S o p o r [2]

It happened so quickly, then. They drove to Ms. Sopor’s enormous house, a monolith rendered benign by the white fence preceding it and the gloom of the abandoned cottage adjacent. The girl settled in. Time passed, marked by a flurry of misremembered exchanges:

“You shouldn’t have had to go through all that.” That was Ms. Sopor’s mantra, lent voice over the first breakfast they’d shared—a domestic spread lathered in syrup and crowned by perfect omelettes. The old woman was knitting, always knitting, at home. Some kind of sweater, dull and white.

The girl had been loath to glance up from her food and edged, impatiently: “Someone was going to. That’s the way the world works, isn’t it?”

“Aren’t you young to be saying that? Mmm, maybe not. But aren’t you glad it’s over now, all the… hardship?”

“I think once it’s over we’ll all be dead.”

Blessed silence reigned a few days after that. Long enough so that all the pedestrian opulence of Ms. Sopor’s home stopped feeling so alien, so ephemeral. The girl lounged at the table. Ms. Sopor had asked to talk about her uncle again. She had refused, and turned blackly to a set of college applications only to hear Ms. Sopor pluck anew at her eardrums: “…it must be hard, to have left you so grim.”

“No. I’m making up for it all. Little by little.”

“It’s not your fault. You don’t need to make up for anythi--.”

“Which is why I can. And—they can’t.”

“…you don’t think judgment is warranted?”

“I think it’s useful.”

“But--?”

“What good will it do?”

“It’ll make it so it doesn’t happen again.”

“Yeah, and that’s worked just fine the past five hundred thousand years humans have been butchering each other. Way I see it, all those sick bastards deserve your pity more than I do.”

She wondered, then, why Ms. Sopor always waited until the words leaping from her tongue were foulest to let her stew in them. After the shame always came a retreat. The numbing quiet of repose…

Sometime later, the girl was finding it more difficult to concentrate on her work, and she had migrated begrudgingly to the parlor in the hopes that Ms. Sopor’s steady regard would help shame her into activity. The clacking of knitting needles was lulling, now—familiar. The old woman’s voice barely rose over the din. “…so how are you making up for it? Everything that happened.”

“Oh, getting an education. All that...” the girl seemed distracted.

“We’ll manage that for sure, poor dear. Everyone’s entitled to that much.”

“Is—anyone really entitled to anything?”

“You don’t think we have rights?”

The girl was distracted, and when she spoke it felt like the dull recitation of a creed from a bygone age, the cant of a prayer from the tongue of a reluctant heretic: “Whatever good you have, someone else is bound to be paying for it, aren’t they?”

“…where do you get all these opinions, clever girl?”

“I read a lot, I suppose…”

A month had passed. The girl lay in ‘her’ room. A soft mattress enticed her, caressing her bent spine and pleading that she sleep—she was limp, but not resting… anything but resting.

Memories thronged her, one after another after another… ad nauseum. It was always a mistake to dig through the past. The moment she closed her fingers about one knot in the tangle of bygone omens it burst into a dozen new, previously insignificant threads she must follow, dreading all the while that she no longer stalked anything but her own train of paranoid delusions. She circled, circled until she was too dizzy to fend off false certainty, and so she withdrew.

Ms. Sopor was her guardian. The woman’s house exuded the same queer aura she did. It made the girl’s spine crawl and so, too, had their first few conversations in the parlor. Conversations that used to end, invariably, in her own sneering, half-pitying silence as Ms. Sopor babbled commiserations. The girl had promised herself to stay wary, to keep sharp.

The question now… what had happened since then?

Dried tears were stiffening her cheeks. Ms. Sopor’s cloying scent haunted her, redolent the old woman’s embrace, a couple thousand, pounding heartbeats past.

Had that terrible refrain finally gotten under her skin? Poor thing, you shouldn’t have had to pay. Or was her own callousness, the taint of her soul being unveiled to her? Had she been twisted all along?

Too much. She was beginning to dull. Her homework swam before her vision each night, and it had become a chore. She forgot what agony felt like, and her nightmares receded, but the less she remembered of the pain, the more she feared it, the more she lusted for violent closure. Something that would relegate it to the past. She hadn’t known resentment, before. It didn’t bite, like people said. It slithered. It was a slithering thing…

If only she wasn’t so tired all the time. If only she could think.

She heard a knock, and droned her invitation. Ms. Sopor returned with a glass of water and a pill. The effort to rise into a sitting position was Herculean.

“You said you weren’t feeling well…”

“I changed my mind.”

“Dear, you shouldn’t be afraid to take a little Advil if you need it.”

“I am…” She grappled for the word. “Singularly convinced it won’t help. Singularly.”

Ms. Sopor frowned, her whole face pinching. That ubitiquous sweater-thing dangled from the bag over her shoulder, and at the sight of it the girl winced.

“What’s wrong?” Ms. Sopor pressed, leaning closer.

“I think…” the girl murmured, shaken. “I think I hate myself.”

The old woman’s face pinched in a grimace of real pain as she caught up the girl’s hand where it was rising to cover the tears welling in her eyes. “Oh, honey…”

The first time she’d cried, it had felt such a precious thing, a relief. What now, but an expression of the same, tired…?

“Listen,” Ms. Sopor pressed, squeezing her fingers. “I can see you’re in ever so much pain--.”

Am I?

“But listen. It’s not your fault. You’ve worked so hard. You’ve earned some rest. It was others as caused all this difficulty you’re going through, you don’t need to feel this way.”

“But…” the girl’s head swam, the words trickling through the fingers of her lone free hand, bereft of substance. She could not form a solid thought. Only slump instinctively toward Ms. Sopor’s warmth, eyes drooping.

The old woman grimaced. “Why don’t you… rest a while, dear? No need to face it all now. Some sleep might do you good.”
Sleep, and rest…

“…I…” The girl didn’t finish. Only fell onto Ms. Sopor’s shoulder, her breaths shallow, but steady. A grey pallor began to dawn over her features.

Sighing, Ms. Sopor took the sweater from her bag and began tugging it down over the girl’s head. The sleeper did not stir, not even while her guardian twisted her wrists up through the soft woolen armholes. Most peculiar, the length of those sleeves. But the garment was misshapen of a purpose; Ms. Sopor folded the girl’s arms down over her abdomen and tied the trailing sleeves behind her back.

Then she took her charge up in her arms. The old woman was deceptively strong, and she didn’t stagger once as she bore the cocooned girl through a door normally locked, up into the attic. There, rows upon rows of beds gathered dust. Cobwebs were strewn from corner to corner of the room, wrapped thick about its occupants.

Ms. Sopor swallowed heavily as she laid the girl on an empty white mattress and turned to leave. Wiping the tears from her eyes, she tried to straighten her back; there was volunteer work to be done at the shelter.

And there was no end to the work of the gods.