by C. L. Stone
The officer decided not to cuff me, said he thought that I looked too fragile to do so. And I was fragile.
My emotions were buried beneath the surface, but I always carried a wounded look.
I was broken.
I wanted to be strong; to block out the emotions that would make me feel too much, but it was harder than expected. It wasn't that I didn't believe myself to be unlovable, because I was. I knew my self-worth and I knew people had tried. They had tried to love me, but the price felt too high to risk my heart. There was no such thing as love in my world. Love causes pain, disappointments, and I’d had enough of that. I needed to protect myself.
I looked up towards the clock on the dash, and saw that it was ten-forty. Late.
Glancing towards the officer again, I saw another one had joined him.
It was Officer Brady.
I groaned, leaning my head back. I couldn't believe they called him. This wasn’t a small town or anything, so how in the hell did he keep showing up everywhere?
Officer Brady spoke to Officer McIdiot and then came to my door and opened it. Bending down, he looked at me.
“Daniels," he greeted.
“Brady,” I stated as I glared straight ahead.
He stepped back, gesturing for me to step out. “Come on, let's go.”
I grumbled, pulling myself out of the vehicle as he shut the door behind me. He ushered me towards his K9 unit SUV and had me get in.
I buckled myself in the seat, and turned around to see a German shepherd, the one I knew would be there. The two of us never really got along.
He growled at me, his brown eyes narrowing. When I kept his stare, he whined before finally letting out a grumble and lying down across the back seat.
“Hello, HotShot,” I said, smiling as Officer Brady hopped in.
“You can’t run off like that, Daniels!” he lectured as we rode off. “It's too late at night, and who knows what could have happened to you!” His hair held more silver than the first time we had met, aging him. I couldn’t help but think I was partly to blame for that. I hadn’t been an easy child, and in some ways, he had bound himself to me as another parent figure, even though I had never resided in his house.
“How's your wife?” I asked, glancing out of the window, trying to deflect.
“Nu-uh,” he stated, shaking his head. “You don't get to ask about my wife until we talk about what happened tonight.”
I twisted my lips, glaring at my reflection in the window, not wanting to talk about it, but I knew he would persist. I pinched my lips.
“They wouldn't believe me when I told them that I didn't take the money. They kept trying; asking me to tell the truth, that the consequences would be less if I just ‘fessed up,” I finished harshly.
“Did you?” he softly asked. I whipped my head towards him, my eyes blazing.
“I am not a thief,” I grounded out. “I never touched her purse.”
Officer Brady was silent as he continued to drive. I could tell he was thinking hard. Possibly about the night he found me.
Just like tonight, he had come and rescued me.
He had been leaning over me when I came to after blacking out, with both of my parents already gone.
“Oh man, Lee,” he had said to his partner. “Look at her, she's only a kid.” He'd crouched down, and I had groaned as my head radiated in pain. My body had been stiff and painful.
“You hang in there, honey,” he had said to me gently, careful not to touch my bruised body. “Help's coming.”
Help did come and so did the accusations. They wanted to know what had happened. I told them what I could remember. They said my father died of ‘blunt force trauma to the head’, had asked if I knew who had done it?
Did I do it?
I told them, no. I don't know. That I couldn't remember.
They ruled it as self-defense. That my mom could have been the one to strike him, but I knew better.
She was already gone when I had gotten to her that night. Either I had killed my father and blocked it out somehow, or someone had done it for me.
I settled on the idea that someone else had done it. That someone had showed up that night and saved me. My reasoning behind this idea was that the police had never found a murder weapon, and that confused them. To this day, one was never found.
Perhaps I was romancing the idea that someone had heard me and stepped in, but I wouldn’t know. Throughout the years, no one had stepped forward, and I couldn’t blame them. I wouldn’t want to confess to murdering someone, even if it was an act to save someone else.
Or, I could have blocked out that I had done it. It was a circle that never ended. Did I do it, or was it someone else? Either way, I was grateful that I was alive.
I glanced out the window, watching street after street fly by. Since that night, Officer Brady had been the only constant in my life, besides my case worker.
