horrible or pitiable within these walls that the nurses could not help but ogle the haggard creature she'd become.

"They're not staring," said Broderick softly, and he lowered his gaze and began to fiddle with his shirt sleeve once more.

"They are," said Deirdre, painfully conscious of the way her voice grated against the walls of her throat. Tentatively, she checked the locations of the surrounding nurses—they could not be close enough to overhear her—and continued: "They think I'm... I don't know. Crazy? It's been like this since Lydia was born—I would've pointed it out, but there's always been someone right next to me, and it's not like I want to be rude, but—"

And here Broderick should have interrupted with some even-handed affirmation of her grievances—"yes, of course, you're always so polite but that sounds terrible"—but he only buttoned and unbuttoned the sleeve of his shirt, leaving a significantly-more-uncomfortable Deirdre to forge ahead on her own.

"Anyway, they're looking at me like I did something. I don't know what it was. Refusing the pain meds? I told them about my history, it should've made sense—oh, and the screaming, too, I feel like they hated the screaming, but I don't understand, they deliver babies every day, this whole wing should be filled with screaming and they should be usedto it, I just... I don't know. Tell me I'm not crazy."

"About what?"

The disinterested tone of his voice burrowed under Deirdre's skin, and she felt the corners of her lips turn downward without her meaning them to. She leaned deeper into Broderick's personal space as she spoke: "Everything! Just tell me I'm not imagining the staring, the frowning, the—the hostility?" With every word, she gripped Lydia closer to her chest—the steady warmth of the newborn was proving more of a comfort than her own husband—and she willed Broderick to look her in the eye, to provide the sort of sensible affection she'd grown accustomed to receiving from him, to help her feel as if he understood the eight hours of agonizing pain she'd endured and the forty-eight hours of subtler pain that had come afterward. Broderick's inattention would not would not break her, she knew; she'd been stretched taut by the delivery, but any further aggravation would only stretch her further, weakening her mental stability and enabling the easy paranoia to which she was prone rather than shattering her altogether. Still, she did not enjoy feeling stretched. She enjoyed a husband who was willing to address her concerns, and a lasting belief that she'd married the right man, and a promise that all of this—the people who believed her hysterical, the world that seemed to condemn her for every emotionally-driven choice she'd ever made—was a surmountable obstacle.

So when Broderick's head lifted, and when he finally looked at Deirdre directly, her surprise was pleasant. She felt warm relief engulf her body like the thick blankets her bedside attendants had denied her, and she smiled before she realized that Broderick was not smiling, that his eyes appeared cold and vacant.

"I think we should go home," he said, and he began to walk toward the patient exit.

It was a few moments before Deirdre found the strength to follow him, before she crammed the cadence of his voice into the darker crevices of her brain and willed her weary legs to move forward. But in her mind's eye, Broderick was staring at her still, his eyes just as glassily detached as those of the medical staff, his face just as void of feeling. Her entire body still reeled with the impression that she'd just spoken to a stranger; her mind, however, whispered that she had not, because she had spoken to the same person again and again from the bed on which Lydia had been born, in the guise of a nurse asking for her meal order or a doctor checking her blood pressure or an attendant handing her a new robe.

Hollow eyes. Empty face. Indifference bordering on antagonism.

She closed her eyes. She sucked in a deep, shuddering breath. She reminded herself that she had experienced anxieties like these from her first moments of advanced consciousness, that these were the kinds of fears that her old community had despised her for, that sweet, loving Broderick would grieve if he thought that she'd slid backwards into former thought patterns. She whispered to her innermost self, to the baby in her arms, that she would not allow the worst pieces of herself to destroy the best pieces of their future lives together.

But something inside of Deirdre felt sour.

She pretended that this was not the case. She opened her eyes, and she shoved the old anxieties into places where she could not be distracted by them, and she strode through the double doors of the hospital with a steely gaze and a thumping, too-rapid heartbeat.

