"You're having more of those? How many have you popped today?"
Van doesn't even bother to roll her eyes. The remark travels a short distance from the living room, courtesy of her stepfather— who's presumably indulging in his budding gambling problem on his phone— and into the kitchen where it clings to the air like miasma. The best she gives is a grimace, mostly at the implication that her pill-taking is unnecessary— the thought of putting the blister packet of aspirin back on top of the fridge knocks about in her head, but then the pulse in her forehead returns with a vengeance. She quickly decides against it. Her hands shake almost imperceptibly as she pops a pair of aspirin tablets out of their cavities, knocks them back into her mouth and swallows them dry. A lump forms in her throat anyway, and so she walks to the sink and pours herself a pint glass of tap water that does little to placate the soreness of her oesophagus.
"I'm talking to you, Van, don't ignore your father when he's talking to you." Tom calls again, louder this time. His voice makes her temples throb with indignation. She glares in his general direction through the open door that leads directly into their sitting room, and sees him smirking behind his phone. She holds back the urge to scathingly remind him that he's not her dad. Instead, Van shakes her head in annoyance, then winces at the palpitation of pain it inspires across the nerves of her forehead. She pours the rest of the water into the sink and walks back into the living room, deliberately neglecting to switch the light off or shut the door behind her. She makes for the sofa, intending to resume her meal, but Tom's voice cuts her off.
"Blimey, don't you look a sight? How long have you had that top on for? And when was the last time that rats nest of yours was brushed?"
The comment makes her pause in the middle of the room and glare hard at him. In some dark, petty corner of her mind, she hates that his observations are completely right. Van looks, and to a greater extent, feels like a sack of shit. She's wearing the same faded black shirt that she's had on for at least four days, a pair of her mother's sagging pyjama pants because she couldn't find any of her own, and a mismatched pair of socks that were damp when she'd slipped them on earlier. Her skin is blanched with the remnants of sickness, her dark hair hanging tragically over her pale face with limp strands falling into her tired eyes. Telling of her negligence when it came to maintaining a normal sleep schedule were the dark circles that ringed their underside. She'd been bedbound for the past fortnight due to an inexplicable sickness that seemed to be fortified against any and all antibiotics she could've pumped into her body.
Her immune system was left to its natural defences to fend off bouts of violent nausea and chronic migraines that seemed to worsen with time, accompanied by incessant dizzy spells and nosebleeds. Van had only recently made somewhat of a recovery, but what remained was a constant state of vertigo and a pulsing pain behind her eyes. Nobody knew where the ailment had come from, since the season for bugs and viruses had long since passed. Run of the mill symptoms that she experienced due to her chronic migraines.
But what her family didn't know about were the more unseemly symptoms.
They were hallucinations, by all accounts. At first she'd accredited them to the antibiotics, and then to the sickness itself. She thought nothing of the flicker of a silhouette in the corner of her peripheral vision, a shadow in the darkest corner of her room. The unshakeable feeling that she was being watched.
She was paranoid to begin with. It was likely that her sickness-addled mind was playing tricks on her.
"Literally fuck off, Thomas." Van says after a heartbeat and returns to her seat. Tom tuts, face quickly turning sour as he look to his wife for a reaction, but Van's mother doesn't even stir.
"What, so you're not going to say anything?" He demands. His wife, Marie, doesn't pay him even the slightest modicum of attention. Instead, she stares unblinking at the television screen, and when both Van and Thomas realise that he isn't going to be backed up by his wife, his face hardens with irritation and he snarls at Van.
"Keep running that mouth and you'll get a fucking slap, keep on going." He grits through his teeth. Van rolls her eyes again. "And keep your eyes still. I mean it, Evangeline, I'll-"
"You'll- what? Give me a slap? Go on, then." Van cuts him off and smirks to herself, pulling her plate back into her knee and continues eating. Thomas mutters a few choice words to himself, something that distinctly resembles 'fucking had it', but both the fact his jaw is wired tightly shut and Van is only half listening to his murmuring makes it unclear.
"Go upstairs." A third voice pervades after a beat. Van glances up from the half-eaten pasta and her mother is staring right at her.
"What?" She sputters. "Why? I didn't even—"
"Now, Van. I'm not in the mood to hear you two fucking arguing, so either shut up or piss off to your bedroom, eh?" Marie barks at her daughter.
"Don't say anything to him, though, eh? Just me? The child?" Van says virulently, and it's enough to earn a glare from her mother. Thomas has perked up now things are in his favour and it proves to infuriate Evangeline. "Right, okay, he's the favourite."
"You're pushing your luck. Stop making smart remarks or I'll be the one wiping that smug look off your face."
And just because she can't help herself-
"Why don't you take it in turns, then? Both of you can have one cheek, if you like."
- - -
A little while later Van is staring out of her bedroom window and into the cluster of woodland that stretches across her back garden and spans for miles beyond. She always feels uneasy when she's near the grove near her house; overcome with the inconsolable feeling that the woods wasn't entirely uncharted. It had been years since she'd been there, because every time she'd intended to do so, she was dissuaded by an icy chill of fear. As a child, she'd never really been deep within the boscage, only past the first few trees and never far enough so that her house wasn't in her line of vision, but even then, the cold, visceral feeling remained from childhood. As if she was a guest in somebody else's house. As if there was something out there; deeper, beyond the trees.
And in the present as she stares at the trees, she swears that she sees a figure flicker into existence amongst the slim branches, too tall and entirely too skinny, a vague smudge of black and white that remains for not even a fraction of a second before it disappears into thin air.
Evangeline feels a dribble of blood leak from her nose.
YOU ARE READING
"Eulogium"
Fanfiction"She was Van, plain Van, in the morning, standing five feet three in one sock. She was Vanny in slacks. She was affectionately known as "Angie" at school. She was Evangeline on the dotted line. But in his arms she was always Vanity." yes this is a s...
