by Rob Shepherd
It stopped abruptly, choked off.
Annamarie looked around in the glare from the overhead light. “Who said that?” she asked in a voice that was growing weak with blood loss.
She looked at the bloodstained bed, the bloody finger marks clawed into the wall. In the gray mirror, she saw a baby, newborn, bloody, the cord still attached. It was looking out at her.
Pain ripped through Annamarie’s belly and she had to push or die. She grunted with the effort, bearing down as snippets of buried memory resurfaced. The baby, the baby, her child was coming and she was so alone in this seedy, hotel room.
Pushing, bearing down, writhing in pain, her baby, her daughter was coming into this world. She had escaped her mother to have this child. She was going to be a mommy. She felt excitement and joy filling in all the spaces between the pain. In a few more minutes, she’d be a mommy and free to raise her child as a child should be raised. Not suffocated by archaic and wasteful rules from an age long dead. She and her baby would conquer the world. Live happily ever after.
She swam out of the memory. The baby was staring out at her from the mirror, a baby covered in more than just the blood of birth, this was a broken baby, twisted and dead. “I loved you! I remember I loved you!” Annemarie sobbed to the reflection. “What does this all mean? Why didn’t I remember you? How can a mother forget her child?”
Annamarie writhed with pulsing pain “Why are you doing this to me now, why here, why in the mirror? You said you wanted to met me, but you are a baby.”
Suddenly Annamarie wasn’t Annemarie. Suddenly Angela was there with her, her thoughts in her head. “Not a baby, I’ve spent almost 50 years in this mirror, in this room, in the walls of this building, I made those people call you as they slept in this room. I made them be my voice. I’ve watched the world as it passed through here. I learned about love and hate, love and sex, love and the different types of love. I want my turn. Tonight do you know what tonight is?”
Again Annamarie shook her head in a negative gesture. She squeezed her eyes closed, and the vision of Mama bursting into the room, Mama helping guide the baby free. She was so happy to see Mama, to have help at this momentous event. She even forgot that she had run away, hidden away from her. She hurt, she wanted her mommy and then Mama was there.
She saw Angela freed from her body, breathing in life “Waaaaah-wah-waaaaaaah-wa—”
Then saw Mama strangling her baby with the cord. The little eyes bulging, the life leaving, choking out of her daughter. Annamarie struggled up, the blood hemorrhaging from her. She had to save her baby, her daughter, but she was too weak, too sick. She was going to die too.
“Angela!”
As she fell to a heap on the floor Mama shoved the dead infant up to her face and screamed. “A child of sin has no place in this world.” Then she threw the baby against the wall, the little form shattering the mirror over the dresser.
Annamarie reached out a bloody hand and screamed “Angela!” Then there was nothing to remember, nothing for a very long time while Mama took care of her and helped her to get better, while Mama took away her past, present and future.
Crying, she lay on the floor in that hotel room and wept for a lost and wasted life, two lost and wasted lives.
“Mother…Mommy,” Angela said in her mind, “Today is my birthday. Spend it with me!”
Annamarie struggled to stand. She pulled herself up and stumbled to the mirror. She touched the glass and it was cold, so very, very cold. “Oh my baby,” she sobbed. “Mommy’s here.”
Pain gripped her, a fire running through her body, life flowing out of her onto the floor. She fell forward and shattered the mirror into a thousand dark, silver shards.
***
The light came on and the young couple, teenagers by the look of them, entered room 614. They stared shyly at each other then kissed. A loving kiss, tender yet needy.
The boy took off his shirt and pants and stood there in the shabby room with just his shorts and socks on.
“Come on, Baby.” He murmured. “Your turn.”
She moved to the front of the bed and pealed off her little tee-top. She glanced at herself in the mirror and obviously liked what she saw. Then she let out a little squeaky yelp and shuddered. “Did you see that?”
“See what,” Puzzlement and annoyance tinged with teen-lust colored his voice. “I thought, I thought I saw…”
He walked up to her and hugged her. “Saw what?”
