Glow: Chapter 1. A Short Story by Lisa Vega
Short Story Written by: Lisa Vega
Creative Direction by: Catie Menke
Some people, like Posy Thorne, shone like the sun. I had entered the bookshop to see the latest volume of Flower Girl on display beside a life-sized cardboard cutout of the heroine herself. Now I sat in an armchair by the window letting dark spots jump into my view, as a scent like fresh peaches floated off the pages of the comic book. In it, Posy defeated small-time criminals using themed powers like hypnotic pollen and restraining vines. Nothing too violent for the kids. I tried to see something of my old friend in all that pink ink.
The Posy I remembered pointed finger guns at tin cans and paper targets from the surplus store, the two of us barefoot in the fields behind her grandparents’ house. I closed my eyes and tried to picture the moment in time. A younger me, watching through dirt-stained goggles with the scratch of wild grass on my shins. “Thorn shooting, take one,” I'd called out to Posy a few yards away, mocking the motion of a clapperboard with my hands. She had rolled her eyes; make-believe was beneath her.
My world within the bookstore warped around me as I heard the voice of my own, younger self. Posy's comic book stretched and smeared into streaks of pink, white and black. The window flexed impossibly. I was catapulted through space and time, and then I was there, squinting through the haze of those goggles. A spray of thorns bursting from Posy's two pointer fingers rent the paper targets and felled three of the four cans with a chorus of clinks. The strands of Posy’s strawberry blonde hair floated upward, held aloft by blinding pink. I shielded my eyes.
"Miss?" A woman's voice snatched me back into the armchair in the bookstore. My head snapped up from where it had slumped forward toward my chest. "Hmm? yes?" I slurred. Remembering where I was, I felt a wave of heat and the sudden need to stand. "I'm so sorry," I said, smoothing my hands over my clothes, my hair.
The woman had a look of amusement she was trying to hide. "It's no worry at all," she offered gently, "you can stay as long as you like, or I can ring you up if you're ready." She tilted her head toward the comic book I'd dropped on the floor.
*Oh shi--uh, yes, sorry." I stooped to pick up the book, stammering.
"I'll be right up front," she said. I followed her sheepishly to the checkout counter. “Can I get a gift receipt for this?” I asked as I handed her the book. She held it out in front of her, admiring the cover.
“Oh, is that what this is? My daughter adores Flower Girl!" She drew out the word adores with dramatic flourish. "Why, she tells me all the time, 'Mom, I wanna go viral!' Can you believe that?" I shook my head no. She scanned the barcode. "These are such amazing times, you know?"
“My niece too," I said absently, gazing toward the door.
"What?"
I looked at her, and she looked confused. I was expected to elaborate. "My niece, Aurora," I gestured toward the book and swiped my card, "loves Flower Girl too. She turns eight next weekend. She's glowing like all the time now. Yellow.”
The woman’s eyes lit up, and a hint of a glow, pale green, surrounded her for the briefest of moments. “It’s exciting to watch that start to develop, isn’t it? Receipt in the bag?”
“It really is. And yes, thank you.”
We exchanged well wishes, and I stepped out into the sharp light of the afternoon. The little street was alive with weekend shoppers, some glowing weakly, others not at all.
Posy had been radiant for as long as I’d known her, so it came as no surprise when two years ago her video titled Flower Girl, a 20-second time-lapse of her sprouting petals and leaves from her skin, blew up. We’d long since grown apart by then, and though I could barely recognize her in yoga pants, wild hair straightened into a tight bob, I would have known that pink aura anywhere. The way it grew brighter and brighter and didn’t stop.
I spent the night with the memory of an old boyfriend. I walked my fingers up the freckles on his shoulders. We were back in the guesthouse we had rented together from an old widow who wore her hair in a long white braid and didn't care if we smoked pot. That had been six years ago, before I'd packed up and headed for the city. He went by Samuel, never Sam, and he felt like nights back home, like sandals in the dirt under the porch light, with moths dancing above. His glow was orange. I bathed in it, naked legs teasing his. The next morning, I woke up alone in my condo with terrible cottonmouth.
