Name: Clare
Story: Moonsisters
Colors: Caput Mortuum 4, Livor mortis; Moonlight 19, Sidereal; Antique Brass 17, There is no reality in which I would live in South Dakota.
Supplies and Materials: Fingerpainting (one scene in this actually made me sick to write), canvas, oils, charcoal, pastels (darkfantasybingo: sacrifice), novelty beads ("We deserve beauty, love, respect, admiration, kindness and compassion. If we don't get it, there will be hell to pay." -- Margaret Cho)
Word Count: 2,968
Rating: hard R
Warnings: (skip) Multiple murders, sociopathic POV character, attempted rape, animal abuse.
Notes: Funny story about this character. I distinctly recall naming her after someone my friends and I hated when I was writing at least one version of the Moonsisters. However, I can't recall a single thing about this person we hated other than that her name was Maureen. I asked my best friend about it a few days ago, and she didn't remember anything, either. So I guess she didn't make that much of an impression! Hopefully this incarnation of Maureen is a more interesting villain than just someone to name after someone I hate; she's certainly more three-dimensional and way scarier after this story.


Maureen heard the sounds. She always said she’d heard nothing, suspected nothing, but she did. She heard it and she knew what it was. She was only twelve years old and she wasn’t supposed to watch television, but she’d heard those sounds enough times in her dreams.

Choking gasps. Quiet, masculine grunts. Then the soft sigh, almost a rattle.

Then, of course, her father made himself a drink, like he usually did at night. Maureen waited from her tiny bedroom for him to move back into the living room, settle down on the couch to watch the forbidden box. He didn’t turn the television on, though; she heard the springs of the couch, but then he just sat there. She crept to the end of the hallway and peeked out, but he was just sitting there, the drink in his hands, staring at nothing. He didn’t see her, as he never did when he was watching television.

She crept past the end of the hall, down the side of the room and behind the couch between him and the dark, curtain-covered window. Then into the kitchen. There was her mother, lying on the floor, just as she’d expected. Her hands were curled into claws and she was staring straight up, eyes wide to bursting. Her neck was purplish-black, spotted with bruises, and some drool had come out of both sides of her mouth, shining as it dried. Her legs were straight out; the backs of them had already begun to darken where they rested against the floor.

A crash and a splatter made her turn to face her father. He was on his feet, staring at her. The sound had been his untouched drink falling to the floor. “Maureen,” he said. He took one long step toward her and grabbed her arm, tightly, but not so tightly that she was frightened. She just looked at him.

“Your mother is asleep,” he said. She knew it was not true, did not understand how he could have thought she would believe it, but she nodded anyway. Sometimes lies were easier.

He took a deep breath, seeming to take courage from her belief of the lie. A slow light sparked in his eyes. “Let’s take advantage of it. We’ll get out of here. Just you and me, huh? Wouldn’t you like that?”

She smiled. She loved her father. “Yes. Let’s do that.”

He pulled her back toward the hall and let go of her arm. “Pack up quickly. We want to get out of here before she wakes up.”

“Of course,” she said, and went to pack her clothes, some jewelry, the few things she couldn’t live without. She knew her mother was not going to wake up, but she had also seen the police arrive plenty of times to their apartment building. They could be quick. She and her father would have to be quicker.

She met him in the hall with her full suitcase and he took her out to the car. They drove away under the stars.

—

Maureen was amazed at the change in her father by the time they reached an anonymous, cheap hotel and took a room for the remainder of the night. He was so full of energy he almost seemed to spark. He waved his arms as he spoke. He hadn’t even had his nightly drink; he didn’t seem to need it. She wondered if he had somehow absorbed her mother’s life.

Once they were alone in the motel room, he laughed and lifted Maureen into the air by her waist, something he hadn’t done since she was much smaller. But today it didn’t seem to hurt his back. “Just you and me, baby girl! We’ve made it away clean, haven’t we?” He put her down on the bed and turned to the television. “Let’s see. Let’s just see if we have.”

He turned on the TV news, but even the stupor he usually went into when watching—the excuse her mother had always given for forbidding it to Maureen—did not appear. He paced the room, combed his hair, even attempted to trim it in small bathroom. He laughed every time the news announcer said something that wasn’t related to Maureen’s mother.

