Page 8 of The Quiet
Samual didn’t rush, perhaps more for her sake than his own. “Embolisms rupture realities. You experienced this?”
“Yes.”
“Can you describe it?”
“Droplets in the air that I guess used to be leaves, melted earth dripping off the tree branches, shards of air lodged into the ground,” Ella said mechanically as if providing a traditional report, a step away from any feeling as if it lingered like a cliff beside her. “Deeper than a normal mutation,” she added, avoiding any description of what had happened to the human bodies.
“It was like everything bled together into a bowl, and not everything was able to separate itself to come back out again,” Samual replied.
“Sure,” Ella said, grateful at Samual’s simplistic explanation when she didn’t want to relive the worst of it.
“You came out of the embolism mostly intact. You’re a walking miracle.” Samual didn’t seem surprised by her brashness in neglecting to visit a doctor, nor did he seem worried. “When everything mutated for that moment, when it was broken down and mixed together, do you remember what you felt?”
Ella swallowed, reluctantly revisiting the scene as she rubbed her hands together. “No.”
“Don’t judge it with your mind. What do you feel like happened? You remember Listening, don’t you?”
They’d sit in the woods with their eyes closed, just feeling things around and inside, naming them off like a game. It was a basic Listener practice, and it seemed so childish now, but yes, she remembered.
Ella felt ridiculous considering his instructions, and more so that she knew exactly what she’d say. “I don’t know. Fear. Just so much fear and loneliness. I felt like I was drowning in it, in an ocean of it, and I couldn’t see the shore. I thought I was going to die. I felt so out of control.”
Samual didn’t rush her. “Your entire life flashed before you as you died, didn’t it? All of your memories, even those you’d forgotten, were laid bare, even if just for an instant,” he said, “what else?”
“I feel like a part of my mind is still trapped in it.”
“In what?”
“In one of those memories, like something grabbed me and won’t let go,” she said, rubbing her head as if the words themselves brought on a painful headache. She vaguely remembered sitting at a white table, but like emerging from a fuzzy dream, that was all. Her entire body hurt, Ella unable to distinguish the pain of grief from any side effects of the embolism.
“Maybe something did grab you as you walked through your memories.” He gave her that open look as if he wasn’t intent on any real conclusions. She was frustrated by it. She wanted to wrestle the feeling and wring meaning from it, twist it in her hands until it showed its usefulness.
“You know why Amnesiac’s take Amnesia?” Samual asked, but then explained it anyway as if eager to remind her. “There’s a Listener belief that meditating on the past takes us there, and powerful Strike, in their defiance of the natural world, can see us when we time travel like this. When we look at the past, at a memory of them, they can look right back at us.”
Samual fell silent, and she traced the direction of his thinking,
The anger must have shown on her face, because Samual finished his thought as if she were already arguing. “You said something grabbed you.”
“Unbelievable.” She marched from the kitchen, dodging past the furniture, ready to leave. “I thought you were above it all, but I guess I was wrong! You’ve been alone out here too long!”
Samual followed her, as if startled by such a dramatic change in her mood. An unusual urgency in his voice unnerved her. She could tell some kind of proclamation was coming that she wouldn’t like.
“Something had to have saved you!” Samual said, “Something from your past that had the ability to reach out to you. Something Amnesia caused you to forget!”
Ella burst through the door, taking snap steps down the stairs as Samual fumbled after her.
“I’m sick and tired of this!” she shouted back but didn’t slow down, “Strike have been dead for over a hundred years! That’s not speculation, that’s history!”
“You can’t deny the mystery in this world. You can’t deny fate.”
Ella turned like the flip of a knife, looking up at Samual who waited in the doorway with a deep expression of hurt she didn’t understand.
“Fate denied me first!” she shouted. “All of these ghost stories! Using Strike and Spirits to spread fear and control people! I’m sick and tired of it! People make monsters out of nothing! They’re turning us,” she teared up, “they’re turning my team into monsters! We hunted monsters! We saved people from monsters! You—you see spiritual messages in—in,” she threw her hand out, “used tea leaves, and burning wood, and you pray to stone figures and paintings that never talk back but you can’t see people—real people when you look at them. You can’t look at people’s suffering without seeing something disgusting and I–,” she choked for a breath, wrestling one into her lungs between sobs, “I can’t believe Crow would do this to us. We saw each other.”
She pushed her hands out as if throwing a picture forward that she wished he and everyone else could see. “What my team had wasn’t because of the Spirits or fate. We built it. It was ours–not part of anyone else’s plan! It was a family. We loved each other!”
Samual didn’t say anything else, and Ella wiped her face, rarely given to tears. She gasped for air and calmed down, leaving nothing but stillness inside as the words she’d wanted to say finally escaped, leveraged against someone she loved.
“I’m sorry,” Ella said, unwrapping the reins of her horse from the tree limb. “I’m tired. I’m tired of seeing things break, broken people and things.” She buried her stained nail beds in her fists, unable to completely hide the subtle marks of the blood she’d furiously scrubbed. “I’ve always tried to build a livable world, but all I have are these hands and my entire life has still been just too little to spend on helping anyone else. So much effort and for what? The world is still just as broken, and now I’m alone in it.”
