The Way The World Ends ✓

Chapter 4. Indigo

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Shape without form, shade without color.

Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

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She had a funeral. Everyone said it was lovely, but to me, it was anything but. How can a funeral be lovely? Everyone shows up to feel sorry for you, everyone pretends like they knew whoever died. Everyone pretended to know the real her. The real Maggie Clark. But no one did. No one except for me. All everyone else knew was the idea of her they built up in their mind. Good or bad. Anywhere from 'she was the loveliest person I ever met', 'we were truly blessed to have her', 'I just wish we had her longer', to the snickers behind my back of 'she deserved it' or 'she was asking for it, dressing and going around the way she did'. To my own surprise, tears sprang at the former type of comments. I was lucky to have her. I just wished I realized it sooner. People could say all the bad things they wanted about her because I knew they weren't true, but when someone stumbled upon something accurate, something I realized too late, that's when I lost the power over my tear ducts. I had to excuse myself during the funeral and couldn't deliver the eulogy. So, my aunt did instead.

Good old aunt Sonny. I shouldn't have let her do it. She sugar-coated everything in our life and overcompensated to the point where everyone overestimated the number of terrible things that had actually happened. She made it sound like my father wasn't crazy, that her insane sister provoked him and drove him over the edge. To be completely honest, aunt Sonny was always jealous of my dad marrying my mom instead of her. My dad had his own money my aunt was after. In fact, the only reason my parents met was because Sonny went on a date with my dad that ended poorly because well, Sonny was transparent. She always thought my mother stole her life.

Sonny made my mother sound weak. My mother was the strong one, and the only one who will remember that is me.

He didn't have a funeral. In fact, everyone seemed to have just forgotten he existed. No funeral, no eulogy, no obituary in the paper. Not even buried. Cremated; ashes scattered in the cemetery. I didn't do it. I think Sonny did. She probably dumped him out of the pot and ran like he was a swarm of bees whose hive she knocked over. Fine by me.

If it was just my mother, everyone would look at me with pity. I could handle pity. What I wasn't prepared for was that look everyone had on their faces the next day back at school: the 'oh crap' look of near horror, like they all expected me to go berserk because obviously, that was in my blood.

Aunt Sonny moved in immediately. My mother's artwork had earned her a good sum of money over the years, especially when the art museum started displaying her pieces. Our house sat at the end of the cul-de-sac, picture perfect, not too big not too small. A perfect family on the perfect block in a perfect town in a perfect state. Appearances aren't everything. The house may have been beautiful, but what was inside now wasn't. From the moment Aunt Sonny moved in, it became her house, not my parents, not mine, not ours, but hers. She moved all of her things in and sold her house within the month of 'the incident', as she called it. Now instead of my mom's artwork hanging on the wall, there's mostly mirrors and slightly chipping blue paint that Sonny insisted she would do-over soon. I tried to spend as much time out of the house as my body would allow, which wasn't much. I had my routine: get up, go to school, sometimes loiter at the coffee shop with a book until I started to fidget in my seat, go home, and lock myself up in my room for the rest of the night. Repeat. I wish I at least had a cat or a hamster or something to keep me company. I was pretty much on my own. Any social interaction was just too much even if I hadn't become a disease after my parents' deaths.