Hollow

by Rhonda Parrish

  “You hate rollercoasters . . .” I say it just to say something, anything. I need to keep Amy talking, need to keep myself centred. I can’t think about Keith, either version of him, or Stacy, or the trees. I need to stay focused on Amy and on the weight of the magpie on my shoulder. On the soft chirping noises he makes in the back of his throat, more like a guinea pig than normal bird sounds.

  “I know, I know. God, Morgan, please hurry. The ride is going to start again. I can’t do it again. I can’t!”

  “What do you mean?” I ask, though my stomach sinks at my suspicions. “Amy, I’m coming. Hang on . . . whatever it is, hang on.”

  “Morgan, I’m sorr—” Her voice is devoured by her scream and the unmistakable rumblings of rollercoaster cars beginning to roll, to pick up speed.

  “Amy!” I shout, loud enough it startles Ghost, who flutters up from my shoulder, smacking me in the face with his wing tips before he settles back down and pecks lightly at my collarbone, like a chastisement. “Amy!”

  The rumbling continues, and I hear Amy’s screams. They shift in intensity and proximity. Going up and down like the rollercoaster I assume she’s being forced to ride.

  “Amy!” My scream is more a croak than a cry, but finally, finally I can feel a change in the quality of the sound. Like I’m getting closer. The coaster is louder, Amy’s shrieks closer.

  And then there it is. The Corpse Collector. The same coaster that had terrified Amy when she was littler, but this one is even bigger and scarier than the one in reality. The tracks look made of bone, and the mountains and valleys so exaggerated and immense that though the fog has cleared around my immediate area, I can only see the very top of the shortest peak and it comes to a sharp point, like the teeth of an especially scary jack-o-lantern.

  Amy’s scream grows louder, as does the rumble of the car on the track, and I watch it fly down from a peak cloaked in fog. The car is dilapidated, ready to fall apart, and held together only by fear and superstition. It, too, looks like it’s formed of bones, with a great leering red mouth slashed across the front.

  It zooms up a hill, balances on the pointed top like something out of a cartoon and comes to a complete stop for the space of two breaths while Amy, chest heaving and eyes wide with terror, sits in horrified silence, and then it plummets.

  The car stops at the flat bit of the track near where I’m standing, and I run over to it.

  “Oh, Amy!” I hug her as best I can from outside the car, and feel her arms clamp around me like an octopus’s.

  “Morgan! I’m sorry. I’m so sorry I used your camera!”

  “It’s okay, Amy, it’s okay. Let’s get you out of here, all right? Let’s get you out and go home.”

  “I can’t. I can’t—”

  I pull back and see Amy, her face smeared with ashes from my clothes, gesturing at the harness. It’s all one piece, fused together and holding her into the coaster. “There’s no way out.”

  I bite my lower lip, tasting salt and ash, then take a deep breath, closing my eyes and letting it out slowly to contain the panic I can feel growing inside me. I can’t afford to start crying again, and I certainly can’t afford to have a total breakdown like I did earlier.

  I open my eyes, feel my grip on my self-control tighten a bit. “There has to be some way,” I say as calmly as I can manage. “I mean, anything seems to be possible here, right?”

  “Not this, I don’t think. I used your camera and it was like . . . I split. The bad part of me is out there, living my life, and the good part of me got sucked in here. Trapped.”

  That must be what Un-Keith was talking about; good parts and bad parts.

  Amy’s lower lip quivers and she sniffs at the rivers of snot that flow from her nose. She’s obviously trying very hard to be brave and I feel my admiration for her grow. I wouldn’t have managed half so well when I was seven.

  “There has to be some way to get out.”

  Ghost leaps off my shoulder and struts back and forth along the top edge of the rollercoaster car.

  “You have a bird.”

  “I have a bird,” I say, half-laughing at the absurdity.

  “It’s pretty. I wish I had a bird.”

  “Well, when we get you out of here, we’ll have to find you one.”

  Amy shakes her head. “I can’t get out. I’ve been trying since I got here. I’m stuck. It goes around and around . . .” Fresh tears slip down her cheeks and she swipes at them with her sleeve.

  Stuck in a nightmare, her own personal hell, I realize. Like Keith. Like Stacy. “I wasn’t here then,” I say with far more confidence than I feel.