My glow was just like the sky before and after it rained. My power was to make people sad.
Momma would tell me even the doctor cried the day I was born. I loved Momma very much, though I could never tell if she liked me.
“My beautiful Baby Blue,” she would call me with her eyes all puffy.
On the first day of school, Ms. Marsters called Momma to come back and get me because I was mean to my classmates. I stared down at my new white sneakers against the navy blue tile in the hallway, while Ms. Marsters and Momma whispered nearby. They were hissy like snakes, or what I thought snakes would sound like if I'd ever heard one.
"Blue, honey," Momma said to me on our way back to the car, "can you tell me what you said to your classmates that made them cry?"
Momma taught me at home after that.
When I was really little, I only glowed sometimes. Momma would tell me to go to timeout, and when I stopped glowing, I could play with my toys. As I got bigger, the glowing lasted longer. Then it lasted all day. Momma, looking very tired, got rid of timeout. I got to walk around all blue and shiny whenever I felt like after that, and that was nice.
I started to see less of Momma though. She spent more time out front smoking cigarettes or in her bedroom with the door locked. When I got even bigger and she taught me the microwave, she would leave for the store and come back after dark. Sometimes, she'd be gone for longer, and I wondered if people could sleep at the store. Maybe that's what those tall beds were for, with all their big fluffy pillows.
I wasn't allowed to go outside on my own, even though I could sometimes see other girls walking by if I peered through the blinds. Momma said we had to keep them closed. I wished we didn't. I wished I could be one of those pretty girls walking in twos and threes, with their bright-colored backpacks.
One day, Momma wasn't around two mornings in a row, which had not happened before. Then she was gone for three mornings, which had definitely not happened before. Then she was gone for four. I started to stare at the front door a lot.
Five mornings, and I came up with games to play with Momma and the front door. I'd walk back and forth ten times, and if the door opened when I was directly in front of it, I'd win. But it never opened. I fixed my eyes on the doorknob from the farthest corner of the living room, thinking if I stared hard enough, I could turn it with my mind. But it never turned. When it got dark, I fought with the urge to fling the door open, just so I could see Momma coming up the sidewalk. But I had a strong feeling she wouldn't be there. That made me mad.
I decided that if she was gone a sixth morning, I would walk right out the front door and to the end of the street. Maybe then, Momma would have no choice but to appear.
The next morning, I discovered Momma still hadn't come home. I checked her room, then the kitchen. I peered out the window to see if she was smoking, but she wasn't. And so I took a deep breath, unlocked the bottom and top locks on the front door, and not even bothering with shoes, turned the knob and let the sunlight pour in.
The end of the street was four houses from our house, on both sides. I counted as I walked past each of the four houses. I walked past the house with the grumpy man--that was the one right next to ours. Then I walked past the house with the BEWARE OF DOG sign, and the one with the big hole in the fence. The last house was the windchime house, which was my favorite. It had metal chimes that went ting and wooden ones that went clack and swirly glass things in every color.
I stopped at the stop sign, looking left and right. Momma didn't appear. Everything was quiet except for the soft, fairytale sounds of the windchimes. Then a door opened and shut, and I saw a lady not much taller than me but far, far older standing outside the windchime house. She had long, white hair and a weird dress, and she looked like a witch right out of the storybooks Momma read to me when I was little. Witches liked to catch and eat children, according to the stories, and I had no reason to think this witch was any different.
I felt brave, having reached the end of the street on my own. I was on a quest to find Momma. So when the witch opened her mouth to speak curses at me, I beat her to it.
"What do you want?" I shouted. "Go away!"
She raised her white eyebrows, then pinched them together. She stepped toward me, and I stepped back.
