Ronan Rothschild, like almost every other child in Clearwater, had a summer job at a laboratory, helping some crazy scientist by carrying and cleaning and looking useful. Ronan worked at Dr. Gina’s time lab. There was so little to do there that Gina let him bring in a book, so Ronan just sat perched on a high stool and fetched whatever Gina happened to need. It was a good job, since it payed four dollars an hour and included snacks and usually an ice cream cone at the end of the day.
He rarely read the books he brought in to work. He thought. He did have a lot to think about. His sister Emma acting all suicidal, the dare he had sent to Sebastian. . .and remembering his father.
Dad was always ready to play. Sometimes Ronan would show up at his lab after school, and Dad would be in the middle of some important experiment, but he always made time to roll around in the grass outside with Ronan, or share an after-school snack or something. It always made him feel important, wanted, when his dad would take time off to play with him.
Now Dad was gone, and life sucked. Mom became one of those crazy workaholic types and barely even noticed how desperate for help her daughter was becoming. Emma herself was the worst of them all. Ronan sighed and looked up at Gina.
“Need anything?” he asked, not really expecting an affirmative answer.
“Bring me the hydrochloric acid? It’s on the top shelf.”
Ronan slid off his stool and fetched her the little vial, labeled hydro c in Gina’s scrawling handwriting. He handed it to her, returned her smile and went back to his chair. He opened his book to a random page and scanned it, looking for anything familiar.
“How are you doing, Ronan?”
“Uh. . .what?” he said. He hadn’t really been listening to her tone of voice; he couldn’t tell if the underlying message had been one of whether he wanted a cola or whether he was suicidal like Emma.
Gina slid off her high lab stool and leaned against the counter, watching him with calm, maternal eyes. “I’m worried about you. Is everything alright at home?”
Ronan nodded, eyes running over the words in the book but not digesting any of them. “Uh-huh. What’s the hydrochloric acid for?”
She paused. “The usual. I’m sorry, Ronan, I know you don’t want to talk about it, but if something’s wrong at home I need to know about it. You know you’re not just my summer employee, you’re more of a nephew, and I really do care about what happens to you. It’s not right, how lonely you are.”
He closed the book. His mind went running over what to tell this motherly scientist who had taken such a liking for him. “You have any sisters or brothers, Gina?”
She grinned and huffed a little. “Yeah. Little sister. Pain in my a. . .butt, too.”
“Well, were you the popular one, or was she?”
“What do you mean?” She knew exactly what he meant. Her head was cocked to one side but she was fiddling with a test tube full of bright green slime, twirling it in her hands.
“Were you her sister, or was she your sister? I mean, when you introduced yourself, did people say, ‘oh, you’re so-and-so’s sister.’?” Gina nodded uncomfortably. Ronan continued. “It’s like that. Emma’s got problems, has since Dad died. But. . .I don’t. I mean, I don’t have problems, and so nobody pays me any attention. Everyone’s trying to get Emma to a psychiatrist, trying to make her all better, and nobody notices me. Mom’s always working. And to make matters worse, I’m failing science, which is just about the worst thing that can happen to a kid in a town like Clearwater. But I’m okay. What the heck it that green slime?”
Gina stopped fiddling with the test tube and set it back with its empty brothers. “Ronan, how’d you like to come over to my place for dinner tonight? I’m making quiche.”
Postponed
Sebastian ate a late dinner and was just heading out for the Fence when the telephone rang. In a tiny town like Clearwater, nobody called. His mom answered it, looking bemused. She held it out to him. “It’s for you,” she said, and then broke out in a fit of laughter. “He called you? What a weird kid!”
Sebastian took the phone and slowly put it to his ear, unsure of what to expect. “Uh. . .hello?”
“I’m grounded,” came Travis’ groan. “I was playing with the fire extinguisher. . .and I’m grounded.”
Sebastian laughed then, too. His mother’s contagious giggles mixed with the absurdity of someone actually using the telephone was too much to keep in.
