Part ONE

BLUE and red dots dance across my face. . . . But I don't know how. What even has blue and red lights? Perhaps. . . ?

Maybe those lights could be the fictional characters that Emery had made up so long ago to scare me?

Emery's dead, griped a voice in my head, speaking the truth. Your sister's dead.

Shut up, I tell the voice, but then forget-slash-ignore why, as pain pulses through my head. My ears zone out a bit, and when they work again, the low murmurs are closer.

A touch at my arm.

Who was it? The only person I'd socialized with, talked with, the only person who'd touched me in seven years, since both her and I were taken deep into the forest and left there for dead by our father, who was disgusted with us because I killed my mom and she killed a little girl selling cookies across the street, was Emery. Her real name was Emerina. I called her Emery; Mom called her Emy-bear; Dad called her Em.

“Hello?” Asks a voice, above my head, and my ears take in a sharp sound, unnatural. I mutter and flop my head to the side.

Conversation ceases around me. The person touches my arm, but I'm already gone.

2005

A sharp clicking rings in my ears. Teeth chattering. I feel a nerve-y coldness on my arms and legs, my face, and a pain in my jaw, and realize that it's me. My hair, seen out of one eye where it's flopped in front of, is mousy brown. My arms are wrapped around my legs, my chin on my knees, and my fingers are pinching each-other, trying to get the feeling back in them.

Emery sits across from me, and it is then that I realize that this isn't a current event: it's a flashback.

My first day in the forest.

Emery's hair is also brown, but mine is creamy and light, and hers is like cinammon. Her eyes, trained on the ground, are a mixture of brown and blue. Her skin, though, is not brown; it is creamy pale. Her hands—the nails are un-Emery-ly gross: broken and bloody, with dirt and said blood under her fingernails—are playing with a pile of sticks.

My hands clap together, and Emery flies back, sitting on her heels, as the sticks flare into fire.

A smile lights up my sister's once-gloomy face. She holds up her hand and I fist-bump her. Even though she's only seven, she's always been great with kids.

I am five.

“I'm gonna go and get some more wood,” Emery says, and disappears out of our little clearing: one side is a hill, trees sticking out at measured-looking intervals, like columns; they're all evergreens. The occasional prickly plant of a blackberry bush stuck from between outcroppings of bark.

I added more tinder to the fire, dry pine needles, dead leaves.

When Emery came back, she placed two logs sandwiching the fire, and handed me a pile of berries. “The rounder ones, those are huckleberries, the cluster-y ones, those are blackberries,” she said. I shoved them all in my mouth. They burst upon my tongue, and the sour taste woke me up a little. Not much. I was very tired. Emery set another log on the flames, and sat half-facing the fire, leaned against a thick tree, free of bugs. She pulled me into her lap and hugged me.

I burried my head in her shoulder and tried to forget that we were alone, together in the forest like some fairytale that shouldn't have existed. She tugged at my dirty hair, pulling at the tangles, but I didn't make a noise. Her voice faded with my consciousness, as I fell asleep, as she whispered the lyrics to some song I liked. “'Cause all your people are vampires, and all your stor-ies are stale, and though you pre-tend to stand by us . . . I know you're certain, we'll faiiil. . . . “

. . .

When I woke the next morning, it was her salmon sweatshirt, not Emery's arms, that hung about my shoulders. The fire was smoking dully, wetly, and I looked to the sky to see if it had rained. It hadn't. The tree was still dry behind my back.

I looked around for Emery, and had just given up when she came walking over to me. She set a log or two on the fire absently, then pulled off her backpack—where had she gotten a backpack?--and sat down in front of me.

I pulled her jacket tighter around me, flipping up the hood, and tightening the strings while the sleeves waded around my sides. She looked at me. “I woke up early, so I decided to retrace our pathroad,” she said, and the Emery-like word almost made me smile. “I found this.” She flashed the pack at me. On the front of it, tucked in a pocket, was a note, but I couldn't read it. “It says, To my princesses.” She shook her head at that, and swept her dark hair over a shoulder, tipping her head upside down and securing a hair tie in it. I touched one cinnamon-colored wavy lock, and she half-smiled at me. When she was done with her hair, she reached for the bag again. She started with the smallest pockets, leading up the large main one. She recited the name of each item as she lifted it out of the bag. “Iodine. Matches, in a waterproof box. Thank god. Gum. Toothpaste, two tubes. Oh—this.” She grabbed a brown and beige teddy bear that I loved with all my heart, and I clutched it to my chest.

