Chapter Text
GENE
Heffron have you seen Heffron?
It’s cold. So cold. So cold. So cold.
Scampering from place to place, door to door, foxhole to foxhole.
Can never find him.
Never can find him.
There is a fire, he can see it under the surface of the earth like it’s translucent. Solid leaves and twigs make a spider web of shadow that attempts to cover it but he can see with trained eyes that can spot life in the tangled undergrowth that there are glowing embers below.
He finds the hollow cavity of the largest tree in sight, crawls on hands and knees, eventually slipping down.
Finally finally finally a place like a womb in the ground, a grave or a womb, Grandma sits below the earth with her hands that cook and build, knit and hold and heal and heal and heal, but Heffron is not sitting with her.
She puts up a hand. The palm faces him. Her nails are black.
She says: “non!”
She isn’t cruel, but her eyes are in shadow and her lip curls like he remembers.
She won’t allow him to stay.
Heffron isn’t here. But Eugene wants to stay here in this safe cavern.
But Heffron isn’t here. Heffron isn’t here.
“Chocolat, pour vous!”
Renee and his Grandmother are there now, they sit together woven in scarves of blue cotton stripes and now they reach out their hands and their hands are holding one piece of chocolat and it is melting so Eugene has to grab it quick.
Heffron isn’t here.
The chocolat is warm and soft in his curled palm. He’s worried it won’t last.
Heffron, have you seen Heffron?
They shake their heads but they are smiling.
They say: “non.”
He must go.
He blinks awake and there is soft sunlight of the dawn on his face. It aches in his eyes for a short moment, then the pain goes away.
The sun is healing. He knows that as a fact.
So he sits up with a grunt and stretches his arms up above his head as the sheet slips from his body to fold at his waist. He can hear cicadas outside the window.
Shifting his aching legs around over the side of the bed, he drinks his fill of water from the glass he’d left on the floor last night, and wiggles his toes on the hardwood.
He gets up and pads sleepily to the front door, sits on the porch chair and just absorbs the sun for a while, squinting at the tree line with groggy appreciation.
It is a Saturday. The sun gets hotter as it rises. A promise of summer to come.
Yesterday was long hours in woodwork and cement too. His muscles ache.
Like a cold-blooded creature Eugene feels it seeping into his skin and warming him through and through and it is home, he thinks.
When he thought about it, he found being plucked away from ancestral roots hadn’t even taken him that far from his grandma in spirit.
But at night, when the darkness came his dreams were getting stronger and more vivid.
Eugene knows that going from being a child in the marshlands to years on end carrying the burden of the responsibility of treating wounded men in nightmarish landscapes, seeing amputations up close and in detail, having his hands on internal organs, feeling multiple last breaths expelled upon his skin, to being thrown back to the same marshlands, back to his old job and family and his father’s house, that life cannot be the same. That something has changed in him irrevocably and that he cannot live as he did before.
Matured from boy to man in a river of blood.
He knows that he cannot pretend he did not come out unscathed. Just because your job was to look after the men doesn’t mean you didn’t need looking after, is what his mother said. And yet he tries to forget. Doesn’t like to think about it let alone talk about it. Doesn’t like to let himself believe he cares. Much to the side-eying of his sisters and brother who are all adults now too, all have children of their own, and his mother who knows him in his core and his father who doesn’t.
He has been forever marked by what he saw but it’s the coming back home and finding that it’s not really his home any longer that fucks him up, mostly because he’s not sure it ever was, or at least because the differences and similarities are made even more stark when juxtaposed with his old life. He doesn’t fit.
It’s what he expected. Now he’s a different shape. But he was always a misshapen key in the wrong lock.
The rocking chair he sits in on his father’s front porch is certainly not comfortable; it’s as if it prefers his father sit on it.
He gets up, goes back into the house, tilts his head and listens for a moment. He hears no noise from the other end of the house. His father must be asleep or more likely gone out early with his shrimping buddies.
When Eugene was a little boy, he used to beg his father to go out on the boat, thought it was the best thing in the world to get to go shrimping with his pop and his buddies. Now it seemed trivial. Unappealing.
He spies his cigarettes on the counter top, grabs them and finds a lighter tucked away in the cupboard next to the stove.
