Sugarcane and Indigo

The End of the Road

So, you're close to the end of the story, huh? You're probably wondering what's going to happen. You're probably looking back right about now trying to figure out how we ended up here. You're probably desperately looking behind you trying to see where everything went so wrong.

People tend to do that a lot.

Iris Fletch, the witch, did. She was the type of person who saw the future by looking at the past. The type of woman who on the road of life never went back but refused to walk forward, choosing instead to stand sideways keeping an eye on both directions, making sure that nothing ever came her way that she didn't see coming.

In short, Iris Fletch was a woman obsessed with time.

Maybe it was the fact that in the grand scheme of things, life acted a lot like a movie for her and she was the only person with a remote. The only person with the gift to skip past the present and see deep into the future without the ability to change a single thing. That was the thing about the future, Iris Fletch had discovered from a very early, you often saw what was going to happen after everything that could be done to change it had already gone past.

The first time Iris Fletch learned that particular lesson she was barely into her girlhood at the tender young age of 15. She was a pretty thing with big brown eyes that stared right through you into your hidden corners and a smile that stretched widely under high her high sharp cheekbones. The night she learned that lesson, though, she wasn't smiling. She was sitting on the stairs - the same stairs her granddaughter would sit on in almost the exact same position - with her arms hanging loosely between her legs and her shoulders hunched up to her ears with her head hanging low. On the landing below her, her parents were fighting over what to do. Her older brother, Zachariah, had run off with a married woman almost twice his age, leaving town in the process.

That was the thing about her brother, he was an empath, he got so used to feeling emotions second-hand that whenever he got the chance to feel one of his own, he'd move heaven and Earth to keep it. But this was the first time he'd done anything like this.

"He's grown! He's made his bed, he can lie in it now," Iris's father, Abhraham, had shouted at his wife.

"Grown?" Iris's mother, Mauve, had sputtered, "Grown? He's barely 19! He's still a child! We need to go after him."

"And do what?" Abraham had demanded, "We can't bring him back here. They'd burn him alive for running off with that woman."

"And they'll burn him alive out there! You know what they do to our type of people," Mauve had hissed in a carrying whisper.

Iris hugged herself tighter on the stairs. She didn't know if her mother meant Black folks or witches, but everything she'd heard about the outside and outsiders in general - mostly overheard in whispers around corners - told her that it was a dangerous place that ate black bodies and left behind weathered corpses.

Why had her brother ever gone to such a horrid place, Iris had wondered to herself not for the first time.

"Abraham," Mauve finally said, reaching out for her aging husband, "he's our son. Our son. We need to go bring him home."

Abraham had been quiet for a long, drawn out moment while Iris held her breath above them before he finally nodded.

"Alright," he finally agreed, "We'll leave in the morning."

Iris hadn't seen the vision until it was too late. Hadn't seen her parents and her brother lying on those motel beds until moments before it was happening. At first she thought they were asleep, but the phone next to them was ringing and not a single one of them moved to answer it. That's when she noticed that they weren't breathing. She had rushed to the phone and immediately rang the place they were staying on their way home but no one answered. Two weeks later a single letter came from the city's morgue explaining what had happened: gas leak.