“I’m not laughing, dude! Seriously! I can’t leave the house til school tomorrow. Are you aware of how much this sucks? I really wanted to climb the Fence, too. I’m grounded for two weeks. Plus I have to get all the white stuff off the couch.”
Sebastian struggled to contain his laughter. “Okay, I’ll go find Ronan and tell him some other time. Can I come see the house? Is the white stuff still there?”
Ixchel’s Wrath
Ixchel watched them, from her place in the throne of heaven. She watched the humans with their dirty lives and their tiny, stupid brains and she wanted them dead. They deserved to die for what they did to her. No more roaming the earth like a goddess should be free to do, only this dimension they so naively called heaven. They would die.
The power of hundreds of gods inside her screamed to be let loose, to hurt, to destroy. The powers inside her ravaged each other, boiling and roiling and turmoiling until there was no alternative but to ruin.
She gathered the strength of thousands of gods and let out a scream so piercing that it ripped through the very fabric of reality and tore a hole to the human world. She flooded through the hole like a million angry tides and fell upon the human people with relish. But she could not kill them. She blew through the world as if the dozen wind gods inside her had finally found their escape but no matter how many ways and times she tried she could not take a human life with the hands that had taken the blood of so many gods.
Ixchel, goddess of all that was and is and will be, gathered her powers and flew like the thunderbird of legend back through the rent in the sky to the dimension she called heaven, called home. She cursed and she yelled and she screamed her piercing scream but to no avail. She could not kill the humans she so badly needed to destroy.
Why? The question ricocheted inside her, echoing in far recesses of herself that even she rarely visited. She searched herself and all the dimensions she ruled over and she found her answer, an answer she hated so passionately that were it not for the goddess of truth lying inside her she would have rejected it.
As powerful as thou art, my queen, murmured the centaur. His breath smelled of honeydew and lemon, and of the melody of fable. As powerful as thou art, my queen, there is still a part of thee which is, unchangeably, the Ixchel who was born of two priests and was raised by the gods to be a rainbow, a waterfall, a weaver, a mother. The centaur bowed his great neck and began to sing, a tune of times gone by when the Mayan people praised the great Ix Chel and when there were millions of goddesses and gods who sat in the great throne of heaven. My queen, my Ixchel, you cannot kill humanity because underneath the captive gods inside you is the same Ixchel who sat at the shrines in Cozumel and Isla Mujeres to bless the pregnant women who travelled so far for your blessings, who fell in love with the sun and sang for him in his palace while he spurned her. No, my queen. Ixchel would never do such a terrible thing.
From deep within herself Ixchel drew the Norn, Verdandi, and threw her powers at the world, for no longer could the anger of Ixchel’s entity be contained in the shell of one goddess. Verdandi smiled her terrible, all-knowing smile and for that one instant the Norns overpowered Ixchel and unleashed themselves upon their world.
Urd, Verdandi and Skuld. Past, present and future. They twirled together in a wild, untamed dance of freedom from the body if Ixchel and their victory, their passion, their ultimate release threw a force upon the universe with such force that only one place in the entire universe was saved from the great lack of time that flooded all.
But Ixchel returned, battling her way into the glorious entwining of the time sisters, and her power returned the three into her, their powers stolen for Ixchel’s purposes. Ixchel bent over the rip in the fabric of the universe and surveyed the world created by time.
Frozen
There was silence all around her, like somebody pressed PAUSE on the TV and didn’t tell her, and Jee was very lost. She hugged Lollipop to her chest and sang to her, sang to Lollipop, because there was no one else to sing to. Everyone was frozen. People, cars, birds in flight. Jee walked through the streets of some town and cried, because everything was frozen but her, and that was a very lonely sort of feeling.