And there at the threshold, blinking away relentless sunlight and shielding Lydia's eyes from the glare, Deirdre gazed at the life she'd chosen for herself—smiling Broderick in the driver's seat of their gray pickup truck, bags of feed slumped in the cargo bed for the dogs and the goats, a decal on the back window with a bearded man and a long-haired woman and a cartoonish baby swaddled in blankets. For all of this, Deirdre would have beamed and allowed her anxieties to melt away, except there was also a humongous, chartreuse eye hovering in the sky behind the truck and it, like the doctors and nurses in the hospital Deirdre had just fled, was staring directly through her.

She blinked. The eye did not disappear. She blinked again, and she felt her entire being twist as she stretched tighter and tighter, as her palms grew clammy and her breath grew shallow and her world became dread and nothing else.

"Broderick," she said, voice shaking like a loose clothesline. "Broderick, look behind you."

Broderick turned, and for a moment he sat motionless in the driver's seat of the pickup truck as Deirdre forced herself to look at her baby instead of the eye, as she begged for the soft curves of Lydia's fragile arms and legs to replace everything that her mind had just recorded. When Broderick turned again, he was still smiling.

"I don't understand," he said.

"The eye," said Deirdre. "The—the giant green sphere. The black pupil. The eye."

"I don't understand," said Broderick, grinning like the man in the window decal.

And although Deirdre had never truly broken before—though she stretched instead of shattered, though she'd taught herself to do nothing else—she felt a piece of herself shatter in the hospital parking lot, her attention split between the family who desperately needed her continued normalcy and the floating eye that promised to undo everything.

She opened the passenger-side door of the truck. She slid into the sunbaked leather seat, and she closed her eyes, and she pretended that she'd never been like this, that her life was a cartoon decal and that she was absolutely fine.

*

Over the following days, Deirdre fell into a sort of routine. She'd wake, nurse the baby, and amble into her and Broderick's shared study, where she'd record her dreams in a leather-bound journal she'd maintained for the past three years. She'd record other things, too—how often had Lydia cried the night before? How soundly had Broderick slept? How big had the eye gotten overnight?—and she'd leaf through the previous pages to soothe any morning anxiety, because she found that comparing present experiences to those of the past granted her a comforting perspective. It was true that she had never imagined an enormous, sickly-green orb hovering over the horizon before, but it was also true that she had never given birth, or coped with the rapidly-adjusting hormone levels of a new mother, or been forced to remember the excruciating pain she'd experienced at the hospital during every subsequent nightmare. These factors could explain why her latent paranoia had only now been given form, why she also imagined the orb's piercing stare intermittently coming from her husband or her neighbors, and they gave her reason to abandon her fears in the study every morning and emerge a bolder, if not more self-doubting, woman.

Her coworkers wouldn't expect her at the urgent care clinic for another year now, so Deirdre turned her energy toward gardening. Before Lydia's birth, she'd planted tomatoes and cucumbers in the tiny plot of land outside the farmhouse, and so she spent her afternoons watering the growing shoots, stringing wire so that the deer wouldn't siphon away her spoils, and inspecting the ground around the plants for weeds and pests. Most of these tasks she could accomplish one-handed, and so she'd cradle Lydia in the crook of her right arm as she sprayed the vegetable plants with a hose or paced between rows, singing nursery rhymes and pretending that the giant, floating eye did not scrutinize her progress. As time passed, the eye grew harder to ignore because it physically grew, the chartreuse orb expanding just as much as the black dot sealed inside of it; in the moments that Deirdre forgot not to look at the sky, she'd pause in her gardening and find herself arrested by the eye's sheer girth. It was not yet big enough to block out the sun, but in a few weeks' time it might be, and then Deirdre would encounter a great deal more difficulty in attempting to deny her own disintegrating mental state. Even now, the denial was somewhat tricky; with the eye this close, she could make out the pupil twitching every now and then, its movements erratic and jerky, and she'd feel her stomach churn at the sight of it. Then Lydia would begin to cry—she sensed, somehow, when Deirdre's everyday trials overwhelmed her—and Deirdre would shush her and glance back at the eye for a moment, and she'd pretend that the convulsing pupil had not halted directly over their farm as she fought to focus on the garden once more.

