ALL THE RAGE (writer: T.M. Frazier)(79)

And the snowflakes, steady as they fall, through that yellow beam below.

You could never count them all. One blink and you’d miss some. One sharp stab of pain that drives your face into the mattress, and you’d miss plenty.

And that’s the point, I suppose. You keep counting. You watch the snow fall, and you count every snowflake your eyes can catch, until it’s finally over.

The darkness wasn’t always there. I was bright and shiny once. There was no tarnish at my edges, no very bad thing that existed inside me. I had a mother, and a boyfriend, and a life, and I was loved. I had plans and goals and aspirations.

One moment and they were all gone.

I know what you’re thinking. You think I went mad when I saw Leo being burned alive, or when I gazed down at my comatose mother in the hospital after, as words like Brain swelling and head—on collision drifted through the air, meant for me but headed somewhere beyond.

Or maybe, maybe, you think it was that first time, on the kitchen floor, a tangle of limbs, mouth pressed to palm, fingers squeezing wrists.

And every time I’d tell you, you were wrong. That, even as I cried in the aftermath of Damon’s sudden interest in me, I still was a girl without a black coal heart.

I can tell you the exact moment the darkness burrowed in to stay. I imagine it like some filthy worm, coming up from the earth, chewing a neat circle in my skin and wriggling in. Finding that hollow space beneath my heart, in my ribcage, and curling up. Sated. Satisfied. Warm. I feel it sometimes, when I’m frightened, and my heart won’t slow down. It beats like mad, like a machine gun with the trigger locked on. I can’t breathe. My vision tunnels. In those moments, I imagine the worm, how happy he must be, how comforted by my fragility.

It’s strange how you know something has happened, even if you can’t remember it.

When you wake up in your bed, and the sheets beneath you are wet, and you haven’t wet the bed since you were little, a three year old girl who started to cry because she’d slept through instead of getting up and going to the bathroom.

Eighteen years old, naked, and laying in a cold, wet spot, damp thighs and a bitter taste on your tongue. The taste of a medication you took once after your dad died and you started having nightmares that kept you awake. The bitter pill that your mother crushed into a glass of milk for you, the one that knocked you under and held you there so that you could still see the nightmares in your sleep, but could no longer wake up from them. It was terrifying, and it’s terrifying now. It’s in your mouth and in your nostrils and down the back of your throat.

You have been drugged.

Somebody has undressed you, tucked you into your bed, and they have left something inside you.

A darkness. A coiled, buzzing midnight that becomes all you’ve ever known.

You don’t like it at first. It frightens you.

The darkness is where nightmares come to life.

But after time goes by, you start to feel differently.

You begin to realise that the darkness you’ve been given is not a burden, but a gift.





CHAPTER TWO




Thanksgiving Eve, 2014

The day of


I’ve never felt rain like the rain we had that night.

It didn’t fall from the sky so much as it drove into the ground, each drop an individual missile that indented the earth and turned firm-packed dirt to mud. It bit at your skin like tiny stinging bullets, if you were stupid – or unlucky – enough to be caught out in the deluge.

It’s imprinted in my mind like it’s still happening now, on a constant loop.

I smell disinfectant as Clare, the owner of the diner where I’m working, wipes spilled beer off the bar.

Truck lights flash past on the interstate, on their way through our tiny town, in and out of Gun Creek in fifteen seconds. We have plenty of customers here, but nobody ever stays longer than a meal and a bathroom stop. The truck stop out front lies empty most nights, the once bustling stop in the road usurped by a fancier one up the highway fifty miles or so, with it’s shiny gas station and fast-flow gasoline pumps and sealed parking lot for the trucks to pull in for the night.

This diner is the most alive part of our town, and it’s dying.

There’s a storm outside tonight, not unusual for this time of year, but the business it’s bought us is incredible. Dana’s Grill is heaving; I can’t remember the last time I had to seat customers at the bar while I cleared off tables. I overheard a couple truck drivers talking about some flooding North, and I’m guessing the shiny rest stop has been cut off by the deluge.

I’m handing change to a table of truck drivers when I hear the sound. It’s dampened by the unrelenting rain, the water almost delaying the shock waves from breaching the diner.

A loud bang. The sickening screech of metal twisting, accordioning in on itself like a can being crushed underfoot. Every head in the diner swivels to look outside, just as a crack of lightning lights up the world in an eerie blue-white flash that lasts but a second.

A bright red car with a black racing stripe down the middle. It’s on it’s roof, skittering down the road with a horrible scraping sound. It hit something, hard. What did it hit? Not a tree. There aren’t any trees on this stretch of highway, save for a few dying lemon trees that somebody planted out the front of Dana’s Grill years ago and left to try and survive in the blistering hot summers and fatally cold winters that make up our little spot in Northern Nevada.