“Nothing,” she said. “Let’s just switch to another room.”
He sighed but didn’t want to lose the night. “All right.”
They dressed quickly and left the room, but just before the door closed the girl looked back at the gray tinged mirror and her eyes met the eyes of the smiling old woman cradling a tiny baby.
Angels in Blue-Black Skies
By Blaise Torrance
Shannon was mildly drunk by the time she picked her daughter up. She had received a phone call mid-afternoon from the school secretary, primly letting her know that Mikaela was being difficult again, and they’d had no choice but to remove her from class.
It was the third time in two weeks. Shannon had burst into hot, frustrated tears in the middle of her kitchen, surrounded by dozens of cupcakes she had been inexpertly frosting for the village fete. Then she had slung the cakes in the bin and knocked back two large glasses of wine, standing right out in the back garden where the neighbours could see. To the left was Lynne who regularly put half a dozen empty wine bottles out in her recycling bin for collection, and to the right was a retired professor who could get through a bottle of whiskey a day.
It wouldn’t stop them talking. Shannon and her family were a source of amusement in the village, the working class couple who thought they had done well for themselves. Thanks to Steve’s building work, they could afford a nice house in a neighbourhood full of doctors and lawyers and professors, but they couldn’t do anything about Steve’s white van, Shannon’s common accent or Mikaela who was loud and coarse and chavvy, plunked conspicuously in the middle of a class full of precocious little Emily’s and Olivia’s and Graces.
Eyes crawled avidly across Shannon’s back. She defiantly gulped down the last of her wine before turning to greet Lynne who was watching over the garden fence, one arm around a fluffy white hen, the other raised hastily in a wave. The wine turned sour in Shannon’s mouth.
She was late for the afternoon school run. Shannon wove between Range Rovers and parked bicycles with straw baskets mounted on the front, up to the playground where the other mothers were gathered. The mothers here all had the lean, elegant look of racehorses with their good bones, toned legs and tousled tawny and gold manes of hair that looked as if they had never seen dye. Nothing like the jocular crowd of mothers at Mikaela’s previous school who showed up in pajamas and baby-spit stained tops, hair scraped up in messy ponytails, love handles spilling out over tracksuit bottoms.
Shannon had adapted. She’d toned down her fake tan until she was a subtle, south-of-France gold rather than Lanzarote brown, swapped her tight jeans for breezy boutique dresses and dyed her highlighted hair a soft chestnut like a spaniel’s gleaming coat, but it was never enough.
Mikaela came barrelling out of the crowd, making a beeline for her mother. Her mouth was set in a sullen line, her eyes as bright and hard as blue marbles and her school bag dragging rebelliously behind her. As usual, she was alone.
“I heard you got sent out of class today,” Shannon said.
Mikaela glowered at her furiously, looking like a miniature teenager. “I ’ate it here,” she said, deliberately stressing the dropped h and letting her voice rise up in a nasal whine. “They’re all knob heads in my class.”
“You’re going to have to try harder, Mikaela,” Shannon said as severely as she could manage, even though she was tipsy and at the end of her tether and only wanted to laugh and agree with her daughter. “Come on.”
They were heading for the gate when one of the mot
hers strode over, elegant and long-legged in faded jeans and a wax jacket. “Hi there,” she said with a dazzling smile, offering a golden hand. “I’m Audrey, Piper’s mother.”
“Shannon,” Shannon said. “Mikaela’s mother, for my sins.”
Audrey only laughed. “Bright, creative children like Mikaela can have such trouble in the school system, don’t you think?” she said, and looked down at the pretty blonde girl by her side. “Piper has the same problem.”
“She’s having a hard time adjusting,” Shannon said vaguely, unsure if Audrey was making fun of them. “It’s hard for her, moving away from all her friends.”
“I was wondering if you had considered the possibility that Mikaela may be an indigo?” Audrey sounded a little tentative.
“A what?”
