Fictioneer Conflict Prompt/ Man vs. Society - Secrets

This is an entry in the Fictioneer Conflict Prompt Man vs. Society Contest hosted by @jrhughes.

Secrets

“She has old eyes, Ann.” Leah steps to the window, her back to me.

I take a sip of tea, buying time. Too hot. My tongue feels scraped raw, but the pain calms me and keeps the shaking out of my voice. “She is barely six….”

I watch my best friend as she stands: model-straight, tall. Her stillness feels deliberate. An afront.

“Bran doesn’t want to play with her anymore. Says she’s spooky the way she looks at him. Like she knows all his secrets, and he doesn’t have secrets yet. Even a kid sees it. You have to get her tested.” Leah faces me, her amber eyes lined with charcoal, soft. There is no judgement in her face or her voice, but I cringe anyway. I sense the fear in her. Soon she will choose.

“I will,” I say evenly and take another sip, larger now, still scalding.

Leah walks over and sits next to me, places her smooth long-fingered palm on my leg, leans in. “It’s likely his genes anyway. You’re too…normal. It’s not your fault….”

I don’t remember moving but I’m in the kitchen, my hands wrapped around the cold edge of the counter, knuckles bleached white. The white of Greg’s uniform when he’d put it on in the mornings. I can almost smell the starched cleanness of it, my fingers itching to touch the collar, touch him. I lift my eyes and Leah is by the door, her face splotched with red, her perfectly firm manufactured boobs bobbing up and down in a quick rhythm.. She looks at me, shakes her head and thumbs the button. The door swishes open. She does not turn to look at me again.

---

I reach for a bottle of firewine stashed behind empty coffee cans. The harsh, peppery smell hits me hard. My eyes water. I take a swig anyway, then another before setting it down. My throat burns, but the queasiness in my belly is almost gone, replaced with heat.

2:15. That gives me just under an hour. I won’t need half that to pack the few things we own.

It’ll take Leah twenty minutes to walk home, drop off her purse and keys on that antique console table she had a carpenter’s kid restore (paid him in food, she told me proudly afterwards, because what would a half-starved, unshaven boy in his stained clothes and his barely serviceable shoes do with the money but spend it on booze anyway), then she’ll check her makeup. Then she’ll call. It would take them a half hour at least to get here.

2:35. I am packed and changed into a loose pair of jeans and a thermal hoodie. I’m clutching another hoodie to my chest, dark gray, Emma’s. It smells of flowery soap and grass.

I pull out my porta-screen, the old, untraceable model, and zoom in on the tiny dot on a map. Our one contingency plan, the one Greg and I made when I first felt Emma’s bony knees or elbows kick against my belly. I’d taken Greg’s hand, large, calloused, and placed it over the mound of my over-ripe flesh, needing him to feel it. He must have seen it then, the fear. The one percent chance…. We couldn’t risk talking about it then, not until the next morning, huddled outside a small shack at the edge, rain coming down hard and cold. He didn’t say a word for a long time, then ever so softly, took my face into his rain-slicked hands, but warm, always warm. “It’ll be alright…. Even if the baby has it, it’ll be alright.”

It took Greg two months to find the old screen. Then four years chasing whispers in every part of town where old lived. Years of creeping along dark alleys, searching for someone who’d know what to do, someone who’d care enough to help. That’s who put that dot on the map. He didn’t care, of course, the old coot, but a bottle of whiskey got the address out of him just the same.

The door slides open, letting in Emma, her face flushed. She looks at the small bag, then at me, her eyes taking in my face. Her smile dies. Her eyes are on me, unblinking, sad, steady. Unchild-like.

“I’m sorry, momma,” my child says. Because of course she knows.

I pull her to me, my fingers brushing through the tangled strands, smoothing them to silk. “It’s not your fault, Em. It’s not your fault.”

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