The Gemini Age: Book One

[12-1] Under the Spotlights - Part One

    Penelope remembered every part of the day the medics had come to bear her mother to her resting-place. Even after the best part of a year, she recalled how much of a sobbing wreck her father had been, powerless to speak to the streams of strangers passing through his front porch, let alone help them look after his wife. Acting in her father's stead, Penelope had stared at her mother's still face as they rocked her over the doorsteps and down the corridors, knocking the stretcher's frame against the doorway to the bedroom. Nothing registered on her mother's face. Nothing formed a deep wrinkle around her nose or disturbed a pale golden hair on her head. That day, Penelope looked at her mother and saw an absence, a lifeless husk left by a soul long fled beyond her reach.

    "And yet you've changed much less than Father has," she said to her mother as she fiddled with the untucked corner of the duvet. A shade of blue as dark as this one ran the risk of washing out her mother's pale features even at the height of her health. In the earliest design stages, when Aemilia still clung to the coattails of her consciousness, she persuaded her husband to choose a blushing red for the master bedroom that suited both their tastes. After her deterioration, however, the blush never rose. The sheets of the master bed remained a bloodless white, and Philemon cast his wife into the crystalline sea downstairs without a second glance.

    Penelope picked herself up and stretched her numb legs around the room, scanning the few possessions retained on the shelves and tables by her mother's bed. Besides her medical essentials, the room offered little more insight into Aemilia's inner life than the unmarked master bedroom upstairs. A selection of her slip-on footwear lined up for passing eyes in a compact shoe nest opposite the door, the feet of the nest's sturdy wooden legs painted a deep chestnut colour to distinguish it from the near-identical piece in the porch. The wardrobe optimistically awaited her mother's return to waking life by collecting her preferred dresses and outfits and exhibiting them on its chrome rail. 

    Browsing, Penelope noticed the dominance of soft neutral tones and splashes of bronze in her mother's attire, and the close parallels with her own outfit proved one step too many towards the uncanny and she shut the door again, meeting her own eye in the mirror mounted on the wardrobe's front face. Online comments from distant relatives insisted that she looked like her mother, yet she had not been convinced by their claims until now.

    Something caught Penelope's eye as she stared at the scene in the mirror. Behind her ankle, submerged in the depths of the bed's shadow, a loop of tan material smiled at her. Penelope kneeled and angled her hand under the bed, her fingers flicking around until they locked around the loop, the material of which she identified as faux leather as she pulled it over the hardwood floor. At the end of the handle hung a small shoulder bag crafted from the same tan material, with silver metallic accents that announced the bag's lack of age and use in their spotless surfaces. 

    The dry texture of the bag's surface crept along Penelope's arm to the back of her neck. Her mother had bought her a similar bag long ago, albeit with darker material and bronze accents, that Penelope had yet to use due to its comically small size and functionless clasp. However impractical it was, however, Penelope liked to appreciate it in private as a rare spontaneous gift her mother had deemed her worthy of receiving. She had not known her mother intended for the two of them to match, though the attitude it revealed went some way to explaining why her mother resented Penelope's preference for flying under her father's mechanist wing. Cute bags clashed with grease-stained coveralls.

    Years of family life flooded back as Penelope unclipped the bag's seal, her eyes fixed on her mother's face as the metal clasp clicked loose. In a matter of minutes, Penelope had violated the cardinal rules of both her parents by trespassing in her father's office and snooping in her mother's bag, and as she conceded to her curiosity, her overwhelming feeling was one of resignation rather than relief. The bag was lighter than she expected, and its few contents jostled around the dark velvet interior until the bag sat on top of the bed. It drooped under Penelope's gaze as she released it at her mother's side.