“Walbert,” I rejoiced, in my five-year-old way, held the animal in the air, and rubbed my dirty face on his. “You're alive!”

Emery continued. “Apple-cherry juice—good jug. Ziplocks. Water bottles—six. Cup-cookies, two. Books—two. Garbage bags. Notebooks—three. And . . . the rest is clothing,” the brunette finished. She looked through the clothes, and then began through the bag's possessions again. Being a five-year-old, I didn't grasp that all of our fucking possessions were kept, now, in that fucking bag.

I put Walbert on my knees, grabbed my skirt, and rocked side to side like a mental patient, smiling, eyes wide. Crown psycho.

My stomach growled, and I gasped like this was a new thing. I leaned back against the tree, stretching my legs out, and put my hands on my very-flat stomach. Nope, no five-year-old Baby Chub for me. Yay.

I smoothed my hands in circles, talking half to myself, half to Walbert or Emery.

“. . . actually, I don't know her age; she had to be like really, really old, like—like thirty-five! Yeah, and she lived in a rocketship, and had eight kids, but they all lived on a space station on Jupiter! And she drove up there every year for their birth-averseries, so she was cool.”

“Who is the 'she' of the tale you're recounting?” Asked Emery, who had turned to poke at the fire uneasily.

“Why, Mrs. Butterworth, of course!” I exclaimed.

“You know she's not a real person, right?”

“Hmph.” I said, struggling around to face the tree, propping my legs up and sinking my back onto the forest floor. “I'm ignored you.”

“It's 'ignoring', R.”

I'd been about to keep up the “ignoring you” act, clapping my hands over my ears and la-la-la-ing, but stopped. “I like that,” I said.

“What? Ignoring? You're not doing a very good job with it.”

I stuck my tongue out at her. “'R'.” I repeated. “I like the nickname.”

“No kidding?!” Emery exclaimed, baffled, turning to look at me. “You never like my nicknames!”

“Yeah. So stick with that one.”

“Rose, Rosie, Lina--”

“Generic, pansy-badass, STUPID--”

“Pansy-badass? I like that.”

“You want me to call you Pansy-Badass?” I asked, confused.

“No!” Emery exclaimed. “I am Emery, demon fairy princess of the . . . of Douglas County!” She made an entiled pose, after a puzzled face.

“Is that just because of the trees? You can't be queen of the trees. It's not fair.”

“But then what if I am queen, and you're princess?”

“Fairies are pansies!” I protested.

“No, faeries. Like, F-A-E-R-I-E-S, faeries. They're evil badasses.”

“I don't believe you can be both evil and a badass.” I said snootily, examining my nails.

“All evil people are badasses, and all badasses are evil—or I guess boarderline-evil. Like Harry Potter.”

“HAIRY POOTER!” I boomed. “COME OUT WITH YOUR HANDS UP, AND NO ONE WILL BE HURT.”

She giggled, and I giggled, and it was all fun and games until the chicken's head was cut off.

Or, well, until my stomach started growling.

I gasped again, touched it, and then told the sky: “We need to find some food.”

Emery bolted to her feet, facing the sky, posture dutiful. “We need to kill something.” She announced.

2007

SQUIRREL tastes like chicken. What's sad is that I found that out at five years old.

It was two years later, and we were still surviving in that forest. I was older. Emery was older. We looked like hobos now. We'd found some ditches around a week after that first day, emptied them of grossness and probable shit, and layered them with sturdy leaves to catch rain water, and could rinse off with the water; we replaced them every two months. A tree on the left edge of the forest had its bark scraped off on one end; Emery, using the half hunting knife, half machete that she'd found, rusted and imbedded in a pine, and named Lady Awesome for reasons unknown to me, sliced a calendar into the bark—well, she carved the month we left, and the rest was simple tallying.

Emery began teaching me things; she allotted one of the notebooks to me, and a pencil that she'd scavenged from somewhere, rinsed off, and sharpened with Lady Awesome, and taught me. Math, mostly, since it was the easiest to remember, I guess. One plus one is two, two plus two is four, four plus four is eight, ect., ect.. We'd go on like that until one hundred, and then move on. Slowly, addition had developed into multiplication, which was now division.

When I was six, she started teaching me how to spell—my name, my full name, my last name, hers. Punctuation, grammar, a little. Emery also taught me my fake name, to use with strangers. I forgot it when I was like ten, but it didn't matter; “R,” which is what I actually use on everybody, is not on any records, and “Collins” which is my last name, is much too generic to actually lend any help. “Marie,” which is my middle name, is just as bad. My alter ego is Jane Marcus, which I thought was stupid, and told her so. She replied, “Stupid people are legal,” and ended the conversation with that.

