Burning the Bridges of Madison County

Carol-Anne’s grey, mermaid hair draped over her weathered face as she held me down in my chair. She was comforting yet authoritative, like some kind of militant golden retriever.

She tightened my restraints.

“Easy now. Just a little bit longer.”

Muffled by the Belmont pursed between her lips, her voice was rickety yet steady. She always knew how to keep her shit together, and she’d been training me to do the same for quite some time.

Ash fluttered off the tip of her cigarette like an early November snowfall.

My nails dug into my seat. I was convulsing. The pale blue electricity was cold as it flowed through my veins like a liquified full moon. My body was stiff like a wooden plank. I often thought I might snap right in half, whenever we did this damn ritual.

Through squinted eyes I glared at her, this woman who understood me back when no one else had cared to. “I see myself a lot in you,” she said when she first saw me panhandling on Dyers Avenue. I admit, it was odd when I found myself without a roof over my head because…. I had so much potential. But who gives a fuck? Potential isn’t unique, and it doesn’t mean shit unless you do something about it.

Call me a masochist, but some days, I do miss the soothing clank of loose change dropping against the bottom of my bucket.

Bound to my chair, I threw my head back, biting down on my tongue. I nearly toppled over when—aaaaaaah……my skin started stinging, like a thousand wasps were pricking me like tiny tattoo needles.

It’s almost over.

Carol-Anne took my hand in hers. Our fingers clasped, my muscles began to relax. As my lungs expanded and contracted with more ease, I watched as The Pulse sucked out of me like a vacuum and back into the ether.

I slumped over, my tongue hanging out of my mouth.

“Good girl.” Carol-Anne’s crow’s feet deepened as she looked at me adoringly, that maternal witch.

Carol-Anne had been my sanctuary. She taught me everything she knew about being a Resonant, including how to repress the fact that I was one at all.

“It’s not safe for us out there, especially not for others. You don’t want to hurt others, do you?” Her warnings were both foreboding and wickedly convenient. So long as I feared my own power via her calculations, I’d stay tethered to her.

For a long while, Carol-Anne was the only other Resonant I knew. I used to think we were the only ones like us on Earth—until I learned better. It’s hard to meet like-minded souls when everyone’s running from the torment of who they are.

My perception changed the day I met Malloy.

My whiskey sour shattered in front of me when The Pulse first sparked between us. The electric current ignited like a fuse across the maple bartop, detonating everything in its path.

The bartender caught his breath after the impact. His palm against his chest. “Jesus fucking Christ! The bar— what the hell was that!?”

Finding Malloy’s sincere, mahogany gaze, it was clear we both knew exactly what had just happened. After that moment, he wouldn’t remain a stranger, and Carol-Anne’s safety had felt like a cage ever since.

“Are you out of your God damn mind? Resonants can’t be in relationships, especially with each other!” Her wrist bangles clattered like shackles as she threw her hands up. “All hell could break loose. For you. For him. For everyone!”

My hands clenched in fists as my sides. Carol-Anne treated me like a doll. She’d play with me and dress me up and toss me aside as needed. She adored me, so long as I stayed in the neat and tidy toy box she had so carefully placed me in. Where I saw potential, Carol-Anne saw danger, and is there anything more painful than love tarnished by conditions?

Perhaps the treachery of when my heart first started to awaken. But wow…was it ever glorious, like I was being branded with a hot iron, scalding endorphins right in my aorta.

When Malloy and I were together, it was like trying to contain the sun in a jam jar. We’d try to be inconspicuous over coffee and a six dollar bacon and eggs—I liked mine over easy, while he preferred scrambled—but we were only fooling ourselves.

“Nice day today, huh?” He tilted his beautiful head as the napkin holder inched its way to the middle of the table on its own.

“Yeah.” My cheek burned—a little too much—as he brushed my hair out of my face with his fingers.

“I know it’s October, but maybe we should go to the beach?”

Our mugs started to rattle.

Oh no.

I hesitated.

“Sounds perfect.”

But as we played footsies under the table, The Pulse began shifting the tiles of the checkered floor.

My heart pounded against my chest. The server’s screams were superseded by her coffee pot smashing into a million pieces, right out of her hands. As the diner windows cracked upwards in a serpentine fashion, Malloy ripped me out of the booth by the arm.

“Quick!”

We tripped over our own feet as we bolted out of there. All things considered, I doubt anyone noticed we didn’t pay the bill.

It was sort of poetic in a way, when I turned back for one final look at the place from across the street. The panes morphed into the geometry of a cathedral’s stained glass.

