childhoods in parallel
These lights burn.
The disinfectant they lather on every surface does nothing to mask this reminder. His every ragged breath jolts me awake as the presence-more-than-tangibility of his weakness, his necessitated bedpan, bites like the musk of those garter snakes; the resulting pain resembles the pain of their absence. I saw them everywhere in the old place, the woods behind, parks, Mamรก's garden when she still had the wherewithal to maintain one. Not here.
Life exists in Gravesfield, but it is not my life. It is hard not to form a bitterness towards it, or to see why it's my responsibility not to, like she tells me in words gentler than she means. Like the doctors tell me when they offer some new tasteless sweet thing to cover whatever news is coming today. They're bad at masking in many ways.
He has now not spoken in a month.
Mamรก tries to get a smile out of me. She deserves to get one. She brings me out for food I have a difficult time tasting, despite having had all these things before - old reliable favorites. Another thing that decides to fail us. Figures.
Her own smile is grotesque, puckering in its struggle to maintain itself. Her face is only allowed to rest when I look away - her subtle relieved exhalation cuts through anything. I pretend I don't hear it. I hear a lot of things. I hear venomous words I don't recognize when I press my ear to the door of the teacher's lounge, but I recognize my name being said, and I recognize my thinking is the problem they have with me. Is my not thinking well enough another thing that has failed us? Was it a decision? What could the consequences of this decision have been? What do they know that I don't?
She brought me to her work on this day. No other choice. Nobody could (or would) look after me, nobody knows us. I don't think she'd trust anyone with me - me with anyone? - anyone with me.
Necessity bringing me to another place of death. I've heard enough sputumy coughs and mewls but my ears just overflow, overflow, and it forms a fog that wraps around my head and stops me from breathing. I cannot stand their deathly stillnesses. When Mamรก leaves me alone with this geriatric cat, I start ruffling its side. Nothing. I can't handle it, I resort to shaking, almost scratching, pulling at its tail, I can't stand it, I can't stand it.
I only gain a response from the arthritic thing after outright yanking its tail, and out comes a scream as it hobbles its creaking body off the counter, more of a fall than a jump, then it plods to the room's furthest corner.
Guilt gnaws at me, but I would surely feel more if I had neglected my duties to check on the cat's health.
Mamรก hears the scream and when she hurriedly returns, I feel the same burn from the look in her eyes she tries to suppress as I did pressing my ear to that door.
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'The, ah, neighbors, have set five more traps in our eastern woods. We have lost another hound.'
Mother pouts at Father's words, his tired eyes glazed over with apathy. I don't like the 'dignified wealthy games' they take me along to play with the dogs they keep - or more accurately are half fed by us and our golems, and half by the fruits of our neighbors' lands, but sleep here and they train in their off time - off time they seldom have.
None of us eat the rasselbock once the hounds flush them out of their holes at my parents' behest; 'that's lowly people's food. We are not lowly people.' I am grateful they have not asked me to deal the final blow myself. I don't like when they think I'm frail, but some instances I can live with. I plug my ears to prevent them from ringing at the high pitch, before Father raises his golem's arm and casts it towards the mammal pinched in the hounds' antish trap jaws. We never touch the animals, only ride our golems behind the dogs and pretend we're doing something.
'Kreist', she says, a popular expletive nobody knows the meaning of, other than the Emperor uttered it in an impassioned speech and uncharacteristically clapped his hand over his foul... what could be a mouth? 'Do they need their livestock so badly? Set three golems to patrol for every trap. As well-armed as you can make them. Next one I send to town I'll have purchase a pup. Allmother-allfather Below, what irrational people.'
She never mourns the dogs when their assault on our neighbors' land is punished. Not like I do, or the twins do, or Father pretends not to. Assets, they are. We are? No, they are. Only they.
She always assumes the worst of our neighbors. Whether it's out of a delusion of persecution or a fantasy of justified retaliation, I cannot tell. When Father is gone, she strokes the back of my head and mutters, 'Don't worry, girl, if any of them trap you, we'll see them drained of all their little worth before they're shipped off.'
This does not comfort me. I remain unprotected, uncentered. If I had the courage I might ask her, 'what if I was hurt by someone of use to you?' This has not happened yet, and at that I already know the answer. I only long to hear it spoken. One day.
