Brighter Than the Sun - Darynda Jones Page 0,3

can’t take that away. I want to dream about her some more, but the minute the nurse leaves, Earl rips out the IV, throws my clothes at me, and tells me to get dressed. Quietly. Or I know what will happen.

Damn straight, I do.

3

I don’t see the light for a while after that. I’m in the basement for days and everything is blurry. Kim stands guard. I can hear her moving around behind the door.

My throat hurts because Earl choked me. He doesn’t normally do that. Goes to show how pissed he was. Not even at me. He’s mad because the girl he was seeing found me in the basement. That’s how I ended up in the hospital in the first place. Earl had gone out for beer and she went to the basement, looking for a washer to do his laundry. She was going to surprise him. Kim must have been in the shower. She would’ve explained that I was okay. But since I was unconscious, she thought I fell, so she called 911 before Earl got home. He had to go along with it, I guess, but he got angrier than I’ve ever seen him.

Sometimes I wonder why he has girlfriends. He doesn’t like them. He pretends to. Tells them what they want to hear. They never last long, though. He gets tired of them pretty quick. This last one made a huge mistake. I’ll never see her again, and I liked her. She didn’t smoke and she smelled like peppermint and made me spaghetti.

I lie back against the concrete and think of Dutch. Of the girl made of light. Of the people in her life who didn’t work out quite as one would expect.

When she is about a year old, her dad brings home a girlfriend. I don’t like her. She is too much like Earl. She’s fond of the dad well enough, and Dutch’s sister, but there is something strange about the way she looks at Dutch. She oohs and ahhs when the dad is around, but when she is alone with Dutch, something isn’t right. I feel contempt come off her. Jealousy. Why would a lady be jealous of a baby?

I don’t understand people. They smile when they are mad. They hug people they hate. They steal from people they genuinely love. And they are jealous of babies.

Dutch’s eyes sparkle and her light is brighter than ever. A dead lady is pretending to eat her toes and Dutch laughs and laughs. Her dad laughs, too, but it makes the lady angry. That’s when I know for sure what the woman is. A problem.

4

I’ve died a hundred deaths, but I’m alive. Because of her. Because of her light. Because of her smile. Every time I die, I float toward her, and I am saved. I am healed. Her light soaks into me. Oozes inside me. Fixes all the broken parts, accomplishing something all the king’s horses and all the king’s men could never have done.

Sometimes I’m grateful. Sometimes I’m not, because I know it will happen again and again, and I figure there comes a time when it needs to end. When I just need to die and stay dead. But she saves me whether I want to be saved or not.

And now she’s doing it again. I am at her house, drifting toward her light. She brushes past me in the hall and turns around real fast, like I’ve startled her. She’s wearing a summer dress and sandals, and her hair has been pulled up into a ponytail.

I stay back. I always cover myself in the hooded cloak and try to stay back, but she stands there with her gold eyes wide and her pretty mouth open. She’s nine going on thirty. Full of sass and spark and secrets. She shimmers with life. She is the exact opposite of me and I’ve grown to understand the “opposites attract” thing.

Her lips are pink and full and her cheeks warm. If she weren’t so scared of me, I’d try to steal a kiss. But she’s terrified, and that just seems wrong. Like something Earl would do. I shudder at the thought.

Then the problem lady, aka her stepmom, stomps into the hall and grabs her arm. They are going to be late and she is in a lot of trouble, little lady. Why is she wearing that dress? She told her not to wear that dress. It’s too chilly. She’ll just have to freeze. Maybe she’ll learn a