A Breath on Glass (Part 3)

  The first day at the orphanage was no better or worse than the next, or any day thereafter; eventually the experience of the house morphed into one indiscernible blur. The weather was dependably gloomy. The residents were background characters in Puckett House’s eternal soap opera. When bored, Danny liked to speculate on the other orphans’ background: maybe they were once convivial. Well-rounded. But the house had since changed them into a moping, melancholy species Danny knew them to be. He was constantly terrified that he might undergo a similar transformation. 

   So in spite of this, he resolved daily to do something - anything - that would free him from the chains the orphanage tried to bind him by. Sometimes he would plan his day as the cold shower spluttered on him in the morning. More often, though, he would do it the night before, forcing an optimistic outlook as one day ended and another one loomed.

   But tonight, looking forward was more difficult. Tonight was another one of those nights, the kind that came every year and was persistent in its taunt: it was the eve of his fifteenth birthday, meaning the eighth anniversary of his father’s death. 

   There was something else, too.

   Danny had just the right balance of trust and skepticism to be susceptible to it: the idea that there was something behind the coincidence. Every year - every birthday - since the accident, something out of the ordinary had happened to him. Nothing news-worthy. Nothing miraculous. Just something that strayed from the path of a normal day’s route.

  It was a frivolous thing to concern oneself with, but the trend was undeniable: Danny recounted when, last year, the dining room ceiling had collapsed. ‘It’s a miracle nobody was crushed,’ the resident caretaker, Mr Lichen, had ever so grimly put it. Combine that with Danny’s twelfth birthday, when he had been unusually woken by the patter of warm summer rain. Of course, he was horrified that his bed had been moved outside, seemingly of its own accord, but getting it back into his room was the real problem. ‘The things some people do in their sleep,’ Mr Lichen commented. This preceded a tedious anecdote about his ex-wife and her persistent night terrors.

   Tomorrow would only add to the list. Another strange incident. Another year of not knowing the secret behind the pattern.

   It’s childish, Danny repeated internally. Just a juvenile game. Let it go.

   Surely Danny had more important things to concern himself with, things that were worthy of his time? Inevitably - and as he would often do when in a sorry state - his mind drifted to the six happy years he spent with his dad. When Danny closed his eyes - even now - he could still see his father staring back. But each time he got further away, and the emerald his eyes once shimmered had long ago dulled. It was as if they knew. It was as if they could see the trouble they had faced and what had happened since. As for his mother - well, she was long gone. The only memories Danny had of her came from shaky home videos and blurry photographs.

  ‘That was her, Elena Bucket. The most wonderful woman in the world,’ he was told wistfully by his father. She had died giving birth to him. And no matter how frequently such a notion was denied, Danny compared her death to the flip of a coin: him on one side, her on the other. He just wished that they could’ve swapped places.

  Sighing (because over-thinking had worsened his condition), Danny attempted to find a more comfortable sleeping position - or, at least, a spot on the mattress where springs didn’t dig into his back. Once content, he let his body loosen, breathing slowly and heavily as one does in the seconds before sleep.

   His whirring mind slowed as thoughts of tomorrow, of his mother, his father, and his old life gave in. He let them drift away and - finally - was at peace. 

   This was the calm before the storm.