His father is a hoarder and a generally messy guy, the kitchen strewn with waste and mould growing up the walls, so Eugene, having kept himself and his workspace very tidy through the war, has taken up the job of cleaning the house. His father did not show a single drop of appreciation for his son’s quiet efforts, but Eugene needed a place to stay before he saved up enough for rent or his own place, and whilst his father was letting him stay there for free, he may as well repay him somehow.
He figured that was as much as his father could give him in terms of love. Free room and board. He didn’t need hugs and smiles, because he knew deep down his father didn’t want him homeless or hungry, and he supposed that was enough.
So they tolerated each other. For now. It was unsustainable, but in the present moment, it would have to do.
His mother offered he stay at her place of course, but the house was full to the brim already, and she hardly had the funds to cover everyone as it was, so he politely refused. Didn’t impose himself upon her.
He visited every few days anyway. Better to be harassed by the dog and his sisters screaming children than sit in silence or rage with his sullen father.
The week day construction work would allow him to save up, and in the meantime he could scrounge and clean and avoid fighting with his father by laughing with his mother or floating down the river on his own, listening to cicadas and waterbirds and watching the sky turn purple and red of an evening.
He smokes and gazes at the shadows under the trees. Vines creep up the trunks and there’s steam rising up twisting misty and mysterious between them.
He exhales and the smoke twists the same like the air is thick.
Today he’ll put pen to paper. He’s been putting it off for a long while. Today he’ll get around to it.
***
BABE
The attic room is pale blue, almost grey. There’s one small window embedded in the slant of the roof, and sunlight does in fact make it through, though all it seems to do is highlight the terrible dusty quality of the air.
He cracks his knuckles which are sore from the inside out and yawns. He hadn’t slept well.
Huey, fat cat that he was, grey and white patched is oozing over the sides of the old wooden chair he’d taken a liking to next to Babe’s bed, meows at him and stretches too, leaping over to bundle himself onto Babe’s lap like a small bear. He’s a huge cat. Drooling too. Babe makes a fond but disgusted face. Rearing away from the creature, before giving in and scratching the top of its massive head.
“Get a load a this guy” he mutters to himself.
He can already hear the chaotic symphony of the city waking up, gulls and cars honking, people bustling in the streets below…
There is also the harsh but muffled sound of voices screeching downstairs, and sighs. He’s three stories up and still, the Heffron family vocalisation style was genetically and infamously loud.
“Dawn fucking chorus” He smiles sarcastically at the cat.
“Babe!” His mother yells from downstairs. “Babe! Wake up!”
“I’m awake Ma!” He yells to the door.
“Well get down here! We need your help with the-” the rest of the sentence is muffled.
“What?” He yells again.
“-elp with the door hinge! The door hinge!”
“Eh?!”
“It’s come loose again!”
“Loose?!”
There’s a thudding sound from his sister’s room below. She must be bashing the ceiling with a broom handle or something.
"For fuck sake! Will you just go downstairs?” He hears through the floor boards.
“Alright alright I’m going!” He says to the floor.
“Ma! I’ll be down in a minute!” He yells to the door.
“Jesus fucking christ.” He mutters to the cat, who hops off his lap and glares at him from the corner of the room.
Downstairs there is the sizzling sound and smell of eggs cooking in the pan, cheese, bacon, and there’s sawdust in the dry air, from whatever the hell is going on with the door hinge. His father seems to be hacking away at the door and sanding it down in intervals.
His brothers, mother, sisters and father are all talking at once.
He loves his family to death but he’s suffocating in this ram-packed household.
Saying that, he immediately joins the kerfuffle, determined to figure out what the issue is with door so he can go about the rest of his day in peace.
"Coffee. I need coffee!" He announces and one of his brother scrambles to make it, distracts himself and promptly burns the eggs, causing a small black cloud of smoke to join the dust and wood shavings.
Annie comes down moments later, sniffing and pulling a face of absolute disgust. She grabs a plate and stands hip cocked by the toaster till it pops unceremoniously for her. She rolls her eyes, not even attempting to help her flailing siblings and goes to the door to pick up the mail. She is evidently determined to go about her day normally and without interruptions. Babe wishes he could be so lucky.
She stumbles over Huey who is making an entrance too, and drops something.
"Babe will you pick that up? It's for you anyway." She says, mouth full of toast.
Babe sees there’s a letter for him fallen on the mat next to the shoe rack. He bends to pick it up before the cat can get to it. The scrawl is unmistakable. His heart skips a beat.