Fiction Fridays: Afterglow Chapter 3
Fiction Fridays now on Tuesdays for this week only. I will not elaborate.
Hi there! Thanks for reading. If you’re looking for Chapter 1, you can find it here. If you’re looking for Chapter 2, it’s here.
CHAPTER THREE
It’s so loud here, Mama. We landed an hour ago and everyone’s been shouting. They were going to let us off the ship but then they told us to go back to our rooms. I don’t know what to do. I’m just sitting on my cot with Mr. Snuffles. Why did you send me here by myself? I’m afraid everyone’s forgotten about me. There’s just so much yelling.
Please come soon.
Love, Rachel
Luminous balloons glowed overhead. Molly tried to reach them. Reds and greens and blinking oranges all floated and spun and twisted to the wind’s every whim. They reminded her of a trip to Baltimore’s Inner Harbour that her parents had taken her on when she was a girl. “Sailabration,” her parents had called it. She hadn’t understood the pun at the time, but there were ships there. Molly loved ships. Submarines and Naval Battleships and old replica pirate vessels all bobbed and swayed on the Chesapeake Bay, and all of them had balloons of every colour tied to mainsails and communications arrays and masts. They bobbed in salty sea air like tethered birds in the wind blowing off the Inner Harbour. It was full of people and life and culture, she supposed, but Little Molly—the Molly in her memory—was only concerned with ships and balloons and ice cream.
The balloons in front of her now were glowing electric blue, and some of them were blinking in the sky. She had never seen a blinking balloon before. She thought back to watching the Naval pilots perform tricks in their fighter jets over the water, to eating funnel cakes and seeing fireworks over Fort McHenry. She remembered tugging on her father’s blue jeans when she wanted a balloon from a red-nosed clown. None of those balloons glowed.
“Stay close, Molly,” he would say. “I can’t lose you, Molly. Molly. Molly.”
“Um, Ms. Molly?” Someone was shining a flashlight in her eyes and poking her cheek. “Ms. Molly?”
She sat up. The voice gasped, and the sound of clattering broomsticks and mop buckets came from a corner of the room. Little blue lights flashed in little shoe shapes near the floor.
Molly almost shot at them. “Quiet,” she hissed. “They’ll hear.”
“Sorry,” someone squeaked out from the corner. Then, small, muffled sobs emanated from that same corner. A child’s voice. She sighed, fished around in her pack for a light, and clicked it on. Sure enough, a young boy, no more than eight or nine, huddled in bloodied clothes with light-up Star Wars shoes pressed up against boxes of floor cleaner. Tony’s kid? Had to be. Same shoes. There were tear tracks in the blood that covered his face.
“How did you know my name?”
The kid made a choking noise, then coughed out, “Mr. Murdoch told me.”
Molly pushed herself up to comfort the boy. The world swayed and whirled, but not nearly as badly as it had before. She was able to cross the room with only minor pain in her ankle. She crouched down next to the kid and put an arm around him.
He buried his face in her chest and let out those long, wracking, hyperventilating sobs that only kids seemed to be able to do. Molly squeezed him close to her.
“Hey,” she said, “It’ll be okay.”
“They killed my daddy.” The boy shook and cried his silent tears. “They killed my daddy.” Molly found herself crying with the kid. He kept repeating the same words over and over and over. “They killed my daddy, they killed my daddy, they killed my daddy,” in a higher and higher pitch until the words passed out of intelligible speech and into a continuous, sobbing moan. All at once, Molly’s Box of Broken Things burst open, and all the ugly, sad, dark truths came boiling out.
“I’m so sorry.” Her own tears were coming hot and thick. They mingled on the utility room floor. “They killed my daddy too.”