Lanterns In The Morning

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to any actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2015 by Peter Sargent

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  Lanterns In The Morning

  Molly uprooted weeds and sapling trees from the ground and replanted them in a circle. Her father’s silky black Rottweiler found the end of its chain and stretched its body in her direction, warning her with a toothy bawl to cut this game short. Molly had begun with a stone circle, but her five year old logic told her that stones slept. Things growing in the soil always stood in watchful meditation, and that was what Molly needed. She hadn’t slept for three days, an eternity for a girl her age, and she had no intention of ever shutting her eyes again. She sat in the circle and watched the sun set beyond the pond.

  Mom and Dad stood behind the porch door, where they could see their daughter but not go to her. The porch was rotted through and the only way to enter the yard was to leave by the front door and loop around the house, as Molly had done. Her parents had no intention of rescuing her. At least her father didn’t, because he didn’t think she needed rescuing. The only thing that kept Mom inside was the threat her husband had made a minute ago. He’d said he’d tie his wife down if he had to. He’d unspooled and cut off ten feet of twine to prove his point, and now he held it in a loop behind his back. Mom held a pill box in her right hand. Her wrist trembled and rattled the sleeping pills inside. Her tremors intensified until they broke her husband’s concentration. He snapped his head at her and the homicidal look on his face breached her fear of him, of the things he’d done and of all the things she’d once believed him capable of.

  He believed that making Molly sleep would kill her. Mom believed the opposite, and what did it matter if this unemployed college janitor chased her? He was a just a dumb shit with twelve dollar jeans from K-Mart and he was slower than he was stupid. She was ten years his junior. The veins of gray hairs that curled through the charcoal colored steel wool on his head were proof of that. He dared her to run, and she took it – she bolted across the two rooms that comprised the entire lower floor of their house and crashed through the front door. He tumbled after her, but he slipped on the threshold and hammered his knee on the concrete steps. He didn’t make a sound, but he did leap up and go at it again.

  Mom took a half a lap around the house, making sure that the circumference of her path had a diameter longer than the Rottweiler’s chain. His name was Hunter, and he was a darling when he didn’t get wind that something was very wrong. When Mom had run far enough to see Molly again, thunder crashed on the pond’s far side, where the town was. The woman looked away from her daughter for a moment, looked where the clouds were gathering. There was an orange glow – yes, the sun was setting, but it was more than a glow – it was a flickering light, a big candle flame. And there was smoke. Rising, drifting, and covering the sky. Molly had warned her mother about this.

  The woman fell down on the ground next to Molly, crushing her plants, and curled the girl up in her arms. Molly twisted her body and shrieked. Her father rushed at them, wobbling on his battered knee. The man thought he was saving her from an ignorant mother. The man was so out of touch, and so suckered in by his princess that he couldn’t understand that what most kids cried about, what they pleaded with you not to do, was exactly what they needed for their own good. And Molly needed to sleep. Her mother managed to pop the bottle’s lid with her thumb and dump the pills into her palm. She held her fingers over Molly’s mouth, and the girl bit her – but the medicine went down. Molly stood up and staggered out of her circle. She turned to her mother and opened her mouth and didn’t breathe. She grabbed her throat.

  “Molly? Oh my god, Molly?”

  Without looking at anyone, the girl said, “They will light lanterns in the morning.”

  Neither Mom nor Dad twitched a muscle. Then the sky opened and soaked them. How could the storm have come here so quickly? Somehow, Molly had summoned it. She breathed again. And then she tore off. Her father knelt down and opened his arms, certain that princess would come for him after her mother had tortured her, but the girl sped past him. She slogged through the mud path to the road, and her parents chased her.

  There was a woman walking down the middle of the street. She wore shades and swept a red-tipped cane from side to side, though there was nothing close enough for her to detect with it. The woman was enormous, but not fat. She was at least six and a half feet tall and she wore a wide brimmed hat, flower patterned sun dress, and leather sandals. Molly crashed into her and the woman, unsurprised and unshaken by the little blond projectile, reached down and curled the girl up in one of her colossal arms. With the other arm she continued to tap the cane, a metronome that beat over the hush of the rain. The flower patterned woman turned from the road and came down the path to the house, her sandaled feet sloshing in the mire.

  When the two were close enough for Molly’s parents to see them clearly, they discovered that their daughter was sleeping. Dad took the girl from the woman and Molly awoke in an instant, crying,

  “They’re burning it down! ”

  The town, thought Dad. He didn’t know where the thought came from, but there it was. And another one: they’ve stopped believing what the silicon says. At last.

  The giant woman took Molly from her father and again the girl fell asleep. All three adults climbed the cement steps in silence and entered the house. The woman crossed the kitchen and into the other room, where the screen door looked over the eroded decking and Molly’s ruined monument. She turned to the room’s only piece of furniture, a futon with the angle of a shark’s mouth rising above water. She considered it, knowing that if a creature her size sat there she might never get up again, and decided to rest her bones. She sat for a minute and then she said,

  “When Molly realized that you’d given her the pills, she told me to come and protect her while she slept.” The woman’s voice sounded like it didn’t come from inside the room. It sounded like a radio transmission, complete with faint music bleeding from an adjacent channel. “Who told you to make her sleep?”

  Dad was too afraid to open his gutless mouth. Mom said, “The Sorter.”

  The big woman hummed with the music. She considered this. The Sorter was a computer program that asked you a thousand questions and then understood you completely. After that, you asked the Sorter the questions. What career should I pursue? Whom should I marry? What’s wrong with my daughter? Nearly everyone, but not everyone, charted each waypoint of their lives by the Sorter, the great navigator. Mom and Dad were two of those who belonged to not everyone. That’s how they ended up here, on the wrong side of the pond, in a house that was two rooms stacked on two rooms. They were a peeling wife and a crumbling husband, and when their daughter swore to stay awake the rest of her life, one of them decided enough was enough. Maybe Mom could afford the illusion of freedom when she was young, but when you have a child your life is no longer yours anyway. Mom turned to the Sorter, and the Sorter told her to put her only child to sleep with a pill.

  The goliath in the flower print said, “We sleep the most when we grow in the womb. Our fetal rest is broken into many intervals. Then we are born and we sleep less every day, but more at one time. That is, until we grow old, when we reverse our
progress. Where do you suppose the mind comes from? When does a mass of blinking lights reach sentience? Where does it go when it passes away? We sleep and we sleep until we are awake, and then we sleep again forever.”

  Dad stood up. He went to the kitchen and opened a drawer, from which he retrieved the project knife he’d used to cut the twine. He pushed the button and slipped the blade out from its casing. His wife shot up and ran at him, full of confidence from her previous adventure. The old janitor didn’t do a thing to her. He put the tip against his own neck and everyone in the room was still. A bead of blood licked the metal point.

  He looked from the standing woman to the sitting one and said, “I’ll bet the Sorter never told you I’d do that. All it says is I’m a guy that talks and can’t make meat from anything.” He turned again to his daughter’s protector. “What you’re saying is that bitch is all wrong. We were right in the first place to keep Molly away from that damn computer. You make sense, but I’m not going to let you keep holding on to my little girl.”

  “What the Sorter knew,” said the radio voice, “Was that someday your little girl would look sick and that would motivate