Karen’s pigtails sprouted through the cracks in her skull like weeds from a shattered sidewalk, and Jack thought it might be existentially horrifying were they not such cute pigtails. She had in the hair ties that looked like ladybugs.

“Dad,” she groaned. “Can you hurry? I have to be there by three.”

“Hold your horses,” he chastised patiently, wrapping one smooth band of hair around another. Her hair was getting so long, he thought ruefully. It seemed like only yesterday it’d barely passed where her ears should be, and now it was past her shoulders.

“I wish I had a blue dress,” she grumbled, glowering at the mirror and the dark outfit she wore. Her father hummed understandingly. He bought her all the dresses she asked for, of course, from cornflower blue to pastel pink to the ones decorated with skateboarding cats and surfing dogs. They all just turned into black cloaks. He assured her she still looked adorable in these, but she shrugged off the compliments and resumed sulking. Maybe it was just a part of growing up. She was almost a teenager, he supposed.

It wasn’t always like this. Her mother, whose face Jack could only remember after waking up from a particularly frightening nightmare, had been around in the early days. For the first time in his life, Average Jack had been the talk of the town: a baby out of wedlock. His mother had fanned her face so hysterically that they hadn’t needed to pay the air conditioning bill for months, his father had grumbled and paced so furiously that their kitchen now featured a small trench, and several neighbors had sprained their index fingers from pointing too hard. Jack hadn’t minded. He had been deeply in love ever since he’d been approached at the bar with the opening line, let’s raise a little hell. The rumors of his impulsiveness had been greatly exaggerated: he fully intended to marry this woman, and be as good a father as there could be.

“Dad, you have to hurry up,” Karen insisted, squirming in the chair enough to make the floorboards creak. “I haven’t even wrapped her present.”

“You should have done that before today,” Jack advised unhelpfully, refusing to rush this moment of somewhat reluctant father-daughter bonding. “Now come on, help me out. Are they even?” She hesitated between pouting and helping, but seemed to decide the latter would end the torture sooner. He watched her too-serious expression of consideration and felt, not for the first time, the strong urge to pinch her nonexistent chubby cheeks.

“They’re even,” she decided. He nodded and grabbed the two beetle ties to wrap up the braids. The moment he’d finished, she pulled up her hood, scooted off the chair, and raced to her bedroom. As he collected the keys and confirmed his wallet’s location, he heard the sounds of ripping tape and reckless wrapping paper destruction.

“We have to get there by three!” He shouted up, in no rush but always happy to tease. When Karen bounded down the steps, she did so with several hastily-prepared presents tucked between her elbow and hip.

“I’m ready!” She announced, barely stopping to tell him so. She stood in front of the door and jerked her head towards the handle impatiently, practically vibrating with excitement. When he opened the door, the fresh air felt so warm it was as though he’d stepped into a bath. He had only just begun to appreciate the beautiful May afternoon when Karen barrelled past him towards the street, leaping from her left foot to her right. “Come on!” She shouted without looking back.

Buying their current house had been a shrewd decision based off of the key location location location mantra of real estate. Luckily for Jack, few people were eager to be within walking distance of the local cemetery. Though it didn’t come up often enough, he thought with no small bitterness. He appreciated that Karen’s mother had a career-oriented lifestyle, but he wished that she had more time for their daughter.

They passed through the wrought iron gate and headed towards the mausoleum. Many graves had flowers and balloons today, which Jack thought was sweet, but the mausoleum was a display of excess. There was even a banner which read Happy Mother’s Day!, which Jack (frankly) thought was a little self-indulgent. Karen seemed thrilled by the over abundance of decorations, however, and began jogging past old tombstones and fresh mounds of dirt.

“Come on, come on!” She shouted excitedly. “She’s already here!” Sure enough, they were only a few feet from the mausoleum when the summer warmth dissipated and Jack felt uneasy, as if he’d just remembered his oven had been left on. The shadows cast from gnarly trees and cracked stones gathered themselves up into a very shapely mass of seething black. Jack scratched the back of his neck self-consciously, hoping his new haircut wasn’t too short.

“Hello, darling!”

Karen threw herself up into her mother’s arms, grinning against her robes. “Hiya, Mom! Do you like my dress? It was blue before. I have presents for you! Don’t peek too hard; I didn’t finish wrapping them because Dad said my hair needed to be brushed.”

“Your braids look very nice,” her mother replied. “How’s your midas touch?”

“I wear gloves to school,” Karen assured her, wiggling her black gloves (they’d been pink with blue kittens, initially). “I haven’t forgotten since last summer, when I won tag.”

“Well, I’ll leave you two to it,” Jack announced, feeling a little out of place. Though he loved spending time with them, Karen rarely had a chance to discuss her favorite hobbies. Jack tried, but he found he could only nod along supportively rather than add anything of substance. Her mother had such a hard time taking off work; she always had a lot of catching up to do no matter how short her visits were. He waved, happily noting the way one of his wife’s eye sockets darkened imperceptibly (perhaps signalling a flirtatious wink), and headed back towards the main road. As he walked, he couldn’t help but wish he had more in common with his family, or at least more time with them both. Maybe, he thought wistfully, there was a way to keep them all together.

As a car zoomed past, he paused, staring after it. He glanced back at his wife and daughter, currently cutting down some weeds with matching scythes and matching toothy grins, and nodded with certainty.

He waited.

When a large bus came rumbling down, foolhardy in its speed and no doubt past its annual inspection date, he took a step forward. The bus shouted its objections, but he just smiled and remained resolute. It might have worked had a hand not grabbed forcefully at his shirt, pulling him back onto the manicured lawn.