“An indigo child,” Audrey said. “Not many people have heard of them. They’re unusually sensitive, intelligent children that are often misunderstood or diagnosed with ADHD or conduct disorder. It was one of Mikaela’s paintings that made me wonder. It was a very unusual painting, wasn’t it Piper? Very mature for a girl of Mikaela’s age.”
Piper nodded enthusiastically. Mikaela scowled in response and yanked at Shannon’s hand.
“In fact, we’d like to extend an invitation to a group we run for indigo children,” Audrey continued, absently petting Piper’s blonde hair. “We run it in the village hall, Saturday mornings and Mondays and Wednesdays after school. There’s yoga, crystal therapy, art projects, music, all kinds of activities. I think Mikaela could really benefit from it, and we’d love to have her.”
It was a Monday. Mikaela trailed after her mother in furious silence, her bag scraping behind her all the way to the village hall. There were four other children there. Stroppy little Piper, tearful and snivelling Oliver, bookish Duncan, and wispy Katherine, who in Shannon’s opinion seemed a bit slow, but was tremendously creative according to her mother.
“She writes about angels,” her mother said with great enthusiasm. “All kinds of stories that a child of her age simply couldn’t make up, and she won’t take any credit for it. It’s the angels, she said, who tell her their stories.”
Shannon told Steve all about it later that evening after they had gone to bed.
“Not that I believe in this sort of thing, but it makes you think, doesn’t it?” she said. “There was a little boy, Duncan, who was telling me about how he and Oliver could speak to each other without opening their mouths, straight into each other’s minds. He said the Celestials gave them these powers and that it was the x-gene and humanity was changing for the better. And that one day, he and Oliver were going to be omega-level when they came into their powers.
Steve began howling with laughter so loudly she thought he would wake Mikaela up. Shannon gave him am indignant shove and he fell out of bed, which only made him laugh harder.
“Duncan reads too many comic books,” he said once he had composed himself. His mouth twitched. “He’s got all that from the X-Men, love. He’s just playing pretend like kids do, and those silly women are lapping it all up.”
“Hmm,” Shannon said, a little injured even though she didn’t exactly believe any of it. “Well, it can’t hurt that Mikaela’s making friends with nice girls for once. We’ve already invited Piper and Katherine around for dinner this Friday.”
Steve was still wiping tears of laughter from his eyes. “Better not make soup,” he said. “They’ll bend all the spoons-” and he began to crack up again.
Shannon stuck Mikaela’s picture on the fridge, much to her daughter’s embarrassment. It was a good picture, even though Shannon had always struggled to make the usual token compliments (“What a nice cat! And is this a picture of Mummy? Let’s put it on the fridge for Daddy to see”) about her daughter’s early rainbow-coloured daubings. This was painted entirely in shades of moody blues mixed to make cornflowers and teals and cobalts and navy and everywhere, deep whorls of indigo. “The angels,” Piper had explained authoritatively to Shannon, even though they looked more like butterflies. “Indigo is the colour of intuition and healing energy, you see.”
Piper was a precocious little brat, but Shannon could deal with that. Mikaela’s old friends had smoked and swore and knew too much about sex by the time they were eight years old. They came from broken homes with delinquent brothers and pregnant sisters and stepfathers slumped in front of the TV all day. Her school had been a bleak, hopeless place with jaded teachers who expected nothing from their students. For all she tried to hide her intelligence, Mikaela had a bright, furious mind that quickly turned towards mischief when bored, and when confronted with it, her teachers had only shrugged and suggested Ritalin.
There were no more calls about bad behaviour. Mikaela, who supposedly couldn’t sit still for ten minutes, eagerly went to the village hall after school to paint, compose music, and even lie down and meditate in peaceful silence.
Dinner was a success too, though Shannon had to hastily run to the shops to replace half the ingredients after Katherine’s mother worriedly checked that everything would be organic. “Indigo children are so sensitive to food additives,” she had said earnestly. “Refined sugar too. One of the mothers brought these dreadful lurid-coloured cupcakes to class for her daughter’s birthday and Katherine was just sick for weeks afterwards, no energy at all.”
