Sleight

sleight

Book One of the AVRA-K

Jennifer Sommersby

This is a work of fiction. Al of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons (living or dead), is entirely coincidental.

Al rights reserved. No part of this publication, in any format, can be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic or mechanical, without express written permission from the author and/or publisher.

SLEIGHT: BOOK ONE OF THE AVRA-K . Words and cover copyright © 2011 by Jennifer Sommersby Young Smashwords Edition: March 2011

To learn more about the author, visit www.jennifersommersby.com.

Contents

Dedication

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Acknowledgments

For Blake, Yaunna, Brennan, and Kendon.

And Gary, too.

:1:

December 31

May my soul ascend aloft after death; may it descend only after it has perished.

— Chapter 154, Egyptian Book of the Dead, The Book of Going Forth By Day

The last funeral I went to was for a lion. Sarah. She was mauled to death by her lover. There was no casket. Just a canvas tarp and some very thick plastic.

The open grave I stood before this afternoon did have a casket.

Wood and brass, a human inside laying atop satin and cotton. My mother. And she wasn’t mauled to death by anything except her psychosis.

The idea of leaving Delia in the ground, al by herself, with nothing but a rosary to keep her company made me sick to my stomach. She never had a rosary in her awake life. The douche bag at the funeral home must’ve thought she would need one for her eternal sleep. Presumptuous dick with his combover and his sweat-stained shirt. I should’ve insisted on packing a wool blanket or her favorite red sweater. The Egyptians loaded tombs with food, jewelry, even combs and dishes. They had the right idea. North Americans were cruel with their burials, leaving their dead to fend for themselves with nothing but useless beads.

The generic one-size-fits-al eulogy proved that the on-cal pastor knew nothing about my mother. He was just filing his shift, doing his job. “Aunt” Marlene and my “uncles,” Ted and his brother Irwin, my legal guardians and the only real caregivers I’d ever known, took turns placing their pink carnations atop the casket, folowed by a steady stream of people who were the only family I had left—felow circus company members, none of us bound by blood or genes but al of us related forever. Wire walkers, acrobats, trapeze flyers, animal wranglers, sword swalowers, a psychic, the tattooed guy. Normal people, or, normal to me.

I stood to the side, twirling the stem of my own flower between my fingers. I didn’t want the arms of condolence wrapped around my shoulders, these wel-meaning humans whispering words into my ear to try and make me feel better. Nothing was going to make me feel better, not now. Maybe not ever.

“Gemma, do you want to say a few words?” Aunt Marlene asked me through the wrinkled, wet handkerchief under her nose.

The smal crowd was silent, watching me, their eyes pained, cheeks wet.

“What, like, hey, Mom, happy new year?” I looked away. I knew Mar was hurting, too, but I didn’t care. I had some leeway when it came to being an obnoxious punk. It was my mother who was dead, my mother who’d left me in the care of others while she unraveled in any number of mental institutions, my mother who said she loved me but loved herself more. I could be the biggest ass in the world, if I wanted to. I’d earned that.

Standing around the periphery of the yard hovered a colection of ethereal bodies lacking the density to obscure the frosted greenery behind them. The shades. Delia wasn’t among them. Did that mean she was in heaven? Hel? Somewhere in between? If she were in-between, she’d have been standing among them, watching me from the eastern tree line, stuck between this life and the next.

Where do people go after they’ve swalowed enough pils to kil a stable ful of horses?

It was too much. Too much misery. Too much sadness. I surveyed the assemblage of forgotten souls—men, women, a few children, some dressed in period clothing, some more recent. The old dead mingling with the new. Seeing the kids was the hardest.

Little kids weren’t supposed to die. And they sure as hel weren’t supposed to be shades. What kind of god does that?

I didn’t dare let my eyes linger too long for fear of drawing the attention of felow funeral-goers. The shades never spoke to me, nor I to them. And I wondered if so many were present because they knew I could see them, or if they came out for every new addition to their halowed ground. Like a welcome to the neighborhood sorta thing.

A little girl waved at me. I waved back but felt a hand on my opposite shoulder. As I met Marlene’s gaze, she gave me a weak, questioning smile, one I’d seen dozens of times before: Are they there? Are the people there? She knew what I could see. She, Ted, and Irwin were the only ones who knew I could see, except for Delia. Delia saw them, too, but her shades were mean, prone to endless torment. Not quiet and unobtrusive like mine.

I nodded and looked down at my feet.

The casket shuddered on the metal framework when the guy pressed the black button to engage the lift motor that would lower my dead mother into the freezing ground.

“…We commend the soul of our sister departed, and we commit her body to the ground; earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust…”

The last of the flowers were lobbed into the pit. “You want to ride back with us, Gems?” Junie. My best friend and lifelong companion, her face blotchy and swolen from crying. She hadn’t known my mom very wel, but she’d seen the damage Delia’s mania had inflicted upon me. It was safe to assume that Junie’s tears were more for me than for my mom.

