Teaser Tuesday
Strange and Beautiful teaser! The boy Lana is referring to in this scene is a kid who just broke into their aviary and got himself bitten by a firebird.
*
We take the bitten boy into the house and set him on the couch. In a bright, floral-wall-papered room he looks like a corpse - his skin yellow-gray, eyes filmy and dull. I suck in a breath, my stomach sick. I can feel the heat radiating from his body, can feel his temperature climbing higher every second.
“Lana.” Dad stares at me, his face ashy and drawn. “Go get your mother.”
I run up the stairs to her bedroom and pound on the door. “Mom. Mom! Wake up.”
A groan, a gurgling mumble that sounds sort of like, “Too early…make your own breakfast…”
“Mom, someone was bitten.”
There’s silence inside the room, and then seconds later she flings open the door, her hair and eyes wild, her body wrapped in a bathrobe. I try to remember when she went to bed. Then I realize that she never actually got up yesterday.
But she’s definitely awake now. “Where?” she whispers. “Where is he?” She stares straight past me.
“Downstairs,” I mumble. “In the living room.”
She flies to the boy’s side, her hands like nervous birds. Straightening his glasses. Pushing hair off his forehead. Oh-so motherly, like a postcard parent. I can’t help but remind myself that those hands have never pushed the hair off my forehead.
“Damnit, Pyotr, I’ve told you time and time again,” she says, in her thin, wispy angel-voice. “I told you those birds would kill someone, and I was right.”
“They were protecting their nests,” I say half-heartedly.
“He’s only a boy,” Mom says, and this time she looks at me - her eyes hot and accusing. I don’t blink, don’t look away. I stare at her steadily until she turns her attention back to the boy.
“We have an hour at most,” she says. “Pyotr, fill the bathtub with cold water. Lana, go get me a knife - sterilized, please.”
I jog into the kitchen and grab a steak knife from the drawer, sliding it under a hot stream of water from the faucet. I bring it back to my mother. She takes it, and before I can blink or cry out she’s slipping the blade across her palm.
“Mom!” I stare at her, horrified. I know my mother has bouts of depression, but I never expected -
“Human blood is the only cure for firebird venom,” Mom says. She squeezes her hand into a fist and drizzles drops of bright red liquid into the boy’s mouth. “I would think your father had taught you that.”
My father hadn’t. I’ve never been bitten, never even felt nervous around the firebirds’ shiny sharp teeth.
Mom shakes her palm, scattering drops of red across the boy’s face. “Help me get up him to the tub,” she says. She curls her arms around the boy’s body, hauls him toward the bathroom. I see the veins stand out on her arms and forehead like thin blue ropes, and sweat pops out on her skin.
My mother is fragile. Dad reminds me of this fact every time we argue, every time I get mad at her. “She’s just fragile, Lana. She never fully recovered from the complicated pregnancy. It’s not you - it’s just the memory of the pain, the fear…” When I was six months old the doctors called it post-partum depression. But does post-partum depression really last sixteen years?
It’s the question I ask myself whenever she looks at me with that strange mix of grief and bitterness, like her skin-and-bones body and graying hair are my fault. Like everything’s my fault.