"Go away!" I repeated. "Go away, go away!"
But it wasn't working. Now she was walking toward me, asking, "where is your mother?" in a thin voice that prickled my ears. It sounded too close for the distance between us, like her voice was coming from right beside me. I was no longer brave. "Why isn't your mother with you?" the witch rasped again as she drew closer, glowing a deep, dark red. I turned and ran home.
By the time I got back into the house and locked the bottom and the top locks, I was light and floaty. I sunk to the floor, shutting my eyes tight and willing Momma to return.
But she didn't. I decided that, witch or no, I would go out again the next day, and the next, as long as it took to get her back.
When I awoke the next day and Momma was still gone, I hurried to put on my shoes. I would need them this time. I shut the front door behind me and walked right past the grumpy house, the dog house, and the fence hole house. This time when I reached the stop sign, I only glanced at the windchimes house, which was now the witch house, before stepping off the curb and crossing the street.
"Remember when I won my first shooting competition?" I asked my grandparents. I set a fresh bouquet of posies between their headstones. "Afterwards, when I'd asked if you thought Mom and Dad could see me from Heaven?"
It was early in the morning, and the breeze gave me a chill as it rustled the two oak trees standing guard over the graves. I pulled my green bomber jacket tightly around myself. I only ever wore pink for appearances and social media.
"I think it was you, Grandpa, who said of course they could see me. They were watching from the highest cloud, and they were so proud of me." I looked to the sky to stall my tears. "I don't know why I'm bringing this up. I feel like an idiot." I had to laugh bitterly, because I could almost hear Grandma's voice shushing me.
She believed in things unseen, which was not to say she'd been religious. I remembered her describing to me a video she had recently seen of an experiment. Two apples with words written on them in marker. Positive words on one: love, happy, good. Hateful words on the other. She'd watched a time-lapse of the negative apple rotting and molding, while the other remained unchanged. She’d later told me how the video had stuck with her. She died shortly after Grandpa did. It was the memory of her that gave me the idea for my first video.
"I'm famous now, did you know?" I shook my head at nothing. "And I guess, I don't know, maybe I just wanted to know if you could see. If you were prou--" My voice broke at proud, and I dropped to my knees in the patchy grass, babbling. "I just don't know what I'm doing. Like, what even is the point of it now? Who's it for?"
I stared at the headstones, the flowers, old petals, discarded and dried beneath new ones. I looked from one to the other, expectant. I did not believe in things unseen. I never had. If words really were powerful, now was the time for words, any words. Any sign. All I heard was the wind, cold and uncaring.
"I didn't think so," I sighed, and with my arms still crossed over my chest, I stood slowly and left.
Back in L.A., it was easy to avoid being recognized. Most people who knew who I was from my stream only ever saw an overwhelming amount of pink. Wig, jumpsuit, eyeshadow, glow. I'd stay in character for hours while I was on camera, so all it took was an oversized hoodie in any other color, and I was practically invisible. I relished in those moments. Here, in my childhood stomping grounds, I'd need to be more careful.
I drove a rented sedan through town. Seeing all the old mom-and-pops, inherited by the children of previous owners, the Davidson farm still sprawling and muddy, a new young pair of working dogs lying in the shade near the front gate, the yellow fields and dirt driveways, filled me with nostalgia. I hadn't been back home since the funeral. There hadn't been anything to come back for. Though lately, I'd started to feel that way about every place. Like an invasive species transplanted by mistake, or in ignorance, I didn't belong in the new environment where I found myself, and there was no going back from here.
"Well, well," I said, as I pulled up to the old house with its faded white paint and black shutters. The two acres of land were as I remembered them, if a bit overgrown. They butted up against a dead and damp looking forest. The whole place looked forsaken but familiar. I stepped out of the car, letting my boots sink into the mud before trudging up to the porch. I rested a hand on one chipped wooden post, feeling the echoes of loss beneath it.
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