  The magpie jumps back up on my shoulder, and I can feel the car begin to vibrate beneath my palms.

  “Morgan. I—I’m sorry.”

  “Stop saying that!” I snap. I can see the struggle Amy’s having to control her fear as the speed of the vibrations in the car amp up, and I tear at the femurs crossed over her chest and fused between her thighs to the bone seat. “It’s not your fault!”

  I don’t mean to sound so angry, but I am. Not angry at Amy, angry at myself, and at the bones which are keeping my sister from me. “It’s not your fault,” I yell again, pulling at the harness with all my might, bracing my feet on the side of the car and straining and straining. “It’s my fault. It’s all my fault.”

  Amy’s voice sounds oddly calm, scarily soft. She speaks in a whisper which I shouldn’t be able to hear over the growing rumbling of the car as it revs itself up, but I can. I can hear her as clearly as if we were standing in the kitchen at home, side by side, making dinner. “It’s not your fault, Morgan,” she says. “It’s not your fault.”

  My hands slip off the bones I’m pulling against, and my momentum, all the tension in my body, propels me backward. Ghost erupts off my shoulder, a flurry of feathers and affronted squawks, and the car shoots off down the track.

  “Amy!” I shout as I fall backward and am swallowed by the white.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  THE WHITE SLOWLY dissipates, becoming less opaque, and I find myself in the backseat of the minivan, strapped into Aric’s booster seat. No . . . I am Aric. But I’m also myself. In the same way as is possible in a dream, I am both. I feel myself contained within Aric, thinking my own thoughts, while at the same time hearing his. I see the world through his eyes, feel the plush edges of the sides of his booster seat through his fingertips.

  The radio plays song number twenty-three from the year’s top one hundred hits, while up front Mom and I are arguing. The windshield wipers squeak across the glass, pushing the slush-like snow off to one side, then tamping it down. Off to the side, then down. To the side, then down. Aric kicks his feet happily, listening to them drum against the bottom of the seat. The booster was new, this was the first week he’d been allowed in it instead of his car seat. Car seats were for babies. Booster seats, now, booster seats were for big boys!

  “Would you stop that?” Amy says, and we, Aric and I, turn his/our head to face her. Amy is frowning at us. Frowning and then staring deliberately down at his/our feet where they are tapping against the vinyl seat of the van.

  Aric taps faster, harder, smiling at Amy in exactly the way that drives her crazy, and then sticks out his tongue. It’s safe. There’s no way Mom is going to notice, she’s too busy with me in the front.

  Oh no, I think. Oh God, no.

  Off to the side, then down, the wipers go. To the side, then down.

  Swish, squeak. Swish, squeak.

  “Mom!” Amy yells, and Aric laughs as Mom ignores her. He stops kicking his feet though. It was kind of getting boring and he doesn’t want Mom to turn around and shout at him too. Sometimes she does that. She gets mad at one person and then if you do even one teeny tiny thing wrong she yells at you too. He doesn’t like that much.

  “We would be there already if you hadn’t forgotten!” Mom shouts at me. It’s true, Aric thinks. We are going to some New Year’s Eve party at Dad’s work. It’s a grown-up
party but Dad promised there would be other kids there, and we get to stay up all the way until midnight. We’d been almost all the way there when Morgan realised she’d forgotten something and Mom turned around to get it. They’ve both been grumpy ever since.

  The champagne. I’d forgotten the case of champagne. Mom asked me to make sure I packed it into the van for the toast at midnight, and I’d forgotten.

  Swish, squeak. Swish, squeak.

  “And now, number twenty-one on the ultimate top one hundred hits of the year . . .” The DJ’s voice fills the van in the awkward silence that follows Mom’s outburst. I look at myself through Aric’s eyes. It’s easy to do. I’m sitting in the front and he’s in the middle of the backseat. Even in profile I/we can see my brow is furrowed, my teeth clenched, and my chin stuck out defiantly. My arms are crossed over my chest and my legs stick out in front of me, stiff as boards.

  “I said I was sorry,” I say sulkily. “Gawd.”

  “Sorry doesn’t make things better,” Mom snaps.

  Using Aric’s eyes I look out the windshield. I can see it coming. No one else knows, not yet, but I can see it coming. A big, black dot in the distance, barely visible through the snow.

