Page 95 of Girls Night
“Don’t,” Electra says, her tiny voice scared and urgent. “Please. Don’t leave right now. I don’t know where I am…”
“I have things to do. Besides, you’re in the Three Blind Mice. You’re safe.”
“You know how I can get when I’m coming down from a vision.” Her eyes go round and glassy. “I need an anchor to make sure I’m okay…”
I swallow a lump threatening to rise up my throat. “You don’t need me to anchor you. Get one of your sisters to do it. You haven’t needed me since we broke up.”
“But, the place with the flowers…”
“Forget about it,” I say, taking hold of the curtain and yanking it to the side.
Hands clasp at the bottom of my shirt. “Why did you come here? What do you want from me?”
Without turning around, I swat Electra’s hands away. “I didn’t come here foryou.”
“For Alectra, then?”
“Jesus!” I screw my eyes shut and do my best to ignore the heat rising up my neck and flushing my face. “I can’t stand you three. You’re so —”
“Please.” Electra’s voice is in my ear now. She’s so close I’m starting to sweat. “Don’t go.”
I open my eyes and through the darkness of the Three Blind Mice I can make out the door. It seems so far away. What I say next tastes like cyanide, but a deal is a deal and I can’t stop myself. I need to get out of here. “You’re so pathetic. I can’t stand you. You’re the reason I’m on probation with magic. The reason it fucks me around every single damned day! What makes you think I will stay?”
“I didn’t mean that,” Electra says after a beat, but I’m already halfway to the door. I refuse to look back. I can’t have this play on my conscience, not when the guilt I feel from what led to our break up still eats away at my soul whenever Electra comes to mind.
As I get to the door and open it, a warm breeze filters into the store and I take a deep breath.
“Don’t go to the place with the flowers, Delphi,” Electra calls out to me. “It’s horrible here… There…” She bursts into tears. Loud and manic. “Oh, my God, where am I? What have you done?” I turn a final time to see her silhouette fall to the floor.
Trapped between a vision and the real world, Electra is lost. Desperate to find her way home. And I’m abandoning her even though I know for a fact that she’s incapable of doing it alone. Sure, she has her sisters, but when Electra gets worked up they become nothing more than fragmented personalities of a broken little girl. Alectra and Olectra are as powerless to help their sister as Electra is of helping herself. They are, after all, one in the same.
I shut the door to the Three Blind Mice and step onto the pavement. As I do, I hear a muffled shriek coming from deep within the store.
I light up a cigarette and make my way to the nearest bus stop. God, I make myself sick.
Chapter Four
A few days before
A few hours from the grit and smut of the city, a woman stands at the window of her bedroom, and waits.
Overlooking the quaint sprawl of the town beneath her, she can make out every flower as they bloom through cracks in concrete where people once walked, against the walls of quiet houses, and atop furniture and beds where some would have lounged.
What one may consider a ghost town has never been so alive with the songs and blush of the flowers she has grown. So rich in greenery and inflorescence, she finds it hard to imagine what it was like before she’d arrived, not that she really wants to.
Up until recently, her days were spent exploring these living streets, her ears, and eyes open to the melodies and wonders of the gardens she personally curated. She’d take deep breaths and enjoy the ecstasy carried on the wind from her flowers as if it were pollen. These explorations of her town served as reminders of why she was brought into this world. Not to take part in its rat race or swim along currents, but to bring it back to life.
These days, however, her strolls are confined to the circumference of her bedroom, and no further. Her bones are brittle, her skin tissue paper thin. And, although she has been content with the view of her work from her bedroom window, today she yearns for something more. Today, her frustration boils over.
In a corner of the bedroom, near the door but not close enough, Copper-Eye lies on the wooden floor. She cannot feel her legs; her body has grown stiff. She’ll never forgive herself for taking her eyes off the girl she brought into this world, even though it was only for a few seconds as she was changing the bedpan.This wasn’t how it was supposed to end for me, she thinks, her muscles rock hard and swollen.We were supposed to see this to the end. Together.
Through her copper eye, she sees the girl’s aura glow. Energy leaves her body like steam and sits heavily in the air of the room, painting it a dull amber. Suddenly, something ripples under the flesh on her face and breaks through her skin. She doesn’t scream, nor cry out for help. Copper-Eye knows better than that. So, she prays. Not to any deity in particular, but to any that are willing to lend her their ears. For the first time in decades, and the last, she is terrified.
As the vessel that brought the woman at the window into this world begins to grow and spread out along the bedroom floor, her copper eye pops out of its socket and rolls to the woman’s wrinkled feet. With strain, she bends down and picks the eyeball up, then takes in the flowering garden where Copper-Eye lay mere seconds ago.
“You said it wasn’t time,” the woman says to the new-born flowers, rolling the copper eye around the palm of her hand. It’s heavy and wet. “Thatshewouldn’t be ready. But youwillbring her to me.”
She stretches her mouth wide and pushes the eye between her lips. Squeezing her eyes tight, she swallows.
