Free Throat by R. A. Nelson

actually going to help?”
    “Hey, come on, I help.”
    “Okay. You do. Sometimes. Do you really know why he left?”
    “I don’t think I want to talk about it.”
    “It’s okay.”
    “For you, maybe.”
    “He met someone, Emma. You know that, don’t you?”
    I reached for more socks. “I really don’t want to talk about this.”
    “It wasn’t anything you did, honey. It wasn’t your epilepsy. That was just … timing.”
    “I’m not stupid, Mom.” My seizure condition was usually off-limits when it came to talking about Dad. She knew that. She was supposed to know. We worked together for a while not speaking.
    “I think he’s embarrassed,” Mom said.
    “Who?”
    “Your dad. He’s embarrassed. It was supposed to be one of those happily-ever-after things, you know.”
    “So do you hate him?”
    She watched her hands working on a shirt. Picked up another one and folded it. “There’s no future in hating someone, Emma.”
    “Even if he deserves it?”
    I looked at her face. She was swiping one of Manda’s socks across her eyes.
    “Are you okay?” I said.
    “Why don’t you go to bed or something?” she whispered.
    “Not sleepy,” I said. I would have patted her on the back or given her a hug, but I was not big into the comforting thing. I figured it made you weak. But I touched her arm. “Mom?”
    “What.”
    “Sometimes you believe in something, you think you know what it is, and it changes. Your world is suddenly completelydifferent and you have to figure it out all over again. I know what that’s like.”
    “Because of your epilepsy?”
    I let her believe that’s what I was talking about.
    Later I lay there looking up at the ceiling in my room. My window was cracked open and somewhere across the complex I heard somebody say, “I really can’t stand living like this anymore.” I listened to them going back and forth, a man and a woman somewhere out there in the night. Nothing earth-shattering, but still something no one else should have been allowed to hear.
    I didn’t want to believe it, but I knew my old life was coming to an end. It had to. I was different. I wasn’t my mother’s daughter anymore. Not the daughter she knew.
    I looked at the clock: 12:03 a.m. I stared at it. Kept staring. The numbers were red. Someone once told me the best clocks had red numbers because the light was softer than blue in the dark. I couldn’t see how that was true. Blue was robin eggs, soft spring skies, water that was not stormy. Red was war and sunburn and ambulance lights and warning beacons.
And blood
.
    I was still staring, but I didn’t really see the number on the clock anymore. Actually, I saw it, but it wasn’t a number. It wasn’t even a light. It had become a colored thing with edges and a shape. Something about the shape pleased me. I kept staring.
    Pretty soon I was experiencing another “small” seizure. I didn’t know it at the time, of course. You usually don’t, not till afterward. Sometimes not at all. I just kept staring and staring at the number on the clock, feeling more and more comfortable.
    Then the clock went away, and the comfortable feeling was all there was, and I was basically staring at a place in the center of thedark. I could see perfectly that there was nothing there but the wall and my bedroom closet. But then something different happened: instead of becoming a blip of lost time in my life, I was completely aware of what was going on.
    It started like this: the feeling of something physical pushing itself into my head … a solid, invisible finger digging straight into the comfortable feeling of my absence seizure. I kept staring at the wall; I suddenly became aware that someone was standing there. A tall man with long legs and a coat that came to his knees …
    “Good evening,
Mädchen,
” he said.
    If the bottom of the sea could make a sound, that’s what his voice sounded like.
    He was with me, right there in my bedroom. The vampire. I should