My Own Miraculous: A Short Story by Jackson Joshilyn

Author:Jackson, Joshilyn [Jackson, Joshilyn]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2013-10-28T18:30:00+00:00

Chapter 5

Natty, sacked out in his car seat, was the only thing that kept me from screaming and just screaming and just screaming on and on.

Hilde peeped her big eyes sideways at me and then crooned, “My own! My own miraculous!” and I didn’t know if she meant me, or Natty, or whatever this was that she was doing with the car. Her own miraculous crime?

“What?” I said, because it was the only word I had.

“We are miraculous, me and him,” said Hilde, facing forward and creeping up, up, up, talking faster than the car was going. “Him with me, it will work. This time it will work. You’ll see, you’ll see.” And then she said three words that made all my blood stop running and chill into sludge inside my every vein. She said, “We’re gonna fly.”

Natty was buckled in, or else I would have snatched him and simply opened the door and rolled out and let her go. But I wouldn’t leave my son. I knew what she meant to do. We were going all the way up, to one of the spectacular waterfall views. We were going to drive right over it. She meant for us to Thelma and Louise the whole long way down, spattering ourselves across my very own mountain.

In the faint light from the dashboard she looked over at me and she grinned, wildly delighted, like she expected me to grin back. Like I was her co-conspirator. Grinned! With her good hand and her bandaged one both clenching and unclenching at the Impala’s wheel.

“Hilde,” I said. “My God, Hilde, you can’t drive us—” I stopped. The only possible next words were, off the mountain. I was so scared of the very words, I couldn’t say them out loud.

“Sure, I can,” she said, in an oddly reassuring tone. “I have my learner’s permit. As long as you’re in the car with me, it’s completely legal.”

She kept right on driving, and my heart kept right on pounding, but in my head, where it mattered, all my panic stopped. Click. It just turned off. My body was still full of adrenaline from when I thought that Mimmy’d run over a person, but I was calm inside now and I could think for the first time since I’d seen Mr. Bang go down under the car. I thought, This child has a learner’s permit.

She was crazy, but she was a crazy fifteen-year-old girl. A sick one, with arms as skinny as pipe cleaners. She was six years younger, three inches shorter, thirty-five pounds lighter, and I wasn’t going to fly today.

I unbuckled myself, scooted fast across the long seat, grabbed the keys and turned the Impala’s engine off. We guttered to a stop, and I jammed the gear shift up into park before we could start rolling backward.

“Oh, no! Oh, no!” Hilde said, turning to me with the dismayed eyes of a child who finds its goldfish floating very still at the top of the bowl. “What are you doing?”

“I’m declining to be murdered,” I told her.

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