Most of the clothes in the bag that Dad had left with us turned out to be pretty much shit. Two sweaters—good. A pair of sweatpants and a white-to-gray dress, long. Okay, I guess. A pair or two of socks, some undergarments, and some rain ponchos.

That was it. Like, seriously, I'm being serious.

We'd split the shit, the sweaters for warmth, and the rest to wear while one of us washed the good stuff. That was, until I outgrew the pink dress I'd worn the day I'd gotten there, and was left in the sweatpants, the gray dress, and a sweater.

When even the sweatpants were too short, and the dress was getting too tight, I woke up in the morning to find Emery gone.

I'd assumed she'd gone to get something to eat, but, when I checked, there was a skinned rabbit, gutted and cooked, and a small pile of new bones in the ditch a ways away from HQ that we'd deemed the trash.

I ate.

A few hours later, I began climbing trees to get my mind off of worrying for her. Sure, I was seven years old, but I worried a lot.

Lady Awesome was on a rock bench by the fire. One of the sweaters was gone, aloung with her pink sweatshirt. The backpack was gone.

Bad signs, very bad signs.

When the sun was three quarters of the way down the sky, I heard rustling.

I grabbed Lady Awesome and holed up in my tree, not moving except for the shake from adrenaline. Could I kill a intruder? Hell yes, I could.

When the brunette walked into the clearing, I froze. She set down about a half ton of paper shopping bags on the underbrush, and dropped the familiar backpack. Then, she said, very clearly, “If you're staring at me with Lady Awesome, back the fuck up.”

I laughed. Emery told me to come down, and then began splitting the contents of the paper bags, into the original backpack and a new one. The new one was white with black polka-dots, and had red fixtures, where the other bag was green and industrial.

She sent me to gather firewood with Lady Awesome before I saw much of what it was. When I came back, I built the fire up a little—I was a natural—and followed a persistent Emery to the left side of the forest. She led me to a pond, filled with fish, and had me gather water, to boil it on the fire.

I complained that I felt like her fucking maid, but complied. When it was all boiled, we grabbed the buckets and she directed me to pour them in the abandoned truck that we slept in. She'd spread a tarp aloung the bed, and it looked okay, so I did it.

We bathed in it, with grapefruit-scented soap—yum—and she actually had towels when we got out. She provided new clothes—from the backpacks. We changed on the sweaters, on the ground, since we didn't want our feet dirty.

My clothes were mostly pretty simple: high-waisted jeans, with a sturdy belt, a yellow tee shirt, powder-pink converse—new socks!--and a black bomber jacket, patterned in pink and blue flowers.

Emery's were a little more complicated: an olden-pink crop top, low-rise jeans with rips at the knees, red converse, a light grey tank under the top, ad a mint-colored very fuzzy sweater—that I had a copy of in pink—and a belt that looked almost braided. She also had a black hat that had the inscription “#BITE ME” that made me laugh my ass off.

We towel dried our hair, and she put hers in a french braid, mine with a braid leading from over my left eye, around my head behind my ear, and to the back of my neck. I was obsessed with the color yellow, so she'd also tucked a leather bow in the color in my braid.

She'd cleaned the inside of the truck, which wasn't that bad in the first place, and let me have the backseat. She handed me my shit, and took hers, and we started making up the beds.

My comforter—and extra pillowcases—were vertical striped pink and black. I tucked everything in, and stacked the two pillows with white cases on the bottom, the other two with the pink and black on top, and folded my blankets carefully at the end, so I could grab the end and be covered with all of them.

Emery's bedding was red plaid. Her three throws were, too.

There were an abundance of extra blankets, thrown over the back of the passenger seat.

Emery set up a little more, and then went outside to rid of the bath water and clean off the tarp with Lady Awesome. I went through the ice chest that she'd set up in the backseat.

The truck had a weird-ass layout: in the back, the seats could fold up and retract into a storage-ish place, and there was a shelf-ish thing above the seats—which was where the ice chest rested.

Too much mandane food to count.

We ate KFC chicken for dinner, which, yum. We also had the biscuits. She'd gotten four buckets of the stuff, so we had leftovers.

She let me eat some of the candy, and we both had a sliver of the pecan-vanilla and raspberry-chocolate cake. Yum. We laughed at how she got it: an old lady saw her and gave her it, and then two boxes of toffee, and her friend donated some cookies. The first woman's husband, down at the bakery-slash-auto-shop, had given her three boxes of donuts (“Don't eat those, they're for breakfast!”). The rest she'd bought with money she'd pick-pocketed.

