by Maz Evans
“Virgo!” shouted Pisces, snapping her out of her daydream. “So have you done it?”
Virgo tried to look as if she’d been listening, but realized that either answer could be wrong. Deciding that no response was better than the incorrect one—Virgo was never incorrect—she shrugged a bemused apology.
“For goodness’ sake, child, pay attention!” snapped Pisces, a frustrated bubble escaping his pink lips. “The Muses need that stationery order right away! It’s no use being the source of all creativity if you can’t find a paper clip!”
“Yes—absolutely right—of course,” said Virgo, picking up her golden quill and scratching “paper clips” on a piece of parchment. A job. Excellent. That should keep her busy for …
She looked out of the council chamber’s glass pyramid at another perfect day in her perfect home above the clouds. She knew how lucky she was—after all, who wouldn’t want to live in paradise? It was, well, perfect. Once the council’s business was done for the day—perhaps she’d fly a unicorn over the marshmallow meadows? Or swim with the dolphins in the warm waters of Honey River? Or possibly ride the roller coasters at Wonderland? Or maybe not—she’d done all of those things yesterday. Or was it the day before? Or last week maybe? Virgo couldn’t remember, and there was no one to remind her. But that was fine. Her life was completely perfect. And if she’d had any friends to talk to, she would have told them exactly that.
“So if we’re happy to agree that Pan can do another stadium tour—so long as he stops by eleven p.m. so he doesn’t upset the Furies—then I think that’s everything … ” said Pisces. “Ah. No. One more thing. Prisoner Forty-Two.”
A chorus of moans rang around the chamber as Pisces produced a small golden flask.
Virgo’s ears pricked up. She’d always liked the sound of this job. It required a Zodiac Councillor to deliver a dose of ambrosia to an immortal prisoner on Earth. It was particularly unpopular among the council, none of whom wanted to leave the warmth and comfort of Elysium to visit the cold and dirty mortal realm. But as the youngest councillor, Virgo had never yet been allowed to go. Her mind started to buzz with excitement as she shot her hand up.
“Any volunteers?” Pisces asked.
Virgo waved her hand in the air, letting out a strained grunt as she tried not to shout out.
“Anyone?” said Pisces, somehow oblivious to Virgo nearly exploding right in front of him. “Anyone at all?”
At that moment, every other pair of eyes in the chamber had somewhere else to look. Whether it was something fascinating they had written down, something out of the window, or an imaginary speck of dust (of course no such thing existed in Elysium) on their purple robes, not one of them met the fish’s glassy gaze.
Virgo stretched her left arm as high as it could reach, supporting it with her right to get some extra height.
“There must be someone,” sighed Pisces.
“Me! Me! Let me!” Virgo blurted out. “I mean … I could perform this task proficiently.”
The laughter of her colleagues echoed perfectly around the chamber.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” snorted Aries, the golden ram. “You’re only a child.”
“I’m one thousand nine hundred and sixty-four!” Virgo challenged, to an outpouring of “Aw, bless your heart” from her colleagues.
“No,” declared Pisces finally. “This is an important job for an experienced councillor. You stick to your paper clips.”
“But I—”
“Enough!” snapped Pisces. “My decision is final.”
Virgo accepted this perfectly wise and fair decision without question. Curiously, at exactly that same moment, her golden quill snapped in her hands.
“Well, then, if we have no other offers, I volunteer Taurus,” said Pisces to the bull, who was crocheting a scarf with his horn.
“Me?” whined Taurus. “It can’t be my turn again. Capricorn’s never done it.”
“Oh, yes I have,” snorted the indignant half-goat Capricorn, spitting out the pencil she had been chewing. “I had to do it in the middle of a plague. The place stank. If anyone’s been shirking, it’s Pincer-Pants over there.”
“Put a sock in it, you old goat!” yelled Cancer the crab. “I went during the Norman Conquest—I caught so many arrows in my shell I looked like a hedgehog! What about Castor and Pollux? Just because they’re one constellation shouldn’t mean they get only one turn.”
