Twice Lived by Joma West

Author:Joma West
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tor Publishing Group

* * *

What do you say to your kid when you hear something like that? Georgia wonders. What can I do? She takes Canna’s arm, keeps her mouth shut, walks. This is all I can do. It’s really up to her.

‘I’d swap places with you if I could,’ Georgia whispers. Canna says nothing, but she squeezes her hand in response. Georgia thinks she knows what that means. They walk home.

* * *

The flat seemed hot when Canna got in. She opened all the windows. The attic windows were hard to hang out of, so she climbed up on her bed so she could push her head out into the air. She had forgotten what that view was like. She had forgotten. Or Lily had pushed the memory away, asserting herself in their body. Canna shook her head. She was pretty sure it wasn’t working like that. She had just forgotten the view because she hadn’t done this in a while. She ducked down, back into the room, and grabbed her sketchbook and a pen. A second later she was swinging up through the window like a monkey. A sudden flash of a tree, Aidha’s laugh, green fields … Then the city resolved itself in front of her again.

‘Fuck you, Lily,’ Canna muttered to herself. She settled on the edge of her window, perched on the slant of the roof, and she set her sketchbook on her knees and began to draw. The image flowed naturally, the cityscape before her, but on the rooftop ahead, a figure, Canna, dressed to kill and one target in mind. She drew a speech bubble.

You will never win, comic Canna said.

‘You won’t win,’ real Canna said. She worked on the details of the drawing, filling in every inch of space, and when she was finished the day was darkening. Looking at the drawing, she thought perhaps she had found the composition for that art competition. She could recreate it but on a larger scale. It seemed kind of funny to enter a competition with a piece called You Will Never Win. And maybe she would win it. After all, she was a pretty good artist.

Canna dropped her work back into her room and then jumped down onto her bed and closed the window behind her. She walked into the living room and Georgia looked up at her nervously from where she sat on the sofa.

‘You okay?’ she asked.

‘I think so,’ Canna said. ‘I mean, there aren’t a whole lot of options open right now, so I just have to follow the path laid out, right? I’ll get in touch with the people on that list. See what they say about settling. I want to settle here, George. I really want to stay.’ She looked at her mother and she smiled. ‘I will stay,’ she said.

Georgia couldn’t quite wipe the nervous look off her face, but she smiled too.

‘You will,’ she said, as firmly as she could.

‘Now. How’s about we go and do something? I’m thinking maybe we can give Luca a call and descend upon her family.

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