Her daily routine ended when Broderick arrived at the house, his boots muddy and his shoulders burnt to a toasty brown shade, because after Deirdre had prepared dinner for the two of them and then eaten it, she spent her time doing nothing at all. The problem was that Deirdre possessed little strength once she'd interacted with Broderick; the shallow conversation was what exhausted her—the lingering sense that something had changed, the odd, vacant stare he'd cast in her direction—and too often she dug through these interactions in search of something familiar, some evidence of his former adoration or his happiness in her presence, only to emerge empty-handed. She wrote about this in her journal, too, because the new distance, like the pale-green eye, might have been another monster that her weary brain had conjured simply to frighten her. She also wrote about it because it was possible that Broderick was falling out of love with her. (Hadn't she been warned?) New mothers did not attract husbands as powerfully as future mothers did, particularly not new mothers who refused to lose the baby weight, and Deirdre understood that her appearance had always helped her past relationships stay afloat; without the hourglass waist and the slender thighs, well, Broderick had a few less things to love. Besides, it had always been difficult to love Deirdre as a complete package—in the weeks before her elopement, her family had made this very clear.

So Deirdre spent evenings singing to the baby, and wondering why Broderick had desired her affection in the first place, and watching as the shadows of night obscured the floating eye still barely visible through the nursery window. Then she'd lay Lydia in her bassinet, and she'd pad into the neighboring bedroom, where Broderick would lie sound asleep on the lumpy mattress they'd purchased a year prior, and she'd slip into shallow, tormented slumber only alleviated by the cries of her own infant throughout the night.

Every night, she dreamed of pain. Every morning, she woke and recorded that pain. Every day, she continued to see the eye.

One afternoon, she saw something else.

She uncovered it in the heat of the afternoon, while Lydia wailed in the crook of her elbow and her shovel delved into the earth around her tallest tomato plant. All day, the air had smelled faintly of sulfur and turpentine, and a gray mist had shrouded the farm, its vapor slightly green when the sunlight streamed through it in the right fashion. Now the steel head of Deirdre's shovel was catching on something that certainly wasn't a weed. For a moment, she paused—the obstruction seemed firm but tender, and she wondered if it wasn't the root of a tomato plant that had grown far too thickly and strangely deep. But when she removed her shovel, bile rose in her throat, and she reeled backward even as her feet refused to budge from their position in the dirt.

The not-root shone a milky vermillion color, pulsing with a steady light that faintly illuminated the divot that Deirdre had dug into the soil. As she watched with mounting horror, it shifted slowly, and Deirdre began to see that the not-root had an end, that its shiny, porous flesh tapered into a barbed tip and that it more resembled a tentacle than anything else. Then it began to move, and the tip was snaking its way toward the surface before Deirdre fully realized what was happening.

It emerged into the sunlight. Deirdre smashed it with the head of her shovel.

The flesh flattened with a sickening squelch, then sprung back into place, and so Deirdre whacked the tentacle again and again until the color began to drain from the tip. Deirdre's shovel clanged noisily as it battered the soil, and Lydia began to screech louder, but all Deirdre could sense was the roaring in her ears and the twitching of that tentacle and the constant gaze of the eye overhead, so huge that it had nearly overtaken the entire northern skyline. Her heart was a motor in her chest, and her stomach was a churning mess; as she swung again and again, her mind whispered that the tentacle was imaginary, that it represented some deep-seeded fear of creeping catastrophe, and yet she continued to whack and pant and whack some more until the tentacle had retreated into the dirt and Lydia's screams were piercing her state of horrified concentration.

