Lauren DeStefano - No Intention of Dying

It had been a year since the incident, and now music filled the apartment.

Daphne was curled on the window ledge in her bedroom, staring at her reflection superimposed over the faraway view of the glasslands.

She tapped her pen to the edge of her notebook.

“Are you writing?” Judas said. He sat on the floor beside the window, staring at a blank page of his own. “We’re supposed to have three pages about the two gods by tomorrow, and I was kind of counting on your genius to inspire me.”

“Really, Judas. We go through this every year. We’ve read the material dozens of times by now. What they want is to see how our ‘own unique perspectives have changed.’”

“They want us to regurgitate the text so that they can be sure we aren’t getting any wild ideas, you mean.”

“Don’t be such a cynic,” Daphne said. But when she looked at her paper, the only line she had written was a direct quote from her text.

The music stopped abruptly, and then the silence was broken by a crash of piano keys, and then another.

“Amy?” Daphne was on her feet and out of the room in an instant. After the incident, Amy’s fits had begun and Daphne had learned all the warning signs, the first of which was silence. “Amy!”

Daphne’s sister was lying on the floor by the piano, shuddering. Her eyes were open, all pupil, before they rolled back into white.

Judas ran in after Daphne. “What can I do?”

“You can heat some water and get a cloth,” Daphne said, kneeling beside her sister. “She was acting funny this morning. I thought this might be coming.”

Amy had been seven last year when a patrolman had found her at Internment’s edge. It had been days before she’d awoken, and then longer still before she’d been able to speak. She’d worn bruises then, and a cast on her broken arm. A damaged doll of a girl.

The bruises had faded. The arm had healed. Their parents didn’t speak of it. They wanted to believe that their youngest daughter’s mind was as unblemished as her skin.

The convulsions stopped, mercifully, and Daphne dabbed at her sister’s cheeks with the warm damp cloth. “There,” she said. “It’s over. It wasn’t even a five on a scale of one to ten.”

Amy’s eyes opened, cloudy but blue again, and she groaned.

“Lie still,” Daphne said, when her sister tried to pick herself up. “You remember what the doctor said. Don’t move until your vision clears. Your eyes are still unfocused; I can see it.”

“I couldn’t finish the song,” Amy murmured, after several seconds. She was blinking at the ceiling. “The last chord I played is trapped in my head, flying around.”

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