to the store proper. I’m not about to wait around for one of the sisters to front again and tear me to shreds for disorientating Electra. I can only hope that I’ll be able to make sense of whatever Alectra scribbled on the table when I get home.
“Don’t,” Electra says, her tiny voice scared and urgent. “Please. Don’t leave right now. I don’t know where I am…”
“I have things to do. Besides, you’re in the Three Blind Mice. You’re safe.”
“You know how I can get when I’m coming down from a vision.” Her eyes go round and glassy. “I need an anchor to make sure I’m okay…”
I swallow a lump threatening to rise up my throat. “You don’t need me to anchor you. Get one of your sisters to do it. You haven’t needed me since we broke up.”
“But, the place with the flowers…”
“Forget about it,” I say, taking hold of the curtain and yanking it to the side.
Hands clasp at the bottom of my shirt. “Why did you come here? What do you want from me?”
Without turning around, I swat Electra’s hands away. “I didn’t come here for you.”
“For Alectra, then?”
“Jesus!” I screw my eyes shut and do my best to ignore the heat rising up my neck and flushing my face. “I can’t stand you three. You’re so —”
“Please.” Electra’s voice is in my ear now. She’s so close I’m starting to sweat. “Don’t go.”
I open my eyes and through the darkness of the Three Blind Mice I can make out the door. It seems so far away. What I say next tastes like cyanide, but a deal is a deal and I can’t stop myself. I need to get out of here. “You’re so pathetic. I can’t stand you. You’re the reason I’m on probation with magic. The reason it fucks me around every single damned day! What makes you think I will stay?”
“I didn’t mean that,” Electra says after a beat, but I’m already halfway to the door. I refuse to look back. I can’t have this play on my conscience, not when the guilt I feel from what led to our break up still eats away at my soul whenever Electra comes to mind.
As I get to the door and open it, a warm breeze filters into the store and I take a deep breath.
“Don’t go to the place with the flowers, Delphi,” Electra calls out to me. “It’s horrible here… There…” She bursts into tears. Loud and manic. “Oh, my God, where am I? What have you done?” I turn a final time to see her silhouette fall to the floor.
Trapped between a vision and the real world, Electra is lost. Desperate to find her way home. And I’m abandoning her even though I know for a fact that she’s incapable of doing it alone. Sure, she has her sisters, but when Electra gets worked up they become nothing more than fragmented personalities of a broken little girl. Alectra and Olectra are as powerless to help their sister as Electra is of helping herself. They are, after all, one in the same.
I shut the door to the Three Blind Mice and step onto the pavement. As I do, I hear a muffled shriek coming from deep within the store.
I light up a cigarette and make my way to the nearest bus stop. God, I make myself sick.
Chapter Four
A few days before
A few hours from the grit and smut of the city, a woman stands at the window of her bedroom, and waits.
Overlooking the quaint sprawl of the town beneath her, she can make out every flower as they bloom through cracks in concrete where people once walked, against the walls of quiet houses, and atop furniture and beds where some would have lounged.
What one may consider a ghost town has never been so alive with the songs and blush of the flowers she has grown. So rich in greenery and inflorescence, she finds it hard to imagine what it was like before she’d arrived, not that she really wants to.
Up until recently, her days were spent exploring these living streets, her ears, and eyes open to the melodies and wonders of the gardens she personally curated. She’d take deep breaths and enjoy the ecstasy carried on the wind from her flowers as if it were pollen. These explorations of her town served as reminders of why she was brought into this world. Not to take part in its rat race or swim along currents,