I want to believe that, but I stopped believing in wishes and prayers when they were never answered, and my mother never crawled out from beneath the bed. She never fought to return to me. I catch the thought and hold it tight. The wound of her loss is raw, reopened from the fight with Bret.
I recite what I know to be true.
My father’s death was an accident.
My mother didn’t run away and abandon me.
I am lucky to have Gran. She saved me.
But there’s a whisper in my mind that all she really wanted was to save her daughter and grabbing me was an accident. As a child, she’d check my scars to make sure they hadn’t turned into scales. Check my fingers and toes and teeth and even eyes.
Maybe if I was part monster like her, I’d be safe.
When I get to work, the diners in the café are rude and tip badly. They tell me to smile more. I want to tell them to go to hell, but I don’t. I don’t want my tongue to fork or turn blue.
Or perhaps I do.
I want to scream that they don’t know the truth about the dangers that lurk. Something could reach out and grab them as they sit at the table. Why aren’t people like them taken? Why my mother?
Why not Bret?
There have been nights when I expected to wake to screaming and watch him be dragged Under. Or maybe that’s what I hoped for.
While I don’t remember what happened the night my mother was taken, I have created a memory. In my mind I can see my mother’s face as she tried to protect me, and I can feel the monster's claws deep in my skin.
I smile wider and do more to try to make the diners happy, so they tip better. I need a better job, one where I’m not living on tips, but this café is close to school and home and they work in with my classes and I’m always happy to do the afternoon shift which is made up of parents and small kids having after school treats, and businesspeople grabbing coffees, before cleaning up for the dinner rush.
I half expect to be asked to stay back for the dinner shift, as three out of four times I am. But tonight I leave only half an hour late. I catch the bus home, watching the shadows grow with each breath.
The streetlights flicker and come on but do nothing to fight the darkness.
As I get off the bus, I pull my coat tighter around me for the walk up the block to my apartment. Clouds block the stars and my skin prickles like people are watching me, even though I see no one.
The street is empty.
There aren’t even kids playing like there often is.
Behind me something scuttles. It could be a rat or a bottle blowing in the wind, but I don’t even look back before I run. By the time I reach the door to the apartment block I’m panting, and my hands are shaking so much that it takes me three tries to unlock the door. I slam it behind me and press my back against the wood, breathing hard.
It was nothing, just litter a stray cat.
Monsters don’t roam the street.
Even though I know these things, that doesn’t stop my body from being as tight as a bow string. Above me, laughter filters down the stairs from one of the other apartments. The stairwell is lit and bright and everything is as it should be…except me. I’m freaking out about every shadow and noise because I jump at the thought of monsters like a five-year-old.
I spent years sleeping in Gran’s bed because I was too scared to sleep on my own. I could never sleep over at friends’ houses because I always expected something bad to happen. I was the weird kid who always had nightmares. That I had red hair didn’t help.
When I hit high school, I started dying it a darker shade of red. I didn’t get teased for that. The scars on my arm and leg were something that I couldn’t hide. So I made up different stories depending on who was asking. Or I let them assume they were from a car accident, or self-harm or whatever they wanted to believe. It was easier to play along and be what was expected rather than being myself. And for a time, I wanted to be that girl. She was tough and fun and went to parties and didn’t care about anything because she wanted to live before dying…until my final year.
I’d been crushing on a boy so hard and I’m pretty sure he didn’t know I existed. He was studying and working, and rumor had it that he was also his father’s carer. He never went to parties, but this time he did.
All I wanted to do was kiss him, but I couldn’t find the courage to go after something I really wanted.
Sometime during the night, he vanished from the party. His car was parked in the street, but he was gone. The cops spoke to everyone. They thought we’d killed him and were covering it up.
One kid said they heard screaming, but they thought it was all fun. It was a party, and there were often screams. But I had felt it, the prickle down my neck and the swelling of the darkness—what was I going to say though? Everyone would just say I was drunk, but I knew that he’d been taken to Under. That monsters were everywhere, and I wasn’t safe even when I was surrounded by people.
If not for the necklace, I could’ve been taken.