The Almost Sisters(104)
The air was electric with telephone lines lighting up in crisscross patterns all over the county. The three of us got into my replaced rental car, and we followed Birchie’s story home.
25
It begins with Digby. Digby in the Second South.
Months before my son was born, I’d hoped Digby into being with a pencil. When I’d set him by Violet in the ruined town square, I’d released the name into my art. He belonged there, an avatar of the real boy I couldn’t wait to meet. He started the story in ways that even Violet couldn’t.
Digby doesn’t realize he’s in danger in the opening panel. He leaps through the scant grass on the edge of the park, running along the back side of the square. A few of the shops are visible to his left, and behind him the roof of the brick church rises up into the blackened sky. The steeple is broken, pointing its jagged finger at a shrouded sun.
He is in his shorts and work boots, using a slingshot to hunt a postapocalyptic rabbit monster. It looks like the tattered rabbits that remained around Violet at the end of the old graphic novel, but its katana ears owe a little bit to Kelley Jones’s Batman in Red Rain. Digby is so skinny, so hungry, that his skin is stretched tight over his skull. You can see his swagger, though; his immortal baby braveness is present in the lines of his body as he hunts. There is only one word on that first page, written inside a small white square to show that it is a thought, not dialogue.
Hello.
The view expands. Violet, sheltered by the cemetery’s stone wall, watches him through the wrought-iron gate. She’s wearing camo togs, the pants belted by a frazzled length of rope. Her hair is looped and knotted down her back in six long braids, held off her face by the tattered rag of what used to be her yellow sundress. In this second panel—and in every panel where Digby is seen through Violet’s eyes—his footsteps leave a trail of leafy vines and birds and mice and yearning baby squirrels and unmutated rabbits. His grimy red shirt glows for her.
Violet thinks, A person. A real person, like a living sunbeam in this dark and filthy place.
The view pans out farther: Digby hunting, Violet watching, and slouching shadow shapes that coalesce in the ruined shop windows and listing doorways. My lumpy, stick-armed Lewy bodies have evolved into a pack of postapocalyptic cannibals that Digby calls the Exes. Ex-people, he means. They hunt Digby as he hunts the rabbit.
Violet sees them first.
Like any light in darkness, you attract, she thinks. The Exes are not aware of Violet’s presence. If she warns him, she will give away her own position.
“Hey, kid!” she calls to him anyway. She is no longer that pretty bit of nothing in a sunshine dress. She’s tougher. She has sinned, and she is sorry. “Kid. Behind you.”
Digby’s bravado turns to fear, and he looks back and forth between her and the monstrous Exes. And then he runs. Toward them. As if they are the lesser of two evils, and perhaps they are.
“Oh, poo,” Violet says, but she does not hesitate.
He is running directly into monsters, so Violet leaps after him, snatches him up. She drags him back toward the cemetery, hampered by his struggling. She slams the wrought-iron gate shut behind them, but more Exes are coming in the front gate and streaming out of the church’s back door. Violet and Digby, flanked, are brought to bay with their backs against a crypt. She lets go of Digby. He sidles a few inches away, but there is no place to go. They stand side by side, pressing themselves into the cool stone. Digby has his slingshot out and cocked, ready to go down fighting.
“She’ll come,” Violet tells him.
“Nobody comes,” Digby says, the little pessimist. “Nobody ever comes.”
The Exes sidle closer with their eye bulges shining blind-white, reaching with their ragged-jagged fingers. They sniff at Digby with their high-set, slitted nostrils. They huff the taste of Violet from the air and smile. Their teeth, dripping hungry spittle, are square and blunt and huge.
“She’ll come,” Violet repeats, and Digby takes his eyes off the Exes long enough to shoot her a cynical look.
Then a close-up of his face, his eyes gone wide, surprised. Closer still, and now the whites are visible all around the irises. Violet’s change is seen first this way, in the reflective lens of his innocent gaze.
“Hello, kid,” Violence says, and then she does what Violence does.
I’m proud of the fight scene. It’s some of my best work, the kinetic bodies color-soaked against dark, static backgrounds. Violence is rampant, and Digby backs her, pinging rocks at Exes with his sling. Seeing this, she grins a red-black grin. As she chases off the few surviving Exes, her booted feet smash apart the two dusty skeletons who are lying in each other’s arms in a hollow between two smaller crypts.
She turns again to Digby, and he’s standing with his own feet planted wide, slingshot aimed at her face.
“Oh, kid, what heart,” Violence tells him.
She lets him back away. She lets him run. It is Violet who follows him, watching over him at a distance until she earns his trust enough to get close. It’s not easy. She is blond and blue-eyed, and in this brave new world with its limited resources, the few survivors who are still human have banded into small tribes. Digby’s whole group fell victim to genocide while he was fishing. He came back to find himself thoroughly orphaned, but he could not find his sister’s body in the carnage left behind. He’s looking for her, and Violence-in-Violet goes along; tough as he is, he’s too small to survive alone. Digby will come to love the double woman he calls Vi. He knows that she is beauty and the beast all in one package, just like most of us.