The Magpie's Return by Peter Wright

Author:Peter Wright [Smith, Curtis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Running Wild Press

Kayla’s first night in the pod. Lights out, the other girls talking. Kayla listens. Her map growing. The cigarettes returned, yet the tobacco scent lingers on her pillow. Betty’s tone quieter. A story about her uncle’s house, backyard horseshoes, lightning bugs kept in a jar then released in a sparkling fountain. The sisters impossible to distinguish in the dark, their voices like competing halves of an echo. Heather’s bunk next to Kayla’s. Heather with the least to say, but when she speaks, the others listen.

Silence, the beginning of drift. A reunion with the machine’s stripped pulse. The courtyard lights angle up. The ceiling above Kayla dark, but just beyond, a watery shine. She wonders if she’ll sleep. The thrum of her heart. The bad electricity in her head, the projector waiting to sputter to life. A floorboard squeaks, a scrape of metal on wood. Kayla turns to see Linda pushing her bunk until it rests against her sister’s.

A whisper: “Goodnight, Kayla.”

“Night, Heather.”

Betty’s raspy voice: “Don’t you two ever shut up?”

The sisters, curled in their adjoining beds, laugh.

Kayla slides the necklace from her pocket. She turns, holding herself still as she secures the clasp behind her neck. She lies back, her palm resting over the cross, her eyes open. She grows accustomed to the dark, and the ceiling’s black and white blend into a field of ash. She fights the urge to rock by clenching and releasing her muscles. Arms, legs, chest—the rigidness of seizures, the release of death. She falls inward; her body pushed back, the squeak of grinding molars, pain in her jaw. The demand comes in waves. Minutes apart, then longer. She’s forgotten the feel of hours—these days of running and hiding—but reason tells her a few have passed. Around her, the machine’s purr, the murmur of sleeping breath. She drifts. A surrender, if not to sleep then at least to a floating pool. Her body offered to the ether, to the ceiling’s lake of gray.

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