“Rae.” His urgency was pointed.

Crashing plates and horrified screams thundered between my ears as Malloy and I vanished into a wash of peaceful evergreens.

That day was catastrophic, and Carol-Anne had been amping up our ritual ever since.

“You have to be more self-aware than this. All Resonants do!” She strapped me down in my restraints. “Get your shit together, Rae.”

My throat closed shut as The Pulse rushed out of me like metal pellets being pulled by huge magnets.

I gasped in desperation. “Fuck you Carol-Anne. I love him!”

She gripped my shoulders, forcefully, as though she wanted to hurt me. Her anger was painted in regret like pastel venom. “And you better get over it!”

In the weight of what she’d just done, her mouth went agape as she released me. I caught her registering the force of The Pulse within her, her eyes drooping in quiet acknowledgment.

She’d never show it, but I saw that damn tear stream down her cheek as she turned away. She’d been playing this apathetic charade for a long while.

Funny, how it’s a weakness to admit to ever having cared about someone.

Carol-Anne plopped down, her knees wide and her elbow on her thigh. Her hands shook as she struggled to light her cigarette. I knew Patrick’s ghost was looming over her at that moment—it had been for years—and the only thing worse than being followed by the dead, was being haunted by the living.

My breath crackled in my chest as I watched her, slumped over in the glass house of her own making. Her proverbial stones piled high beside her. It was satisfying, how she wasn’t so quick to throw them that day.

Hell, we’ve all thrown a few stones, haven’t we?

Lying in bed one night, I stared up at my white stucco ceiling, its texture rippling like choppy ocean peaks. I was often paralyzed awake like this in the onyx of night, wondering:

What is so fucking dangerous about Malloy and me? Our love, or our withholding of it?

The Pulse had been dictating my desires—strap me in for the ride, baby—as though I were free-falling off a cliff with no say in where I’d crash. A seductive sentiment, really. Why be accountable for my own self-interest when The Pulse is stronger than free will?

The bitter taste of iron hit my tongue as I gnawed the inside of my cheek.

But what if it is stronger?

Acid churned in my stomach like a cyclone. I gritted my teeth and turned onto my side, curling into myself. Through the agony, the right corner of my mouth lifted as the sliver of moon winked at me through the window.

Clarity rained over me as the burning in my guts started to ease off.

Whether or not being with Malloy would destroy everything—more than it already had—was something I was selfishly, madly, desperately willing to find out.

The next morning, I made my way to Carol-Anne’s. A line of crimson seared the horizon. I stopped for a moment, shielding my eyes with the back of my hand. Butterflies twisted in my abdomen. A lump rose in my throat. I could feel it….

Carol-Anne already knew we would never be doing the ritual again.

She didn’t say anything when I first walked in, dragging long and slow on her cigarette as it dwindled in real time. The chair looked so innocent sitting empty, my restraints resting on its arms. I caressed my left wrist.

As Carol-Anne turned towards me, her gaze was steady and unblinking. Her eyes crawled with red capillaries, holding us both on the shifting hierarchy of mentor and protege.

She cleared her throat.

“You have no idea what you’re about to get yourself into.” Her voice quivered with immense restraint. “And I envy that of you… so fucking much.”

A wave swelled in my chest. I bit my lower lip and nodded.

“I’ll be seeing you.” We both knew that wasn’t true.

For a tense minute, we teetered the line between a stand off and a hug. Catching my breath with a sharp inhale, I whipped around and walked away, leaving our dynamic behind—the only one I’d ever known—for good.

Maybe I’ll see her again… but who would we be by then?

Malloy’s face in my hands, we kissed as the world fell apart, brick by brick. Concrete cracked and smashed as fire raged around us. The heat of the inferno was crushing as my feet floated off the earth beneath me. Long bolts of sparks speared down from the heavens, splitting the trees straight down their trunks. I pressed my face against Malloy’s shoulder, laughing at the wreckage that I had become.

As the roadway fractured and rose into jagged peaks, my eyes welled as a lone daisy stubbornly pushed through in the distance.

Swirling in nauseating freedom, my legs weakened, trembling at what the aftermath of my choices might bring.

But in the very depth of my bones, I was at peace, knowing that it could not be worse than the terror, emptiness, and debilitating regret of….

Never finding out.

Malloy and I held each other in the destruction of the apocalypse, just a little bit longer.

As the deafening wail of bending metal reverberated for miles…..

The world kept turning.