“Get lost,” huffed the Gemini twins simultaneously and, before long, as so often happened at council meetings, an earsplitting fight had broken out around the golden table.
“Take that, you big drip,” yelled Scorpio as he hurled Libra’s scales at Aquarius, who threw his water jug at Aries, accidentally hitting Cancer and earning himself a very personal nip from her pincers.
“Shut it, Goldilocks!” shouted Sagittarius the centaur, who fired a banana from his bow, splattering squashed fruit all over Leo’s flowing mane.
Virgo surveyed the unfolding carnage with a sigh.
And then something strange happened.
Virgo was perfectly aware that she had the perfect life in the perfect home. But at that precise moment, she knew that it was the perfect time to leave.
Dodging the flying insults, fruit, and body parts, she quietly picked up the golden flask, slipped it into her purple robes, and backed out of the council chamber.
The moment Virgo’s feet touched the cloud outside, she began to run, picking up superhuman speed with every step. As soon as she reached the edge of the clouds, she threw her arms wide open, which immediately transformed her into her starry Virgo constellation. She felt the exhilarating rush and familiar warmth radiating through her as her body melted into a million glimmering stars from the feet up, and she whooshed into the air before plunging down through the clouds into the realm of Earth.
This was as far as she’d ever been from home. There was still time to turn back—perhaps this was a mistake? But then, Virgo reasoned, she never made mistakes. She was perfect. So this must be the right thing to do.
She blasted into the Earth’s night sky, feeling gloriously happy and free. She’d heard so much about this realm, and as she looked down she could see that, yes—it was extraordinary. One minute she was flying over dense jungle pulsing with every species of creature imaginable; the next, vast deserts with no life in sight for thousands of miles. Some parts were filled with tall buildings and moving lights, others with nothing but empty and desolate wastelands. Strange scents filled her lungs—fresh green grass, salty ocean air, frozen mountain dew. She circled the Earth countless times, noticing different details every time she went from day to night—from the wonderful to the worrying to the downright weird. The diversity was endless. Everything was just so … new. Not perfect, like her home—just different.
Indeed, Virgo was so excited by this journey of discovery that it took her a while to realize she was missing one useful piece of information.
She had no idea where she was supposed to go.
Virgo racked her brain for any details she’d gleaned from other councillors. Leo had once mentioned that Prisoner Forty-Two was held on a small island in the north, peopled with an eccentric breed of mortals who liked to drink tea and stand in lines. And Taurus had said that the spot was marked by a stone circle. But up high in the darkness, she couldn’t make anything out.
She decided to drop a little to get a closer look, and soon she could distinguish the tiny mortals scuttling around like ants below. What would it be like to meet one? she wondered. But, no—that was against the rules. And Virgo always obeyed the rules. Well. Nearly always.
Finally, after she’d spent hours rocketing around the night sky, the stone circle leapt out at her in the darkness.
How considerate of the mortals to light it up for us, she thought happily, and started to make her descent.
This was all going to work out perfectly. She’d be back in Elysium for supper. What could possibly go wrong?
Elliot
didn’t know what to do. He couldn’t find Mom anywhere and it was now completely dark. He considered calling the police. But if they found Mom before he did … Where could she have gone this time?
He ran into the kitchen for the tenth time, trying to keep the sickening panic at bay. He would find her. He always did.
In that moment of reason, he finally noticed her pink gardening gloves on the kitchen table. He grabbed his coat—and Mom’s—and headed out to the fields.
As he ran across the farm, he could just discern a tiny figure in the darkness up ahead. He breathed a sigh of relief. There was Mom, kneeling on the grass, happily planting vegetables in the empty field.
On his approach, he could hear her chatting away to the empty space, occasionally breaking into a cheery song. He remembered a time when Mom had seemed so much bigger than him, when one of her hugs could smother him in a warm embrace of rose-scented love, lit up by her wicked laugh.
