Waiting for Sunday

chapter 8 - ember to ash, ash to ember

Time crawls, drags itself forward by its nails. Lillie lays in bed earlier than she usually does, watching the clock on the wall ahead of her tick and tick. She recognizes the knot in her throat; it's been there countless times before. A poem, raw and real and not refined yet, crying to be let free of her.

She hasn't written in days. She feels numb, unlike herself, like a waste of time and space, but she can't even hold a pen. Each time she does, her hand trembles and the blank page threatens to swallow her whole. She remembers the squelch of the ink spider. The bracelet made of flesh, which she burned. What is the point of creating if all she creates is the unnatural, the macabre, the demonic?

She rolls to the other side of the bed, tries to shut her eyes and conjure sleep.

Three minutes later she's up again, the lamp on her desk flicked on, a blank journal below her. The pen's a knife. It's dangerous; it will hurt and it will draw blood. But it will also cut away what needs to be set free.

So Lillie writes.

Later, she will not remember the space of time between when she closed the journal and crawled back beneath the covers, and when she woke dazed and bleary-eyed to shouting urgent voices and flashing red and blue lights and the tiny wheels of a gurney skittering over pavement. Handing her a cup of water and wiping soot from her face, the first responders ask her if she left the stove burning, if she was a smoker, if she forgot a candle in the living room—anything that would make sense. Anything besides what Lillie figures is the truth. She wrote about fire, and that night like the beginning of a new universe it spawned right there from nothing and devoured half of her home.

She is delirious, in and out of consciousness, awake enough to sense the burning, uncomfortable heat in her chest, the pain each time she tries to breathe, but still not quite lucid. The ceiling above her is a pale off-white, almost yellow. A white ceiling fan spins indolently, as if it, too, is half asleep.

"Lillie!" Lillie's stinging eyes fly to the hospital room door as Mira comes catapulting through it, depositing her purse in a heap on the chair and all but sprinting to the bedside. "Oh my God. What the hell happened?"

"I'm fine, Mira," Lillie says, but the hacking cough that tears from her chest moments after undermines the statement's legitimacy. Mira shakes her head, taking the pitcher on the side table and topping off Lillie's glass of water. "Just—a freak accident, I guess."

Mira frowns, helping Lillie sit up, then handing the glass off to her. "Well, wait. It started in your apartment, didn't it?"

The glass is cool against Lillie's palms. She holds it tightly. "Yeah."

"And you have no idea what could have caused it?"

"The stove was off, I swear. It was just—I don't know."

Mira narrows her eyes, which even in the hospital's washed lighting seem even darker than usual. They hold her in an honesty she can't escape from, even if she wanted to. "Spontaneous combustion then," Mira says with a scoff. With a sigh more exhausted than any noise Lillie has heard her make before, she walks over to the armchair in the corner—the same unappetizing yellow-beige as the ceiling—and sinks into it, crossing her legs. "Lillie."

"Mira. Please. Not right now."

"Something's up with you. I've thought it since the reading, really," Mira says, ignoring her. "You seem nervous. Jittery all the time. Just tell me for real, Lillie. Are you hiding something? Does it have to do with this—that Felix guy, or whoever?"

Felix. When she thinks about him there is a strange feeling in her chest, excitement, she thinks, but also something deeper, something like sorrow. There's no name for it; it's just a feeling, like the sting in the back of her throat before tears. Yes. It does have to do with Felix, and it doesn't have to do with Felix. The explanation is something she doesn't have.