Title: Cinders
Part Five: You Missed A Spot
***
Asher’s
stepsisters like to talk. They’re
constantly talking, to their mother or to each other or to themselves. They even talk to him when he’s in the room,
as if something is better than nothing at all, as if their conversations with
their mirrors palls enough after a while that even Asher’s presence is
desirable. Their preference is to
double-team him, to play off of each other’s spiky witticisms and jabs. Asher puts up with this because a) the
satisfaction of mouthing off to them just isn’t worth it, and b) sometimes he
actually learns something worth learning.
He’s been in this place for a week, and it’s slowly but surely driving
him crazy. Asher doesn’t really know
what this place is or why the fuck he’s
here, but if time is passing the same way for Ty that it is for him then he
knows the kid is going crazy. They
fight, it’s an inescapable part of basically living in each other’s pockets,
but he’s never just run away like this.
It’s the longest stretch of time they’ve been apart since Asher found Ty
three years ago, and it feels like he’s missing a limb.
The jerkface
part of Asher kind of wonders how much
Ty is missing him. Like, is he heaving a
few sighs in the morning before getting on with his day, studying and watching
TV and going about his life with just a slightly more hang-dog expression, or
is he breaking down? Is he lying on
Asher’s half of the bed and breathing into his pillow and crying big girly
tears and fucking losing it? Does he
miss Asher so much that he isn’t eating, isn’t making it to class, can’t even
look at all the pretty, hopeful college girls who want to date him because he’s
so sunk in remorse he can barely move?
Asher thinks it’s probably the latter, and he kind of likes that.
Then he kind of
hates himself for feeling that way, because this is Ty, and no matter how much he wants to be that important to the
kid, he doesn’t want him to hurt like that.
In fact, at this point nothing would make Asher happier than for him to
show up again and for no time to have passed, for Ty to be asleep or studying
or still mad at him or anything, just not missing him. Ty has missed enough people in his life;
Asher doesn’t need to be adding to the list.
This is what he’s
thinking about as he cleans out Pinky’s fireplace. Pinky has a name, he just doesn’t care to use
it, and besides it’s something that sounds French and has an accent on the
second syllable that he just knows he’s going to fuck up, even if it’s just in
his head. Pinky usually wears pink, so
it works for her, plus he likes the fact that she has her own theme song in his
mind, the one from the cartoon “Pinky and the Brain.” She seems about as bright as the lanky animated
mouse, but not as funny.
His other
stepsister he calls Envy, not just because green is the color of jealousy and
she wears it a lot, but because she really is a jealous person. She’s smarter than Pinky, thinks she’s
smarter than everyone, and has a dark word and a searching look for absolutely
everything. She followed Asher from her
room into Pinky’s today, and Asher can feel her eyes boring into him as he
works, making sure that Pinky’s fireplace isn’t going to get any cleaner than hers.
No one can have more than Envy.
“You work so
slowly,” Pinky pouts from where she’s spread on a divan, splitting her time in
looking out the window and commenting on everything Asher does. “Honestly, I’ve seen mud-grubbing little
village urchins work faster than you do on your best day.”
“There’s very
little difference between the two,” Envy points out dulcetly. “You missed the back corner, little cinder
boy. You should do it again.”
Asher doesn’t
say anything, just scrapes the bundle of sticks that passes for a brush over
the back of the fireplace. Again. He’s filthy and his back hurts from being
bent over all morning and he hasn’t even gotten to his stepmother’s room yet,
and that’s a whole new level of being looked down upon, but at least she’s mature
enough to prefer ignoring him to talking at him.
They chat about
nonsense, fashions that Asher can’t picture and beauty remedies that involve
egg whites and a lot of patience. He
finishes with the fireplace and gets up, lifts his ever-present bucket and
prepares to get out while the getting’s good.
He’s not fast enough.
“Just a moment.” Pinky stares at him and wrinkles her perfect
nose. “Lord, just looking at you makes
my skin crawl. I think I need a bath
after the experience. Go and heat me
some water, piglet. But clean your hands
before you carry it to my tub. I don’t
want any of your ash falling in and fouling the water.”
“What an
excellent thought, sister,” Envy says, her eyes narrowing in a way that Asher
knows means she wishes she had thought of having a bath first. “I think I’ll have one as well. Go and cut some fresh lavender sprigs to
steep in it. Only put them in once the
water is hot, mind.”
The cauldron in
the kitchen takes four buckets of water to fill. It takes three cauldrons of water to fill one
bathtub, and each sister has her own, behind a painted screen in her room. Their rooms are on the second floor. Not to mention, Cook is undoubtedly working
on lunch at the moment, and the last thing she wants to do is give up the
fireplace for bathwater, so he’ll get to fight with her about that. Asher glares at the women and wishes, for
about the hundredth time, that this place had running water. Life was so much easier when you could just
turn a tap and…
Asher found Cassie in the bathtub. He hadn’t walked home with her that day; he
had been kept late after school for detention, so she had made her way home
alone. It wasn’t the first time Cassie
had done that, so Asher hadn’t been too worried. His brothers were there, and so was his dad,
not that the man was doing anything other than sleeping, probably. He worked an early shift and usually only saw
his kids at the occasional dinner when they were all in the same place at the
same time.
