Brontide

Chapter One

Ottery St. Catchpole, a small village near the South West end of Britain, was where I'd grown up. There were hills as far as the eye could see and beyond them, well, I certainly didn't know what was past them. I only knew what I saw on the map that hung in my school classroom. There was no "Ottery St. Catchpole" anywhere on it, and on the day I discovered this I went home to my mother and asked her a million and one questions.

"Mummy, how come we're not on the map?" I asked as she brushed out my hair, preparing me for bed.

"What map, sweetie?" she asked in a gentle tone.

"The map in school, I looked everywhere and we're not on it. Why is that, Mum? Did they make a mistake?"

She laughed quietly, running the brush slowly through my long golden locks, precisely the same shade as hers. "They didn't make a mistake, sweetie. Ottery St. Catchpole is very small so it's not big enough to appear on a map."

To my almost ten-year-old brain, this didn't make any sense. "Does that mean we aren't important?"

My mother turned me around to face her, cupping my face in her hands. "Of course not, we're all very important. We each have roles that we play in society, jobs that we work hard to keep and lives that we lead. Just because we don't show up on some silly map doesn't mean we aren't important. You're important, Cassie, you're very special, and one day you'll grow up and find your place in the world." She kissed me on the forehead and pulled me in for a hug. 

I considered her words, listening as she quietly hummed while I was in her arms. Truth be told, I couldn't have felt any less special if I tried. It isn't right for someone so young to feel negative about themselves but at the time it was the unfortunate reality of my situation. That night I couldn't help but stare at the ceiling restlessly, her words turning over and over in my head like a broken record.

If only I'd known then how special I really was. 

A few hours later, after I'd finally fallen asleep, I was woken up by my frantic mother. She was crying and muttering things about my grandmother and the hospital and how we had to leave immediately. Clothes were thrown in my direction and I put them on quickly, having absolutely no idea what was going on. My father drove us to the hospital because my mother was in no fit state to drive. Devon, my thirteen-year-old brother, sat next to me in the backseat and said nothing, still in his pajamas. It was all a big rush until we got to her hospital room, where she was hooked up to wires and breathing through a tube. 

The nurse who'd been tending to her brought my mother outside to assess the situation, and it was obvious something was very wrong. A hospital doesn't call you in the middle of the night about one of its long-term patients unless they're dying. With a jolt of my stomach, I realized that was precisely what was happening. 

I gingerly approached her bedside and noticed her eyes were closed, but her heart monitor was beeping so I took that as a good sign. Devon stood next to me and placed the Delilahs my mother had picked from our garden on the night table next to her. Sounds of the muffled conversation between my mother and the nurse seeped into the room and I caught bits and pieces of it, an "I'm sorry" and "there's nothing we can do now." My mother returned shortly and went to the opposite side of the hospital bed, my father rubbing her back consolingly and overall trying to be good moral support. 

Twenty minutes went by and no one said a word, the beeping of the heart monitor doing all the talking for us. I knew my grandmother had been in the hospital for a long time. She'd been battling some sort of cancer, and when she got sick it aged her a lot. She was only in her late fifties, but her eyes were sunken, her hair was sparse and her skin hung loose, tinged with grey. She was a kind woman with a sense of adventure, always traveling all over the place and coming back with endless stories to tell me. She was very interesting and I'd always felt connected to her in a way that I didn't feel with my own mother, though I had no idea what it was.