[Clairaline] 1012.
Daddy is at his job, plinking away at the piano. He is making songs that play on the radio, to make people want to buy cat food, or toilet scrubbers. But the songs he plays are quiet now, and broken up. They don't run skip dance like they did before.
The eighth notes and staccato sixteenths cock their heads. They stare. They say that giving musical properties to canned albacore is a strange thing for humans to do.
When Claire comes into the room, Daddy looks through her like she is another strange human thing, and plinks out an experimental minor trill.
This is not Daddy. Not with those dark eyes that never smile, those shoulders held awkward and rigid. His eyes are buttons and he is a marionette, and he is not her father.
The two strangers who dump brown paper bags of cheeseburgers and curly fries and Code Red onto the table--they are not her mother. Their eyes are as dark and as hopeless as her Other Father's, their movements as wooden. They collapse into chairs and look wretched, but it's 6pm and it's time for dinner and they set the table like Mommy does, after a fashion.
"Your favorite, I am told," says her Other Father. He holds out a cheeseburger, in its grease-stained papers.
And it is.
If all that in the warehouse (whatever had happened in the warehouse; she doesn't quite remember, and perhaps she is a little glad of that) hadn't happened... Mommy was going to make bean casserole and collard greens.
Cheeseburgers are better.
She unwraps one of the cheeseburgers and bites.
"Like Heaven, I am told," says her Other Father. She swears she can hear the marionette strings leading the words from his lips. She tells herself this is impossible. But then she is reminded: Nothing is.
Daddy's crazy, he's never coming back, baby. I'm so sorry. I am sorry sorry sorry
And then he does, like almost nothing happened. But God is dead in their house, the way Father Ben said he couldn't be, because God was immortal and that meant he didn't ever die.
But then Daddy died, even though daddys don't die, and Mommy started hurting things, the way mommys never do. And then everything went up in smoke, and here they are still sitting in that warehouse and acting like it's home. Those two strangers, they killed everything, and the blood's still sticky on the ground beneath the makeshift table they're all sitting at right now.
They killed everything and then they brought her favorite dinner, the way bad guys never do, and her Other Father is plinking at the piano, and it's making her crazy, the way her Daddy's playing never did.
She watches one of the stranger-killer-dinnerbringers take a sip of Code Red from a paper cone he made out of someone's Want Ad. He's tall, taller than her Daddy (who is the tallest person in the world), but he makes a face like a boy in her grade, like he's drinking blood. It dyes his upper lip the same color as the blood stains she can still see on both their hands.
They all eat and drink and mold in the dark corner of the warehouse. The smells of bare pine (like Daddy smelled like, when he was trying to make Mommy that spice rack for her birthday) and old blood and new rain and cold burgers all mix together and she can taste them all and she starts to cry, because she wants her Mommy and her Daddy and she wants bean casserole and she wants to go home.
She chokes out home between the ground up beef bits (and rain and wood and death) in her mouth.
Her Other Father doesn't comprehend. The stranger--the one who's drinking something out out of a brown glass bottle, not Code Red--tells her that 'home' is over. The other tips his paper cone into one of the lifeless paper bags and asks her if she has any relatives in the Lower 48.
"Gonna stay with us a while," he says, like it's vacation and they're going to Grandma Lori's in New Hampshire.
It's hamburgers and curly fries all the way to Grandma's, then, they say, which isn't so bad, because she likes hamburgers and curly fries and Grandma Lori.
But it is so bad, because she's not a baby and she doesn't trust strangers and she doesn't trust knives and she doesn't trust people with blood under their fingernails and bags under their eyes and guns in their waistbands.
"Mommy always drives to Grandma Lori's," she says, even though impossibles don't touch these people. "Daddy always gets lost."
Her Other Father goes plink plink on the piano again, like he's saying oh, he's already well and lost, baby.
Code Red Stranger tells her she should get in the car.
Brown Bottle Stranger just tells her, Well, I guess that makes us your Other Mothers. Because home's gone and this is the best you're gonna get.
Claire runs.
--
The strangers lied. Home is still there. Out beyond the black, beyond the end of worlds. Her house is dark, but she knows it from the little red wagon in the yard and the cross hanging in the foyer. (God is not dead.)
She knows it by the Mommy-shaped shadow sitting at the real kitchen table, in the real kitchen, in her real house. She knows it by the way Mommy calls her angel, and hugs her tight, and doesn't say anything about demons or salt or driving to Grandma Lori's.
She doesn't know it by the knife in Mommy's hand, or the red smile she watches Mommy open across her throat (she can see it in the hall mirror, she can see it, and it's--)
Real. The pain is real. This is real. As real as the two strangers (Other Mother) and her Other Father (piano's quiet now) crashing into the kitchen and looking doubly haunted, because they are just too late.