Jee wondered who would take care of her. Who would tuck her into bed, if Mommy was frozen, and who would kiss her boo-boos and make them better? Who would tie her shoe laces? She looked down at Lollipop and touched the little white nose. “It’s okay, Lollipop. I’ll take care of you. Don’t you worry, okay?” She sat cross-legged in the middle of the street, because all the cars were frozen, and she sat Lollipop across from her. “Are you hungry, Lollipop? Me too. Let’s have tea and cookies. But not real cookies, pretend cookies. Okay? Let’s pretend they’ve got chocolate chips in them. I like those, don’t you?”
She pored pretend tea into Lollipop’s pretend cup and then her own and she sipped it like the beautiful ladies in the movies. “It’s a lovely day, isn’t it, Lollipop?” She stared at the pretend tea and cookies. “I’m hungry for real. Pretend cookies didn’t help. Let’s go find home, okay, Lollipop?”
She stepped carefully over the imaginary tea and cookies and picked Lollipop off the ground. The sky was low and her shadow was long, and Jee knew that meant night was coming soon. “We’d better hurry, Lollipop,” she said wisely. “Scary things come out at night.”
A Way Out
Emma stared at the sheet of lined paper, marred by the words A Way Out scrawled at the top. It felt good, writing poetry. The true way out, better than cutting herself or listening to her music or trying very very hard not to think. But tonight no words would come, only thoughts about how much she hated her mother. Hate, hate, hate.
She focused on the title of the poem she never wrote and thought about a way out. She needed to escape, to get away from snotty Ronan and his video games, from Mom and her stupid notions of parenting and the people who thought that talking it out would solve everything. Solve what? I’m not algebra. She hurled the pen at the wall and it fell to the floor with a small crash, like cracking at egg on a tabletop. Emma watched it roll to a stop and then she left her bedroom.
“Where are you going?” Mom said.
“I’m going. . .I’ve found a way out.”
Mom caught her by the arm and pulled her onto the couch. “No you’re not. You’re going to tell me why you broke my mirror, and then you’re going to tell me why you’ve been cutting yourself. This has got to stop.”
Emma squinted at her mother. “I like the gray hair, Mom. It goes with the cold stone heart reflected in your eyes.” She stood and left.
“Emma! You get back here! Emma! Emma!”
She tucked her black hair behind her ear and headed towards the Fence.
Words and emotions collided in her brain. She felt as if, for the first time since Dad died, she was making a decision on her own. Cutting. . .that was the relief. Feeling the blood pulsing in her, reassuring herself that she was really alive, that living was good. Watching the blood flow down her wrist into the palm of her hand, collecting there, warm and very much alive. But now, she could escape. She could go anywhere, be anyone.
Almost, almost, Emma smiled.
She stood beside the Fence, running her hand across the wires of it. What strange powers belonged to this Fence to keep the world outside from entering and the world inside from spilling its secrets to the civilians. It was time. She cast one more backwards glance towards her home, towards the idiots and the nerds who inhabited Clearwater, and dug her foot into an opening.
“Hey! Who’re you?”
Emma laid her head against the Fence and turned. “Go away or ‘ll kill you.”
The person came closer and night ceased to hide the form of Sebastian walking towards her. Emma’s heart pounded. Not Sebastian. She began to climb higher, to get away from the boy who so cruelly haunted her dreams.
He caught her ankle. “Who are you? Why are you climbing the Fence?”
“Piss off!” She kicked at him and she thought she felt her foot smash into something, probably his nose.
“Emma?” he said in disbelief.
She climbed higher. She had to get away from him, she couldn’t talk, she needed to escape from him. And then she was at the top, and she lifted one foot over the Fence, and then the other, and she jumped.
Silence enfolded her like a coffin. She stared at Sebastian, on the other side of the Fence, at his face, capturing it in her heart in case she never saw him again. And then she ran, tripping in tree roots and refusing to admit to herself that she was crying. Emma never cried.
_________________________________________
I know the writing itself is getting less creative and I plan on revising and editing when I finish chapter one, which should be today or tomorrow. Please help me out, folks!
