Firebolt

EDIT: Sorry about the title, it's 2519 words, not 251...oops.

This is a relatively short story I wrote for an English class, but since it's 500 words over the upper guideline given for the short story forum, I thought I'd post it here. I hope I chose the right forum.

The prompt for the assignment was, Freewrite about something that disturbs you, and then create a story that deals with your chosen disturbing concept.

Any critiques you can give are welcome; I'd especially like to hear which parts you think work and which don't, what you'd add or take out, etc. Be harsh!

Here it is:

Charity bounced home from school one day in the first grade, more eager to speak with her mother than she could ever remember. Her friend Raven had come to school flushed and excited because her mother had sat her down that morning, near the hour she was born, and had told her the story of how she got her name. It was a point of great pride for Raven, how her father loved a poem about a bird of the same name, and had read it to her when she was still in her mother’s tummy. Charity was burning to ask her mother for the story of her own naming, conjuring exciting and whimsical tales of how the name had sprung to her mother’s mind, or, perhaps, to her never-known father’s mind.

Upon entering the kitchen, Charity’s query tumbled out of her mouth to her mother, seated at the kitchen table peeling potatoes. Her mother listened resignedly, and then said “I was at a charity bake sale when I went into labor.” She followed this profound statement by returning to her potatoes, seeming to forget Charity’s presence in the dingy kitchen. Charity watched her for a moment, disappointed in this singularly boring story of her name’s origin, and then tried to make it seem better to herself. Her mother had captured the moment of her birth, the place she was when she first really became a mother; after all, a round tummy only needed so much mothering. She smiled to herself, mollified with her rosy new view, and skipped off to play.

***

Charity cried on her bed, quietly, with the door shut tight so her mother wouldn’t hear. Her mother didn’t hold with crying, alternately calling it unfeminine and weak. Still, this was certainly tear-worthy. Raven hadn’t been the same since they had left the elementary school for the junior high school, but her recent betrayal went deeper than simply forgetting to call, or bring lunch items to swap. Those rumors about Charity’s mother were horrible, horrible, horrible; beyond mean, beyond uncalled for, and way beyond the bounds of friendship forgiveness. No, that last wasn’t true; at least, Charity hoped it wasn’t true. She thought she knew Raven was just putting on this show for the popular girls, the ones neither of them had cared a whit about before now. She hoped Raven would realize how silly she was being if Charity just called her.

She calmed her hiccupping sobs and picked up the phone to do just that. When Raven answered the phone, however, it wasn’t the Raven Charity was familiar with; it was a bored, sarcastic Raven with no hint of an apology or any kind of remorse at all. Charity hung up five agonizing minutes later, sobbing anew and with more vigor than ever. She was so loud that her mother eventually came in to check on her. Charity was once again on the receiving end of a speech about the shame in crying, and how she should hold her head high no matter what people said. When her mom’s rant cooled down, Charity broke out and told her mom everything Raven had said. Halfway through the description her mom’s temper boiled over like nothing Charity had ever seen before. She cowered at the corner of her bed, wishing she hadn’t said a word and listening to her mom rant and rave about things she didn’t understand. The anger wasn’t directed at Charity; in fact, Charity couldn’t quite tell who her mom was angry at. She acted like she was talking to someone in the room, but Charity knew it couldn’t be her because she didn’t understand any of the accusations her mom was making. Her mom eventually tired, and abruptly cut off her angry river of words to stalk out of the room. Charity didn’t dare follow for several long minutes, simply sitting on her bed shaking and puzzling over what she had heard.

When Charity finally eased into the living room, her mother had her back to the hallway, but from the heave of her shoulders, Charity could tell her mom was doing something unheard of: Charity’s mother was crying.

For a moment Charity was paralyzed with indecision; should she run to her mom and offer comfort, or run away from the almost unnatural sight before her? Her mom NEVER cried; she hated crying, thought it was weakness leaking out of a person and beneath the dignity of anyone worth anything at all. Charity ran back to her room silently, closing the door behind her, and spent the rest of a sleepless night berating herself for not running to her mother.

