Page 50 of Housesitter

“Only losers need luck,” Ruby rhymed off by rote as she cleared the breakfast plates off the table. “Are you a loser?”

“...not the day to ask, Ruby.”

She snorted. Kel started to open the door. He caught a glimpse of his reflection, caught in the smeared glass, and hesitated.

“Did you ever find those photos?” he asked as he looked over his shoulder. Ruby paused mid-balancing act, one hand braced on top of a stack of chipped mugs. Her expression was blank as she turned her mouth down at the corners and shrugged her incomprehension. “The ones from back then, when you and Grandad were friends with Dio. We talked about it the other day.”

Ruby blinked and puffed her cheeks out in a baffled sigh.

“I don’t…” she started to say, then shook her head as the penny dropped. “Photos. No, of course, I don’t know how that slipped my mind. I…I guess I’m so used to having everything on my phone. I remember now.”

She started toward the kitchen. Kel stared at her back.

“Ruby?”

She spun on the ball of her foot. The sole squeaked against the lino. She gave him an exasperated look. “What?!”

“The photos?”

She stared at him. Kel felt the smoke stir, the heat of it rising through his chest and into his sinuses. It tasted different, like licorice and whiskey.

“You were going to look them out for me. Did you find them?”

Ruby gave a scoffing little laugh. “You just asked me that,” she said. “I don’t know what’s gotten into me today.”

Smoke wisped from her mouth. Or it tried to. Threads of shadow crawled out of Ruby’s mouth after them. It was thick and dark, more like cords, and it didn’t whisper to Kel. Instead, it stitched over Ruby’s mouth, through her lips and the tip of her tongue. Like scabs.

She tried to say something, but the words didn’t come out. Her throat worked as she swallowed hard.

…I burned the photos. Why did I do that? The smoke hissed, its ‘voice’ in Kel’s head broken and cracked. I should have burned them before. Like the rest of the words/memories/faces. Why didn’t I? I should have. He wanted me to; he ask...told TOLD told me to forget, to never remember, to never toldtelltalk

The black threads wormed under Ruby’s skin. Her face twisted painfully as the dark lines crawled up into her eyes and squirmed out of her ears. Her arms trembled. A fork slid off the stack of plates and dropped to the floor with a clatter, spraying bits of egg and ketchup over the lino.

The noise made Kel jump, and the smoke choked him as he tried to tell her to stop.

…burn the memories and the lies, but there had to be a story for the boy, and the photos were all I had. All. I burned them now, all of them…

The rest of the plates hit the ground and shattered. Coffee splattered over the floor. Ruby collapsed on top of it a second later, eyes rolled back in her head and gibberish spluttering from her mouth.

Kel lunged over to try and catch her—already too late—and then went down on his knees next to her. He ignored the jolt of pain in his knees as he pulled her into his lap.

“Ruby,” he said as he tried to keep her from hurting herself. One hand gripped her shoulders as he fished for the phone in his pocket with the other. “Grandma, it’s ok. I’m here. It doesn’t matter.”

He dialled 9-1-1.

The taste of the smoke in his mouth was gone for the first time in days as he stumbled over the address of the cafe.

“Kel,” Harry said as he got up from behind his desk. He held his hand out. The light from the window reflected off his wedding ring. His expression was warm and pleasant. “It’s good to see you. So how can I help you today?”

As Kel gripped Harry’s hand, his gaze was caught by a splash of something reddish-brown on his cuff. Was it blood or ketchup, he wondered. It could have been either. It didn’t really matter. Kel tried to put it out of his head, but he couldn’t quite shake it. It gnawed at the back of his mind with stubborn persistence as he ran through the expected niceties with Harry on autopilot.

What did it say about him, he wondered, that he’d left his grandmother in hospital to keep an appointment.

Nothing, he supposed, that people hadn’t already been saying.

“...Remember when the Hogs played against Windsor?” Harry reminisced. He twiddled his pen—heavy and metal and expensive—as he talked. “We won 31-28, and you pulled off that one-handed grab at…Shit, what was it?”

He swung back in his chair and chewed on his lower lip as he tried to remember.