shhh tiny voices

“The gift is not a part of you, my love. It is you. You can’t stop it. I’m so sorry.”

Her mother carried so much guilt for her gift, for creating her at all. Carson always figured that’s why she left them. The guilt was too much. Carson was too much. Something her mother never told her, perhaps never even realized, was that there was something Carson could do to end the devastating grief of the gift.

She could stop the bad thing from happening.

She realized as a teenager when she felt the impending assault of a classmate. When the pain felt too large to ignore and she followed its guiding pull behind the school moments before the attack. When she was able to hit the man before he could harm. Her classmate had hugged her, thanked her, and all the pain she’d felt for hours vanished. That’s when she knew the gift wasn’t a punishment. It’s a responsibility.

She’d become a small-time hero of sorts, though few knew to what degree. People in town seem to loathe her less, even if they still fear her. Their hatred is mediated by her helpfulness. Preventing horrors before they can occur does not gain the same attention as intervening during a crime can. Most of the work she does to protect people prevents them from ever even knowing they were in danger at all. It makes the pain lessen inside of her, though, and that’s enough. 

Her life is small but manageable, and her heroic interventions dull the ache to a background buzz. Living in a small town keeps things easier, too: the one time she’s visited a big city she nearly fainted in the streets under the pressing pain of the thousands of lives around her just waiting to suffer or end. Lake Valley is easier, the suffering fewer and farther between. Life is tolerable. Sometimes even pleasant, if she’s lucky. She can handle it.

Then one day she wakes in the middle of the night and it’s like her soul is ripping from her body, gripping hard at her bones in its effort to stay. Her body breaks out into hives, she finds herself retching fruitlessly into the toilet. Every breath she takes feels damp, her lungs sloshing and stuttering around water that isn’t there. She’s drowning. The terror of it nearly consumes her - her fingertips feel raw like she’s been clawing at the walls to escape, her head aches like she’s bashed it against something hard. She’s felt people die before, hundreds of times, but she’s never felt it like this. Her gift screams within her body so loudly her jaw aches: Run. Go now. Find her. Save her. 

Her feet are moving before her brain even tells them to do so, taking her into the kitchen until she has a knife in her hand. She didn’t mean to grab it, yet she knows she needs it. Out of her house she runs, racing down the country dirt road that takes her from her isolated cottage to the rest of town. The gift guides her till she’s on the paved road and racing across it, down the grassy hill until she sees it, there, sticking out of the water: the tail end of a compact car, its headlights shining up as it sinks.

Hurry. Save her now.

Carson splashes into the water, passively aware of the jagged rocks tearing at her skin - she hadn’t put shoes on, hadn’t had time - but all she can focus on is her grip on the door handle of the front seat. She tugs and it opens easily. The unconscious woman’s hand is still tangled around the handle on her side. She’d tried to open it, it seems, but couldn’t against the water’s pressure. The car is filled with water now, though, and the pressure is gone. If it were not for the pulsating panic exploding through Carson at the sight of her, she’d think the woman was already dead. Carson reaches around her and tugs at the seatbelt only to find it unyielding. Knife knife knife, the gift chants, and she slashes at the belt with frantic jagged swipes. Carson cuts the woman free and lets the knife fall with the sinking car. She focuses her hands on pulling her body out and away. Nausea roils in her as she drags her to shore, wave after wave of flickering pain as the woman gradually dies in her arms. Another car has pulled up she can see on the road. The taillights sinking deeper into the lake must have caught their eye, and Carson prays they are calling an ambulance now but she can’t stop to ask, not while she feels the woman die, and so instead she lays her on the grass and she presses on her chest and she breathes into her mouth and she feels a deep gnawing emptiness settling into her bones as the woman fades, and a death has never felt like this before. She’s never felt this emptiness before. And then the woman gasps out a mouthful of water and a euphoria Carson has never known floods her body. She rolls the woman onto her side as she throws up water and nearly collapses under the feel of it. Carson presses her head to the woman’s shoulder and cries. What devastation she’d felt this whole time has been flipped on its head with a rush of endorphins so powerful she trembles. Carson’s never felt joy before, not like this, not with someone else. The ambulance arrives soon after that. EMTs come to load the woman onto a stretcher and Carson stiltedly tells them what she knows. They’re not surprised to see her. Carson is often there at scenes like this, pulling people from the brink of death. They look at her like she’s something to be feared, to be respected, and all Carson can see is the woman she’s saved. She’s beautiful, Carson realizes, especially now that color is returning to her skin. Her red hair lays tangled and plastered against her face and around her oxygen mask, and all Carson wants is to brush it aside. 

“We’ll take it from here, Miss Shaw,” the EMT says nervously as they begin to wheel her away, and every step they take from her pulls the ache back into her. It’s only when they’ve gotten a ways away that Carson realizes how the last few minutes of contact have felt for her. How the moment the woman came back to life, the pain of her gift went away. That’s never happened before. And now she feels that distance like a wound, and the panic sets in with it. “Wait!” she calls out as they load her onto the ambulance. “I’m coming with you.” They seem hesitant to let her but she doesn’t give them a chance, instead climbing aboard like she belongs there. Like she belongs with the woman. On instinct, she grabs the woman’s hand. Instantly the panic lessens, the pain. The world fades into just this moment, just the soft beat of a heart that had moments before been still.

“Do you know this woman?” they ask as they wrap her in a shock blanket. She’s soaked and shivering, though she hardly feels it.  Yes, the gift aches within her. Yes yes yes.