Flashfire

Ch8

"Natron..."

Caleb switched over to his laptop, looking up what it was. He was pleased to find that, in certain cultures, it was used to enhance the spiritual safety of both the living and the dead. Meanwhile, Liam was putting the things that he bought in the pantry. Caleb looked up from the table.

"Liam, I'm going to need you to go back to the store."

Liam huffed. "Can't you just order that stuff online?"

"That'll take days."

"Let's go tomorrow."

"But we need it now."

"Uh, Caleb, can you just wait?"

"No, I cannot wait because you're going to disappear and then I'm going to have to resummon you again!"

Liam sighed.

He knew there was no point in arguing with Caleb, so he closed the pantry door and walked around the table.

"Come with me, I don't know where to look Caleb, I've never seen that Nostra-Nougat-Narwhal salt. What the heck are you even talking about?"

Caleb just chuckled, taking Liam's hand.

"Narwhals have nothing to do with this," he said.

Liam hid a grimace and followed Caleb to the car. The trip to the store was difficult for him. The fluorescents were too bright and the people too loud, moving around like bumper cars cut off from their tracks and racing down a hill with no intention of slowing down. He anxiously ground his teeth as he buckled his seatbelt and Caleb got into the driver's seat. Why was Caleb the one driving?

He glanced over a bit resentfully. It was Liam's car. Even before he died his life was taken out of his hands, and he became a passenger. He did ask him to come with him, but it was not an invitation to get in the driver's seat! Liam shook his head to clear his head. Was this inner monolog irrational? He was less sure of his thoughts lately, less clear of what he was feeling. His head felt trapped in a cotton haze and he looked at a pinpoint of green light ahead as he struggled to see straight.

"Caleb."

Caleb adjusted the rearview mirror for the hundredth time. He smiled when he turned it on him and he came into view. Liam looked away at his own reflection, oddly different somehow since the incident. He looked exactly the same, but he didn't see himself. It was as if he were staring at another reflection. Even when he was brushing his teeth or combing his hair, it was as if someone else was looking back at him and copying his actions, playing a trick on him as if he were in a cartoon.

"Yeah Liam?"

The car slowed as the light turned yellow. Luckily there was no crazy person honking their horn, or Liam may have actually gotten out.

"How am I..."

Caleb tilted his head, brows furrowed. The light from the setting sun made his skin and hair rose-colored. His brown eyes took on a soft, reddish tint. Liam's mind went blank and for a long stretch of silence he couldn't think.

"How are you still here? I don't know, Liam. I haven't been able to summon you for this long." Caleb started the car, shaking his head almost imperceptibly. He smiled, but he looked sad. "It feels like luck that you're still here."

"I mean how am I connected to my body," Liam said.

Caleb's words jarred something in him and suddenly his brain was back online.

"Well..." Caleb stopped at the light. He seemed to be thinking through the whole process, all that he had memorized and absorbed from the text. What came out of his mouth next was never something that Liam expected. "Do you remember oobleck?"

Liam opened his mouth, then let out a loud laugh.

"It's not funny!" Caleb yelled, even though his mouth twisted in a smile. He flexed his fingers on the wheel. The light turned green. Caleb drove straight ahead and then turned right when they passed the next strip of apartments. "I have tied your soul to your body through my magic, and this in turn connects you to me. Imagine that I have pulled your soul from...wherever it goes back to Earth-"

"And I'm looking up at you," Liam said. He bounced his eyebrows.

"Um," Caleb said.

"It's smoldering down there."

Caleb glanced at him, but ultimately kept his eyes on the road. An uncomfortable silence settled between them.

"Really?"

"Nah, I don't actually remember where I go. Get to the part about the oobleck already."

Caleb blew out a breath. "I lost my train of thought."

"It's a long, stretchy, sticky mess that connects us together," Liam said. "Now that I say that, it sounds more like a peanut butter and jelly sandwich."

"Yeah," Caleb said.

Time lapsed as they drove with the radio off until the sky turned purple and dusty blue. The store came into view as they descended over the hill that rose and fell directly into the parking lot below. Liam's stomach flipped as if he were in an elevator, one of the sensations of being alive that he found oddly pleasant. Caleb parked near the basket dropoff and they both had a moment of sitting with the car engine shut off, the yellow blocks like sticks of butter sitting side by side above their heads, washed out by the overbearing fluorescents outside their window.

"So what happens if we're pulled apart?"