//------------------------------// // Chapter 7: Flee and Vanish in the Night // Story: FiO: Even the Strongest Heart // by Shaslan //------------------------------// When I told my dad what had happened, he didn’t believe me. That wasn’t a surprise. But a few days later, when the desk drawer that held Mom’s ponypad began to buzz and vibrate, and then the anxious pink face of the earth pony called Starwine popped up on the screen — he believed me then. After it was over, after he’d stopped shaking and the ponypad was gone, he did something he hadn’t done in a long time. He hugged me. Not a cursory, glancing touch, like he had given me the day after Mom died. Not a passing moment that ended as soon as was socially acceptable. A real hug, long and hard and full of apology. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Mom…she was right. She warned me this would happen.” “Mom?” I echoed. Mom hadn’t warned us of anything. She had run headlong into the danger, arms open to receive it. “Your Nana.” Hearing her name was like a slap in the face. Like waking up on a cold morning. Nana. Sometimes I had thought I was the only one who remembered her. “She told me, when your mom and I were moving out here, that the city…changes people. Chews them up and spits them out all different, she said. Me and Daisy didn’t listen — we wanted to be different. But…this new tech, this pony stuff…it really is as bad as your nana warned me.” He shook his head, and tried to still his trembling fingers. “We should never have left the reservation.” I clung to him, not knowing how to help, but still unbearably glad to finally be included. To be allowed in. “What’re we gonna do?” He sighed and tightened his fingers on mine. “We…we can’t stay here. This place is changing. Food prices are sky-high, and I don’t know how much longer we can afford to stay anyway. And now Daisy…now your mom is…well, we can’t stay here.” “Where are we going to go, Dad?” “I think…” he sucked in a deep breath, “I think it’s time we went home, kiddo.” We made the trip out of the city in an old beater that Dad borrowed from a friend. The friend didn’t even seem to care when the car would come back to him. Just tossed the keys over. [9] ---------- [9] The car was small, and none of our furniture would fit. So we packed light. Just a couple of boxes each, a holdall of clothes and a photo album full of snapshots of Mum and Dad when they were younger, with a few of me as a baby tucked in the back. Dad said it didn’t matter. It wasn’t like we had a house lined up to put our furniture in anyway. Nana’s house had been rented, and had probably been taken over by someone else a long time ago. Once we sorted somewhere to stay and got settled, we could get new furniture, Dad promised, even though money was incredibly tight. Somehow we’d make it work. ---------- We made the drive at night, furtively loading the car under cover of darkness, as though someone might try to stop us if they saw. We took one last look around the apartment that had been our home since before I could remember, and then Dad scooped up the last two binbags of stuff and hustled me down the stairs. He left his phone sitting on the kitchen table, and locked the door behind us. We travelled fast, Dad clutching the steering wheel so tightly the veins popped in his hands. I slept and woke and slept again, and by the time morning came we were pulling into the road that led to the rez. [10] ---------- [10] The car slowed as we passed Nana’s house and I pressed my nose against the window to see — but it was all wrong. The rocking chair on the porch was gone, and instead of Nana’s weaving in the window there were real curtains, shut tight against us. Even the skinny chickens in the yard had vanished. I slumped back into my seat. It had been over a year since I was last here, but it somehow made it all the more clear that Nana was gone. I had remembered the rez as it was with her, a moment frozen in time. But time wasn’t frozen, and the rez had moved on without Nana. Just like Mom, she had vanished. ---------- Dad finally pulled in at Uncle George’s house, a tumbledown ranch house with dusty black paint. He wasn’t my uncle, but at the same time he was everyone’s uncle. He was one of the tribe elders, such as they were, and Nana had been very fond of him. “Old as the hills, he was, even when I was a girl,” she said the first time she took me to see him. He gave us oat cookies and milk, and they talked for hours about the fifties and sixties, what life had been like. This time there were no cookies and milk. Just a hushed, anguished conversation between the two adults, ended by the sad croak of an old voice. “You’d better come inside.”