Tomb and Fissure
A very short story I wrote back in March of last year. I decided to post it while I was in the mood to post old stuff, as with "The Fate of Her Father". This is from the perspective of a character named Madeline who is a supporting role in a story I co-wrote with a couple friends. It was an interesting project.
Critique welcome.
"Tomb and Fissure"
Laura has always been authoritarian by nature, even when we were younger. Once, when I was six, we were left home together, she as my babysitter while our parents took a rare night out for themselves. It was late enough that we could have went to bed and never noticed they were gone, but I wasn’t tired, and Laura was too busy talking on the phone to some friend that she didn’t notice me until nearly midnight.
I was still scared of our house at that age. By day it was beautiful, but the night slunk under doorways and filled entire hallways with gloom and grey shadows, making the plant in the corner look wilted and dead, and transforming forgotten toys into little mines for the remaining occupants of the house. My sister found me wandering those hallways-“Get to bed,” she told me-and tried to imprison me in my own room. I escaped once. She saw me when our neighbor came over to check on us. That neighbor left, and it’s the rest of the incident I remember:
She dragged me upstairs and threw me on the floor. “You’re dead!” She shouted. “I told you to get to sleep!”
I refused. A tussle ensued. Bite marks and scratches appeared on Laura’s arms right before I was thrust in the toy box in the back of my closet. It’s an old toy box, made by my Grandpa Gideon and lined with felt; I kicked and screamed, but Laura locked it shut. I clawed at the top and sides. Laura’s voice, an alto deep enough to almost rumble, answered, “Mom and Dad left you to me, Madeline. You’re supposed to listen to me.”
I quieted to catch my breath. Laura sounded satisfied. Time passed. I started rummaging in the toys pressing in on me from all sides and came up with a plastic spatula from a baking playset; with it I managed to push open the latch from the inside through the crack. At the same time I heard Mom and Dad pull into the driveway, and it took them fourteen seconds from the time they opened the front door downstairs to start ascending to the second floor where my sister had buried me in the closet like a toy.
Fourteen seconds-I remember counting, senses unnaturally acute during that time, fury building up steadily, until they were close enough to my room that I deemed it safe enough to make my escape, which I did with a death-cry against the hinges of my prison. This made my sister jump back.
“Maddie?” Mom called-I heard it but was only vaguely aware of it-“Maddie!” She flew up the rest of the stairs.
Rain beat on my window and the roof of my family’s house, and the grey shadows of the hall merged with the light from my doorway. In the same instant that Mom appeared, my sister had crashed into my dollhouse and cracked not only her head on the floor, but my house, straight down the middle. Well, that was her last time to play babysitter.
She got stitches and privileges revoked, but my house with the fissure down the middle was never quite the same again. I saw it last as a pile of fragments while a black trash bag closed over it, all while I stood sullenly and silently by.