Radical Kills [Chapter one: 'Deliberation']

Whoever invented the art and idea of moving should be shot. Right here, right now, in a Wild West showdown with watching women in table-cloth dresses and Smokey-the-bear hats and gleaming sweat racing down necks and backs in the wild Arizona heat. I’ll provide the gunpowder, you fill up the barrels, and we’ll shoot to the death.

If it were a dream I’d probably wake up just as the shell hit the dusty earth and the bullet came whistling towards me. I’d never actually die, and although you’d shoot me again and again and again, I’d always wake up and feel the aching pleasure in my bones that at least I tried. Because that’s what I feel every morning, subsequent to villainous nightmares trying to put my lights out. But I never fail to wake up before death reaches me. We’re just built that way, I suppose. Most nights I’d wake up around two- or three- a.m., drenched sheets strangling my body and giving me sleep-induced skin sores. Those were the nights where the images in my head whacked me like a whack-a-mole and I was bashed down into Fear where I’d be held and restrained for hours.

Then when it loosened I’d wriggle back up and manage to get in a few extra hours of sleep before feeling that aching pleasure again in the morning. That feeling made me quite the tired soul. It made me not want to get up, just sprawl in bed and be positively indolent. It’s not as if life’s offered much else since we decided to mosey down south.

Not for me, of course. For my sister Charlie, who’s decided she wants to be a world traveler and help positively every living and destitute soul on this planet. I suppose, though, I just wouldn’t have the guts to live in conditions like that. We don’t worry her too much about it, though, my brother and me. First off I don’t think he gives scrap what she does with her life. Heard him say once he’d rather vomit while standing on his head. That’s a good demonstration of his insensitivity.

Me, I’ve deliberated on the implacable topic of what the heck I’m going to do with my life, and I’ve put one thing in place. One, I’ll file this topic away and reassess when I’m a bit older than what Pop calls the ripe old age of thirteen. Besides, it wasn’t too important then for a girl named Bronwyn Upchurch living in the sticks of the North.

There wasn’t much planned location-wise, to start. Dead shrubs and prickly vines could hint something close to gardening. The wide skies could mean something of astronomical proportions. But then there was the dusty road. The glorious, well-trodden road, long and lengthy and proposing. The road I’d gone and sprinted on for century-like years.

It was Pete who first got me into it. Pete’s my brother. His real name’s Peter, but I call him Pete. He’s got these pointy goblin ears and black hair trimmed sidelong to his head, and a mind as mischievous as mine, to be quite precise and not too mistaken.

When I first ran it I felt free, if I remember right. Free in a liberating way. A way lacking restraints, like the Fear that came and dragged me out of nightmare after nightmare. I put one foot in front of the other, tentatively at first, then faster and faster, knocking the wind out of my lungs. Soon I was flying. It took all of Pete’s might to get me to stop.

The next day after my first run was a Sunday, which meant church day, which meant blue cotton dresses and black flats and combing hair into flat-twists for struggling into prim burgundy bows. That was the day Charlie stably refused to be put into, as she called it, such “down-to-earth, child-like garments.” That was also the day that Charlie grew up. She’d grown up, and Mama kept note of it.

Like a big girl she wanted the little skirts she had seen mannequins sporting in the dress shop. The ones with the curled trim and lacy elastic that fits well against your hips. The ones Mama called condemned. She forbade us from wearing them, saying that if she caught us even considering spending our allowance, through frugal, on them, she’d tan our hides to high heaven.

When Mama says something like that you know she’s not one to mess with. Charlie was playing with fire, and I could see the sweltering blaze in her cheeks although she tried to hide it behind the notion of her dark, chocolaty skin. It was in the way her eyes shifted to the ground from time to time, and her scuffling feet on the linoleum in the kitchen, where Mama washed our hair before church.

I had come in the kitchen accompanied by Pete, both our heads stinging from the harsh detangling process executed by Pop’s expert hands. Our hair stood about a foot above us, unmoved but for the future of shampoo and sink water. Relishing the thought of pounding away on the gravel road, I felt cross that day in the kitchen, and decidedly obstinate.

“There’s not a single girl at school who don’t wear a skirt like that,” Charlie had said. “And if I don’t get one, I’ll be an outcast! A freak show! A horror story! A nut case!” Pete looked over at me with wide eyes. Between the two of us we hadn’t heard such words put together in a sentence.

All this girlish squabbling didn’t make any sense anyways. But the outcome was expected, somewhat. After church Charlie was grounded to the confines of her bedroom for five days. The sentence kept elongating afterwards though to its fullest of a week, since Mama had put into our heads the idea of a good no-nonsense hiding. I suppose she figured Charlie was much too old for one. But I was put out with both of them. If a ten-year-old was good enough for a hiding, then so could be a teenage girl like Charlie. She wasn’t any different.