“Daniels,” Brady stated. “You're sixteen, nearly seventeen, you need to quit focusing on the past and look towards your future.”
Still looking out the window, I snorted. I already knew that. I struggled each day to prove myself to others who thought less of me; prove it to those who knew, those who remembered the past as I did. I needed to get out of the system and learn to live on my own. My foster parents weren’t bad. I was given food, a place to live, rules to keep me safe. But no more, no less; just enough.
My first foster family, the Shepherds, had felt sorry for me. They had been my favorite. She was a math teacher. He was an engineer. I left them after a year when Mrs. Shepherd found out she was expecting their first baby. Twins. They moved away to be closer to Mrs. Shepherd's family. I missed them, and when I moved, I had the fleeting thought that I had no home. It was the second place I had stayed in that they became nothing more than houses. It had made me realize that wherever I was, wherever I was going to be, it was temporary. After the third house, I didn't just think that, I believed it.
Brady and Sarah always followed me while I moved around, kept in contact, and I often questioned why they didn’t take me in, but I knew they probably didn’t want a broken child. Especially when they had no others.
They had stayed when others didn’t, and I clung to that, even though I knew it was for nothing. I put up a good front, one I depended on. I wasn’t planning on allowing Officer Brady to bring my walls down.
“What? Are straight A's not enough? How about graduating early and taking college classes? Is that good enough? When will people stop judging me?” I turned to him, “What do I have to do, Brady? What do I have to do for people to see the good in me? All they see now is my past.”
He sighed and pulled into a 24 hour Denny's. “Let's go inside. There's something I want to talk to you about anyway.”
I looked towards the restaurant and back to him, scrunching my brows “At Denny's?” I asked him, slightly confused. “I just poured out my worries to you, and you want to go to Denny's?”
He got out of the SUV before I could ask him anything else, shutting his door.
I looked towards HotShot, “Well, what about you?”
Brady opened the back door, calling for the dog to follow, answering my question. Before he shut the back door, he leaned in and commanded at me, “Hop out of the truck, Faith.”
I grumbled at the use of my first name and jumped out, trailing behind the pair. He wanted to have a serious conversation in Denny's? Then we'd have a serious conversation in Denny’s.
I hope he wasn’t too squeamish about sex, because there was a boy I liked, and I thought birth control might be a good idea. My foster parents would freak if I came out and asked them, so maybe I would leave it up to him. I needed to know that he had my back — he couldn't let me get preggers.
Of course, it was all bull, but it would be awesome to see him squirm. Boys were not for me. They meant dealing with all the little relationship issues, emotions that I never wanted to feel again.
I smiled evilly, and HotShot looked b
ack at me as if he could sense my sneaky plan. He lifted his lips in a gentle growl. I frowned and stuck my tongue out at him.
Weird dog. Hope you enjoyed the teaser of ‘Love is Not Lost’!
Charcoal Tears
SAMPLE
Jane Washington
1
There is a place inside my mind that doesn’t belong. It is overruling and underrated all at once; it is the place that I try my best to ignore. I make excuses, satiating its unspoken need to flee recognition and stalk, unseen, so that I don’t have to claim those things that define me in their darkness. I cage the wild beast that tugs at my heart, and it doesn’t like it. It wants to be used. It wants to be leashed, claimed, and ruled, so that it can make its viciousness my courage. What if it succeeds? I will use bricks instead. I will build them up solidly, block by reassuring block, until a garrison stands guard and only the curious battering of my heart against the drying mortar can be heard. You see, there is safety in simplicity… in a life of simple peace, where the electricity doesn’t dance across the backs of my eyelids, and the sparks don’t slither over my consciousness. Only asinine peace, where my paintings don’t seem to paint themselves, leaving me with terrible feelings of premonition and a chill beneath my fingernails. Peace. I made vicious strokes with the brush, ignoring the paint that splattered to the floor, marking my sneakers. I didn’t even know what colour the shoes were supposed to be—black, or dark blue, maybe. It didn’t matter. I had bought them at a garage sale years ago, and they barely even fit anymore.
