The Girl Who Would Be King(89)

Instead of putting out the fire I kick over the trashcan and spread the fire across the floor. The sprinklers pop on almost instantly. It’s actually great they come on, because I’m feeling a bit dirty and they feel like a nice cleansing rain. I pick Liz up and sling her over my shoulder, her hip jabbing me in the ear. We’re both pretty soaked when we hit the hallway, and I head toward the stairs and go up two flights to the roof.

The sirens are screaming in the street, only a block or so away. I look up at the sky. I’ve been thinking for a while now that I should probably be able to fly; I don’t know why not – I can do almost everything else I’ve ever thought of.

So I close my eyes and concentrate. The sirens are distracting, and Liz is starting to moan a little bit. I set her down carefully and force all of the world away from me and focus. I push down on everything inside of me and then just let it explode up and through me. I shoot into the air so fast it feels like I’ve been shot out of a cannon. I slow down and levitate for a moment, trying to just appreciate the awesomeness of it, looking down on the city and the people-ants below me, as I should have been doing all along. This officially goes on the top of the ‘list of things that are awesome about being me’. I touch back down on the roof and pick Liz up, cradling her like Superman rescuing Lois Lane from a burning building. Though in Superman’s case, I don’t suppose he started the fire. I lift off the ground and point myself northwest, headed for the house in Malibu with my newest asset, the brains of my new operation.



°

“MOM!” I scream, my voice tearing at the sky. I dive into the water and swim frantically, pulling myself through the cold, dark sheets with every ounce of power I have. It’s all I can do to keep my head down so I can swim faster, at each stroke I want to look up and make sure she hasn’t disappeared. When my feet hit the rocky bottom, I scramble up the bank, pulling my wet hair from my eyes to see if she’s there, sure she’ll be gone. But she’s not. She’s still there. Wavering and flickering like a candle, but there. Indisputably there.

I run to the house, the rocks tearing up my feet. At the porch I pull up short, afraid I’ll barrel right through her. She turns to me, ethereal and beautiful, her red hair glowing about her like a halo.

“You’re not ready, darling,” she says as I rush to catch my breath.

“What, Mom, what does that mean?” there are so many things I want to say, so many questions I want to ask, but they’ve all turned into an impenetrable ball of wire in my head and I can’t sort them out.

“It’s my fault. I should have seen it. Found a better way to warn you. It’s coming for you and you’re not ready,” she shakes her head sadly, and she flickers more, becoming almost watery.

“Then, then what can I do to be ready? What’s coming?” I ask. These aren’t the questions I had thought of asking all these years, but they’re what come out regardless. I move forward to touch her even though it’s clear there’s nothing to touch. She shudders back a bit.

“The power. Your dreams. The dreams you used to have, of the storm? It’s coming, you don’t have much time left.”

“So help me,” I say.

“Oh darling, I can’t,” she says and shakes her head. “You have to get there your own way.”

I smash at the porch with my fist, breaking a board into splinters. “Then why are you even here?!” I shout, surprised at the anger in my voice.

“I wanted to see you,” she says simply. And when I look up, to apologize, to tell her that I wanted to see her too, that I’m glad she came, even if it’s in the same riddles and nonsense that has always followed her – she’s gone. As if she was never there. As if I’ve been ranting at an empty porch.

I sit in my wet underwear on the steps, shivering until I’m dry, and then I put my clothes back on and curl up on the porch to sleep, hoping she’ll come back, even if only in my dreams.

But somehow I know she won’t.

In the morning I begin the walk back to the road, and then the slow trek back to my life. By late evening I’m back in Manhattan and the world is a cacophony of noises, both good and bad.



As I walk back home the good is quickly overwhelmed by the bad. I feel the fire powerfully in my chest and I follow it. It’s a strange one this time, feeling more like a slow burn, rather than a flash. I’m not sure what that means, but it’s got me curious. I begin running. The further east I get the fewer people I see until finally I’m down by empty docks I've never seen before. The fire feeling is coming from a warehouse on one of the docks, abandoned and quiet, except if you could assign a picture to the feeling I get when I look at it, it would look like a building engulfed in fire, to an almost cartoonish degree. Flames licking at the sky, smoke pouring into the world in great billowing clouds. But in reality it’s silent and unmoving and I wonder if my super-senses have finally gotten something wrong. Just as I’m about to turn around there’s a sharp clap of metal and a shout from inside. I rush to the doors and fling them open.