She sighed, readjusted Lydia, and plodded over to the porch swing so that she could breastfeed. The tension of the encounter began to dissipate, and Deirdre resolved to forget that the incident had ever occurred—she'd leave it out of her journal, she'd allow it to remain an imaginary phantom instead of a half-real one. And this plan might have succeeded, had Deirdre not finished nursing and then proceeded to uncover three more tentacles in her garden within the span of an hour.

By the time Broderick ambled through the front door of their farmhouse, discarding his muddy boots in the corner and resuming his silent vigil at the dinner table, Deirdre had been stretched so thin that she thought herself in real danger of snapping were any further pressure applied. Yet she asked Broderick the tremulous question she'd formulated anyway, because she could no longer contain her anxiety to her head alone; the eye was one matter, but the tentacles were too real to deny, too horrible to shoulder alone.

"Did you see anything today?" she asked, and her hand shook around the handle of a frying pan as she fought to keep her face even. "In the fields? Did you see anything weird growing in the dirt, like—like pests, or—I don't know. Anything?" Deirdre had resolved not to be hysterical today, as much as her family might have hoped to see her hysteria degrade her own marriage. She would present herself calmly, because she was either very crazy or very much in danger and a hysterical approach would alleviate neither of these things.

But Broderick only shook his head, and when Deirdre glanced up at him, he was staring in the same hollow-eyed, empty-faced manner that ensured that he would be of no help to her.

"I don't know what you mean," said Broderick, and another piece of Deirdre shattered as Lydia began to howl.

*

The mist was always present now—wafting inside the house when she woke, drifting through the streets of town when she drove to purchase groceries, lingering about the roots of her dying tomato and cucumber plants. When Deirdre considered it, she could not be sure that the mist hadn't always been there, ever since...well, since she'd given birth to Lydia, since she'd experienced the worst physical pain she'd ever encountered and opened her eyes to find hollow-eyed, empty-faced people staring back at her. The olivine mist had been there then, and the eye had been there, too, and even though the fleshy, barbed tentacles hadn't been there, they were certainly here now, and they were causing the fabric of the world to decay as Deirdre watched, terrified.

The plants were dying. Grass was wilting, vegetables were rotting, and Broderick was returning from the fields each evening with a stupid smile plastered onto his face and a promise that the corn had never been better. The goods stocking the grocery store smelled putrid—the produce oozed with milky pus, while greenish meats riddled with lesions and insect eggs spilled over the butcher's counter. Yet Deirdre's neighbors purchased these foods, looked upon them fondly, consumed them without hesitation. Soon the only thing remaining for Deirdre to be grateful for was the fact that her own breastmilk was not tainted, that Lydia remained safe from the edible terrors that manifested around her.

It was all an illusion. It was all horrifyingly real. She oscillated jerkily between the two alternatives, praying for the sake of her child that she was insane yet fearing for their family's safety if she was not. The world was blind to its own decay, and so Deirdre could not attempt to alert people to it who would never fully understand, who might (rightly) accuse Deirdre of schizophrenia or some kind of postpartum psychosis. Yet she was forced to watch the world shatter and herself stretch thinner and thinner with malnutrition and stress, and she could not imagine a life worse than the one that she had been trapped inside.

One night Deirdre awoke roughly, plagued by continuing nightmares of her own labor-induced pain from weeks before, to find Broderick lying awake on the mattress beside her, staring blankly into her face with an open mouth and a heaving chest. For a moment, squinting at his body in the dark as her panic diminished, she thought that Broderick's chest had grown markedly hairier while she'd been distracted with more important, terrifying matters; then she realized that the growths on Broderick's chest were not natural, that they'd plunged from his chest seeping blood and viscera, that they were the very same vermillion tentacles that plagued the dirt around her house and that they were actively killing him as Deirdre watched.

He was choking now, blood spilling from his mouth as the tentacles writhed and grasped at empty air. As Deirdre shrieked, Lydia began to scream from the nursery, and the tentacles only seemed to twitch more rapidly in response; they flung droplets of crimson-stained pus across the sheets, and Deirdre continued to scream, and Broderick choked and stared and choked some more until his chest finally stopped heaving and he collapsed, his eyes truly hollow and his face truly empty, and Deirdre realized that every remaining piece of Broderick had been extinguished in a matter of seconds.

