Another journal

Written during my month of writing.  You can find all the sections here.

Kitchen noises and falsetto disco woke Emily after the sun had been pouring in her bedroom window for hours. Making a disgusted noise, she slid the window shut and dropped the blinds, darkening the room.

“Closing the barn after the horses,” she muttered. Her aunt’s trailer worked like a solar oven, heating steadily throughout the day. A neutral state that one could sleep in was only possible if the entire place was closed like a tomb as soon as the sun appeared, then opened up to night air and bugs the moment outside temperatures dropped. Emily hoped that she hadn’t doomed herself to over-warm tossing and turning that night by sleeping in.

She coughed up something gross in the bathroom. Splashing her face with cold water, Emily decided she was more or less acceptable and shuffled into the kitchen.

Her aunt was half-dancing at the sink to a worn out mixtape a boyfriend had given her years ago. Tall, still prone to wearing the short-shorts that made her popular with local bar bands and mortified Emily in grade school, Janice was a perfect aunt and a woman who would have never been a mother, given a choice. Emily remembered one of her favourite stories, from when her aunt was still in high school and had decided to skip a week, to go follow some sort of fair—

With a sharp intake of breath, Emily leaned against the dark wood panelled wall. Her aunt had never gone to high school. She’d spent her young life in some sort of court in the Sidhe, living in a way that couldn’t be imagined while standing in a decades-old double-wide trailer listening to New Wave and feeling like somebody had punched you in the gut.

As she made the realisation, her aunt turned and met her eyes, paused mid-dance move. The two women sized each other up, resetting assumptions built up over nearly two decades of living together. Emily noticed for the first time that her aunt’s dark hair had threads of grey shot through it.

“Is it awful, growing old? Or being mortal, I guess.” Embarrassed, Emily looked down, scrubbing her toes against the worn carpet.

Biting her lip, Janice shook her head, “Being as you’ve known nothing but mortality, I’m assuming you mean in comparison?” Emily nodded. Her aunt picked at the flaking edge of the countertop before answering. “It can be pretty terrible when I think that twenty years ago I had maybe a century before my hair showed silver. It’s like living on fast-forward, the body deteriorating at a manic rate. There’ve been definite high points though, raising you.”

“That’s an aunt answer, not a Janice answer.” Emily sniffled and tried to roll her eyes.

“True. But nobody deserves to hear the Janice answer before breakfast. I want you to get some dang food in, and tea—then we can be all chatty about life and love and coups in the Sidhe.”

Emily dutifully tried to focus on breakfast and her habitual morning crossword, but kept finding herself staring into the middle distance, cereal spoon raised halfway to her mouth. When Janice swapped out the tea for coffee, Emily noticed that the bowl was empty and she’d solved only seven clues, even though she’d picked an easy crossword at the front of the book.

Her aunt smiled. “Go take a shower and we’ll go for a drive.” Emily picked up the mug, bringing it with her to the trailer’s full bath. Janice called after her, “magical chosen kid or not, you’re still a heathen to drink coffee in the shower!”

The two women passed the town’s official boundaries, Janice at the wheel. Emily had always loved and hated the smallness of her hometown and its proximity to farms and forest. The cooler weather, mushroom hunting and view didn’t really make up for the single screen theatre and half-hour drive to the closest mall. Since she’d always had a bicycle, Emily had never felt like she needed to find a car, even though it severely limited her scope of activities. The total lack of a social life probably helped with that. Drives with her aunt were something different, though. They knew the back country and old highways better than most maps. They’d found that difficult conversations were easier when one person had to keep her eyes on the road.

Propping her feet up on the dash, Emily turned to look at her aunt. “Did you all move out here for the isolation?”

“Something like that. It’s cheaper than the city, for sure. Having forest land nearby is useful for other things, especially when we were trying to figure out how to get back.” Janice raised an eyebrow, still watching the road, “but we stayed because of the isolation.” She threw a glance at her niece. “Keeping you from opportunities was part of the gambit.”

Emily grimaced. “I’m having trouble comprehending the scope of how much of my life was manufactured.”

“Now, don’t say that. You lived it, didn’t you? We didn’t actively interfere. We just set up a situation and made sure that only the right variables were introduced.”

“Ugh, like a science experiment.”

“Or growing roses,” Janice drawled in a passable southern accent, “you’re our little hothouse flower, Amelia.” Emily laughed. “Anyway, to continue my answer—we were also dropped off nearby when we were exiled and partly could never get up the momentum to leave a spot where we knew Folk could cross over.”

Emily cranked down the window and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. Janice frowned.

“I wish you wouldn’t smoke so much.”

“It’s like a couple a day, jeez.” She stabbed the car lighter in and waited for it to heat up.

“You picked it up from that weirdo Roper girl, I know it.”

Emily managed to light her cigarette and sigh at the same time. “She was my only friend and then moved away, point one, so don’t diss on her. Point two—”

“Point two it’s nails in your coffin.”

“Not like it’ll matter when we rejoin the Sidhe.”

“If we rejoin the Sidhe. If, Emily.” Janice watched her niece sink deeper in the passenger seat, exhaling from her nose. “I don’t want to be a bummer, but this is not a game. Which is such a trope thing to say, I know. But we are specifically dealing with situations that are tropes and clichés, with rules that seem whimsical but have thousands of years of repetition and structure to back them.” Emily remained silent. “You read enough, you know that in anything worth the trouble the entire ordeal is harrowing.”

Emily looked at her aunt from the corner of her eye. Janice’s mouth was compressed to a hard line, her eyes focused on the road. Bringing her feet up onto the seat, Emily pulled herself out of a slouch and tapped her cigarette in the console ashtray, meeting her aunt’s glance at her movement.

“It’s difficult to judge when you don’t have all the information. I mean, other than crossing over to the Sidhe for you guys I don’t know what I’m going to have to do. ‘Win back our place’ is a little vague as a battle plan.” Emily lifted her chin imperiously, “but I can guess what you’re going to say.”

“That we have to keep some information from you to control the gambit? Yes.”

Emily scoffed, “that is such bullshit.”

“Language!” Janice glanced at her speedometer and let off the gas as they swept up turns cutting through forested hills. “It is bullshit, and it was bullshit that my sister died and it was bullshit that I had to raise her damn kid and it was the crowning bullshit that I couldn’t even do that the way I wanted but had to shape her to be a god-damned weapon just so I could get home.” She pushed hair from her eyes, “I can only give you so much. There’s some fictionalised histories you can read for background on why we had to leave. At the official ceremony tonight you’ll get a better idea of the plan and be presented with keys.” She slowed for a squirrel that waited until the car was almost on it to bolt. “Not, like, real keys. Objects of usefulness.”

“So not like an RPG?” The side of Emily’s mouth quirked. “You’re not going to give me a silver key so I can get the gold key and then the diamond key or whatever?”

Janice glared at the road. “That place with the milkshakes is coming up. Are you hungry?”

Mirrored from Journal of a Something or Other.