Stained Glass Souls (Wattys 2014, Collector's Dream Award Winner)

Charliegh: The Snowball of Secrets

"I never understood why Clark Kent was so hell bent on keeping Lois Lane in the dark." ~ Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler's Wife

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(Charliegh)

Charliegh hated town days.

Two of her least favorite things – Purposeless, Pushy People and Endless Entertainment surged around her like a flood. Everyone had ventured out of their rabbit holes for a quick day along Main Street, toting strollers and handbags from booth to booth. If she closed her eyes, she could imagine it was a harvest festival – air tinged with cinnamon, kettle corn, and melting chocolate. Yet she could hear the cars, engines groaning in protest as they inched the long way around Main Street, the tap-tap of shoes upon sidewalks. It was a circus, a city circus, filled with white tents, free junk, and terrible renditions of popular music.

The music stage was located in the biggest tent, which stretched its ribbed fingers down the length of the library parking lot. People sat clustered around folding tables inside, hands folded around cups of steaming beverages, children with sugared lips bouncing up and down in their seats.

When her eyes fluttered open, the world was momentarily fragmented by the jagged black strokes of her eyelashes. She opened her eyes, wider, and took a deep breath. She was still here, standing in line at the coffee kiosk near the hair salon, trying to shrug deeper into her puffy coat for warmth.  More than a few pitying glances were thrown her way, parents hustling sticky-fingered children in a long, rapid circle around her. The whole community knew about Earnest. How when he left his family, he had left her as well. Most of them – all of them – knew about That Day. She should have felt sorrow, a riptide of Compassion tugging her into churning, murky blackness. But what she really felt was the Condemnation, little whispered words, the cusp of a glare. How dare you, they said. How dare you.

Lord, is friendship such a crime, that I must be reprimanded? She lowered her head, shrugging her shoulders higher. Her hair fell over her line of sight, dry and crunchy with gel as it rubbed against her forehead and cheeks.

Today was terrible.

She had met Earnest and his family at Town Days. Mercy – the head of the children’s ministry for Redemption Community – had recruited her to work the “duck pond” for the church booth. She sat and shivered on an overturned bucket for hours, watching four years olds dip wooden rods into an inflatable swimming pool. Her job was to smile, hand out candy. Mercy had been engrossed in conversation with the family – pausing occasionally to beam at the youngest, a little girl with golden curls, who had a bag of blue cotton candy gripped tightly in her fist.

“Charliegh.” She had looked up, and there they were – a tall, smiling man, holding hands with his wife, a petite, brown-haired waitress that Charliegh recognized from the downtown café. A boy of about her own age, with silent, brooding eyes had been loitering behind them, trying to keep his sister still. “This is the Olsens.”

And somehow, after that day, Charliegh had ended up tangled in their lives. She became like the wrinkles in the corners of your eyes – you knew they existed, and that they always had, but you couldn’t pinpoint the exact moment when you noticed that they had appeared to accompany your smile.

She fought tears. Just like she couldn’t pinpoint the exact moment of becoming, she couldn’t mark the exact moment of unraveling. She knew all about ending, how unexpected changes made the world shocking and impossible and unfamiliar. She knew about starting, full of cotton candy and saccharine smiles. So why couldn’t she find the middle, territory trekked the longest, the kind that faded when you turned to see how far you had come?