She felt herself choking now as a combination of mucus and bile clogged her throat. Still, the fleshy tendrils were stretching outward, their barbs tilted toward Deirdre in a way that twisted her stomach and forced her out of the bed. Blood and pus still dripped down her face, joined by fresh, startled tears; her hands trembled as she staggered backward toward the door, watching the tentacles sprout from her husband's body cavity faster than she thought possible, and she stumbled into the hall and slammed the door shut with a force that rocked the entire farmhouse.

Lydia's room was silent and dark, and Deirdre balked at the entrance before affirming that the room was bereft of fleshy growths, that the infant shrieking inside of the bassinet was free of tentacles or blood or pus. Then she rushed toward Lydia with open arms, hastily scooping her into her grasp and whispering words of shaky encouragement, and then they rushed back into the hallway together, where—oh god—dark, snakelike silhouettes were streaming from beneath the closed door of Deirdre's bedroom.

She stifled a scream as she sprinted toward the kitchen. There were no tentacles there, she was sure, unless Broderick had kept any of the spoiled food she'd been forced to prepare for him—unless the spawn was able to grow from produce or meat alone—and, as she spilled into the familiar expanse of their family kitchen, some relief engulfed her when she realized that the room was clear and, beyond that, the entrance to the backyard.

She had no plan, but she fled the house all the same. The instant she emerged into the coolness of the night, Lydia still whining at her shoulder, Deirdre spotted the plot of writhing tendrils that her vegetable garden had become. In the moonlight, they were a strange, alien sea that reacted to her presence, twitching and leaning towards her as the screen door swung shut in their wake; with screaming nerves and a pounding head, Deirdre turned and began to run for the gray pickup truck.

She refused to break here. She would stretch herself long enough to drive to...to Nebraska, or Iowa, or any place that the tentacles had not infested and the strange fog had not marked as tainted. Yet as her feet pounded against the gravel, it occurred to Deirdre that perhaps nowhere was safe, that if she had watched the news or contacted her family, she'd have seen tainted food and vacant eyes in every corner of the world she cared to examine.

For a moment, Deirdre imagined that the entirety of this evening—these two months—had existed in her mind, that she'd invented the whole terrible ordeal. She pretended that her husband was still alive, that the eye floating overhead did not exist, that the tentacles were products of her own anxiety; she pretended that she would last the night.

But then the eye floating overhead blinked at her, and tentacles erupted from the ground, and Deirdre finally broke.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Shay

There is a cruel similarity in the occupations of the surgeon and the butcher. Each has hands accustomed to the careful workings of a blade, fingers adept at cutting through flesh. Alas, the surgeon is held in much higher esteem, for they are the saviours of life, Christs upon their stakes, although instead of their lives, they give only their time, and instead of sins, absolve you of your money. The butcher is seen more lowly, grovelling in blood and filth, and for what purpose other than to chop the heads of chickens and pigs, than to bring death, and take life? Ah, but remember, fine piggies, that the breasts of meat and thighs of fat you so sustain yourselves on had lives at one point, lives that needed taking before your fine teeth could rip at them; and the surgeon, with his fine tools and liquid resolutions, may not always succeed in the task at hand, and more often than not, death is to find his patient. Now the butcher, he never fails in his task - and done in one fell swoop!

See, now, the innerworkings of each, the ability of both to sustain and end life as they so please. Be not surprised when the butcher turns his back on you, and the surgeon soon thereafter.

You will not see them leave.

"Dad, I don't know if I can do this." I twist my hands together, small, soft hands not yet grown and calloused like mom or dad's. The creases of my palms are wet and wringing them together only slicks the sweat around and onto the pads of my fingers. I then try to wipe the moisture off on my costume, but looking down, I see only disappointment. "There's so many people out there. I look like a chunky walnut." I hang my head, and the brown hair falls into my eyes. "They're gonna laugh at me."