  To the side, then down. Swish, squeak.

  In the passenger seat I turn and scream as loud as I can right at Mom, “Well I can’t change the past, can I?”

  Mom turns to respond to me. Aric and I watch her hand come up off the steering wheel, and he thinks she’s going to slap me, but she doesn’t get the chance.

  In front of Mom and me, a shape comes at us out of the snow. A big, black, hulking mass pushes the storm out of its way, rips through it like it’s rice paper, and drives straight toward us. It’s on the wrong side of the road, on our side of the road, and the sound it makes is like a dinosaur charging, a herd of dinosaurs.

  Amy screams, and Aric wants to look at her but he can’t look away from the SUV coming right at them. Bigger and bigger it looms. Things slow down, like in the movies, and we have time to notice tiny, minute details.

  To the side, then down. The wipers move like images in a movie watched frame by frame.

  Amy’s scream goes on, and on . . . drawn out, elongated, distorted.

  Mom starts to turn her head back to the road, and up in the front seat, my eyes shift toward the menace but my head stays still, pointed toward Mom. Frozen.

  Swiiiiiiish . . .

  Aric feels the first trickle of fear slide down his spine and settle in his belly.

  Wake up, I think desperately from within him. Wake up. It’s time to wake up. Wake up! Wake up!

  Squeeeeeaaaaak . . .

  Impossibly, Aric can see the driver of the SUV as clearly as his own hand. It’s a man. His eyes are bloodshot and rimmed with red. His hair, short and greasy, sticks up in wild rooster spikes at the front, like Aric’s sometimes does when he runs his fingers up through it in the bath. His skin has deep wrinkles on its forehead and his cheeks are flushed red. His knuckles, wrapped around the steering wheel, are bony, sticking up so much they remind Aric weirdly of the little metal stand Mom and Dad put toast in at the breakfast table. We watch as the man sees us, his eyes focus on our van, his mouth opening slowly, so slowly, and impossibly wide, like a snake’s, in a long scream we can’t hear.

  To the side . . .

  The SUV connects with the minivan on Mom’s side. Aric watches as the metal on both vehicles folds like an accordion, the sound of it crumpling adding a deep back note to everyone’s screams, to the music on the radio, the wipers sliding over the glass.

  . . . then down.

  We are all thrown forward as the minivan comes to an abrupt stop. Aric and I feel the seatbelt across him pull taut, then give away. Then we are airborne. Flying up and through the cabin of the minivan. Away from Amy, past me, moving too fast for anyone to react though for us every second stretches out like an hour. Mom is moving too. Up out of her seat, we watch as she floats like an astronaut in space, then her head slams straight up, into the ceiling of the minivan, and bends at an angle we’ve only seen in cartoons. Then she crumples like a broken marionette, back into her seat as the SUV drives the whole front of the vehicle, including the steering wheel, straight at her chest.

  Wake up! Wake up! Goddamn it! Wake! Up!

  Then Aric, with me locked inside him, hits the windshield.

  There is a brief flash of pain, hot as lightning. It sears through us, and then it is gone and the world is as mixed up as a jigsaw puzzle in a box. We can see the music, the top 40 station from our minivan mixing and merging with the country station from the SUV. It looks like lights, fluid and rhythmic as Northern Lights, and it pulses and weaves together into a brilliant tapestry of purple, green, and blue. We can smell the screams. Our own (We are screaming? We hadn’t realised until now) is crisp, like the air before a storm; Amy’s is salty as buttered popcorn; and the stranger, the man in the SUV, his scream is thick and heavy as engine oil.

  We taste the glass through our skin as it rips through our body, hot like the peppers Daddy likes, but cooled by the ice cream-flavoured kisses of the snowflakes that splash against us. One after another, after another.

  The impact spins the SUV and the minivan both around, but we keep going straight. Straight as an arrow. Straight toward the road.

  We see the road coming closer. It’s white all around but for the tracks the SUV has left in the snow. There it’s melted, and we can see occasional patches of bare asphalt in the packed-down snow. It’s to one of those that we fly. The melted snow glistens like gems on the blacktop, prettier than any of the ornaments from our Christmas tree.

  Wake up!

