0

The Demon’s Cantos Part 25

After Byron’s outburst neither he nor Tilda had much of an appetite. The two sat in almost mournful silence as the kitchen filled with the crunchy odor of browning pizza dough until Byron excused himself, leaving another earnest, uncomfortable apology in his wake.

Back in his all-white room, Byron sat on the side of the bed, amidst the tousled sheets, and looked at one of the walls until his eyes filled with tears. Eventually, the house itself seemed to take notice of Byron’s state and it dimmed the floor to ceiling windows and darkened the walls until the room was filled with twilight. The effect was so subtle that Byron hardly took conscious notice of it happening, though it put him intuitively more at ease.

Still the tears flowed as Byron laid down on his side, his cheeks wetting the soft white pillowcase.

Three weeks.

The words appeared in Byron’s mind from nowhere and forced their way out of his mouth. “Three weeks,” he said to himself, his voice nasal with crying. The words took on a talisman-like quality, as if their explanatory power was limitless and Byron found real solace in speaking them again, pronouncing them slowly and carefully.

“Three. Weeks.”

That was, at most, as much time had passed since Nan’s death. Within no more than three weeks, Byron’s life had transformed, morphed out of all proportion, from an utterly banal if somewhat lonely teenage melodrama into an absolute chaos of loss and magic and monsters and harrowing danger.

Nan died on a Sunday, exactly a week before Byron teleported Korbius into her kitchen. Byron had made breakfast – they always had breakfast in bed on Sundays. Byron would fry up a couple of eggs and pancakes, lay them out on a tray with some coffee and orange juice, and bring them to Nan before making up his own tray and returning to lay beside her. Then the two of them would sit back and watch “Meet The Press” and Nan would pay half attention and mostly just poke fun at Chuck Todd – her favorite Sunday morning activity.

“Who he think he foolin’,” she used to say, pointing a fork at the nearly muted TV, “who you think you fooling’ Chuck? Wearin’ that goatee . . .” she’d suck at her front teeth and talk to Chuck directly, “You ain’t foolin’ anyone Chuck, you damn sure ain’t foolin’ no ladies. I can promise you that.”

For a moment Byron couldn’t help but smile at the memory before he was drawn back to the last Sunday.

He’d made their usual breakfast, and laid it all out on two trays and brought hers in first, as always.

The moment Byron entered the room he went cold as ice. The TV wasn’t on, though it was past 10:30, and Byron knew immediately something was wrong. Nan was curled up under the covers, as still as a bundle of pillows a teenager might place in their stead to sneak out in the night.

His hands and feet tingled and made it hard to carry the tray. He nearly dropped it but forced himself to hold firm. He gripped the edges of the tray tightly, until his knuckles were white as if by grasping the silvery metal edges he could force Sunday to continue as normal. Byron just stood there, holding breakfast, and even allowed himself to imagine that if he just held onto the tray tight enough, for long enough, Nan would stir beneath her blankets and turn towards him with her wide, grateful smile.

But she never did and Byron’s arms began to ache. Eventually, he had no choice but to put down the tray and approach – though he knew well enough what he would find.

It seemed trite to him even to think it at the time, but she really did look at peace, as though she’d died in the middle of a wonderful dream and decided never to leave it.

For Byron, Nan was just such a dream – the very embodiment of the word family. There was no one else – there had never been anyone else as far as Byron was concerned. He did not remember a time before Nan and counted himself lucky for that. No foster parents, no shelters, no hospitals. Just Nan, stepping in to take a broken toddler no one else wanted, a kid she had no obligations towards whatsoever, the child of a stranger and a drug addict, unloved and abandoned. The state warned her – he would almost certainly be delayed. Hell, he was three years old and didn’t even have a name yet. But Nan didn’t give a good goddamn about any of that.

“When two puzzle pieces fit together,” she often said whenever those early times came up, “there ain’t no questioning that its right, Byron. And I knew from the start,” that warm, maternal smile, “we just fit, baby.”

Three weeks. No time at all. Even in the midst of all the madness, Byron still found himself worrying about Nan now and again – as if she were at home, waiting for him to return. He would have to remind himself – while firing lighting out of his hands or floating through the air – that it simply was not the case.

There was no home to return to. Ocracoke Island, that recurrent summer oasis, was ash. Byron would never see Nan again, except perhaps in his dreams. And that was just the start of it. Slowly Byron was coming to accept that he would never finish high school, never kiss a girl, never get a job or have children of his own. He had to force himself to reckon, over and over again, with the impossible reality – that within a few days, at most, Byron would be fighting a God using powers he didn’t understand, couldn’t control, and wished, more than anything, he had never discovered.

Laying there cocooned within warm blankets in the darkened room, lost in even darker thoughts, trapped behind a veil of tears, Byron fell into a deep sleep.

He could not tell whether it was reality or himself which temporarily faded away – but as ever and always when the desperate are blessed with sleep, it hardly mattered.

If You Enjoyed This Story – Or Any Of The Hundreds Of Other Legends From The Multiverse – And Want To Give A Dollar To The Madman Behind The Curtain Who Writes Them All:

Subscribe to the RSS feed or leave a comment anywhere on the r/LFTM subreddit with “!subscribeme” or “subscribeme!”, and you’ll receive a notification whenever a new story or continuation is posted.

READ MORE FLASH FICTION

READ LONGER STORIES