Someone took a paintbrush to the sky again. It’s streaked with gold and pink, the few clouds a light purple against the darkening blue. I itch to grab some pencils or paint and capture the moment, but I know it’s futile. There’s a box under my bed full of failed tries – 12 years of tries, and the first look exactly like the last. To tell the truth, I was a better artist at three than now at sixteen. So I simply watch and dream of catching this moment for eternity.
“Sang!” my mother’s voice is hoarse. “Dinner!” I wait for the last rays of pink to disappear before I leave the twilight to it’s own devices and head downstairs to the kitchen. My mother nods at me, handing me a bowl of stew. We sit down across from each other, silently eating.
I don’t remember when we stopped talking. I mean, when I stopped talking. My mother still talks, but since I’m the only other person in the house and I don’t talk back, she rarely does it anymore. When I was little I was this giant chatterbox, but somehow talking became uninteresting at some point and I gradually stopped. Sometimes I try again, but it hurts so much I’d rather stick with being mute. So now all I do is read. And write a little bit now and then.
When my mother is done she washes her dishes and then heads up to her room, right next to mine. She’s been doing that a lot lately. Sometimes she doesn’t come back out for days at a time, and then only to go grocery shopping. Well, at least I think that’s what she does. She disappeared for a month once, but she came back with groceries, so what do I know?
It’s been going on for about a year now. I remember because she shaved off her long, dirty blond hair one day and simply disappeared in her room. We used to be like twins – we had the same hair, the same green eyes, same build; I’m even the same size now. When I was little we’d pretend we were looking into the mirror when we looked at the other, so we’d copy all their movements. It was my favorite game for a while. But then she cut off her hair and all comradeship we might have had before was lost.
With a sigh I stand up from the table, wash and dry my dishes before heading back to my room. Twilight is gone now and the stars are coming out. From my window I look for the familiar patterns, naming them silently as I go along: ursa major, ursa minor with Polaris at it’s end, Orion, the hunter, canis major, canis minor, Gemini – the twins… One day I want to have a telescope and see the rest of space. I mean, of course I’ve seen pictures on the Internet, but I know it’s not the same to being outside and actually looking through a telescope. I know it.
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An hour or two later, when I’m done contemplating the miracle that is stars and it’s too dark to see anything going on outside, I crawl to my bed and turn on my laptop. I’ve been homeschooled my whole life and my mother gave it to me so that I could find information beyond the few books we have at home, and I can never stop being grateful for it. It’s my connection to the Internet, and my connection to the world. I mean, sure, somehow she did something to it so that I can’t actually actively participate in the internet – I don’t have an e-mail, so I can’t join any forum or platform or whatever to write there, and besides, whatever she did to my laptop most likely wouldn’t allow it – but I can read every word the rest of the world has written, and I can find information about anything and everything out there. I don’t know what I would do without it. Die of boredom, most likely.
I surf the Internet until the wee hours of the morning, when I can barely keep my eyes open. Determined to stay awake as long as possible I find some calculus problems and start working. It really doesn’t matter when I go to sleep or wake up. My mother will be in her room for the next week and I’ll be stuck here with my window and my laptop. I don’t even have school anymore – I did all these final exams before my mother changed, so I should have graduated high school. Of course, there might still be some unfinished paperwork flying around, but I don’t have to take classes anymore. Not that my mother would give them in her condition.
Just a few weeks before she shaved her head and disappeared in her room she promised me that I could go to college when I turned eighteen. And not just the online kind – she said she’d pay for the full experience, including professors, dormitories and lots and lots of other kids. I had been ecstatic. Sure, the thought of all those people was kind of dissettling, especially when you thought about the probability that a murderer or rapist or kidnapper would also be attending. But I would be outside. And I would give anything to be outside.
But now, I didn’t really think it would be happening. Something was wrong with my mother, and I didn’t know what. In the beginning I had thought she was simply sick, so I made chicken soup and the like for her. But she locked her door, and I couldn’t get to her. I had asked her about it when she came back out, but she pretended not to see my notes and that my croaking attempt at speaking was unintelligible. Maybe it was. I offered her repeatedly to bring her food when she was locked up in her room, but she always waved me off, saying that she was fine. I had begun to suspect that she had a secret food stash up there, and I was proven correct when I watched her always take one shopping bag up to her room with her when she returned from her trips. Though it was impossible to fit enough food into that bag to be able to last for days on end without other food.
At four in the morning my eyes started drooping for real. Biting my lip I forced myself to concentrate on the calculus problem in front of me. With a shaking hand I added another number to the piece of paper. I didn’t want to go to sleep. I’d give anything to not go to sleep. Why couldn’t my body just accept that?
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YOU ARE READING
O brave new world
FanfictionA fan fiction based on C.L. Stone's Ghost Bird series. What would have happened if Sang's mother didn't die... I have stopped writing this, but my notes are at the end.