After that story, I eagerly asked the question I'd been wanting to since the bath: “Can we go back?”

Emery looked at the ground. “No.” She said. “Trust me. No.”

2013

It was at the edge of 2013 that I think we ran into trouble. At least, I think that's what led up the bug shit, the shit that led to me passed out in a parking lot somewhere with policemen about to suck my brains out.

After that first time when I was seven, Emery went outside the forest for food and clothes and crap every year, once. Maybe twice if she was sloppy and forgot something. She would never take me with her, but each time she went out, she'd come back with new songs to recite to me.

One day, when Emery was supposed to be coming back from a shopping trip, she rushed into the clearing with only her backpack. “Hide!” She hissed, and I scrambled into a tree. She grabbed our flashlights, by the fire, climbed up with me. She'd just clung onto the last foothold when two people crashed into the clearing, panting. Two guys. The smaller one, a ginger with a giant forehead and a weird-ass nose, had his gun drawn, and was struggling with something hooked to his shoulder. The bigger one was looking around, fingering the trigger of his.

Dad used to use guns; I knew how to shoot, Emery knew how to shoot. In our education, you aren't supposed to even get near the trigger unless you've aimed and aren't gonna fucking miss. This dude was shaking like a coffee addict.

Emery handed over my flashlight, a brass number with a loop of string to hang around your hand, and clutched her black one. She talked lowly, quietly, in my ear. “I'll get the big guy. You get the smaller one, okay? Don't let them touch their walkie talkies—those are the things on their shoulders. Don't get shot. You first. Go.”

I took a deep breath, and jumped off my branch, brandishing the flashlight.

They pointed their guns at me. They had brass badges on their chests.

“You aren't that girl we were. . . . “ Said the smaller guy.

“Duh.” I notified.

The bigger guy grunted, and leaned down to his walkie talkie. I wildly swung out at the ginger, catching him on in the head, and blood spurted over my flashlight. Emery flew out of the tree, at slammed the big dude in the head, like I'd done to his partner.

We slammed into each-other's backs, and immeadiately spun away. I dodged Ginger's gun, smacked him in his fucked-up nose, spun around for grace, and slammed my knee into his netherregions. He yelled out a grunt of pain, and dropped to the floor. I kicked him in the stomach, and he grabbed my foot with an evil laugh; I tangled my hands in his hair and tugged his face, hard, into my knee. He screamed, and flew backwards, taking me with him. I fell, one knee on his stomach, one on the ground, and he grabbed me by my hair and jerked me down next to him, rolling on top of me. I dug my fingers into his eyes, and he yelled. He clawed around for his gun, which he'd dropped, and came up empty. He didn't have to know that it was right next to his leg.

He rocked to the side, and fell off of me. I spun to my feet and kicked him in the ribs a few times. He found the gun, and I was spinning away when he shot me in the leg. 

2013

I screamed, and fell in a pile of flesh on the ground. Ginger flung himself on top of me, and his eyeballs bled on my face, but I was beond caring now. I punched him in the face, and he dug his fingers into my bullet wound. I screeched a devil-scream, and snapped at him. My teeth caught his nose, and, powered with adrenaline and anger and pain, I guess, I tore his fucking nose off.

Blood spurted every-fucking-where, and he screamed like a little girl.

I smiled wickedly. His hand slammed into my leg again, and I gritted my teeth. My mind flashed, in less than a second, to my earliest memory, those flames . . . I concentrated on that spot in my brain, the one that wanted to destroy the world.

Ginger turned the color of his hair. Flames licked his pasty-ass skin from the inside out, like burning paper, and he roared. He didn't move, though, as if he was paralysed. His hair blackened and fell in a powder, then came his flesh and uniform, his badge thumping to the forest floor.

I killed him. I killed him. The realization switched from shock to triumph. I killed him, I killed him, I killed him! I laughed out loud, and looked over to see Emery going through the other dude's pockets. When she saw me, she grabbed him by the hair, and tilted his face towards me. It was imploded by probably Emery's flashlight. “See? See that? Don't ever do drugs.” She said.

2003

I'm not sure why I'm going back to this memory. Maybe it's because I mentioned it in the last one, but I don't know how the brain works, Emery was the smart one.

As I said, it's my earliest memory. Flames. I also said that I killed my mother, didn't I? Yes, well, this is it.

Anyway.

I was crying. Not in the silent, clean kind, in the snot-down-your-neck, rage-screaming way. Granted, I was three. But still.

