by Julie Drew
Hope not being the watcher’s strong suit, however, the thought was gone as quickly as it had arrived. The watcher noted the man who sat apart, reading. He looked tired, and—disengaged. If his face had shown a keen interest in his book, some sense in his body language that he was fully participating in the pages he turned every few minutes, the watcher would have felt reassured, but the book seemed a mere prop, a mask, a device meant to act as a buffer between him and—well, everything.
The woman sat on the sofa, her slim legs curled up under her, the light from the lamp on the table next to her casting a soft sheen over her dark, auburn hair. A young boy with bright orange hair and wire-framed glasses sat next to her, reading slowly and painfully aloud from a large book in his lap. He stopped and looked up at the woman, and the watcher saw for the first time the sullen look on his face.
“This is boring,” he said.
“Max, I don’t want to hear any more. You will do your homework. You will bring up your reading scores. There is no excuse for your grades except laziness, and I won’t tolerate it. Now continue.”
The watcher felt a pang of sympathy for the boy but quickly squelched it. Such feelings would only get in the way, making an already unpleasant job even harder. The family must be observed, their behaviors and interactions analyzed dispassionately, and decisions made.
Finally, the watcher turned to the room’s one remaining occupant: the girl with the fiery hair. She seemed to have grown older, matured, the watcher noted, a maturity that was happening rather too quickly, but unavoidably, given recent events. She was becoming increasingly familiar with pain and uncertainty, and a world that was far more difficult and complex than she could have imagined only a few months ago. The watcher sighed. Everyone had to grow up, eventually.
Some, sooner than others.
The redheaded girl sat on the far end of the sofa, her knees bent and arms hugging her legs to her chest. She, too, sat apart—similar to the man, but rather than his quiet disengagement she exhibited an alertness, and a level of anxiety, that the watcher found alarming.
As her differently-colored eyes darted between the man who sat reading in a chair on the other side of the room, the pages of his open book washed in soft white light, his face in shadow, and the woman and boy who sat closer, on the other end of the sofa, the watcher marked the extraordinary contrast between this tableau and others—earlier scenes that had included the same people, but without the woman, of course. She was the crux of this entire problem, and there simply was no good solution. There was bad, and with any luck at all, less bad.
The watcher checked the time, noted the sound of powerful vehicles approaching from the far end of the street, and moved soundlessly away from the window, across the yard to the sidewalk and toward town. The familiar houses were somewhat of a comfort, even knowing that only two blocks away the Reverend Doyle of One God One Truth and a surprising number of his followers had taken up residence. In less time than expected, the watcher heard the sharp knock on the door of the house where the family lived, confirmation that the government had indeed made its move. There was nothing else to hear as the watcher continued down the sidewalk; these kinds of agents did their work in silence, and no one but the watcher even knew that the girl would be taken, that the lives of the family would change drastically, and nothing would be done to stop it. The trajectory they were on would have to play out, regardless of what it would do to them—and despite the fact that not all of them would survive.
THE END
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Julie Drew is Professor of English at The University of Akron in Ohio, where she teaches creative writing, cultural studies, and film. When she and her family are not in Akron, they are in RI, in a delightful little roundhouse in the woods.
Julie’s first novel, Daughter of Providence, was published by Overlook Press in 2011 to enthusiastic reviews, after which she jumped right into The Tesla Effect trilogy. Glimpse and Run will be followed quickly by Breathe.
Learn more about forthcoming books and communicate with the author at www.juliedrew.com.
Ring of Fire Publishing
www.ringoffirebooks.com