Page 55 of A Slipper in the Smoke
Elena flinched. She didn’t want to talk about her, but she couldn’t form the words to tell him that.
“—Is she always like that?”
Elena wanted to argue, wanted to disagree, to excuse the behaviour, to findsomethingnice to say about her, something good. It was why she hadn’t wanted him to come back, hadn’t wanted him to see what her stepmother was like, how they lived, how she let her treat her…
But in the end, she could only nod.
“Elena…”
“It isn’t forever,” she said quickly. “Only until I save up enough money. Don’t tell me to just leave. Ican’t.I’ve got nowhere to go. Not yet. But I will. Just a bit longer, just a bit longer…”
Pip sighed, looking grey and aged, like there were a thousand things he wanted to do or say butcouldn’t.How could he? There was nothing he could do. There was nothing anyone could do.
Except her. She could hang on just a little longer.
Pip’s hand had not yet left her back. “I want to help you,” he said eventually.
You can’t. No one can.
You are, you are, you are…
Elena raised her head off her desk. It didn’t feel right, to be vertical. Her brain felt like it was a cannonball, rolling off her neck.
“Pip…”
He cupped her cheek. “Yes?”
“I don’t… I don’t feel right…”
It was her last conscious thought before she pitched forward into his arms.
The room was spinning, and someone was screaming. There were people in the room, people and faces she didn’t recognise, horrible, hooded beaks…
The dread doctors, with their scanners and their machines, things beeping all around her.
She tried to move, to speak, but she couldn’t. Her limbs felt like lead.
“It’s not the coal sickness!” a voice screamed.
Pip.
She wanted to clutch at his voice, hold onto it like rain after a drought, but it slipped through her fingers.
Other voices were talking, other people. Someone in a white coat, and a person in grey council robes. There was movement, walls blurring around her. More shouting, hushed discussions.
In and out, she faded, bobbing on consciousness like water.
She drowned in dreams.
Home in Navarra, in the barn with her machines. Bronze horses nudged her cheeks. Her father smiled. Farmhands laughed. Her mother pushed her on a swing.
She skipped through meadows with her friends’ hands in hers. Silken locks slipped through her fingers as she braided their hair. Ribbons and lace swirled through the air like butterflies.
Storm clouds rolled in. The fields turned grey. Her friends vanished.
She stood beside a tree, and fell down at her mother’s grave. She traced the letters on the stone like it could pull her mother back to her, knit a little piece of her onto her soul.
But the stone was cold, and so was her mother.
