Childhood is a darkness illumed by flickerlight, a void of memory sparked into remembrance as by the soft passing of fireflies over black velvet, lightening like sparks—
There was a house.
Yes.
There was I.
And mother and father and the dog named Justiciar, whose fur was the colour of ash.
There was the living room with the big window through which the morning sunlight flooded, and the kitchen where mother often wept, and father’s study, where he sat and read and brooded, his swollen hands submerged in bowls of ice; and the passing of time was measured in the silent thaw of ice to water, and I brought the towel for father to dry his hands, and I brought the towel for mother to clean her face, and I saw blood and I saw blood.
At night there was my room.
I, in it.
Each dusk was an erasure of the day that’d passed and all contained within it, and as I sat upon the bed I dared not shut the door, for what if it would never open again, trapping me inside forever, wrapped unmummified in cotton sheets, entombed still-living in this house of brick and pain?
Out the door I would see the hallway wall, and ritually stare at it with my headphones on, music playing, day-dreaming as, in time, the space between the hall and doorframe flattened, and the boundary disappeared, leaving me alone in an uncertain nothingness, pregnant with dread, whose illusory peace was most often broken only by the light which seeped into the hall from below the door beside my own, the door to mother and father’s bedroom.
But whenever that door opened—
Light, (Flash of), thunderous and blinding, their silhouettes projected, if but momentarily, upon the wall: father, looming, entering; mother, insignificant and broken, and I pulled the sheets higher and turned the volume up until the music hurt my head and my skull shook like a can of paint and my skin threatened to peel from my face, the pale whiteness of its flesh set to unveil the yellowed whiteness of its bone, under both of which: the destructure of a black core throbbing to the rhythm of each imagined
Thud.
Sometimes after the final flash of light, I rose from bed and looked out my window, into the back garden, where although I did not see I knew my mother sometimes went, and once or twice I caught—like the subtle sting of a syringe—sight of the glowing end of a cigarette, slight and trembling and twinkling like a star, before burning out once and for all. Like even the sun must. Like we all must, one day.
Then morning.
Perhaps after sleep; perhaps not.
Mother in the kitchen, crying. Father in his study icing his hands.
We did not speak. Or think
about it, because how could anyone comprehend the brilliance of the morning light, streaming in through the big bay window, against the flat, opaque backdrop of the recurring nightmare. If one, not the other. And sitting in the brightness of the living room I knew it was true and therefore the other false, the mere lingering of a dream I had because I was possessed of a sick mind, “a degenerate mind,” as Crown counsel would later describe it, saying it not to me but to the jury, none of whom ever looked me in the eye lest, apparently, I infect them with my degeneracy.
The justice system became my second home.
Its corridors were endless.
Traversed by lawyers and judges and people patiently pacing, waiting, day after day, to be admitted to the Law. I lived among them. Although like the gods they carefully guarded their sacred flame, not allowing me access to anything flammable, “after what [I] had done,” (“…burnt, and the widower father charred to a black corpse that turned to dust when touched by forensics.”), they left me otherwise alone.
My cell was spare, with a bed, toilet and desk, and I showered in a communal shower that smelled of bleach. The courthouse itself smelled overwhelmingly of wood and rot. The judges, who never hurried, reminded me of burrowing worms capped with powdered wigs. The lawyers were slivers, dangerous fragments of an organic substance whose living source had long ago died. To be avoided.
“You sure you don’t want a counsel representing you, miss? Most judges do pref—”
“No,” I said.
The other accused ignored me for the most part, either frothing with a fulsome anger at the world or lost in inverted explorations of their meandering selves, but there was one incident I must mention because it was the second time I channeled lightning. The man had come upon me in the shower and before I could scream had pressed a calloused hand against my mouth and pushed me down to the tiled floor, pinning my body with his. I’d closed my eyes and he was about to do it to me when he spat, “Open yore eyes! Open yore eyes and looka-me, bitch!” and like before—like that day, like in my father’s house—I felt the light creeping through my veins, and when I did as I’d been told, opening my eyes: became orbs of pure illumination whose rays like fire-snakes did blind him.
With melted eyes dripping through fingers pressed tight against his face he receded, screeching as he went, and the only time I saw him after that he wore patches over his hollow sockets, and his face was brown and gnarled as tree bark.
On the day my trial ended and the verdict was read, I remember thinking all the people in the courtroom had giant, inflated heads that could detach from their necks and become planets orbiting a central star called Justice. Oh, how they worshipped their legalistic interpretation of this burning mass. Their tests and jurisprudence, their precedents and first principles. Round and round their severed heads travelled, bloated and self-sure in their codified belief that they had taken the chaos of life and rendered it mechanical, yet universally unaware that by doing so it was their own natures they had undone. From the clay of humanity, automatons. Willingly, they had given up their supernatures, their divine connection to the light. “Your honour,” spoke the head of the jury, “we have reached a verdict. We find the girl—my apologies, your honour. We find the accused guilty of the murder of one Artholomew Powell, her father…”
Mother’s light extinguished by her own hand resting in eternal stillness.
“…of setting deliberate fire to his house.”
I submerged my face in the icy water, and felt for the first time the illumination course within me. Come to life, light.
“We recommend,” spoke the head of the jury, “as punishment for the aforementioned crimes, the penalty of—”
My father’s house, its glowing walls
and courthouse halls in dazzling flame, as the observers from the public gallery crawl choking towards exits that they will never reach, the Crown counsel is a wailing torch, the jury members vomit burning innards unto each other as they drown in their own liquefactions, and the judge is a fat, blubbering candle in a puddle of once-human lard.
“death.”
I channel lightning.
For the third time in my life I channel lightning, but for the first time I do it with control.
Childhood is a darkness illumed by flickerlight, a void of memory sparked into remembrance as by the soft passing of fireflies over black velvet, lightening like sparks, which shall set fire to the suffocating material of the present and against which my future shall burn evermore brightly.