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

Ariel: Cold Coffee (Part Two)

(Ariel: unedited, cont.)

The blur of timeline that Ariel called “The Years of Regretting Randall” had hazily begun about a week before his tenth birthday. They should have been going to celebrate it, but they weren’t. Years apart had created a void that widened into a chasm. Ariel felt at times like she was standing on the edge of a cliff and straining to see the other side.

Except, there wasn’t another side – there was black space as far as the eye could see. It was something that couldn’t be bridged or climbed or jumped. It was unfathomable.

That day, Ariel had decided to attempt the impossible: she would call Randall and wish him happy birthday. Maybe if she jumped, everyone else would have to as well.

Strangely, she woke at seven a.m. School didn’t start for another two hours, and, bored, she had wandered downstairs to her parent's room. She found Anya asleep, slender limbs sprawled across the rumpled white sheets, golden hair tangling around her face.

Dad was missing.

His briefcase was still perched next to the closet door, but his shoes and his jacket were gone. Ariel had stood in the doorway for a long time that morning, watching her lonely mother sleep. This wasn’t the first time. Every morning Ariel rose early was a morning that Dad was gone.

Bored and alone, fighting tears, she had finally moved from the doorway to wander the house. When she hummed, it bounced off the arched ceiling, high-pitched notes twisting through the swaying glass chandeliers. She opened doors, slammed them shut, wanting noise, reprieve from the haunting silence.

The tenth door she opened was the one she never shut.

“Hello?” No reply. Nothing but an echo, coming back garbled and strange. She had taken one step in, then another. It was a room she had never seen before, small but grand. Four windows paneled the far wall, a long oaken desk sitting solidly before the light they released. Paintings – landscapes, of oceans and deserts, cowboys in mahogany frames and presidents in gold – hung systemically on the navy walls, and a ceiling fan buzzed lazily overhead, flicking dust from one place to the next.

Ariel had tiptoed in, cautious. She had hugged her arms around her skinny frame, whispering words she had heard her mother say when she was upset; an appeal to Mary, mother of God. Not that it had done her mother any good – being a Christian, and practicing as a Catholic, and neither making her marriage flourish.

No amount of prayers could protect you, Ariel learned, but the thought of a God, strong and mighty, watching over her dismal life, was strangely comforting.

She ran to the windows and thrust the heavy curtains open, momentarily blinded by the sun. Nothing but a winding cul-de-sac greeted her, and so she had closed them again. She plunked into the spinning chair behind the desk, whirled around until she was dizzy and had to rest her head against the broad wooden back.

That was when she saw it. A tiny box, nailed to the underside of the desk. It was surprisingly dingy compared to the relative splendor of the office. Curious, Ariel slid off the chair and crawled under the desk. It was dark down there, and there were cobwebs. But the box had seemed to be giving off its own aurora, a bright silver gleam that made her eyes burn.

It looked just like a birdhouse, with a top that lifted when she tugged at it with her fingers. Inside, she found stacks of small glass bottles, filled with amber fluid. She hadn’t known then what they were, what they meant. She took one out, slipped it into the elastic waistband of her skirt, and left the office.

They were just bottles. It was just an office. And didn’t adults do these things, kept secrets from their children, hiding the motivation behind those secrets to even themselves? Yet try as she might to ignore it, something sinister seemed to be breathing down her neck that night as she lay in her bedroom, shrouded beneath her white canopy.