***

Charity walked home slowly, soaking in the varied emotions from her first day of high school. She hadn’t been stuffed in any trash cans or lockers, or been the victim of any other cliché horrors, but it had still been a trying day. The classes were confusing, the people were impassive, if not unfriendly, and the teachers were already looking like they could use another bout of summer. Overall, she thought she’d like it, but it was a huge difference from junior high. She contemplated the differences, the unsettling aspects, and the almost frightening new privileges as she neared her house.

Suddenly, a car screeched around the corner ahead of her, screaming away from her street like a getaway car in a murder. Charity jumped, startled, and backed toward the grassy lawn behind her to give the crazy driver plenty of room for his bursts of angry-sounding speed. She watched as he faded into the distance, then continued on to her house.

Opening the door, she felt as if she had walked into a brick wall. The house was a mess. Not quite like you see on the cop shows on TV, but still more of a shambles than she had ever seen it. A kitchen chair was overturned; a painting hung listing to one side above a dent in the purple wall. Papers littered the floor, entirely unlike her mom’s well-ordered and primly organized kitchen. She dropped her books, anxious to find her mom and be reassured that everything was okay.

Her mom was sitting in the living room, on the floor, surrounded by more papers and pillows from the couches. Her shoulders shook in a way Charity had only seen once before in her life, indicating her mom’s tears. Charity felt as if she had intruded on something private and unholy, but shook the feeling off with a supreme act of will when she remembered her reaction to the last instance of weakness from her mom. She stepped forward, hesitantly, then with more certainty as she assured herself this was the right thing to do. She knelt next to her mother, silently, and put her arms around her gently.

Her mother flinched, twisting away with a sob, and backhanded Charity with absent and indifferent vigor. Charity cried out as she fell backwards, her mouth stinging. She lay where she fell for a moment and then stood up, holding an icy hand to her burning mouth and cheek. She watched her mother sob quietly where she lay, paying no attention to her wounded daughter. Charity felt her heart quiver, felt a sob of her own clawing its way up her throat, and bolted for the door, retracing her steps from a minute before. She ran, and ran, running until she could run no more, the burning in her leg muscles eclipsing the burning of her mouth.

She collapsed on the ground by a tree in the park, noticing the rain for the first time as she huddled to keep herself warm. Curled up on the ground, partially sheltered from the rain by the huge tree at her back, she settled in. She had decided somewhere in her breakneck run that she wasn’t going back to that house for a while, perhaps for the night. Her cheek had stopped stinging, but her deeper wounds would need time to heal before she could face her mother. No apology would be forthcoming; apologies rated right up there with crying as a weakness in her mother’s eyes. Charity felt anger at her mother’s treatment welling up in her, bringing fresh tears with it. She knew that if she let herself not care, she wouldn’t hurt anymore; if she refused to care about her mother, she certainly wouldn’t care about the slap, or anything else she might do. Ice flooded her fingers and toes, asking to be allowed into the rest of her, to numb her and kill the pain.

Charity suddenly realized that’s what her mother had done. Her mother had let the ice into her, had stopped caring. She decided under that tree’s gaze that she never wanted to become like her mother. She couldn’t bear the thought of becoming a mother who would carelessly backhand her daughter for giving a hug. Her mother, withdrawn and emotionless, hated anyone seeing her at her most vulnerable.

Charity resolved to care, and the ice left her, leaving the pain in its wake. Charity let it wash over her as the rain washed over her shivering body.

***

Charity couldn’t believe one heart could hold so much pain and not burst. She felt heavy, heavier with every step she took and every face she looked at. Ever since moving to the city to work at the homeless shelter, she had felt overwhelmed with the agony of all the people around her, as if their pain washed through her in waves each time she passed near them. She didn’t know how she could stand to see so much pain for much longer. Each time she felt this way, she remembered the look on the face of the first child she had helped at the shelter. That look and others like it were the reason she kept going. The only reason, for the moment, but she clung to the wispy hope that she’d find more concrete reasons, and soon.

