10.
I put my weight against the warm car bonnet and tried to clear the stars from my eyes. The woman in the back leant forward to speak, pushing waves of patterns past my vision in her wake.
“Sis are you ok? We lost you back at the gas station. Jed honey give her a hand.”
The click of the car door quivers through warm metal to my hands. I stare at the woman through the weaving patterns and catch her profile in the light. Familiar but not my sister.
“Theresa are you ok?” Said the man. I look to the woman and then back to him, he is staring at me.
The patterns clear and I see my face reflected in the rear window. But the window is down. I lower myself to look in the wing mirror, touching Theresa's lines, I see her soul in my eyes. A sonic wave of nausea moves through me, balance lost as Jed places me in the back of the car.
“We best get moving if we're going to make the cabin before it snows”. The man starts the engine.
The woman takes my arm and whispers, “This is what you wanted isn't it? Or did you expect to keep yourself too?”
By michael thricksos, on blogspot
11.
The worn leather squeaked as if welcoming me home. The car smelt the same, of petrol and apple cores and liquorice cigarette papers, but it was my hands that frightened me the most. Such familiar hands, with their carefully shaped nails. That thin gold wedding band.
When she passed me the baby, I marvelled at the ease in which those fingers claimed him. As if they were more a part of him than me. Ben was sunk into his blanket, his small lips sucking even as he dreamed. I drew him close, but his dense, curled heat couldn’t touch me. Nothing could.
Without glancing up, I felt the woman’s eyes on me, but it was Jed who spoke.
“Of course,” he said, “we won’t go to the cabin right away. There’s the campsite to find first. There’s so much to come.”
A full bottle of whisky was wedged into the back seat between us, amidst a scattering of playing cards. A pair of sevens lay face up.
I leant my forehead on the clammy window as we started to drive. Stripped of their snow, the trees looked raw and vulnerable and very black.
Your turn . . .
3 comments:
Cold.
The misted pane is cold against my cheek but not painful. Ben is asleep, cradled in one arm against my chest and I touch my face with the other, expecting scars and bruises and blood caked against my lips and lashes but there is nothing but the wind-hardened skin and the musk of dry loam beneath my fingernails.
I look down at Ben, swaddled in a wool blanket crocheted by Aunt Miranda when Theresa – when I was born. He felt hot and I pulled away some of the wool from around his wrinkled prune face.
My heart stopped. For a few seconds I died of shock, then a wave of nausea went through me and I coughed, the acrid taste of bile flooding my mouth. I swallowed and looked u[. Jed’s eyes in the mirror, watching me.
“Something wrong, hon?”
“He’s dead.” I let Ben fall to the floor, his withered, mummified head sounding hollow as it hit the ridge of the foot well. A flat, the note. The sound of a dead baby is A flat.
“Of course he is, silly.” My sister leaned forward to pick him up, fussing with the blanket. “He died a year ago.”
12.
I felt like the trees; confined and lost in time. Nothing made sense. Why were we driving back? Jed had said they’d lost me at the gas station. Although my fall could have affected my memory, I was convinced I’d been running to save them. Jed with his drunken rages. Theresa with her sense of retribution. And Ben, helpless and sleepy, unaware of being caught in their stupid mess.
I needed to open a window. I needed to get out of this sweaty, whisky reeking car. Theresa’s hand suddenly crept over my own, as if she’d read my thoughts.
‘Please don’t go’ she whispered. Something in the fragility of her tone made me trust her.
I glanced at my hand again. I was trying frantically to remember who had placed that wedding ring on me.
The humming birds were gathered in evening song, and despite my body aching, I wanted desperately to be outside with them; to be free from this sense of anguish.
I suddenly looked over at Theresa’s hands. They were both free from adornment. I caught those sneering eyes in the wing mirror, and instantly knew it was Jed who had placed that band on my finger.
The blog story is now closing . . . until the morning, when you can perhaps help me to work out what's going on (?!), and maybe provide us with an ending!!!
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