I don't even fucking know what I was crying about now. I just know that Mom burst into the room, light brown hair tousled, blue eyes wide, brandishing a pitchfork she'd gotten from god knows where, and I screamed louder. “M-om-my!” I choked, and she dropped the weapon and rushed over.

“What's wrong, honey, baby, please,” she said, and I grabbed at the air. Taking that as a sign to hold me, she began to lift me up. Halfway out of my crib—yes, still in a crib at three—she stopped. She blushed wholeheartedly, and her whole body was frozen. There was surprise in her eye. “You're--”she started, through stiff lips. “Fire . . . “ she trailed off, and black ate out of her skin on her face and neck. In a split second, she burst into flames, and I screamed.

She dropped me, and disolved into a powder in the blue carpet.

The end. That's why I'm scarred for life. They ripped out the carpet later, FYI.

2013

Anyway. Back to the real story. Emery went shopping a ways later. She'd started teaching me to fight more than street moves. Just in case.

Emery went out on a Saturday, which I thought was weird, she only went on weekdays. I didn't say anything, though. She was in a bad mood, and therefore was a bitch. So, yeah.

I was eating the rest of a rabbit—delisous—in the back of the truck all day, waiting for her. She didn't show, and soon, it was dark. I was worried—and scared, I'd never spent a night without her in the forest, not once. I stayed holed up in the back with the curtains drawn all over—she'd brought them back when I was nine.

To keep from freaking out, I kept myself busy with fantasizing about the future, and ever since I've been obsessed with it. I will have a house with Emery, two floors and a basement, and we'd have a weapons stash in one of the extra rooms. Semi-separate art studios, in the basement. I'd pick my own clothes, and eat shitty things all the time, and draw if I wanted to. I would have a whole box filled with half-used sketchbooks. I'd have a half-ton of pillows on my bed, which would be like a cloud, and I'd have a bookshelf, too. With all my favorite books, and some knick-knacks, too.

I eventually fell asleep, and when I woke in the morning, Emery still wasn't there. I clutched my coat, an oversized brown leather number, spotting tiny icesicles frozen onto the branches of the evergreens around the truck.

I wasted a page of my notebook with scribbles and doodles, curled up in wool blankets, and ate another rabbit. I had one more in the ice chest, but that was it.

Emery didn't come back for five days. On the sixth, I packed up my backpack and searched for a way ou of the forest. I never had before, I'd trusted Emery to shop for my shit, and I trusted Emery when she said that we couldn't go back.

I still did; I just knew she wouldn't disappear like this volutarily. Someone had caught her. It wasn't that she was just hiding from someone, because if she was, she'd have been back days ago. It's not that hard to distract someone.

The best of distractions lay in the brain of the distractor, Emery would say in training. And the heart of the distractee.

I found the way out near the end of the day, around three, I guess, and found myself I a parking lot. Yep. That one.

I looked around. The asfault felt weird under my feet. I started forward, but after about two steps, something slammed into me. I flew into a tree, and spat blood when I landed.

“Idiot little girl,” hissed whatever-the-Hell, the thing that had pushed me—and, really, that's all you could call it, I didn't have a face. It was a fucking black blob, with red splotches for eyes, and the vague shape of a man. It was also not wearing any clothes, and I didn't look to see if the rest of it was shaped like a man, too. It had a forked tongue, peeking out of bright red lips that looked bloodless, except for the color. “Mine. You're mine.”

“Whoa now,” I panted at it. “Fuck off, fuckface.”

He ignored me, and I was still lying on the ground when he zipped to kneel next to me. I scrambled for my flashlight, but he grabbed the sleeve of my jacket and sniffed. What the fuck?

“Mmmm . . . “ The demon trailed. “That smell, so sweet. . . . “

I smell like raspberries and cheesecake and scalded water. Always do. “Dude, step the fuck away from me!” I warned, jerking away from him.

“Oh, but you smell so gorgeous . . . I can't wait to devour your face.”

“Yeah, not really scoring you any points here, bitchass.” Bitchass was an Emery word. She made it up when she was seven, that first year.

He kicked me in the ribs, so I grabbed his ankle and sent flames up his leg. He screeched, and stumbled backward to fall on his ass. I finally found myself able to grab my flashlight, and did so. I hit his fallen figure in the head once. He raked his claws across my stomach, and two more hits had him either uncosious or dead. I made it to the other side of the parking lot before passing out.

. . .

Now, come the shithead lights. I'll spare you the crap, let's just get on with it.