The watercolour outlines dripped down the paper and I flicked the brush onto a rickety wooden table beside me, reaching forward to smudge the paint into place with my fingers. The table was propped up with two good legs and one half of a broken baseball bat, and it housed all of the brushes that I was currently abandoning in lieu of my fingers. I made soft flicks upwards
and coaxing, easy nudges toward where I wanted the paint to stain. People generally didn’t understand this thing that I did. They didn’t understand how it could look like I was damaging my art into existence. Every one of my works should have been a mess by the time I finished with them, but instead they grew into delicate and precise visions. Then again… people consisted of my little brother Tariq, my dead mother, and my art teacher—Quillan. Nobody else cared. The first coat finished, I quickly washed my brushes and tipped them all into an empty jar. I shucked my painting shirt—an old sweatshirt of Tariq’s—and pulled the plain blouse that I had thrown off earlier over my tank. I didn’t waste any effort on my hair, I didn’t bother with any fancy makeup and I didn’t check to see if my blouse was inside out, back-to-front or rent clear down the middle.
I simply grabbed my book bag and left the garage in my chameleon sneakers. The garage door groaned as I pulled it down, protesting all the way until it landed with a sighing whump against the concrete. After it was locked, I re-hid the key under a rock in one of the bushes to the side. I had gradually turned the space into an art studio over the last two years, and my father still hadn’t noticed. I didn’t know why I bothered hiding the key in the same place. Habit? What would happen if he spontaneously decided to take a stroll around the boundaries of our underwhelming, insignificant rectangle of land? Even though the alcohol pumped through his system thicker than blood, he still had a brain in his head, and it still worked—at least half of the time. He might not remember that we owned a garage, but he would certainly know what one looked like.
I should probably move the key. My progress toward the small, double-storey, faded-brick house was marked with caution, my eyes flicking occasionally up to the half-open windows, examining the torn curtains that snaked outside to tangle with the faint morning breeze. I planted myself by the window to the kitchen for a moment, but didn’t hear any activity. The house seemed to be sleeping, but then again, our house always seemed to be sleeping. Not that anyone had ever asked me, but I was firmly of the opinion that it was the quiet things in life that boasted the most menace: the silent people, the unspoken words… the sleeping houses. Deeming it safe, I entered through the front door and passed by the cracked linoleum and water-stained walls that decorated the kitchen, climbing the staircase to the second landing. As soon as my father’s snore shook through the house I relaxed and ran the rest of the way to Tariq’s bedroom. Tipping the door open, I peeped inside.
“Hey.” I stared at the back of his head, a shaggy mess of dark hair reminding me that I needed to give him another haircut. “We have to go. You ready?”
He turned, his eyes still glued to whatever he had been reading, and nodded without actually looking at me. “Yeah, sure. Ready.” He spoke lowly, almost a whisper.
I rolled my eyes and pushed myself further into the room, easily grabbing the book from him. “Pay attention,” I admonished.
“Sorry.” He unfolded himself and stood, suddenly looking down at me, rewarding me with a dopey smile. He ruffled up my hair with a hand. “Is the beast still asleep?” The brief flash of comfortable happiness drained out of me in an instant, but I turned so that he didn’t have to see it. I nodded, and he left it at that. We descended the stairs and gravitated toward the kitchen. There was an apple left over from the small collection of fresh fruit that I had bought the week before. Nothing else. Tariq searched anyway, like he did every morning.
“Where’d the crackers go?” he asked, smacking the last cupboard closed a little too heavily. We both paused, waiting.
“Gone,” I said, after another snore rumbled down the stairs. “Have you eaten anything?” He narrowed his green eyes on me. I hated when he gave me that look. He had been doing it too often lately, like he could tell every time I lied to him. He was supposed to be the younger sibling. “Yes,” I lied, turning away from him. “I got up early to do some painting.” “Oh really?” This seemed to brighten him up, and he dropped an arm over my shoulders as we moved toward the front of the house. He began to munch on the apple. “I’m glad, Seph. I was worried there for a bit.”
