Wren in Chaos
“Mom! Mom!” Wren yelled as she stood on the second floor. Her damp hands held the shaking rifle, as her sister screamed over and over and, Nicole kept roaring, “No!”
That was when the sisters’ mother ran from the darkened house with the hilt of a knife sticking out of the space just below her left clavicle with Nicole’s father chasing her. Then the shots were fired, as their mother lay in the middle of the street on her back, with momentary flashes that lite the night in contrast to the dark in rapid bursts.
Without the moonlight, the three girls would not have known the final outcome, but they saw everything…even the last moment Sloan looked up at them in the window to the moment when Doug’s body landed face down across her legs. Like a drunken boat docking at a busy marina on a Saturday night, Sloan’s body jolted to the side, then righted once again with the impact.
That was it. Both bodies laid motionless. Still. Wren put the rifle down, leaned it against the wall, thinking, How can you leave us like this? You promised.
“Mom! Is she dead?” Mae turned to Wren and asked. Tears streaming down her face, her hands plastered to the window.
Nicole had turned away, leaned against the wall, buckled into herself and slid down the wall wracked with sobs when Wren looked.
She didn’t blame Nicole, she couldn’t look at them laying there in the street any longer, either.
“Where are you going?” Mae screamed. “Mom said to stay here.”
Before Wren realized her plan, she unlocked the door to the bedroom and rushed downstairs with Mae on her heels.
“You can’t go out there!” Mae yelled.
“We have to get Mom away from him. Now help me or be quiet!” she said through clenched teeth.
Nicole suddenly appeared next to Mae saying, “We can help,” as she rubbed the slick moisture away from her eyes with the palms of her hands.
I can’t let her see her father that way, Wren thought. It’s not right.
“Nicole, no. You should stay here. Mae and I…we’ll bring Mom in.”
As Nicole began to shake her head in protest, Wren said, “We need you to look out for anyone. We’ll be quick. Yell if you see anyone coming, okay?”
The young girl took in a long shuttering breath. The breath told Wren, the tears were held there…just on the verge.
“I knew something like this was going to happen.” Wren’s harsh whisper caught her sister by surprise.
“How did you know?” Mae asked still crying.
“Just get behind me. Only move when I say so,” Wren said. She put her warm hand on the door handle, and looked out the side window with the two bodies lying there in the street. A silver-winged moth floated down like a feather and landed on corpses as if that were allowed now that her mother was motionless out there. Wren opened the door, then felt Mae’s clammy hands hang onto her arm. “Stop that! Come on,” she said, shaking from her sister’s grasp.
Looking up and down the street as she neared the stoop, she saw no movement. Nothing. No one came running to help them or harm them. If moths could land on corpses in the middle of the street, no one is coming, friend or foe, she reasoned.
Then, when she decided to stop being afraid, Wren marched with heed, straight out to her mother.
“Wait, is it safe?” Mae said scrambling after her sister. “Mom said to stay inside!”
Wren never answered. Her feet stopped at her mother’s head while her arms hung like stiff rods swinging at her sides.
Standing over her mother’s form from the top down, it occurred to Wren that never in her life had she seen her mother this way: small, delicate, fragile. Dead? That was the question Mae asked her earlier. The hilt swayed just so slightly in the wind. Wren’s knees buckled suddenly, to get a closer look. “Mom?”
“Is she dead?” Mae asked, her voice wretched, from five broad steps behind her.
Wren forgot her sister. Forgot she was even there.
“No. Help me.”
“Is he…dead?” Mae asked still from the same distance behind her.
“Yes. Too much blood.”
Pebbles skidded under the soles Mae’s sneakers as Wren’s eyes tracked the slow oscillations of the hilt, back and forth. It wasn’t the wind.
“Be careful of the knife,” Wren said to her sister as they each lifted their mother by the shoulders and freed her legs of the dead weight of Doug.
She felt her mother would weigh as much as a mountain. She thought the task of dragging her inside the house would take all night. In no time, they pulled her surprisingly light body, back across the street, out of the moonlight and into the darkened house.
It was Nicole who held the door open to the moonlight as they crossed the threshold and sealed it slowly shut as she peeked at her dead father’s form until the last sliver blinked out.