Flashes Of Light

Past - Ane

Time moved so slowly after the President's death.

Sveta and Logar often talked about 'erased history'. I did not know what it meant, and I didn't ask. I noticed they stayed to themselves anyway.

I didn't think they had a fling --- I was under the impression Sveta bedded just anybody, because it was what The Anti said about her. Still, you had to have no scruples to lie with Logar Iris, so I wasn't under the impression she did.

As for Logar, I thought it was obvious that he liked Jonath Cincinnati. But then Jonath turned out to be Sveta, so I didn't know what to think anymore.

To be honest, I didn't think about them much at all. I barely thought about Percie, who was kind and handsome, and who brought me food even when I didn't want to eat it. I couldn't think of anything but the rifle in my hands, and the fact that I was a coward.

Throughout all of my childhood, I never stood up to The Anti. He wasn't a good father. He seemed too ebullient, too preoccupied with his schemes to be a bully, but he was. I wasn't exceptionally good at anything, and he exploited that to make me feel inferior. My mother was more his victim than his wife. I've heard it said by my aunts that, since she was a famous fashion model, she caught his eye and he started stalking her and paying people to set them up on dates.

I never asked my mother if it was the truth. I think it would have hurt too much, either way. My mother was a teenage single mom back then, and she just wanted to move on after my father, who was a deadbeat who worked for The Anti. At least her upgrade made us rich. I was never able to hate her. I've always thought she'd done the best for us.

But lately I started thinking that maybe she didn't even get a choice in the matter.

And I couldn't stand up to Michaim as an adult, either. He told me to shoot, and I did. An innocent life on my hands, that should have been on his. I tried to tell myself that it was precisely so. That it was my stepfather's hands that were stained with blood.

But in my nightmares, the hands were always mine.

"Surprise surprise!" Logar Iris announced one day at breakfast. I wanted to let him know that I didn't like when he talked the manic way Michaim talked, but then I remembered that The Anti had hurt him too. Perhaps more than I would ever know. My friends were already fucked up before I entered their lives.

"We got mail," he added, raising his eyebrows. At first I found it corny how not even Sveta talks back to him anymore. But then I realized that whatever was happening between them made sense.

Logar was the cult leader, and she was the cult.

Speaking of which, Sveta wanted to bring the Power Of Sight to new heights, and explode in her own right. But I already had my mind half-made that I would quit the group before it even came to that.

'Mail' consisted in a brown package. Logar unwrapped it, and we stayed silent for a moment.

"It's..." Percie started saying. He gulped. "It's Lix's autobiography."

I liked how Percie seemed to have maintained his humanity and his integrity through it all. He felt things as much as before. He was like a safe harbour, and I looked at him like the wistful ghost of one who has already drowned.

"I remember reading it before," Sveta said, thinking of the times where her memories were still jambled by whatever torture the President's men had put her through. "It was weird, but maybe it was just me."

"I think someone sent it to us with a purpose," Logar added, and became white all over when a corny birthday card fell out from it.

I picked up, and read it aloud. "It's no one's birthday, but how am I to know after all? I do not know when you little calamities clawed your way up from Hell to Earth. This is a reminder that you all think you're you against me, but that really it's just you against you."