Autumn

I must be in a sharing mood, because here is another extract!
It's the first time we hear from Lacie's point of view, and I've often debated as to where I should put it, but it's currently the start of Chapter 2. For a little bit of trivia, it sets the time in our world at the autumnal equinox, which in 2010 also coincided with a full moon.
This is something that has been written for quite a while, so perhaps a bit more 'matured' than the previous extract, and one I particularly like. Hope you do too! :)

~*~

For years I felt as though nothing tied me to the little girl I was when I left Brittany with my parents. She was a stranger. I knew nothing of her. Peter’s death had turned me into a blank canvas. But it seems the past had only been frozen in time; since being back, wherever my gaze drops risks shattering the surface of my consciousness with long-lost memories: an oddly coloured brick on a house, an old tree by the road, the taste of a foreign sweet. The tiniest word, written on an object as innocent as a school diary, can trigger a flood of thoughts. Autumn.

Tomorrow it will be autumn, but you couldn't tell, with the stifling heat that makes strings of hair, beaded with pearls of sweat, stick to the damp skin on my neck.

Autumn. Peter loved autumn. On Halloween day, he would get up at dawn to carve the pumpkins and decorate the house with paper garlands and crumpled leaves. Then he would spend the rest of the day re-enacting to our family audience spooky stories of spirits and ghosts coming back to earth for one night. If I ever got scared, and I often would, my brother would reassure me with his expert knowledge on how to keep the sprites at bay.

‘It's autumn tomorrow, Mum,’ I say, breathing in the air from the open window in the car driving me back from school.

‘That's lovely, dear.’

Her eyes do not betray even a flicker of life. She's somewhere else, or years behind, when worries had not yet made her fair hair white, her eyebrows fade and her grey eyes become empty.

I clench my jaw and hug my school diary closer, a pain in my throat. It has always been beyond me why she became this nothingness the day her son died and, most of all, why her other child was not good enough a reason to stay alive. Dad was the same. A part of them died that day, I'm sure of that. They say that it's just that ‘Mum and Dad don't love each other anymore but they still love you like before’. But I’m thirteen and I understand a lot more than my parents give me credit for into why we left Brittany and Grandpa's house in a rush after the funeral, why we moved to London, and why Mum and I have to move back to Grandpa's house now that Dad and her have split up. The truth is that the day Peter died they forgot how to live.

The turn of a road, a graveyard behind a stonewall and it all comes back to me with the brutality of the storm at Peter’s funeral: the rain, the casket, the days of frantic phone calls and endless hours of waiting, someone telling Mum and Dad that they had found Peter’s body. I remember now. The visitor looked like an important person; he had a shirt on in spite of the stuffy summer heat.

‘I have to warn you, it might be quite upsetting,’ the man said to my parents. ‘It looks like he's been attacked by some animal. The marks look like wolves' but there haven’t been wolves in Brittany for hundreds of years.’

He seemed to find this idea very puzzling, which I thought was strange; all the fairy tales Peter had told me said the woods were full of wolves.

‘Forensics will tell’, Dad said, grabbing his coat as Grandpa’s car revved in the driveway.

‘Did the Big Bad Wolf eat Peter, Daddy?’ my seven-year-old self asked. ‘Like the Little Red Riding Hood?’

Mum hugged me between two howls of pain and stroked my nose with her finger.

‘Yes, Lacie’, said Dad, looking surprised to find me there, ‘but be a good girl and don't ask questions, you're making Mummy cry. You stay with Grandpa, we’ll be back soon.’

So I stopped asking questions, even when I wondered why there was a thunderstorm that evening, as if the weather-man had waited for us to be sad to start the rain after the days of heavy heat, why Peter was buried in an ugly cemetery and not in his beloved forest, and why his favourite plush dog, Barney, had to go with him, even though Barney was promised to me and would be lonely in a dark coffin with a dead body.

Worst amongst all the questions I was forced to swallow back down with breakfast every morning was why, within weeks of losing my best friend, my brother, my Peter, why on earth I had to lose the second best person in the world, Grandpa. How sad I was to be forced into a cloudy London life with grey parents. It is this same life my parents' separation has made me leave as well to go back to Brittany to the house we had so expediently fled.

Now, being back, I don't know how Grandpa could stand it all these years, every piece of furniture and every stone of his old Breton house tainted by the past, dragging the unaware walker-by into dark corners. Halloween has come early this year; this place is full of ghosts.