FF (February 2013) Kim Pritekel - After Shadow

Clara always knew she was different, but just how different she was was to be seen. She will be forced on a journey to places that, though nightmarish to some, make perfect sense to her. While living a life in darkness and shadow, massaging the ghosts we all want to hide from beneath the covers, she will discover her own light of day. But, can she discover her heart?

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Sample

Prologue

1980: Denver, Colorado

Clara Greenwold could hear noises coming from the basement. Her mother had gone down there a while ago to get hamburger from the freezer for their dinner. Clara walked into the kitchen, tentatively placing a hand on the partially open basement door and looking down into the deep, inky depths of the steep, narrow stairwell.

“Mama?” she called, her four year old voice high-pitched and unsure. “Are you comin’ back up?”

“Yeah, honey,” Stephanie Greenwold called back through the gloom. And then, “Clara, come down here for a minute. I want to show you something.”

The child felt panicked butterflies battering her ribcage at the request. She chewed uncertainly on a finger, then, never removing the digit, placed one foot on the naked wood top stair. The sole of her tennis show thudded dully. Her hand never left the rail that slid alongside the stairs, her saucered eyes trying desperately to adjust to the darkness that was quickly engulfing her. “Mama?” she called out again, needing the reassurance that her mother was really there at the end of the dark tunnel.

“I’m here, sweetie.”

As Clara moved further into the basement, she felt the thickness in her belly, as she always did when heading down into the darkness. She always hated it when her mother would ask her to go downstairs for anything. She didn’t understand why her sister – older by three years – was never asked to go.

Finally, the dim light from the naked bulb that hung in the unfinished space came into view. Clara hit the cement floor of the basement, and scurried over to where her mother knelt. As long as the girl could remember, there had always been a large wooden box against the far wall. Her mother called it a hope chest. Clara wasn’t sure what that was, but never went near it. Whenever she did, she got a funny feeling in her tummy.

“What are you doing, Mama?” Clara asked, copying her mother’s kneeling position on the floor. It occurred to the young girl just how much smaller she was than the woman who was her mama.

“I’m looking through some of grandma and grandpa’s things, sweetie,” Stephanie said absently, looking into the depths of the cedar hope chest. The chest had belonged to her mother, who’d had it since she was a small girl, growing up in rural Colorado in the 1930s and 1940s. When she’d married in her late teens, it had changed from holding the dreams of a young girl to the memories of a young bride.

“How did they die again, Mama?” Clara picked up a small Indian girl doll. The clothing and moccasins were elegant in their colorful beads and ribbon work.

“I’ve told you this story a hundred times, Clara,” Stephanie smiled, leaning over and kissing the top of her youngest daughter’s head. “They were killed in a car accident when I was just a little older than you are now.”

“Oh,” the girl said, as though hearing the details for the very first time. She put the doll aside and picked up a long violin bow.

“Oh! No, Clara, don’t touch that.” Stephanie took the bow away from the child, and placed lovingly beside the violin in the opened black, velvet-lined case. She snapped the aged case shut and moved it out of a questing four-year olds reach. “My mother used to play for us when we were little,” Stephanie remembered. She sighed, sifting through some clothing.

Clara’s wide, violet eyes fell upon something else. She reached both hands in and came out with a strange object. It was cloth that had been clinched inside a round, wooden frame, the cloth stretched taut across it’s face. On the stretched part of the cloth, a design of flowers and a bird had been done in needlepoint, the bird not completed. All across one entire side of the cloth was something that was a brownish color, making the material stiff.

A small, curious finger reached out and touched the hardened brownish stuff, and the girl gasped. She felt the butterflies from moments before turn into screeching eagles, battering the insides of her entire body. She began to sweat, her head throbbing with the pounding of every heartbeat. She felt a sense of dread wash over her. Fear clenched her guts, followed by a deep sorrow and regret.

Stephanie gasped in shock as her daughter burst into hysterical tears, dropping the needlepoint to the floor, and plowing up the stairs at a dead run.

“Clara!”

Clara ran to her bedroom, throwing herself on the pretty white and green canopy bed that she’d just started sleeping in the previous spring. She couldn’t hold back the hot tears as they streamed down her face and onto the pink comforter, along with dribbles from her nose.

“Clara!” Stephanie, out of breath and filled with fear, nearly bypassed her daughter’s open bedroom door in her haste to get to the girl. “What is it, honey?” She hurried over to the bed, sitting beside her sobbing daughter. “What happened?”

Clara allowed herself to be cuddled by her mother, grabbing onto the older woman as if for her very life. “She was so sad!” she cried, the emotions still coursing through her like an electric shock

“Who?” Stephanie ran her fingers through soft, brown hair, kissing the top of Clara’s head.

