Weekly Writing – January 28 2023

What if I told you what a goddamn relief it was to think I might just be crazy?
When no one else notices something horrible, that’s the most comforting thing you can hope for, isn’t it? Like a different version of hoping it’s all a dream, for when you know damn well you’re awake. If you’re just crazy, if it’s not real, then you just have to ignore it.
But when other people start turning their heads to look at it, when it gets too bad to ignore, then you have to face the fact it’s not just horrible and real – you’re a shiftless idiot on top of that, for letting it go on as long as it has.
Little Kelly. It was obvious to me from the start, at least, that she had the sort of awful burning spark that gets kids taken away. The air around her felt like static electricity, that zap field waiting to explode as soon as it touches metal or skin. She was a month old when I found her mobile spinning above the crib, no batteries or anything to turn it – just her baby blue eyes fixed on it, little hands grasping, much too sure of what she saw and what she wanted for such a chubby little grub. Too sure of what she could move.
I tried to bring it up with her mother. Got a blank look in return. I thought maybe she – Mabel, we’ve been close since she was acing classes and I was bumming cigarettes in high school – might be just ignoring it herself, trying to hide from what it meant. Her first baby, and she wasn’t going to get to keep her. Not once she started lifting the cars on Main Street with her mind and spinning them around like a mobile, the way her bright baby grin said she couldn’t wait to do.
But the more I pressed, the clearest it became that Mabel just plain didn’t notice. Even when I showed her, when the stuffed animals all lined up on Kelly’s shelf were sparking with static and the biggest of them, the bunny, was kicking its legs. She started looking at me like I was crazy.
So maybe I was, I thought. I hoped. If I was, I wasn’t going to take it out on my oldest friend and her new baby. I kept my mouth shut, even as the weirdness grew with Kelly.
I thought of talking to Kelly about it, once she was old enough for words, then school, then old enough to only sulk a little when her mom got pregnant again. But the hell of it was, when doors with no fancy motion sensors opened for her, when her old bunny disappeared and a grey rabbit with legs too long started hopping around the yard, when she didn’t even need the pedals to make her bike go faster than the cars on the interstate and never got so much as a scrape for it, even she didn’t seem to notice.
So I had to be crazy, didn’t I? A kid couldn’t have that much of a spark, a blaze, hell, a goddamn nuclear explosion, and not know it. How would that even work? Could she be making everyone ignore it, even herself?
But not me? Why not me?
Then Sandra was born, and she didn’t make the air pop and crackle, but she could shudder her toys just a little, and Mabel went wild. With pride, I think, but also fear, mostly fear, because now she saw that one of her babies had a spark, and she wasn’t going to let the feds take little Sandra away.
Everything, her whole life, became about hiding Sandra. And of course that meant Kelly faded into the background a little, even more so than a kid with a new baby sibling usually would. She kept going to her classes, acing them, like her mother, and working her magic without ever seeming to realize it herself.
Was it that she couldn’t crack me somehow, couldn’t make me forget? Did I have a spark, too, but not a spark so as anyone would ever notice, but a coal? Too dead and burnt for her spark to light it?
I cried when she graduated. I’m man enough to admit it. I was so proud of her, and scared for her, and I was the only one there for her, since Sandra had started throwing little table-shaking tantrums and Mabel was afraid to take her out in public.
She tried so hard to hide that little spark. But the feds still came sniffing around in the end, the way they do. Kelly was about a month from going away to university, so Mabel asked, tears in her voice on the phone, if her first baby could come stay with me for a little while. Keep her out of the way of the dark suits lurking around town, keep her from getting caught up in a mess that had nothing to do with her.
Nothing to do with her! I watched Kelly, not so little anymore but always little to me, grow roses out of apple trees because that was where she wanted them. She was more than any of us had ever been told to be afraid of, and she came into my trailer looking like a rain cloud about to decide to have lightning.
I set her up in the little spare room. Barely more than a closet, and offered her a beer, hoping to cheer her up by reminding her she was old enough for it now. But she still stewed through the evening, and, I’ll admit, I was scared of her for the first time.
I could feel it all around the trailer. Having her there while her mom and little sister were in danger somewhere else was like being in the middle of that static field. I saw her dreams that night, I think, and I hoped to god we wouldn’t wake up to hear the feds had made an arrest.
We did. It’s been raining outside for about two hours now.
Red drops against the windows. Seems it’s worse downtown. Kelly is pacing in the kitchen, the biggest place for it, her fists balled up and her hair floating with static. On the TV, the reporters are drenched red, trying to figure out what to make of it.
They’re all seeing it now. The streets are getting deeper. The gutters are moaning, and they’re all seeing what Kelly can do now, but they still don’t know it, Kelly doesn’t know it, her mother and baby sister in a black van somewhere don’t.
Only I do. I don’t know what she plans to do to the feds, to all of us, for taking her sister. I don’t think even she knows.
But the clouds are getting thicker, and I think we’re all about to find out.