I feel pressure on my shoulders, and look up. Dad isn't smiling - he's not a smiley sort of person - but there's warmth on his face, and a grin at the corners of his eyes. And an awkward strain to his words. "You don't look like a chunky walnut. You look like a monster that's bound to scare some townspeoples' socks off. And if anyone tells you otherwise...you're a very scary walnut. Alright? They're gonna love ya."

He taps my shoulder in the way that a dad might wish his little league baseball star luck, but that's not me, I'm no athlete, not with my asthma, and not with my glasses that sometimes Sherry makes fun of, and not with this costume weighing me down to the floor. But I think Dad notices that I'm still down, so he crouches to my level (he likes when we're on even ground, he says) so that I have to look at him, and he grabs my elbows, and says, "I'll cut you a deal. You go out there and do your very best, and don't be so scared, and we'll go get ice cream after this, all three of us. Any flavor, any cone, any size. How does that sound?"

I've learned that Dad doesn't commit bribery very often, so this must be very special: I perk up, and nod rapidly. "Okay!"

And, although Dad doesn't smile, he cracks, a twitch of something on his lips before he smacks my shoulder again and stands. "Good. Well, I have to get back to your mom, but I promise you I'm never far away. You know your own drill - you'll be okay. Good luck, little man."

Then he's walking away, and then I'm staring at his back, and then I'm alone with strangers in the backstage dimness, already adjusted to the dark and able to pick out the shadows of people and assign names to them. I turn in search of Mrs. Shaw, the director of sorts, but I don't know where she went. Even if she's close by I don't think I'd notice her in the flurry of parents giving their children last minute wishes and touch-ups to makeup and costume design. I can't help watching some of them.

I see Sherry in the far corner, with her mother, and although they're both very put together, and very dressed up for tonight, I can see a tremble in her mom's hand as she brushes a type of powder or something onto Sherry's cheeks. "Now," I hear her mom say, trying to be composed but shaking a whole bunch, "what they say those crazy cultists are doing out there in the city, it's nothin' for you to be scared about, sweet pea. Most are out in those hellish places anyways, y'know, like Kentucky and Ohio. And don't you even worry about what your pa was talking about the news for, alright? Your aunt and grandma are here so I can't have you scaring onstage. They drove out a long way to stay with us, so we ought to give them a reason they came here and didn't go to Uncle Bobby's instead." She continues to ramble, but Sherry seems more at ease than her mother, and when she side-eyes me, I steal away, pinched meanly by her gaze.

The ground creaks underfoot as I walk around, but the voices creak too, quiet and rushed and sharp. A girl and her grandpa are talking in hysterics near the back, and Mr. Don and Ms. Coley are whispering loudly to one another, a phone in the latter's hand as she shares some outlandish story with the former. "I don't know, Jeff, this wild shit is getting too close to us. It's like it's moving in a wave, y'know? And nobody even knows what the hell it is! I mean, you'd think if so many people on the east coast were lying in the street with their backs and necks broke in the streets, somebody would be doing something! Like, I don't know, martial law, or something! Whatever the government does with us in times of crisis nowadays."

Out of breath, Ms. Coley pauses, but then she sees me, and starts, a hand on her chest. "Oh, I am so sorry, I didn't see you there. What d'you need, hon?"

"I'm trying to find Mrs. Shaw," I say cautiously. I've never heard any of my teachers curse before. I only hear my parents and people in traffic and movies do that. Also some other kids in class but they're sort of mean so of course they would. Will they fire her for that?

"Right here!" Mrs. Shaw declares, an artificial leaf frond in one hand and a cluster of ribbons in the other, emerging from the shadows. "We're on in five minutes, and I have all of our starting actors - and actresses - already lined up to go. Except one..." She comes to stand near me, but glances outwards, craning her neck and wheeling it around like the eyes on a submarine. "Have you seen Georgia, Alfie?"

