Pinched white faces. Small, too. Reduced by the weight of that which crushes them. Me. Us.
The Princess of Darkness, normally all pretty, perfumed and bubbly seventeen. Not now, though…
Satanicus Maximus, pretending nonchalance. His cockiness as avoidance therapy. Thirteen years and knows everything. Except this.
Lurch, blissfully ignorant. At work. Unaware. For now. The luckiest of us four. For now.
And me? I thought I did. Knew fear, I mean. The pre-marital years running with, and from, low men and their dodgy molls. Debts accrued and demanding payment. Accrued across the green baize and over the full houses. Under the heart and beyond the busted flushes. Morning-after-the-night-before walks back to the sanctuary I spurned. With pockets empty of dreams and a heart bereft of hope.
Crash trolleys burst through swing doors. The bleeps of monitors and the buzzing of pagers are all around us and doctors, stony-faced and cold, pace ominously by.
Only a curtain separates us from SheWhoIsNever Wrong but it’s a universe away.
We stare uncomprehendingly at an old woman, like fine parchment, waiting for the small puff of breeze that will carry her far, far away, raving in her madness.
A white-coated God stops by. His lips move but I can’t hear what he’s saying. My hands feel just like two balloons. I fight an irrational urge to cackle. I’m Pink and this is my Wall, Doc.
“An aneurysm on the brain”
A force that can kill the sun that warms our world.
“Caught in time”
Her.
“Hopeful”
Mother to The Spawn.
“Still unsure”
But to me? Christ…
“More tests”
And then I drift. In a minute I will need to be everything The spawn need me to be. But for now I drift.
Up, up and away.
Not drowning but drifting…