Free Matchbox Girls by Chrysoula Tzavelas Page B

strong image of Lissa left, and the glass of the kaleidoscope was clear and undistorted.
    The grass and playground reappeared out of the light. The women were gone.
    In the silence that followed, Lissa stomped over to where the women had been, and kicked at the pile of clothes remaining. A dog whined and huddled, licking its flank. It was the black dog, Marley realized, and it had been shot, just like her.
    She touched her arm again absently, but her questing fingers only found a dull pain and a scab.
    “I fixed it,” said Kari, smiling up at her. Both her hands were smeared with blood. “I fixed it.” For just a heartbeat, Marley thought she saw static around Kari's hands, too. But she blinked, and it was gone. The blood was shocking enough, in any case.
    AT stood up slowly. She had many refracted images, too many to count. Marley pushed the kaleidoscope vision away, flinching, refusing to see the refractions.
    “You should... you need to get out of here,” said AT. Her voice was unsteady.
    “What happened? Did that just happen?” Marley stood up herself.
    “Didn’t you hear me?” AT cried, her voice shrill. “You need to get out of here. Those were gunshots; the cops will come.”
    Doubt flickered across Marley’s mind. “But... the light... those women...”
    AT kicked a gun across the grass, savagely. “Let the cops worry about it. Let Senyaza worry about it. You have to go, before somebody else shows up. The cops will separate you from the kids.”
    Marley grabbed Lissa, who seemed calm and satisfied, by the hand. “What about you?”
    AT glanced at the black dog, which was being licked by his friends. “I need to take care of my dog. I’ll find you later or something. Go, go, go!”
    They’d shot her. Suddenly, Marley needed no further urging. She took hold of Kari with her other hand, and she ran.
     

-ten-
     
     
    H abit guided Marley’s rushing steps home, while the fog of dissociation gently drifted through her mind. It’s inevitable, when faced with something incomprehensible, to try to cast it in a familiar framework. When that fails, when no explanation suffices, just write it out of history: a glitch, an anomaly. Let the habits of normalcy prove that it didn’t really happen. Would the world go on just as it had, otherwise? Palm trees and dark birds under a hazy blue sky. A helicopter whirring by, the distant sound of somebody’s stereo. Somebody, somewhere, laughing. Her door, her key.
    She wanted things to be normal. She moved around the apartment, picking up all the belongings the twins had scattered. There was no thought that went with the actions. Her thoughts were all busy shuffling the deck of her memories. Pick a card, any card; I’ll make it disappear.
    But the magic trick wouldn’t work. It couldn’t work. Normalcy had wandered out of her life the day before, with the phone call from the twins. And some parts of it all were just too close. Her arm ached. When a door slammed somewhere outside, she froze. Aloud, she said, “That was just a door slamming. Just a door.”
    But she walked across the room to the bathroom, closed the door behind her, and sank down to the floor. “Boom,” she whispered, and she remembered the crack of the gun.
    They’d shot her. She felt it again: the sting in her arm, and her terror, not for herself, but for Kari. They’d wanted to kill her. Dead. Boom.
    After a few moments, she realized she’d bunched a towel up against her face because she was sobbing and she didn’t want the twins to know.
    Unsteadily, she stood up and ran the faucet to splash water on her face. Then she twisted and began to inspect her injury. It seemed half-healed already, but the blood that had run down her arm was crusted into the edges of the wound. Cleaning the actual injury seemed impossible without assistance and a commitment to potentially re-opening the wound, so she settled for just cleaning the rest of her arm. Then she stuck four strip bandages over the