Rain falls against my window when I wake up, the rhythmic pitter-patter sounds of raindrops calming. Perhaps today will be a better day. As I change my clothes, I silently wish that my dad will be in a good mood today.
He wasn’t totally right after his procedure to cure him of amor deliria nervosa, also known as love. It was identified as a disease by the president and the Consortium fifty-six years ago, and they perfected the cure thirty-five years ago. The cure is supposed to work perfectly well on people when they turn eighteen, although sometimes there are…side effects.
It was certainly that way for my dad. Apparently, his cure didn’t work correctly. There was disruption of the mood-regulating temporal lobes. That’s what they called it. He’s mostly okay, like everybody else. But every so often he has the tendency to fly into rages. And when he does, they often result in harsh consequences for me and my mom.
What would happen is that he would start throwing things around the house and hit anybody who got in his way. This results in a lot of bruises for my mom and me, and she always helps us cover them up, put on makeup and stuff. We can’t tell anyone. We don’t want too many people knowing that my dad’s cure hadn’t worked properly. People could get hysterical; he could be fired. My mom says people would make things difficult. So instead we hide it. Long sleeves in the summertime. Lots of sick days. Lots of lies, too—falling down, bumping my head, hitting the door frame.
I cautiously exit my room, and when I deem it quiet, I walk down the stairs into the living room. We don’t live in the best house in Yarmouth; not by a long shot. We live close to a border fence. A poor area. Nobody else wants to live so close to the Wilds. It was, and still is, considered bad luck. The Wilds are where are the uncureds live. I’ve always been told that the uncured are dirty; they turn into animals. If I ever contract the disease, it will rot me from inside. Out there, in the Wilds, are where the people who are infected with the deliria live.
Or, lived is the correct word. The government flew planes over the Wilds a couple of years ago and bombed it during something called the blitz. They told us that the uncureds living there were eradicated, so now we have nothing to worry about.
So why am I still worrying?
I walk into the kitchen, where my mom is making breakfast. The windows are, of course, closed. The gauzy curtains, that smell like gardenias and plastic, are shut tight as well, to keep the sounds of rain out. My father likes quiet. Noise makes the buzzing start up in his brain—like a storm of bees, he once told me. The louder the buzzing got, the more he couldn’t think. The more he couldn’t think, the angrier he got. Until he had to break, he had to stop it, he had to smash back all that sound with a fist, until there was quiet again.
“Morning,” I say quietly to him as I pass. He doesn’t respond, so I turn to my mom instead. “Can I go out?” I ask, my voice still lowered.
“Out?” she echoes. There is little emotion in her voice, only mild curiosity. This is what the cureds are like. This is what they are supposed to be like, with their emotions diminished.
Unlike my dad.
People tell me that only cureds go to heaven. Not for the first time, I wonder if my dad will. He wasn’t fully cured, after all. They also tell me that patrols are for my own protection. If so, where were they when I had to get my appendix removed because of him? Or when he took my mom by the hair and slam her face-first into the kitchen counter, making me watch a spray of blood on the linoleum and see one of her teeth skitter across the floor, white and shiny as a die? Everyone around me seems happy, but I never am. I still don’t understand why I can’t be like everybody else. Why can’t I have such an opportunity?
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How Raven Found Blue
FanfictionIn Pandemonium, Raven briefly explains to Lena about her relationship to Blue, and how exactly their relationship came to be. In this fanfic of the Delirium universe, I explored the fateful meeting of how Raven found Blue.