Raven: A Delirium Short Story Read Free Page B

sickroom, waiting for the group to decide what should be done with me.
    But Blue wasn’t getting any better.
    I was so afraid—afraid of everything back then, just a skinny little shit who’d made a snap-dash decision to run away and who had no idea what she was doing. My dad had always told me I was stupid in the head, pathetic, one of the losers. And back then, maybe he was right.
    I knew the Thief wasn’t afraid. I could just tell. Wasn’t afraid of me or the other homesteaders, wasn’t afraid of dying.
    When Blue started gurgling and rasping in her sleep—then went ten seconds at a time, still, not breathing, before taking in a gasp of air—I stole a knife from the kitchen and brought it back to the sickroom. My hands were shaking. I remember, because I kept thinking of my mom’s hands, rattling her silverware, fluttering like birds, a wild, frantic part of her. I wondered if she’d been thinking of me at all since I’d left.
    It was late. Everyone else was asleep—now that the Thief had been caught, even Gray didn’t feel the need to patrol.
    The Thief’s smile was like a sickle blade in the dark. I squatted down in front of him.
    “You promised,” I told him. “You promised to help me.”
    “Cross my heart and hope to die,” he said. I didn’t like the sound of his voice—like he was laughing at me—but I cut him loose anyway, feeling sick the whole time, knowing Blue would die otherwise. Might die just the same.
    He stood up, groaning a little. I hadn’t realized how tall he was. I hadn’t seen him except sitting or lying down since he was brought in. I took a step backward, flinching, when he raised his arms above his head.
    His smile vanished, turned into something harder. “You don’t trust me, do you?” he said.
    I shook my head. He extended his hand for the knife, and after a second’s hesitation, I gave it to him.
    “I’ll be back by noon,” he said. My heart was beating hard in my throat, a rhythm saying, Please, please. I’m counting on you. He jerked his chin in Blue’s direction. “Keep her alive until then.”
    Then he was gone, moving soundlessly through the darkened halls, vanishing into the shadows. And I sat holding Blue, with terror sitting like a black mist in my chest, and waited.
     
    Lies are just stories, and stories are all that matter. We all tell stories. Some are more truthful than others, maybe, but in the end the only thing that counts is what you can make people believe.
    I learned to tell stories from my mom. “Your dad’s not feeling well today,” she’d say. She’d say, I had an accident . She’d say, Remember what happened. You’re a clumsy girl. You walked into a door. You tripped and stumbled down a staircase. My favorite story: He doesn’t mean to.
    She was so good at telling stories that I started to believe them after a while. Maybe I was clumsy. Maybe it was my fault, for provoking him.
    Maybe he really didn’t mean to.
    There were stories, too, about a girl who got pregnant before her cure. Caroline Gormely—she lived down the street from me, in our neighborhood of boxy, identical-looking houses. Her parents only found out after she swallowed half a bottle of bleach and was taken to the emergency room. One day she was around, riding the bus home from school, pressing her nose to the glass, the window fogging with her breath. And one day she wasn’t anymore.
    My mom told me she’d been taken somewhere to be cured, shipped off to a different city where she could start again. Her parents had disowned her. She would likely end up working sanitation somewhere, never paired, carrying the blight of the disease around her like a scar. You see what happens, my dad said, when you don’t listen?
    What about the baby? I’d asked my mom.
    She hesitated for only a second. The baby will be taken care of, she said. And she meant it: just not in the way I thought.
     
    The lab tech’s uniform is big on me, so big I feel like a kid playing dress-up.