"No, ma'am." I call her ma'am because my mom says that's the most polite way to say no to someone. Sherry mocks me for that, too, sometimes.

Shortly after Mrs. Shaw tsks, I hear a distant screech and flinch, the folds of my costume wavering with me. Distantly, we find Georgia, her hair all done up and the sparkles on her costume glinting in the dim lighting. She's struggling with a man, her wrist caught in his grasp as she pulls away so harshly that one foot hangs off the ground and most of her body is tilted sideways in order to force her weight away from him. A few flowers fall from her many braids. "I can't go!"

"We have to," the man hisses, leaning forward to seize her other wrist. "We need to get home, pack, and get on the road as fast as possible. Stop fighting me, Georgia May!"

Mrs. Shaw's brow knits in worry, and she scurries over, frond lost to the ground and ribbons released to the wind. "Is there a problem here? Where are you taking her? I need her here; she has no understudy and she's one of the leads. Also, I advise that you lessen your grip, May. That looks like it hurts and I won't hesitate to get someone else over here to verify that."

The man's wide eyes settle on Mrs. Shaw, and he hesitates to lighten his hold on Georgia, but does nonetheless. Not enough for her to slip away, though. The man doesn't blink when he speaks which I find strange. "You gotta cancel this show. People need to get to their homes, to be told it's not safe here."

"You're being paranoid, May," Shaw says, "If it wasn't safe, there'd be alerts, and sirens, and the like telling us to evacuate. There's no reason to leave. And there's no reason to take my cast with you! She doesn't want to go, can you see?"

Finally, he blinks, once. I see his knuckles shift as he tightens up on Georgia again. "That's not up to you, or her, to decide. We need to go. I apologize for ruining the show like this, but I need my family to stay safe."

And then they're gone, and by the look in Mrs. Shaw's eyes, I can tell that the show is, too. In order to make the burden less on her, I say, "I'm sorry. I would've been the fairy, if I knew the lines. And also if the dress wasn't pink."

She laughs, but at first it's mirthless; she laughs a second time shortly after, and I think it's one of those laughs like the kind my mom sometimes does and says "unbelievable" after. Then she laughs a third time, and it feels genuine. That's when I know, as she marches away, that she'll figure something out.

I'm a bit too afraid to focus on what any one person is up to after that point. It's not just the show that's just started, either, or the loud music that still blares muffled through the curtains. It's the things that people have been saying tonight, and doing, and the way that Sherry's mother refuses to leave her daughter's side and go find her seat in the crowd. Sherry seems annoyed at this, and for the first time in a long time, when she catches me staring at them - I've been told I have a bit of a staring problem - she's the first to duck away.

The fear is dull, though, and spikes only when Mrs. Shaw ushers me onto the stage. I'm scared of the laughs I think I'll get, or the snickering from the other kids, or the boos from a faceless audience. But the audience is far from faceless, and nobody laughs, and I derive comfort from this as I deliver my momentous three lines and then take my place at the back of the setting next to the other characters finished with their roles but forced to stay in sight, still and silent.

But throughout my still silence, I notice the exact opposite occurring in the audience. They're small things, subtle things, but things all the same. Someone will whisper a bit too loudly to their spouse in the front row. A cluster of people will look behind them. A pair and their children rise from their seats and leave, the auditorium doors slamming behind them. The glow on parents' faces in the crowd is bright and vicious, and seems to blind me more than the spotlights do just because I can't stop staring at them, at what they mean.

It's when people in the audience start talking, uncaring of one another, or even that they're interrupting the show, that the other kids start getting overwhelmed; they forget their lines, they pause, they stare out silently. Nobody in the crowd seems to mind, or notice. They're too busy discussing amongst themselves, some of them getting up and leaving like the other family did earlier.

For some reason, whatever happens next reminds me of this kid in my class who couldn't feel pain. He would use this to his advantage, to pull tricks in front of the other students and impress them, gross them out, mesmerize them. They were mesmerized, and I admit that I was too, because how can someone just walk up to the front of the room, take a stapler, and stick a stapler or three straight through their ear and not even flinch, not even when you're told to go to the nurse and instead just rip them straight out and drip blood all over the floor? What made him so different that he couldn't feel it so distinctly like the rest of us?