“Jack,” she said. “You can’t visit just yet. Karen hasn’t finished school, and honestly I haven’t cleaned the place. Give me another few years, okay?” She kissed her palm and blew it to Jack, who rushed to catch it despite his mediocre history of athletics.

“Only a few more years?” He repeated hopefully.

“Oh yes,” she assured him. “Same bus, actually. I’ll see you then.”

“Okay,” he agreed, smiling. He stood by the road a little while longer, watching as she walked back to their waiting daughter. Karen was already thrusting presents into her arms, too eager to wait any longer, but when she noticed his gaze she smiled so brightly the sun was rivalled. A few more years? He could do that.

#brushwithdeath

There came a lingering sensation,

That something out there was not right.

That something moved and slipped and scuttled,

In the dark and dead of night.

Opaque windows, dim with dirt,

Began to heave like lungs.

The winds outside howled loud and angry,

As rain lashed glass like cobra tongues.

In sudden silence came the noise.

A cacophony of clattering,

Amongst the remnant smattering

Of rain on pane...

Like tin cans battering, glassware shattering,

And then…

An old man flattering.

“A fine fine house,” he said with silk.

“A fine fine place of fine fine ilk.”

Fingernails against the door,

First 5, then 10, then seven more.

Scratching, scratching, now a knock.

“Let me in; unlock this lock.”

No breaths are drawn within this room;

No eyes meet eyes as shadows loom;

And in the window stares a face,

Without expression, merely grace.

“A fine fine house,” says this old man.

He thinks and looks and sees.

“A fine fine place for you, my friends,

And a fine, fine time for me.”

“What is it?”

“It’s pretty.”

“I like the girl. Looks a bit like Kara, you think?”

Kara glanced up at her name. She had been rummaging through old junk scattered across the superstore car park, desperate to find something of worth. The sky was already bleeding its blue and they had little to their names beyond the usual knives and empty guns. Though she was confident in her own ability to survive a one-sided scrap, she wasn’t alone anymore. She gathered herself up, feeling every long day and bitter fight reverberate along her nerves, and made her way over to the gaggle of children.

“Find something useful, then?” The littlest one, Caroline, closed her fist around the item sheepishly. Her older brother, a sandy-haired boy called Caleb, forced the small fingers open and handed it over.

“What is it?” He asked. Kara twirled the small circle of metal, unexpectedly pleased by the heft. There was something very nostalgic about it all.

“It’s a coin,” she answered. She watched Caroline’s lips trace the word over and over, trying to make a connection.

“What’s that?” Demanded Lily, the last of the trio. She towered over the other two, nearly over Kara herself, and now tried to use that advantage to steal the coin back. Kara just laughed as she palmed the coin, slipping it into her other hand as the children watched, mesmerized.

“This is how they used to trade. You have a gun, I give you some coins, we’re both happy.”

Still trying to get a better look, Caleb asked, “Does it do something?”

“It’s doing it.”

Lily rested a hand on her hip, looking distinctly unimpressed. “Why wouldn’t I just use the gun to get the coin back?”

Kara tsk’ed. “No one would trade with you anymore then, would they?”

“I don’t get it,” Caroline admitted quietly, twisting her fingers up in the fabric of her shirt. Kara considered the problem. She herself had only been sixteen when the bombs dropped; it wasn’t as though she had a degree in economics. She only knew what little she did from odd jobs performed around the neighborhood. For one brief moment, she thought fondly of girl scout fundraisers and paper routes and a summer spent sweeping floors at a pet daycare center. They were all smouldering ruins now, of course, if they even had embers to smoulder. She flipped the coin back and forth across her knuckles, marveling at how this silly skill had transcended lifetimes.

“Think of it this way,” she began, sitting and smiling as the children sat beside her. They formed an imperfect circle, like the damaged silver trim of the coin. “Collecting clean water is dangerous, dirty work, but everyone needs water, don’t they?” Nods rippled through the circle. “But everyone also needs food, and everyone also needs protection. You can have people all work together, of course, and rely on trust, like families-”

“Like us,” piped up Caroline, though she immediately seemed to regret the intrusion. Her lips pursed as if she’d swallowed a lemon whole, and her eyes darted to and fro. Kara smiled gently, hating the tightness in the girl’s shoulders, the wariness in her bright eyes.

“Like us,” she agreed. “But we know that trust is sometimes hard, and that’s why coins existed. You could work all day collecting water and get, let’s say, five coins. When you give a coin to a person for food, they know how much those coins are worth, the trouble you went through to get them. And they get coins, and other people get coins, and so when they handed coins back and forth, it was a sense of community. It was supposed to be that everyone didn’t have to find water, and food, and shelter, and protection. Everyone would do their part so that everyone could have something.” The children watched as she resumed flipping the coin across the back of her hand, sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly.

“Who made the coins? Who decided who should find water or how much that mattered?” Lily, naturally, her nose furrowed like a thoughtful rabbit’s. Kara tossed the little circle up and watched the dwindling daylight flicker across its face. It was dirty, of course, and badly injured, but somehow seized the sun just well enough. When she caught it on the back of her forearm, Kara pointed at the profile etched in gold.

“The same people who decided to drop bombs,” she answered. Lily took the opportunity to snatch the coin, holding it close to her face as if to seek out every detail. She frowned at Kara thoughtfully.

“Could we still get water with it? We’re running low.”

Kara huffed out a laugh. “No, ’fraid not. The thing’s useless as currency. Although…” She trailed off, glancing first at the small camp they’d made beneath the store’s awning and then at the darkening horizon. “Melt it down,” she decided, her joints crackling like a fire as she stood. “One extra bullet might buy us one extra day.”