His words had been spoken casually, but I could tell that he was both relieved and tense in significant measures. I knew because I felt the same way. We walked to the roadside, and I fell quiet again. He didn’t mind so much; he was used to me not talking. We jogged to the end of the road and then picked our way over the crumbling fence of the old council meeting hall. My mother’s beat-up old sedan was parked on the overgrown grass, safe from my father. He had already crashed his own car too many times, and since he refused to look at anything that used to belong to my mother, he didn’t seem to care that her car had gone missing. Most likely he either forgot that we used to own a second car, or he thought that someone had stolen it. If he knew that we were using it, he would have sold it by now. I unlocked it, slid behind the wheel and tossed my bag over to the backseat while Tariq took care of the side gate. There wasn’t much point in keeping it padlocked, but at least it was a mild
defence for anyone who wanted to steal the car and didn’t happen to have bolt cutters or a lock pick in their backpack. The drive to school attempted to console me with its own brand of routine; Tariq hummed softly to the crackled music over the radio and I stared ahead, stoic. I hadn’t touched paint for almost a month, but that morning something had changed, and I wasn’t sure if I liked the sudden turnabout. I loved painting, sure, but I didn’t love things happening all of a sudden without tangible reason. Especially since the sudden burst of creativity had ending in me painting our house burning to the ground. A lone figure had hunched by the roadside to witness the flames, and I didn’t know if any of my family burned within. It was an empty dream, and I had abandoned the painting without a second thought, starting on another. I parked at school and Tariq flashed me a parting grin, already flying across the parking lot to meet up with his friends. I envied his laugh as it carried to where I still sat, but I couldn’t begrudge his happy act. School was his escape. I grabbed my bag, slipped out of the car and locked up, my mind snagging with inexplicable nervousness as I started acro
ss the lot. Perhaps I shouldn’t have painted that morning. Perhaps I should have eaten at least half of the apple.
Perhaps I should have taken better care of my sneakers. Perhaps I should have moved the key. Perhaps…
I didn’t hear the car until it was too late, and instead of spinning away, I turned toward it. There was no particular reason, other than it had shocked me. Maybe my instincts were broken. I caught sight of the face behind the wheel, bright blue eyes and a mouth open mid-shout. I still didn’t turn and I still didn’t run. I didn’t even flinch. The boy had hit the brakes and the car was skidding. An arm hooked around me in the instant before the car would have hit me, tilting the world off-kilter as I was spun around and propelled forwards. I fell to the ground, a heavy mass dropping over my back. Someone grunted in my ear, a car door slammed, and then all of the feeling swept back into me. There was no pain, but I was shaking so hard that my bones were threatening to dislodge, and whoever was slumped over me was cursing roughly. Footsteps approached, pulling him up. His arm tightened around my waist and he pulled me with him. I scrambled to my feet, my face twisting with mortification as the students started to gather. Some guy had his phone out and was recording us, or taking pictures.
I mumbled a curse, glancing at the two people who stood before me as I backed away. The driver was angry—no, furious. The one who had fallen with me was grimacing in pain. I didn’t examine them anymore than that, my brain too shocked to absorb excess information, but I got the impression of broadness and height from the both of them. They were probably on the football team and I’d just pissed off one of them and injured the other. Now I’d have the whole jock scene on my back. I tried to control my reaction, but I was stuttering. Without thinking, I stumbled back another step, and then another.
The driver matched my retreat with a step forward but the other boy held him back, words mumbled beneath his breath. Maybe it was his anger, but I couldn’t look away from the driver. A moment more, and he began to gain definition in my frazzled mind. His eyes were delicate and fierce all at once, like orbs of porcelain sharpened to angry peaks. The colour reminded me of the unreachable point on the horizon where the blue of an ocean morphs with a balmy summer sky, forming a formidable wall of turquoise. I could sense the turbulence roiling beneath, and the glare of brilliance reflecting off the surface. I flinched away from him, focussing on the injured one.