“No, thanks, Junie. I’m going to wait here for a while. Feel sorry for myself a little longer.”

She hugged me and walked toward the car, trailing her twin brother Ash and their parents. She stil had her carnation in hand, as though she’d forgotten to drop it into the grave. Knowing Junie, she wanted to press the flower between two bricks and save it in one of her endless scrapbooks. She’d glue it right next to Delia’s obituary, the one the hospital filed as a matter of public record. Boring, lacking sentiment. “Loving mother and loyal friend.” Again, whoever was in charge of filing in the blanks of the obit worksheet knew little to nothing about the true Delia Flannery. No one wants to read

“haunted by unseen demons” and “prone to sudden outbursts of psychotic behavior.” Not quite as romantic.

Marlene and Ted shook hands with a few of the other company members while I waited, leaned against a tree. I could smel Irwin’s pipe smoke wafting across the grounds. He was already planted in the front seat of Ted’s truck, waiting for us to finish up. Since his accident, he didn’t tolerate the cold very wel.

“Let’s go, honey,” Marlene said, offering me her gloved hand.

“I’m going to wait, Mar. I’l walk back to the hotel in a bit.”

“Gemma, it’s too far and too damned cold to walk,” Ted said.

“We can come back next weekend if you want.”

“Ted, why don’t you and Irwin head on out, grab something to eat, and Gemma and I wil get a cab in a little while, when she’s ready to leave.”

Ted was silent for a beat, chewing on a fresh toothpick. He couldn’t smoke in the graveyard, so toothpicks had to suffice. “Al right. Whatever you think.” He puled out his walet and folded some bils into Marlene’s hand before kissing the top of my head and heading to the truck.

The branches of a stately oak would serve as umbrela to protect my mother from the elements, or they would once spring arrived and the arms and fingers exploded with fresh leaves. Right now, they were sparse and straggly. Almost scary, like witch hands.

I separated myself from Marlene and slid to the ground, my back against the girth of the tree’s old trunk. I folded my long wool coat tight around my lower half and wrapped my arms around my knees to keep the chil from sneaking up my pant legs. The ground was hard, cold, but not wet. At least not where I was sitting. No snow under the tree, too cold to be wet.

The crowd dispersed with relative speed, the cars weaving their way out of the cemetery and back onto the main highway toward the hotel. I watched Ted’s beat-up truck as it inched forward in the queue of vehicles, the distant profile of his brother in the passenger seat wobbling as they went over the speed bumps a little too quickly in a rig with lousy suspension. The right rear brake light was out.

Marlene didn’t impose herself on me by taking a seat next to the tree. Instead, she tightened the black wrap around her shoulders and took a quiet walk through the gravestones, pausing now and again to read the epitaphs, glancing back at me to make sure I was stil sitting where she’d left me. An elderly shade folowed her, a woman with a hunched back and a kind face, a dirty, threadbare shawl draped around her. The granny stood near Marlene whenever she stopped, like an invisible tour guide.

I wiled myself to cry, to squeeze out the tears everyone expected me to shed. My eyes were parched, itchy, uncompromising in their anti-tear position. I plucked the petals off my carnation, creating my own snowstorm of pink on the earth around me.

What am I supposed to do now, Mom? Tell me that.

I stared across the yard. The shades hadn’t moved much, though a few of the children were chasing one another around the more impressive grave markers. It made me smile a little to think that even in death, children could stil play.

A flash caught my attention, the reflection of winter sun off the passenger door window of a black car. There was a split-second delay between the man shutting the door and the actual sound reaching my ear, evidence of how far away he was from where I was seated. His movements were catlike, quick and quiet. Dressed in a black suit and long black overcoat, the only splash of color was a red pocket square in his left breast pocket. In his hands he carried a sizable bouquet of pink flowers—roses, I think. His head was down, his face obscured by the rim of his black fedora.

He walked up the slight incline and stopped just a few feet short of the mouth of Delia’s as-yet open grave. If he saw me sitting off to the side, he didn’t let on, just bent down, dropped the flowers into the pit, and muttered something in a language I couldn’t understand.

He pivoted on his heel, head stil down, and moved with equivalent stealth back to his car. So quiet were his approach and departure that I wouldn’t have even noticed his presence had my eyes been closed.

The only thing that confirmed that I had seen an anonymous visitor was the sudden, strange disappearance of the shades.

Something—or someone—had scared them off.

:2:

All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter another.

—Anatole France

After my mother’s untimely exit from my life on Christmas Eve, we’d lingered in Portland for a few weeks, Ted busy with meetings and bank appointments and act auditions, the usual stuff he did in the off-season. He traveled back and forth to Seattle to meet with some potential new investor, but I was kept very much in the dark.

I think they were afraid to talk to me too much, afraid I’d crumble into a pile of broken chunks. The Girl Formerly Known as Gemma.