Detention was longer than usual, because
Asher called the teacher watching him a dick when the man wouldn’t let him use
his Gameboy. So he spent two hours in a
stuffy classroom instead of one, and another half an hour getting back home. It was a Monday, so when he got in he walked
to the living room and fully expected to see Cassie in her red and blue swimsuit
watching The Little Mermaid with the fishbowl sitting on the table.
The movie was playing, but it was the very
end, where a gigantic Ursula was flinging lightning bolts around and about to
be run through with a ship. Asher knew
this was his sister’s least favorite part of the movie, it always made her a
little scared. Maybe that was why she
wasn’t here for it. “Cassie?” he called
out, putting his backpack on the floor. “Cassie?” No answer.
He walked down the hall and checked her bedroom. Her school clothes were in a heap on the
floor, but there was no Cassie.
Howard and Kyle were in the rec room,
leaning against the couch and playing Grand Theft Auto 2. They didn’t even look over when he came
in. “Where’s Cassie?”
“No clue,” Kyle said distractedly, running
over a prostitute with his car.
“But she didn’t leave or anything, right?”
“Dude, I don’t fucking know, you’re her
babysitter. Get the gun, get the gun!”
he yelled at Howard. Asher turned and
left them alone, going back to the living room with a strange, heavy feeling in
his chest. He looked around. There were a few wet spots on the carpet, a
little darker than the other stains, so probably fresh. Cassie couldn’t carry the fishbowl very well,
it was still a little big for her, but it wasn’t in its usual place so she must
have taken it with her, sloshing all the way.
Asher followed the splashes to the bathroom door.
“Cassie?” he said, knocking on the closed
door. “Are you in here?” There was no answer. “Cassie, c’mon.” He turned the handle and went inside. A few feet into the room, Asher froze. He knew it was the wrong thing to do, knew he
should be moving, but he couldn’t help it.
The fishbowl was sitting on the toilet seat,
half-empty. The gravel and miniature
castle were all lumped on one side, like the bowl had been tilted. Poured out.
The bathtub was full to the brim, with a ring of water spread across the
tile almost as far as the sink. The
water was pink, not clear. Pink. Cassie was there, in her red and blue bathing
suit, face down in the water. Her head
was bleeding. The cut was as long as
Asher’s index finger, but she was bleeding very slowly.
Asher broke out of his paralysis and ran to
the tub. He must have made some kind of
noise, something loud, because by the time he had pulled Cassie out of the
water his brothers were there, and his dad was right behind them, rubbing at
his sleep-crusted eyes and shoving past the boys. Kyle turned pale and puked on the carpet and
Howard looked like he wanted to do the same, but Asher didn’t care. He was holding onto Cassie and she wasn’t
moving, her eyes were open but she wasn’t moving, she wasn’t breathing…
His father shoved him back. “Call 911!” he yelled at Asher, pulling
Cassie into his own arms. Taking her
away from Asher. Asher reached for her
again, but then his dad hit him across the face, hard. The shock of it made tears spring to his
eyes. His father had never hit him
before that day. “Go get the goddamn
phone and call 911!” he snarled.
Asher had gotten to his feet, moved past his
useless brothers, even more useless and frozen than he was, and went and called
911.
“Are you utterly
useless?”
The shrill voice
breaks through the memory, pulling Asher out of that other place and back to
where he is now, which is to say, in the company of two shrieking harpies.
“Can’t you even
follow the simplest instructions?” Envy demands. “Or is the task we’ve given you too complex
for a little piglet? I told you—”
“A royal
carriage!” Pinky breaks in, sitting up abruptly and leaning out the window. Envy turns at once to her sister and Asher
takes a second to get his head right.
Baths. Right. No running water, no problem. He should be leaving, but the way his
stepsisters are acting is totally out of characteristic for them. That is to say, they’re flustered as hell.
“Is it coming
this way?” Envy asks, brushing a few strands of hair back from her face.
“No,” Pinky
reports with disappointment. “It’s going
on—wait! A rider is breaking off! He bears the prince’s standard! Sister, we must get downstairs at once!”
Asher presses
back against the wall as the two tumble past him in a frenzy, checking each
other for assurance of their beauty even as they rush towards the stairs. He puts his bucket down and goes over to the
window, watching as the rider draws close.
The horse moves like the wind, as idyllically far from normal as
everything seems to be here, but the rider has no problem staying on the thing’s
back. He’s carrying some sort of flag,
quartered with fleur-de-lis and stylized dolphins opposite each other. Asher has no idea what that means, but this
is the most interesting thing that’s happened here since he arrived and he
craves a distraction, anything to reroute his brain after thinking about
Cassie. He grabs up his stuff and heads
downstairs, ready to find out more about what’s going on.