“I blew into England on a breeze,” she would giggle in an accent that wasn’t familiar and wasn’t strange. “I am a child of the world!”
It made her seem almost magical. But these days she seemed so small, so fragile, so … old. Elliot wished he’d asked her more about her life while he’d had the chance.
Elliot hurried over to where Mom was busily digging and slipped her coat gently over her shoulders. She turned around and her face shone in a hundred places, as it always did when she saw him. She pushed her messy brown hair out of her face and reached up to give her boy a hug.
“So how was your day?” She smiled.
“Really great,” Elliot lied. “Top of the class in history.”
“You’re so clever, Elly,” she laughed, rubbing some soil on his nose.
“Must take after you, Mom. So what are you plant—”
He stopped as he realized what his mother was doing. A packet of unopened carrot seeds lay by her side and she was putting the final loving touches to planting a row of clothespins. Elliot’s heart plummeted. She was doing it again.
“Come on, Mom, it’s cold. Let’s get you inside.”
Elliot helped her up and gently guided her back toward the house. He settled her in the living room, lit the fire, and went to the kitchen to prepare their supper.
Elliot couldn’t pinpoint exactly when Mom started acting strangely. She’d always been strange, but in a good way—dancing around stores or doing handstands in the street. But something had changed. The last year had passed in such a blur of worrying about Nan and Grandad when they were ill, then grieving for them when they died, that he hadn’t really noticed Mom’s odd behavior until a few months ago.
It began with small things—she’d lose something she’d had two minutes ago, or she couldn’t remember the name of a person or a place. At first, Elliot thought these were the normal short circuits of a stressed and tired mind. But the memory lapses soon became more serious—forgetting there was food in the oven or leaving the bath running. Then one day, Elliot came home from school and Mom was nowhere to be found. He ran down the path to the village and found her in the middle of the road in her nightgown, lost and confused with no idea where she lived. He couldn’t ignore it any longer—Mom needed his help.
By doing all the shopping, cooking, and housework, Elliot had convinced himself that everything was going to be okay. But deep down he knew that Mom needed a doctor. Her mind was unwell. And it was getting worse.
But it wasn’t that simple. What if a doctor said Mom was too ill to look after him? What if they took her away? What would happen to him then?
Elliot had no other family. He didn’t even know if his dad was alive. Elliot and his mother had always lived with his grandparents, and Elliot knew only two things about his father: he’d given Elliot his pocket watch as a baby, and he wasn’t there now. Elliot never knew where he had gone, nor why, and whenever he asked, Mom would get upset and say he was too young to understand.
“Now’s not the time,” she’d say, holding his face in her hands. “One day I’ll explain everything.”
Elliot wasn’t sure now if that day would ever come. Besides, his mother and grandparents had made him happier than any dad could have. His dad obviously didn’t care about him, so he wasn’t going to care back. Elliot quickly checked his pocket to make sure the watch hadn’t fallen out when he’d run outside.
No, it was better this way. Mom had looked after him all his life and now it was his turn to look after her. If he could just keep everyone else’s noses out, they’d be fine. Really.
Elliot opened the kitchen cupboard, even though he knew exactly what it contained. A box of tea bags, some stale cookies, three small cans of beans, and half a loaf of bread. He looked in the chipped cookie jar that guarded their weekly spending money and counted the remaining £3.76 inside. He put the twenty pounds he had “borrowed” from Mrs. Porshley-Plum’s handbag into the jar and added an IOU to all the other notes reminding him that he needed to pay someone back. He’d had to “borrow” a lot of money lately. There were a lot of IOUs in the jar.
Nan and Grandad had never trusted banks and the farm used to provide most of their food, so they kept their life savings in a box under the bed. Elliot was careful to use as little of the money as he could, but he knew it was running out and there were only so many vegetables he and Mom could grow. Over time, the farmworkers had left and the animals were sold—all except Bessie, the lame cow Elliot had raised from a calf, who lived in the derelict cowshed across the paddock.