“Grandma.”

Stephanie stopped dead, a chill trickling through her body. “Your Grandma Greenwold?” Clara shook her head. “Honey, my mom is dead. She’s not sad anymore.”

Clara wiped her nose with her arm, leaving a slime trail behind. She looked up at her mother with big, sad eyes and nodded. “She told me she was.”

Stephanie felt herself go cold, and she shook her head, getting to her feet. “That’s not funny, Clara, and I don’t want to hear you talk that way about your Grandma Holdridge again. Do you understand?”

“But Mama-“

“I’m going to get you a Kleenex for your nose.”

The girl watched her mother leave her bedroom, a sinking feeling replacing the battering wings of the eagles.

Chapter 1

1986

Clara had to admit: up close and personal, butterflies had the strangest faces. Quite ugly, in fact. She gasped as the winged insect took to flight, off the girl’s finger, where it had landed a few moments before. Violet eyes watched it go until it was out of sight.

“So, what do you wanna do now?” Jason Rugby asked, sitting cross-legged on Clara’s back lawn, picking at a scab on his knee. He winced as the roughened patch peeled back, revealing a less-than-healed scrape.

Clara sighed and flung herself back on the lawn, hands cupping the back of her head. She looked up at the blue, July sky. Fat, white clouds drifted by, forming and reforming into crazy patterns. Her father, Max had told her it was called matrixing, where the mind would try and make sense and patterns out of just about anything. Including clouds. If that were true, then she was matrixing a rabbit hopping towards the Seller’s place.

“Clara?”

“What? Oh. Sorry. I don’t know. I could get some money from my mom and would ride down to the store. Get a slurpy.”

Jason laid down next to his best friend, head slightly cocked to the side as he tried to make out what the cloud above him was turning into. “Lotsa clouds today.”

“My mom said we’re in for a summer storm.”

“That sucks. I’ll have to go home early, then.”

They lay in silence for a long minute, listening to the summer day. School had let out a month ago, and the friends were already bored, running out of ideas to fill their days.

Jason and his father had moved into the house at the end of the cul-de-sac the previous Christmas, and Clara had been drawn to the boy. She’d promptly taken over in showing him around Mason Elementary School, and they’d become inseparable. This was their first summer together, and Clara was excited to spend it with him.

“Kids! Lunch!” Stephanie called from the opened sliding glass door, stepping out onto the small patio.

“Mom?” Clara called, lifting her head just enough to see her mother. “Can me and Jason ride down to the store after we eat?”

Stephanie studied her daughter for a moment, hand on hip. “Are you going to be careful this time?” she asked, raising a pale eyebrow at the girl. “I don’t need another call from Mr. Struthers again, telling me how he nearly ended up in the ditch to avoid hitting you because you weren’t paying attention.”

“Mom! That was like, months ago!” Clara sat up, indignant at the memory.

“It doesn’t matter if it was three years ago, Clara. I don’t want you getting hurt.”

Jason glanced back and forth between mother and daughter. He’d heard the entire story at school the following day, hearing how upset the old man had gotten, actually getting to of his car to yell at Clara.

‘Yes, Mom. I promise,” Clara said, rolling her eyes.

“You don’t make faces at me, and I’ll think about it,” Stephanie warned, heading back inside, effectively ending negotiations.

“Your mom’s strict,” Jason whispered, his friend nodding. “My dad lets me do whatever I want.”

“That’s ‘cause he’s never home,” Clara grumbled, getting to her feet. “Come on before she changes her mind.”

Clara sat on the seat of her blue and white Huffy dirt bike, a foot resting on one of the pedals. She rested the large blue, white and red slurpy cup on her raised knee. The neighborhood convenience store was bustling as the noon hour passed. The local workers had come out to gas up, or grab a quick lunch at the Wendy’s on the opposite end of the convenience store parking lot.

“This is so good,” Jason murmured around the straw, the other end creating a tunnel of juice in his cherry slurpy. He sucked greedily, then pulling quickly away from the drink. “Ah! Brain freeze!”

Clara giggled at her friend. He did that every time, and never seemed to learn. She watched as he set the cup down on the lid of a nearby trash can, then grabbed his head. As if that’ll do you any good, you goof, she thought, rolling her eyes.

She glanced across the parking lot, sucking slowly at her drink when she noticed someone standing near the corner of the fast food place, near the busy street beyond. He wore blue jeans, a white t-shirt and high-topped tennis shoes. He was looking right at her. Clara felt her stomach grow tight, a wave of nausea brushing through her. She couldn’t take her eyes off the man, who looked to be in his 20s. He smiled at her, then walked away, headed toward the street. She glanced further up the street, noting that a red truck was headed right for him. The man didn’t slow, or even seem to notice.

