Page 114 of Envious Of Fire
Kyle. It’s something else. Always been something else.
With Kyle.
They’re on the road again. The sun is high. The world is on fire around them. Blazing yellow-white fire.
“I think you loved him,” says Jessica after a long while. The hum of the road fills their ears between her words. Asher’s ears are still filled with the muffled noises of his game, hearing none of this. “I think you loved him so much that … that the day we all thought he died … you …” She sighs. “Brock, you died, too.”
Those words.
How they break Brock’s heart in half.
“I … died …” he recites.
“Yes, you did.”
“I … died … and then … came back.” Brock’s eyes well up. Tears? He touches his face, pokes his left eyeball, draws his finger away to find a dot of liquid at the end. “It was … all like a dream. I should … should forget it ever happened. Things are okay now.”
Jessica half turns to him, eyes on the road. “What?”
“I … died.” Brock starts to breathe funny. Something inside is trying to come out. He grips his thighs, clenches his teeth. The tears dislodge, falling down his face. “I … d-d-died …”
“Sweetheart?”
“I … died … I … died, I … died, died, died …”
“Brock, honey, what’re you—”
He can’t stop repeating the words, over and over. “I died, I died, I died …” If he says it enough, he will remember it’s true, he will remember what happened. And how. He will fight the wall of doubt and disorientation that contains him, he will be free.
“I’m gonna pray for you,” says Jessica, her voice unraveling, tears in her own eyes. “Sweetheart, pray with me, please pray to God, pray right now, right the fuck now, baby, p-p-pray …”
“I DIED!” cries out Brock, grabbing hold of his own head.
Asher pulls out his earbuds. “Dad?”
“D-Dear Lord in Heaven,” starts Jessica, her voice trembling, “p-please take my husband in your most capable, loving hands—”
Brock reaches over the center console, grabs hold of Jessica by the neck. She screams, but not for long. The car veers left, veers right. Brock lunges out. The seatbelt snaps, rips out, loud and popping. Asher shouts out as the car rages off the road in a screaming cacophony of metal and sand.
Red paints Brock’s eyes as he grabs and claws and bites.
Jessica’s screams are swallowed, choked away into the noise of glass and metal crunching. The car lunges and bounces and throws its occupants left, right, to the sky, down to the earth.
Crashes. Stops.
Brock chokes, his mouth filled with something.
Something that is not like gummy candy.
Not like the red jelly in a pastry.
He blinks away red from his eyes, stinging red, not the tears that were there before. He’s atop the driver’s seat, straddling it.
No more screaming. Brock blinks and blinks and blinks.
Something spills from his lips. Jessica’s face comes into view.
Except it’s no longer a face. There’s nothing there.
