Free Shadows Burned In by Chris Pourteau Page A

she’d knuckle under. Elizabeth knew
the whole thing by heart now.
    Often when her mother took up for her to her father, it
inevitably led to a “discussion,” as Mom liked to call it, about how hard it
had been on Elizabeth to leave Houston. Elizabeth labeled that as Stage One.
Stage Two began as her mother’s railings became a lament on how hard it had
been on Susan to move, and how she’d had to give up her job, and how life in
this Podunk town was so boring, and why had she ever let this happen?
    Stage Three included Dad’s standard argument about the
security of the smaller town and how much less stressful it was living here ( Ha! Elizabeth always thought when she heard that). Elizabeth would adjust, he’d
say for the umpteenth time, and if her mom didn’t like it, she could waddle
right out the front door and don’t let it bounce off her fat ass on the way
out. This was when Mom would start crying, which Dad had learned to ignore
while he gathered the latest information from Web Report .
    The fourth and final stage usually began around nine o’clock
when Susan would rap on Elizabeth’s door with a sandwich or something,
apologizing for not having made a better dinner, and Elizabeth would say,
“That’s okay, Mom,” or anything, really, to get her to leave her alone.
Sometimes after an especially difficult argument, Susan felt the need to stay
and comfort Elizabeth, which only added to her daughter’s disgust at the whole
situation. More and more Elizabeth was finding that the less direct contact she
had with her parents, the better she liked it. Occasionally Elizabeth feigned
sleep so that her mother left the sandwich on her bureau and retreated from the
room without waking her. Then Elizabeth would place a towel along the bottom of
her bedroom door to hide any light escaping from the room into the hallway and
fire up the 3V network, losing herself in the games she loved to play alone.
    She started giggling at the absurdity of it all and wiped her
nose and eyes on the pillowcase. Cocking her ear at the closed door, she heard
Stage Two beginning. Elizabeth thought the whole scripted thing even funnier
now that she was laughing—the predictability of it all, history repeating
itself, over and over again. Now she was laughing and crying at the same time at
how stupid her parents were. They read the same old lines from the same old
scene over and over again, and neither’s acting got any better! She buried her
face in the pillow again, this time to keep her parents from hearing her
laughter.
    But her amusement quickly tapered off when she heard her
father’s raging voice. How she hated to hear their fighting! It ripped her
apart inside to hear the only two people she really loved being so cruel to one
another.
    When they began their bickering, as routine as it was, it
twisted Elizabeth’s stomach into knots. She felt certain she was the cause of
it all and had that suspicion confirmed when the whole thing started over again
as the result of something she’d done. Like today. Maybe if they just got
divorced , she had thought a hundred-million times, but no, that thought
filled her with a greater fear and loathing than any argument ever had, and she
felt trapped between what she hated most and what she was most frightened of.
    Now Elizabeth was crying again, and she wasn’t sure if it
was from laughter or frustration, because she couldn’t tell the difference
anymore. Her insides fluttered with the giddiness of it, the mixture of heavy
pain and shaking laughter that made her want to throw up. She had found only
one remedy to this, one thing that kept her insides from exploding and the
heartache from bursting open her chest, and that was to put her interactive suit
on, climb in her 3V tank, and lose herself. It was a race now as she jammed her
arms and legs into the Lycra bodysuit and opened the top to the 3V tank. The
suit covered her from head to toe, leaving only her face bare.
    The sensory deprivation