Clara’s heart began to pound, a sense of urgency gripping her. She took a step forward, about to cry out a warning, when the man faded into the warm afternoon. She started, blinking several times – still no one. The red truck blew by.

“Hey, you okay?” Jason asked, looking from his friend to the restaurant and back again. “You look like you just saw a ghost.”

“I did,” Clara muttered, then turned back to her cold treat.

Soon the pair were on their way back towards their neighborhood, racing each other with their sudden burst of energy from the sugar-filled slurpy. Clara jumped the curb, her Huffy taking to the air in an impressive arc before she landed on the street, her tires and pedaling feet never missing a beat. Jason was right behind her, trying to accomplish the same trick, but instead nearly falling head first into Sylvia Tanner’s prized rose bushes. He cursed softly then hurried after his friend.

***

The dinner table was quiet, only the scraping of forks across plate to grade on Clara’s nerves. Her parents sat on either side of her, her older sister, Kerri across from her. She glanced up at the –pre-teen, only to be nailed to the spot with a glare. To say Clara and Kerri were close would be a complete lie.

Clara was a smaller girl with the build of a bean pole, while Kerri was bigger – in every way – and used that size to her advantage. At least once a week Clara found herself stuff in the trash can outside, or some possession of her ripped out of her hands by the bully she lived with.

Clara’s gaze drifted away from the brown trying to intimidate her, and turned to her father, instead. Max was Clara’s hero. He worked long, hard hours working for a trash pick-up company. He left before dawn, and sometimes got home after dark, usually carrying some sort of “treasure” he’d found during his daily rounds. Stephanie never saw his finds the same way, and more often than not the item found its way back in the trash.

Max Greenwold was a handsome man with Clara’s same brown hair – unlike Kerri and Stephanie’s dark blonde. He had sparkling blue eyes and a dimpled smile. He looked older than his 28 years, but Clara figured that was from his long days. It was important to him that Stephanie stay home with their daughters, so he put in upwards of fifty to sixty hours a week. Clara adored her father.

“How was your day, sweetpea?” he asked, sipping from his milk.

“Good. I managed to jump higher on my bike than Jason. He wasn’t thrilled.” Clara played with her mashed potatoes with her fork.

“Don’t play with your food, Clara. Eat it,” Stephanie said absently, scooping up the last of her peas with a spoon. It was a nightly game to try and get the youngest Greenwold to eat.

“I bet Jason didn’t like that. Maybe he’ll get you tomorrow.”

“Dad! Whose side are you on?”

Max grinned. “Yours, sweetpea.”

Clara glanced around the table at her family, chewing on her lower lip. “Did you know there was a guy who died on Rigby Road?”

Even the silence seemed to screech to a halt. Three pairs of eyes were on her – one blue, two brown.

“What?” Max asked, setting his fork down.

“You’re such a freak,” Kerri muttered, turning back to her dinner.

“I said, there is a guy who died on Rigby Road.” Clara looked at both her parents, her courage beginning to wane, especially as she took in the look of disapproval from her mother. “By Wendy’s. I think he was hit by a car or something…” her voice trailed off.

“Kerri, how did your first day go, babysitting Ross and Jenny’s girls?” Stephanie asked, not even bothering to hide her discomfort with Clara’s words.

Clara felt her heart drop as did her head. She looked at her plate, no longer hungry. Anger mixed with fear topped by hurt began to fill her eyes.

“You can tell me about it later, sweetpea,” Max said softly, patting the girl’s leg under the table.

Clara looked up at him briefly before nodding and looking back at her plate.

The room was dark, only the light shining in from the streetlight at the corner – one house down – broke through the gloom. Clara lay on her bed, one hand tucked behind her head, the other resting casually across her stomach. She connected the glow-in-the-dark stars that her mother had allowed her to put on the ceiling a couple years before. They’d made constellations as well as silly designs. She smiled as she picked out her name, literally written in the stars.

Summer was almost over. It had gone so quickly. It seemed just yesterday her and Jason were wasting a day, trying to figure out what to do with their time. Jason and his father had headed out to North Dakota to see Jason’s grandparents. They had already been gone for a week, though it felt more like a year.

The day before Stephanie had taken Clara and Kerri to shop for school clothes. Clara was proud to say that she’d grown two inches over the summer. That was happy news. She wondered if she was finally taller than her friend, Michelle. Michelle and her family had left for the entire summer, so they wouldn’t see each other until the first day of school, in a week and a half.

Clara’s thoughts stopped as she felt a strange wave her in stomach. She took a deep breath, then looked away from the ceiling. Her eyes were drawn to the corner between her window and the closed closet door. S