Free Castles by Benjamin X Wretlind Page B

point if the voice was disembodied; it would have been my most solemn comfort.
    Instead of Grandma, I was left with Alfie's last words as he stood up and buttoned his pants. "That's what good girls like you get," he said. He put his foot on my stomach and pushed as hard as he could. "You can clean up your own mess, now."
    Alfie left me that night sobbing on the desert floor. I curled into myself with my knees to my chest and pants around my ankles.
    I started to bleed.
     

A CLEARING PICTURE
     

1
     
    I didn't tell anyone what I saw in the Bus. I couldn't, however, hide what happened later. I finally pulled myself together, climbed over the fence and sat on the rocking chair by the front door, life pouring from me as I cried. Mama would have to come out in the morning, and then she would know.
    I spent the next week in the hospital, probed and prodded, questioned and accused, harassed and humiliated. A police officer—who I think took a fancy to Mama—repeatedly asked about Michael. It was almost surreal the way the world looked to me, then: white, sterile, dashes of color thrown in like spilled paint. Nothing made sense at all.
    I don't think about my time in the hospital very much. I remember most of it, and what parts are missing—time that slipped through cracks to dissolve into nothing—I attribute to the pain I felt. I didn't want to live, at least not the way I'd been living for so long.
    On one of the occasions when Mama came to visit without accompanying someone in khaki or white, she sat down on the chair next to the bed and cried. I remember feeling the same as I did when I was six, watching a tear fall from her eyes when Grandma berated her for not caring about the cut on my foot. I didn't say anything to her at first, not because I was mad, but because I wanted her to cry.
    When she finally spoke, she struggled to get her words out. "I'm sorry," she said. It was enough for her to say just that. She whispered something I didn't catch and stood up. With a kiss, she left and I was alone with a memory that I keep clear today. I stared at the door as she walked away, wondering if I'd see her again. I know now that she had finally fallen to the pressure of motherhood. It only took her twelve years to do it.
    I returned home, afraid. I stood at the screen door for a while that first night and looked over the fence into the distance. I couldn't see the Bus in the dark, but I knew it was there, marking death like a gravestone. It hit me then that Michael's final resting place would forever be stuck in my memory, whether I liked it or not. I would always have that reminder of the night two lives were taken, and God wasn't there to clean up the mess.
    It wasn't until years later that I realized God wasn't supposed to clean up the mess. I was.

2
     
    The first night after I returned from the hospital, I didn't fall asleep until well after midnight. I stared at the ceiling and tried to coax reason from insanity. I'm sure Mama knew I was awake, but she probably wanted me to have time to sort through my emotions. I thought I had enough time in the recovery room.
    The pattern in the ceiling blended together, and I found myself connecting the random splotches until I'd painted a scene of death, with Alfie caught in the middle. If I looked hard enough, I could see the dust eels eating his body, chewing on his flesh as he screamed. It wasn't long before the patterns started to swirl in unnatural ways, writhing around in the ceiling.
    I froze. It wasn't anything in the scene I'd painted myself that frightened me—I couldn't move . My body tingled, like I'd stepped out of a freezer and into the bright sun, my flesh on fire. I tried to lift my head, wiggle my fingers, move my legs; nothing worked. I couldn't even blink.
    The dust eels I'd drawn in the pattern on the ceiling grew larger. They squirmed and hissed, spit and snapped at each other, vying for space. There seemed to be hundreds of them, and although I couldn't take