Little Spark

4 - Airsick

Two weeks and two days breeze by, and all too soon, Neighbor James and I are hurtling towards the airport at three times the speed the average seventy-two year old man would drive. "You nervous?" Neighbor James turns and asks me, breaking the silence inside his small sports car.

I look down at my hands in my lap. I polished my nails at 3:00AM during a bout of insomnia, and now they stare back up at me, perfect, glossy white, a tribute to Mom. I never saw her without white nails. She said she wore white as a reminder to choose light over darkness, something I never really understood until seeing the video. "Yeah, I guess I am nervous."

"Care to talk about it?" The grace in his voice makes me smile. If only he knew.

Ever since seeing the video, I've been teeter-tottering between will-to-live crushing despair and light-fixture exploding rage with complete and utter numbness at the balance point. I've had the murder nightmare—and the glowing skin, thermometer-shattering spikes in body temperature, and touch-triggered power outage—four more times. I feel like a Looney-Tune saying this, but because I've been staying at Neighbor James' house and he doesn't make a big deal out of it—he just brings me some water, flips the circuit breaker, and trudges back to bed without a word—I think I've gotten used to the whole thing. I even slept in my own room last night as a sort of last hurrah.

The week and a half since we tossed mom's ashes into the wind from her favorite cliff at Virginia Beach was jammed with packing, yard sales, and postmortem legalities, and although I was fully ready to leave the sadness that clung to everything in our little house like a permanent film of dust, I cried like baby once out the door this morning. It's a good thing Neighbor James owns the place and will keep it up because I think my head would've exploded if I'd had to deal with inheriting a house on top of everything else.

"I don't really know what to say, Neighbor James," I sigh as I watch the trees whiz by. "It's all happening so fast. I feel like just yesterday I was testing the 'shotgun house' theory."

He laughs. "That does seem like yesterday," he says. "You were always too darn curious for your own good, girly. We just about had a heart attack when that gun went off. I mean, what kinda twelve-year-old girl steals a shotgun?" He looks over at me and shakes his head. It hadn't been the smartest experiment, but I was thrilled to discover that our 'shotgun house'—referred to as such because you can shoot a bullet through the front door and it'll go straight out the back—was the real deal.

"That's how I know you'll be alright, Bliss," he continues with a twinkle in his eyes. "Girls like you, the fiery ones with the golden hearts, you all are the world shakers. The folks of Cocoa Falls, Mississippi won't know what hit 'em."

All too soon, we've reached the airport. Neighbor James takes an audible deep breath as we pull to a stop at the curb, and tension fills the interior of the two-seater. "So, listen, I'm sure you don't even wanna think about it, but I wanted to tell you not to worry about that other thing, Bliss."

He's wrong. That video is all I've thought about since I accidently destroyed it, and every time I have the nightmare and wake up in full-on Spark mode, Mom's words become more and more real to me. I actually have the medal and lapel pin—a winged shield a little larger than my thumbnail with a raised torch blazing front of it—tucked into my backpack so they'll be in my possession at all times. I have no idea where I'm going or what I'm doing or where to even start looking for clues or whatever, but those Shadow losers are the reason I've never had a dad and my mom was too traumatized to even talk about him; if I get a chance to take them out, I'm all for it.

"You'll eventually stop seeing your dying mama in your nightmares," he continues—I haven't told him mom's not actually in my nightmare, "and when you get to where you're headed and you meet the people you need to meet, everything your she said will be easier to digest, alright? There's still a lot for you to learn, but I believe in you, girl."