  And then the whole world shatters like the windshield we’d burst through.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  WHEN I OPEN my eyes, my mother is sitting in front of me looking incredibly sad. I’d never photographed her, so this must be part of my hell. Again. Or still. What if it is all my hell? Being shown my mistakes, my helplessness, my guilt, over and over.

  I look down at Mom. She looks small, shrunken in a wheelchair three times too big for her. The light around us is diffuse, like sunbeams coming through a thick cloud of dust, but even so, I can see her clearly, in hyper-realistic detail. Every single hair, every line on her face. I can see the way her fingernails are chewed to the quick, the cuticles mangled, how they shake and she clamps them down around the arms of her chair to still them.

  Behind Mom, the fog clears, replaced by a tire-black sky sprinkled with stars which sparkle like fragments of shattered glass. I close my eyes against the sight of my mom, pathetic against that backdrop, but open them once more when the stars begin to sing. Tinkling ever so quietly, the way the windshield had once our van finally came to a stop. Making the same sound pebbles of glass had as they rattled down against the hood, rolled around on the upholstery while it drank up Mom’s blood.

  I know it wasn’t Mom’s fault, and I know that she’s the one who suffers the most for the accident. I should tell her that, I think. I should let her know. I take a deep breath, but when I exhale, some of my empathy goes with it and a fierce anger takes its place in my belly. “Damn it, Mom,” my words echo as through we’re standing in a giant vat, a metal room. My voice is so dry, so hollow, it doesn’t even sound like mine. Feels like it doesn’t even belong to me, like something alien. “Damn it! We’re suffering too. The accident took your son and your ability to walk, but for us, it took you too!”

  Mom blinks vacantly, tilting her head the way Amy does when she’s thinking hard about something, but she doesn’t say a word. Doesn’t make an effort to respond in any way at all.

  “Damn it!” I shout again, pounding my fist into the meat of my thigh. “It’s not fair. It’s not fair. You get to disappear inside your room, inside yourself. You get to wallow in your grief and your self-pity, but the rest of us, we’re trying to go on with our lives. To function. To live. Why do you get to take the easy way out, huh? Why?”

  Mom opens her mouth
as if to speak, but instead of words a swarm of moths burst forth. Their wings flutter, loud in the eerie silence of the nothingness that surrounds us. They pour, more and more of them, from Mom’s mouth, and spin and swirl, a living, breathing tornado, up and around, up and around, in wider and wider circles. Their bodies and wings strike against the velvety black sky, their fluttering obscures more and more of the sharp stars as the swarm grows and swells and writhes.

  As they retreat, my horror grows. This place. This place. It’s going to make me mad, this place.

  The magpie flies up from my side, circling around and around Mom’s head. It cuts, like a scythe, through the mass of moths and comes to rest on her shoulder. As suddenly as its claws clamp down on her, Mom closes her mouth. The moths above her continue, a swirling vortex, moving around and up, fading further and further away.

  A sob forces its way up my throat, swallowing the rest of my words, turning them into wet-sounding nothings as I sink to my knees and let the tears I didn’t know I had left in me, flow.

  They drop, giant soul-fed tears, directly from my eyes to splatter and spread on my ash-covered thighs. I watch one spot after another form, spread, and fade away. I am beyond thought, letting emotion carry me with it.

  “It’s not fair,” I whisper, and look up to see if Mom has noticed, has seen, has cared. She sits there still, unmoving in her chair. The magpie plucks a stray moth from her greying hair with his stone-like beak and swallows it down, and then tilts his head to stare at me, but Mom doesn’t move. Doesn’t speak.

  Anger grows in me once more. Anger enough to swallow my guilt. Anger at whatever had cursed the camera, had cursed me. Anger at whatever it is that lives here in the white. And weirdly, where my previous anger had pushed my empathy out, this one feeds it. Invites it back inside.

  “It wasn’t your fault,” I say. “It wasn’t your fault.”

  Mom screams.

  She screams, and she, her chair, the starry sky, and the receding moths behind her all shatter like the windshield at the sound. They become a hundred, a thousand, a million tiny shards of glass that rush toward me. They come in slow motion, but I can’t move to avoid them. I watch a million glistening needles all twisting and spiralling toward me. A thousand little cuts about to strike, to draw blood. A hundred little deaths.