Home is over. God is dead.
(And so is Claire.)
The eighth notes and staccato sixteenths cock their heads. They stare. They say that giving musical properties to canned albacore is a strange thing for humans to do.
When Claire comes into the room, Daddy looks through her like she is another strange human thing, and plinks out an experimental minor trill.
This is not Daddy. Not with those dark eyes that never smile, those shoulders held awkward and rigid. His eyes are buttons and he is a marionette, and he is not her father.
The two strangers who dump brown paper bags of cheeseburgers and curly fries and Code Red onto the table--they are not her mother. Their eyes are as dark and as hopeless as her Other Father's, their movements as wooden. They collapse into chairs and look wretched, but it's 6pm and it's time for dinner and they set the table like Mommy does, after a fashion.
"Your favorite, I am told," says her Other Father. He holds out a cheeseburger, in its grease-stained papers.
And it is.
If all that in the warehouse (whatever had happened in the warehouse; she doesn't quite remember, and perhaps she is a little glad of that) hadn't happened... Mommy was going to make bean casserole and collard greens.
Cheeseburgers are better.
She unwraps one of the cheeseburgers and bites.
"Like Heaven, I am told," says her Other Father. She swears she can hear the marionette strings leading the words from his lips. She tells herself this is impossible. But then she is reminded: Nothing is.
Daddy's crazy, he's never coming back, baby. I'm so sorry. I am sorry sorry sorry
And then he does, like almost nothing happened. But God is dead in their house, the way Father Ben said he couldn't be, because God was immortal and that meant he didn't ever die.
But then Daddy died, even though daddys don't die, and Mommy started hurting things, the way mommys never do. And then everything went up in smoke, and here they are still sitting in that warehouse and acting like it's home. Those two strangers, they killed everything, and the blood's still sticky on the ground beneath the makeshift table they're all sitting at right now.
They killed everything and then they brought her favorite dinner, the way bad guys never do, and her Other Father is plinking at the piano, and it's making her crazy, the way her Daddy's playing never did.
She watches one of the stranger-killer-dinnerbringers take a sip of Code Red from a paper cone he made out of someone's Want Ad. He's tall, taller than her Daddy (who is the tallest person in the world), but he makes a face like a boy in her grade, like he's drinking blood. It dyes his upper lip the same color as the blood stains she can still see on both their hands.
They all eat and drink and mold in the dark corner of the warehouse. The smells of bare pine (like Daddy smelled like, when he was trying to make Mommy that spice rack for her birthday) and old blood and new rain and cold burgers all mix together and she can taste them all and she starts to cry, because she wants her Mommy and her Daddy and she wants bean casserole and she wants to go home.
She chokes out home between the ground up beef bits (and rain and wood and death) in her mouth.
Her Other Father doesn't comprehend. The stranger--the one who's drinking something out out of a brown glass bottle, not Code Red--tells her that 'home' is over. The other tips his paper cone into one of the lifeless paper bags and asks her if she has any relatives in the Lower 48.
"Gonna stay with us a while," he says, like it's vacation and they're going to Grandma Lori's in New Hampshire.
It's hamburgers and curly fries all the way to Grandma's, then, they say, which isn't so bad, because she likes hamburgers and curly fries and Grandma Lori.
But it is so bad, because she's not a baby and she doesn't trust strangers and she doesn't trust knives and she doesn't trust people with blood under their fingernails and bags under their eyes and guns in their waistbands.
"Mommy always drives to Grandma Lori's," she says, even though impossibles don't touch these people. "Daddy always gets lost."
Her Other Father goes plink plink on the piano again, like he's saying oh, he's already well and lost, baby.
Code Red Stranger tells her she should get in the car.
Brown Bottle Stranger just tells her, Well, I guess that makes us your Other Mothers. Because home's gone and this is the best you're gonna get.
Claire runs.
--
The strangers lied. Home is still there. Out beyond the black, beyond the end of worlds. Her house is dark, but she knows it from the little red wagon in the yard and the cross hanging in the foyer. (God is not dead.)
She knows it by the Mommy-shaped shadow sitting at the real kitchen table, in the real kitchen, in her real house. She knows it by the way Mommy calls her angel, and hugs her tight, and doesn't say anything about demons or salt or driving to Grandma Lori's.
She doesn't know it by the knife in Mommy's hand, or the red smile she watches Mommy open across her throat (she can see it in the hall mirror, she can see it, and it's--)
Real. The pain is real. This is real. As real as the two strangers (Other Mother) and her Other Father (piano's quiet now) crashing into the kitchen and looking doubly haunted, because they are just too late.
Home is over. God is dead.
(And so is Claire.)