Wannabe

The attic was cold, but cold was better than the piercing heat of angry handprints littered across mottled skin. The sister and brother sat hunched over, bony knees folded into their hollow rib cages like origami. 

Despite its cramped mustiness, the attic was really the only place they had in the Thing’s house. And, of course, the few picture frames of their deceased mother that sagged along the walls, if those counted for anything. And, the sister’s astronomy book.

The sister reached for the book, which smelled of stale air and plastic. She thumbed through the pages, but the spine automatically collapsed to the right one, dozens of visits to the same page having trained it to bend that way naturally. She cleared her throat excessively. “A supernova is the extremely bright, cataclysmic explosion of a massive star at the end of its life,” she read, the spider fingers on her hands bursting outwards on the word “explosion.”

“Doesn’t that sound awesome?” She marveled, peering at her little brother over the top edge of the book.

His gaze bored deep into her, googly eyes blinking blankly. He watched the slight glitter of the starlight cast from the window reflect onto her irises. It seemed unfitting, even pretentious, for her to dream of such things. Even though the celestial light illuminated the aspiration in her eyes, it just as clearly exposed the bluish tinge of the bruises that riddled their gangly bodies.

“I bet Mom was just like a supernova,” she sighed with a fond pride, despite having no memory of her mother.

“I don’t think so,” he whispered back.

“What do you mean?”

“I remember her. She wasn’t like that.”

“Then what was she like?”

He pondered for a second, then receded his head into his folded arms as if to shield himself from unwanted memories.

“I think she was scared,” he said.

The sister frowned. It wasn’t fair that she was the older one, yet had no recollection of their mother. Perhaps she too had tucked her head into her arms long ago.

“She wasn’t scared,” she retorted. “She fought it. Remember? She died fighting it.”

Her brother stayed silent. She continued. 

“I want to be just like her,” she declared, her voice heavy with reverence.

“You’ll never be like her,” he replied.

“Why not?” she questioned, eyebrows furrowing into uneven creases.

“Because you want to be like her,” he explained.

Her eyes widened, swirling with shock as he locked eyes with her, his stare digging. The sky grew heavy with clouds, blocking the starlight that had been shining in her eyes a moment ago. For a flash, her eyes were black. Black and real.

Her face pulled back into a strained grin. She started giggling in sharp, gasping hiccups. If he couldn’t see her, he would have thought she was crying. She reached over to him, ruffling his feathery hair aggressively.

* * *

Her supernova would happen that evening. 

She waited for the Thing to fall into its typical hibernation after 3 PM drinks, then crept out to the shed. An array of axes hung on the back wall. She tiptoed, reaching both skeletal arms to reach one. It was just big enough for her to strike it with a bang. And just small enough for her to go out with a bang.

She tried lifting it off the hook, but it came down with a thud, her frail figure lacking the strength to support it properly. She held it by the handle, dragging the head in the ashy dirt as she trudged back to the house. 

She stood in the hallway that turned into the kitchen, rigid arms concealing the ax behind her back. Adrenaline flooded with each accelerating heartbeat that echoed in her ears as she slowly craned her head around the corner to look at the Thing. 

Or the Man. Or was it once the Father? Fa-ther. The word tasted bitter and foreign on her tongue. 

Father. Had she ever known such a person?

She stared into its void eyes. They were dull and half-lidded for now, but when set off, they were ignited with a smoldering, frenzied red. She took in the Thing’s dark, looming figure that draped over the table. Its head lay flat, surrounded by half empty bottles, one of its choice weapons.

It hadn’t noticed her yet. She swallowed a deep breath. And she smiled. 

She began screaming before she even started running, a pitiful battle cry before the charge. Stumbling forward, the ax was too heavy to lift overhead, so she dragged it on the floor behind her. Reaching the Thing, she plunged the ax into its thigh, unable to swing it any higher. 

The blow was just enough to spark the red in his eyes. Just enough to turn her into the martyr she longed to be.

One cold hand tightened around her throat, but she kept screaming. The astronomy book had said that the supernova’s explosion would be loud too, right? The Thing’s wrangled claws scraped into her skin, but all she hoped was that the blood that poured out would be the same intense scarlet of the stardust she saw in the book’s photos. 

Slowly, her screams faded, and her body went loose, like a marionette whose strings had been cut. The ax slipped from her limp hands. It was time to be exalted, she thought, a hero just like her mother—

A high-pitched grating shriek pierced the room, interrupting her star-kissed dreams of glory. Across the room was her brother, each second of his incessant wail crushing her supernova and sending the stardust plummeting down to earth. 

The Thing dropped her, each lunge he took towards her little brother rumbling through the floor and rattling her with seizures of terror like the coward she pretended not to be.

The Thing’s kicks crashed into his delicate frame with an erratic tempo. With each blow, the Thing bellowed words too loud for her to hear. What she could hear was every thump of its calloused foot into her little brother’s crumpled body. Thump. Thump. Crunch.

After five grueling minutes, her brother lay motionless on the floor. He looked like a crushed bug, limbs jutting out in all the wrong directions.

She dragged her feet over to him, picking up his desecrated, barely alive body and holding it far away from her chest, as though unworthy. She walked over to the storage room and laid him down on the cold concrete, and sat down a few feet away from him. 

“I’m sorry,” she whispered hollowly, eyes fixed on the pregnant clouds that blanketed the sky outside the window. “I thought I was going to win,” she lied.

“You didn’t want to win.” he said, gaze piercing her through his puffy, purple eyes.

“Yeah,” she conceded, voice raw and hushed with the shame of confession.

Outside, droplets of water began to melt away and fall down from the obscuring  clouds.

“Then, what do you want?” the brother asked simply.

Her face contorted, tears spilling uncontrollably, washing layers of deceit and dreams from her eyes, leaving them opaque and untainted by shimmering visions of the supernovas she would never be.

“I want to live,” she whimpered. She pulled her brother into an embrace, and they cried like the little children they were. 

She picked him up, got on her feet, and swung open the storage room door. And she ran down the corridor, and ran through the main door, and ran outside into the rain. 

As she ran into the distance, her brother on her back and cool mud seeping into the cuts on her bare feet, she could feel the blood of her mother surging through her veins.