When I see the double doors fly open of their own accord, and smack an old woman in the face so hard she topples backward onto the tile floor, I hope that she does not feel the pain. When the walls are driven in by what looks like footprints delivered by an unseen beast, and one of those footprints crushes a man's skull, I hope that he does not feel the pain. When the screams fill the air, and the body of three parents do, too, when their necks, or spines, or various other bones snap and break and twist in wild contortions, so quick that it seems it's only done in the span of one second, at the command of a single exhale, I hope that they do not feel the pain.

Everyone else seems to know that they do, though. And so they scream, and they scream, and they scream.

The running starts, then. People push and shove. They trample one another. Some of the kids onstage run off. Most of the people are cut off by that exhaling death, dragged up into the air and broken like the twigs I pick up and snap in the backyard sometimes. I don't move. I watch, paralyzed, but unfortunately not blind, not deaf. Where's Mom? Where's Dad? Why aren't they sitting in the crowd, waiting for me? Why aren't they with me? Where are they? Where am I? What is this?

I feel pressure on my shoulders, but it's nothing like the way Dad tapped me earlier for luck. It's harsher, and scarier because I can feel the fear in his trembling hands. He lifts me, carries me, and then we're running, and this is when I finally begin to scream, because he hasn't carried me in three years and that means something's very, very wrong here.

In a lull where I'm catching my breath, we exit into cold night air, and the icy drizzling of rain falls against my cheeks. I gasp against it, and then I hear someone beside us, who's also running, yell out, "My God!"

Someone replies to him in a shout, "There is no God in this world anymore!"

Against my dad's shoulder, I hear him say, breathlessly and only between his cheeks, "Was there ever?" He runs harder. Then, a few moments later, he too says, "My God."

I turn around in his grasp and am met with the orange illumination of car engines on fire, flames licking at the stars and blocking them out with smoke. There's a large sound like metal being shredded by asphalt as a car is dragged along by an invisible force and crashes into a crowd of people trying to run away, and then through a fence and down into the ditch the teachers always warn us, every day, to stay away from. I shriek, and bury my face into Dad's shoulder as he runs the other way again. "Malia!" Dad yells. That's my mom's name.

"Here!"

"Take my hand."

I assume they do, and we speed up again. I know we're headed closer to the city because it sounds louder there on a normal day. It's also where we live. But the deeper in we go, even though I don't look, I can smell the chaos. It smells metallic. And like chemicals, and fire, and broken things. And it sounds like people exactly the opposite of the boy who puts staples in his ears without flinching.

It sounds like Sherry, screaming.

I finally look up and wish I don't, but I focus instead on the pair running beside us, just like Dad and I, except it's Sherry in her mom's arms. She sees me, and calms, but I can tell that she's been crying, and still is, by the streaks on her face.

"What's happening up there, Malia?" Dad asks hurriedly. "Can you see any better than I can?"

"I have no idea what's going on at all! I don't-"

I scream another bloodcurdling scream again, because there's blood on me now, but this time it belongs to Sherry and her mom. I want to crawl away, under my bed like I did when I was littler, or in the closet, like I sometimes still do, or in the little cupboards in the kitchen I used to be able to fit in. Instead, we're closed into a car that isn't ours, all three of us squeezed into the backseat. Mom slams the door shut on us. We huddle together.

The rain's picked up by now. It runs so heavy, and so violently, that it runs in sheets down each of the windows, distorting the outside world. I'm sort of glad that I can't see it all, but there's something scarier about that, about only seeing shadows flicker past the windows every two seconds. I hear a man screaming wildly as he runs past, "I shall feed you, Lord of mine!"

The car shakes, and we all scream. Then the world goes black. 

Bạn đang đọc truyện trên: AzTruyen.Top