The October Malice ༄ (gxg)

nine, precipice

Amanda Indick was a thorny woman.

The origin of her existential dread was an enigma to Opal and Jeremy who, of course, were the target of her stormy moods. Amanda had not been born in Deliverance; she had met Jeremy at college in the same town where he had started practicing psychology. They were both freshman and were married with a little blonde baby within a year of meeting.

But Jeremy had been born in Deliverance, the only escape of his lifetime being the one year that he resided in the college dorm in that big city. After finding out his girlfriend was pregnant, he decided to move back into the old house where his own parents used to live before they had died. He still got to escape from the town when he was finishing graduate school and operating a clinic, but after the unspeakable scandal kept so far away from Opal's ears, they were stuck in Deliverance for good.

At the end of the first semester of her freshman year, when Amanda found out she was pregnant, she begged Jeremy to not follow through with his chosen profession. With the path to a psychologist being a lengthy one consisting of several years and the amount of student debt he would undoubtedly have, she knew that they would be broke—and they were.

In her infanthood, Opal stayed with Mrs. Browning most of the time while her parents went to classes and to their rinky dink jobs. They became flooded with debt, and the bank nearly repossessed their house had it not been for a large sum of money that Mrs. Browning took out of her savings and gave to Jeremy with no intention of being returned.

Things got better for a while, but before Opal could even retain memories, Amanda began falling deep into her pit of nonrefundable anger. Everything had begun to weigh on her—Deliverance, being poor and deeply in debt, being a parent who was too busy working and doing night classes to see her child.

That's why Opal never felt that motherly embrace as a child, and that was why she kept closer to her dad. Jeremy was an optimistic man, one who could walk through flames with a smile on his face. When Opal was a baby, her mother always went straight to bed when she got home every single night, but her father always stayed up later and cradled Opal against the fabric of his Burger King uniform while he held a textbook on his knee to study for all the tests he had. He usually ended up falling asleep in that position. That was how Opal fell asleep the first several months of her life—in the rocking chair in her nursery, in her father's arms with the feeling of a heavy textbook against her back.

She missed that part of her father, the one who could put out the painful flames of her mother's resentment for her own life and everyone in it. Ever since he quit working out of town, the lightbulb behind his eyes had dimmed, and now since Mrs. Browning's murder, he stayed in bed almost every day. This was only incentive for Amanda's further anger.

"Aren't you going to get out of bed and do something soon?" that voice quipped from the doorway of Opal's room, and the blonde didn't even have to open her eyes to know that Amanda was standing there with her brown hair pulled into a pony and a hand sitting impatiently on her hip.

Opal decided to ignore her most of the time, for she had spent most of the energy from her teen years fighting her mother's fires. So she only turned away, sighing deeply and hoping that sleep would once again overcome her. It was still early in the morning, but her mom always wanted everyone up bright and early on Sundays. It was a futile thing—Amanda Indick would never step foot into a church. Maybe her guilt for what she didn't do on Sundays was what drove her to give everyone in the house something to do.

"You've got chores to do. You can't just lay around and be good for nothing like you always do."

With that, her mother slammed her door shut so hard that Opal could hear a loose leaf of paper fall from the edge of her desk, the coarse sound of it skating across the fibers of the carpet proceeding the sound of the door slam.