She held the divorce papers in her hand, but loosely. Her thoughts didn't so much as nod for a second towards the notion of letting the hard-won sheets slip out of her fingertips, though she let them tug and flap in the evening wind.
She took a sip of coffee, bitter and hot, and let it be hers, narrowing her eyes as she stared into a sunset that felt like an over-weary dawn.
Her little girl, all decked out with big, bouncy pig-tails, chased imaginary friends around the old oak in her front yard. Its fat trunk was enough of a circumnavigation to satisfy the little Napoleon in a shirtwaist dress.
The pigtails jumped and bounded in her wake. She had insisted upon them. Her daughter didn't like them – she was hard pressed to say that she liked them, either. But she had insisted. They reminded her that she was a woman nonetheless old for all of her hair dye and only thirty-something years. Resisting the urge to touch her own hair, she took a sip of coffee that tasted more mundane.
It was comforting, that mundaneness. The flapping of the divorce papers in her hand was just like the flapping of junk mail. She put her little girl in pigtails, and didn't know why, except that her little girl didn't argue too much and it seemed like the thing to do even though it made her feel old.
Sipping coffee from a new mug, standing transfixed in the lawn of a new house, she felt nonetheless old, and her little girl treated all newness and change as if there were nothing new in the world.
She ought to be feeling new. She tried to appear the parent trapped in a magical moment, instead of just a parent trapped by what she wanted turning out to be not enough to fulfill the wanting. What wanting was there left to feel, anyway? They had escaped, by the skin of their teeth. That didn't leave much room for fantasy. It all was fantasy though – the papers, the oak, the imaginary friends and the imaginary divorce – she would never be divorced from her daughter.
Her little girl spun under a dizzy sky, the fading of one of the dark-storms that reminded everyone that they had fucked up hanging in the air. It left a mish-mash of trails of odd purple and black like renting clawmarks in the blue. She should be wearing a hat, or a sunglasses, or something, just to fit in. They'd said the radiation was harmless. Anyone who pretended to half a brain (a brain and half was more like it) gave lip to the warnings when inside: hats and glasses, cover-your-asses, but they wore them anyway – don't you know, just to fit in. The kids wouldn’t wear them at all – her kid, anyway. Oh, well – they had thirty minutes; that was the time somebody somewhere had decided was safe exposure for the minimal amounts of Badness floating about these days. And little kids should get to run outside.
They didn't put on that stuff for protection anyway. Just put on your hat and your big fat sunglasses and pretend it wasn’t there. Then maybe it wouldn’t have happened.
A whole island, sucked into sea. Or blasted into the air. She wondered if that was what made the sky that unusual purple. At one point she'd felt as if she could sympathize with the Island, but even now the superstition still lingered that something irrevocably bad had been done there, and that they were all to blame. And the purple skies, and the black claw-marks, and the mutant children were all their punishment.
She didn't deserve to punished. Her little girl was normal, as far as kids go. So put on a pair of sunglasses and a big-ass floppy hat and put her in pigtails.
It made her sick, staring at the sky. As if she needed any more confirmation that idiots ruled the earth and the sensible were doomed to die, transfixed by their own superiority. She felt a headache coming on, which she supposed meant they hadn't all been caused by her husband. Ex-husband. There was a word that tasted bitter and hot and gloriously all her own. More than the damn coffee, which cooled quickly in this wind.
Her little girl’s sharp giggle caught her attention like a klaxon, but she didn't take her hand from her temple immediately. God, she loved children – loved her child – but all the attendant features drove her crazy: the child-like laugh, the sheer exuberance and naiveté. Piercing loud and little shrieks, and she knew she was supposed to dote on her little girl's innocence, but, God!, when would she grow up and get–
Strange jerking movements and a burbling noise at the tree cut off her thought with mild parental panic, but her daughter wasn't hurt. Apparently her little girl had cornered her imaginary quarry. She threw out her chubby little arms, pigtails flared like painters' brushes, fingers stretched back, unnaturally limber, sharp laugh a victory song...
Then the old oak was burning, burst into white-hot flame ringed with flickering leaves of orange. Its tall trunk consumed, melted into char, a blackened finger pointing at the sky in a matter of moments, broad leaves dropping like glittered confetti on a New Orleans street. They blew across her vision in the dark-storm winds and disappeared into cottony ash like the black in sky, caught and shaped by tendrils of wind, before touching the ground in spots of withered gray.
She stood and watched, too fixed with horror to act.
Her little girl laughed, pigtails whipping from the hot blast of combustion.
“Got you.”