She took a deep breath and steadied herself, standing on a pinnacle of cold, slippery marble and balancing the world.

***

Charity had never felt so alone and so anchorless before. Her body had no weight; only the seatbelt held her to the driver’s seat of the car. Her heart, on the other hand, felt as if it could drag along the ground beneath the car, sagging from the lead and ice it seemed to hold.

She had thought she’d finally found someone to care for her as much as she cared for him, and for a while it had went exactly the way she imagined. Last night, he had changed directions so fast, she felt as if she had been tossed out of a moving car onto the highway with no warning, just a sudden stop as she hit the ground. He had said he couldn’t bear to watch her tear herself apart over problems that weren’t her own. He said he felt as if she was destroying herself for the sake of solving the world’s quandaries, righting its wrongs, and smoothing its imperfections; he said she was going to burn out from overextension. Was that possible? Caring more was always her goal, always. She had believed this one thing was certain, that you could never care too much or too deeply. Sure, getting hurt was always a possibility, and often a certainty, when you cared; but wasn’t the alternative worse? Wasn’t it worse to feel nothing, or to feel only for yourself, than to feel too much?

At that point she wasn’t sure of anything, aside from her own exhaustion. She had been able to maintain her breakneck pace with him around to buoy her spirits, but now that he was gone, she was quickly losing strength. It hurt so badly, and she didn’t know how she could face it. It was a different kind of hurt, because there was nothing she could do to help ease it away. She was no longer sure it was better to feel anything at all than nothing, and she couldn’t bear to strain her weary soul to figure it out. All she could do was hurt ---
And then she could do nothing. She was flying. Everything hurt; shards of hurt impaled her, as if her pain at his abandonment had manifested itself in physical pain – no, something sharp and solid was really cutting her, cutting deep into her heart – and then she saw release, and went toward it, hesitantly at first, then with more certainty, went toward it even as she was hurled through the sky by the momentum of the car – but she wasn’t in the car – where was the car? Where was she?

And then all was black, and blissfully empty.

***

Charity’s mother lay on the couch in her dingy house, dingier herself than the house could ever manage to be, because she had neither the strength nor the will to get off that couch. She felt something slipping away, though she was sure it couldn’t be life, because she had no life. She’d been dead for so long, she forgot exactly how she had died. Someone had killed her; someone had cut her so deep she had surely bled to death from the wound. But it didn’t matter now. Nothing mattered now.

A single tear, dirtier than any other tear in the history of sadness, slimed its way down her face, leaving a track that forged and cut through other tracks, as if the years had been wagons crisscrossing her face indifferently.

She felt her heart falter, flutter, flicker…candle-like, it flickered, a spark and nothing more. Alive, but just a spark left; that’s what she’d been for twenty years. She had been alive but not alive; alive but afraid to live. And now she was not afraid, because she was not going to live much longer.
She saw release, and moved toward it, even as she moved not an inch on that soiled couch. The couch faded, and she wasn’t on the couch, but she didn’t know where she was…where was the couch? Where was she?

And then all was black, and mercifully empty.

***

The preacher extolled their virtues, one after the other, side by side; one who wore her virtues like a protective cloak and one whose virtues were veiled in vileness. Side by side they lay, closer now in death than ever before in life, at least since that charity bake sale long ago, the day they ceased being one and became two. Now they became one again, as identical things are one; two copies of the same one. All else melted away; death cares not for the virtues of eulogies, real or imagined.

Two men, not knowing each other, sat side by side in pews, neither crying but both needing to. They also were one, as identical things are one; both broken, both responsible in some way for the deaths of those in front of them, and both set to live with heavy, tainted hearts for the rest of their lives.

Arooo3

You don't have to use these.

Raven changed to Cassie
Bird of same name changed to girl named Cassie






awesome story!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

__________________
Ali Lynn McFarland

Firebolt

The poem I'm refering to is "The Raven" by Edgar Allen Poe, so the name has a specific reason, but thanks. I'm glad you liked it.