Dinner was followed by a sleepover a fortnight later.
“They’re suspiciously quiet,” Steve said as they watched television downstairs. There was none of the giggling or slamming doors or loud music that Shannon had expected to hear coming from Mikaela’s room. “Have you checked on them? It would be so difficult explaining to the yummy mummy brigade that Magneto kidnapped all their little darlings at Mikaela’s sleepover.”
Shannon threw a cushion at him. Steve caught it and sniggered to himself. He would tease Mikaela from time to time, asking if she had learned how to levitate yet, but it was all good-natured. He had been vehemently opposed to medicating Mikaela when their last doctor had suggested she might have ADHD, and Shannon had been in agreement. It had unsettled her the way parents swapped stories about side effects at the school gate as they doled out pills to little Levis and Jaydens and Mackenzies.
She went to bed around midnight and paused at Mikaela’s door on the way to her room. No light showed beneath the door, but she could hear a soft, constant whispering. Telling each other secrets maybe, or a sleepover game like Chinese whispers. Did kids still play those kinds of games? Shannon knocked, and the whispers ceased instantly.
She pushed the door open. The girls turned to look at her. They were clustered beneath the open window, their pupils dilated enormously in the darkness.
“Having a good night, girls?” Shannon asked, and shivered and wrapped her arms around herself. It was very cold in Mikaela’s room. The girls didn’t seem to notice.
“It’s been super,” Piper said brightly. “Thank you so much for having us, Mrs. Allwood.”
“What are you up to?” Shannon asked. “I thought I heard whispering.”
“We’re trying to talk to angels,” Katherine piped up. Angels! Shannon stifled a laugh. It was the kind of twee nonsense that Mikaela had grown out of years ago along with ponies and princesses. But secretly, she was glad to see Mikaela act like a little girl again. It had saddened her how suddenly her daughter had rejected anything whimsical or magical in favour of trying to act like a teenager twice her age.
“Well, it’s getting cold in here, don’t you think?” she said and crossed over to the window. “I don’t want you girls catching a chill.”
She leaned out to shut the window. Shannon was used to hazy city nights and it seemed very dark out in the country. The garden below was lost in blue-black shadows and the lawn had the lush texture of ink-soaked velvet. The wind made a soft, constant shhhhh-shhhhh in the treetops, perhaps the source of the whispering she had heard.
Shannon looked up on a whim, wondering if the stars really did look different away from city light
s, and her hands tightened on the windowsill as the world seemed to turn upside down. The stars peppered the skies thickly like shrapnel, so many it made her dizzy to look at them. Looking at those stars gave her a strange vertiginous sensation as if she might fall up into the sky if she let go of the sill.
She pulled her head in and slammed the window shut.
In the morning, Audrey collected the kids and took them to the village hall. Shannon idly tidied the house, then ventured up to Mikaela’s room to clear out the sleepover debris. There wasn’t much. The bottles of Coke and bags of sweets that Shannon had rebelliously bought, refined sugar and artificial colours and all, were untouched. Strange. Mikaela usually couldn’t resist chocolate. Shannon shrugged and went to shut the window. It had been opened again.
As Shannon leaned out, she smelled something thick and sweet and chemical like ozone. Her stomach cramped up as she thought of the girls with their dilated pupils, the window open to perhaps let out smoke or telltale fumes, and her mind went straight to drugs or maybe something a little tamer like solvent abuse, out here in the countryside where kids couldn’t buy pills in the playground.
Shannon searched Mikaela’s room, looking under the mattress and beneath folded clothes and inside DVD cases, and she found her daughter’s hiding place at the back of her wardrobe. No drugs were hidden there though, only a floppy stuffed dog, a stable full of pastel ponies and a bag of cheap plastic jewellery. Shannon sat cross-legged on the bedroom floor examining the toys, remembering Christmases past when money had been tight and she had agonised over each and every present she bought. She was charmed that Mikaela had kept these childhood treasures.