Elliot’s early-morning paper route brought in a bit of money, but there was barely enough for the basics, let alone the expensive things he needed for school. He remembered Mr. Boil’s moan about his uniform and made a mental note to sew some buttons on his only shirt and polish the shoes that had been too tight since Easter.
“Beans on toast all right for dinner, Mom?” he called through to the living room.
“Lovely, baby, haven’t had that for a while,” she replied cheerfully.
Mom’s forgetfulness worried Elliot a lot. But if it stopped her from remembering that beans on toast had been their supper every night for the past three weeks, perhaps it wasn’t all bad.
He made their meal and they snuggled in front of their small black-and-white TV to watch a cooking competition Mom enjoyed on Friday nights. She used to be an amazing cook and Elliot laughed as she colorfully insulted the contestants’ efforts.
“I wouldn’t serve that with a tennis racket,” she yelled at one woman’s attempt at a Baked Alaska.
But by nine o’clock, Mom was falling asleep in her chair—she slept a lot these days. Elliot gently woke her and helped her upstairs. He laid her nightgown out on the bed, left the room while she changed, then came back to say good night.
“Do you have everything you need?” he asked as he always did when he tucked the sheets around her.
“Do I have you?” she asked with a sleepy smile.
“Always,” whispered Elliot.
“Then what more could I want?” whispered Josie as she pulled him into a hug. “Good night, my little miracle.”
He stayed for a few moments until Mom fell asleep, then crept quietly out of the room and shut the door.
Elliot returned to the empty living room, cleared away the supper things, and sank down into the comfy armchair. He clicked open the gold cover of his pocket watch, observing the exposed cogs as they ticked the seconds away. He didn’t feel like going to bed, so he flicked the TV on again. The elderly set could only receive four channels—three if it was windy—and when he came across a documentary, he remembered Mr. Boil’s test on Monday. For a moment, Elliot considered studying the unopened history book on the coffee table, then saw the mountain of bills and letters next to it. Each one was more threatening than the last. Water, gas, electricity—the list went on and on.
And there, right at the bottom of the pile, was the Really Scary Letter.
The Really Scary Letter had arrived three weeks ago and had cost Elliot more sleep than all the
others put together. There were no Really Scary Letters mentioned when Mom had seen the ad on the TV promising instant loans if you owned a house. In fact the letter that arrived with the check to pay for Grandad’s funeral—and the bit extra they’d suggested Mom borrow on top—was as friendly as the man on the commercial, who seemed very happy about the “hassle-free instant cash” and “affordable monthly repayments.”
But the monthly repayments weren’t that affordable after all. And the cash hadn’t been hassle-free. And the man wasn’t very friendly when you couldn’t pay his money back.
Dear Mrs. Hooper, Elliot read for the millionth time. We act on behalf of EasyDough! Ltd. Your failure to make payments in accordance with your loan obligation of £20,000 has resulted in proceedings to recover possession of Home Farm, Little Motbury, Wiltshire. If the outstanding payment reaches us by one calendar month from the date of this letter, no further action will be taken. If you do not take the action required, your home will be repossessed on Friday, November 19 …
The letter waffled on for another two pages, but Elliot understood what it meant in plain English. Unless he found twenty thousand pounds in exactly one week, he and Mom were going to lose their home. And then where would they go? They had nowhere and no one. Mom was confused enough in the home she’d known all her adult life. There was no way she’d cope with somewhere new.
Elliot picked up another letter from the electricity company. We regret to inform you that due to nonpayment of your outstanding balance, your service will be terminated on—
The rest was lost as the house was suddenly plunged into darkness.
Elliot pulled out the flashlight, candles, and matches he kept nearby for every time the electricity was cut off and did some rough sums on the back of his math homework. He could pay the electricity bill tomorrow—thank you, Mrs. Porshley-Plum—but that would leave them less than five pounds for food next week. But next week would have to take care of itself. Elliot quietly vowed that if he were ever rich, he’d never eat a baked bean again.