She fell asleep in her clothes, watching him exult over the television, watching him fizz and glow with his energy.

—

In the morning the television woke her. This time the news was about Maureen’s mother. Someone had found her. But no one had found them. The announcer said that there was no sign of Maureen or her father, and there were no sirens anywhere near the hotel. They didn’t show pictures on the television, and Maureen’s father had told the motel people that their last name was Smith instead of Shallow, so no one would associate them with the television, either.

Maureen’s father came back from the bathroom, his face damp. “All right, little girl,” he said. “Where would you like to go? We can’t stay here for too long, but we can go anywhere you want. Anywhere at all, as long as it’s in a different state.”

“Anywhere?” she asked, thinking about all of the places she’d seen on the forbidden television, many of which, she knew, were not real.

“Absolutely anywhere. You think about it while you wash up.” He patted her shoulder and indicated the bathroom.

She walked to it, then turned back to him. “Somewhere we can see the stars. Lots and lots of stars.”

He nodded gravely. “Lots of stars. We can do that. The Midwest it is.”

—

In Ohio they sold the car and bought a trailer. Maureen liked living in it, liked laying in bed and reading a magazine while her father drove her down the highway. At the rest stops and motels where they stopped people clucked over her doll-like face and fine blonde hair. She gave them her prettiest smile and they gave her sweets, something else that her mother had forbidden.

She got her period for the first time before they reached their destination, but her father knew what to do with that, too. He explained things to her and found her a book and bought her a box of pads. She spent minutes at a time staring at the mess in the pad, wondering if all that blood had really come out of her, and what exactly it was supposed to be doing inside her.

People thought it was so sweet, a girl and her father on their own, moving out to a place where the air was clean and the jobs were hard and honest. Maureen’s father told them that her mother had died in an accident and Maureen looked sad when he said it. They let people think that they were just leaving to escape their grief. People clucked and gave them advice and directions and free desserts.

They found a place to live in a small town in Wisconsin. The stars were huge and so close Maureen spent hours at night trying to touch them, even though she knew she couldn’t really reach them. She wondered if it would be possible to get enough power to do it, to fly into the sky and gather bits of glittering light to herself…

Her father told her that their new last name was Smart. She liked that. They’d been smart to leave. He found a new job and he liked it at first, he had energy, but as time went on his energy wound down and he went back to pouring himself a drink at night and sitting there staring at the TV. Life was still better than before; it was still just Maureen and her dad, and she was allowed to watch TV whenever he wasn’t and eat sweets whenever she liked.

She counted out the days. It had been forty-one between when he killed her mother and when he ran out of energy. So it didn’t last very long. But it had lasted long enough to be useful.

In the fall Maureen started at the public school in the town and smiled at all her new teachers and classmates, studying them intently to learn how to make friends. She thought friends would be useful to her. But when she picked a small group to be friends with, she was disappointed: they were shallow, gossipy girls, knowing nothing, doing nothing. She left them as quickly as she’d picked them and didn’t make any more friends. She held herself apart. She impressed her teachers, but not so much that they would single her out for anything.

She tried boys. The middle school and high school were in the same building, which made things easier for her—boys her own age were immature in every way that counted. The older boys were better. And it was so funny how they always thought they were taking advantage of her.

It was funny, that is, until she went to a party in somebody’s barn and four boys, tall boys in high school who played basketball, followed her outside and pressed her against the wall and held her wrists. One boy at a time could be good: four boys at once was bad. She could charm anyone, but they overwhelmed her with size and strength. They had the power at the moment and they knew it.

Maureen was not used to being the one without power. It frightened her and angered her. She began to wonder if she could find power in the same way her father had. But how could she kill one of these boys when her outspread fingers were the same size as their palms, when their knees pressed into her at the height of her hipbones?

She didn’t need the power for long, though. Just for a few minutes. Maybe hurting them would be enough.

She made herself relax, made herself smile, acted as though four boys pressing her against the wall of a barn in the dark under the stars was all she’d ever wanted in life. She held her hands limp and loose until one of them let go of her wrist. Then she lashed out, nails first, and raked one of them across the face.

He howled and staggered back, letting go of her. There was blood under her nails. She felt the power and adrenaline rush up and through her and she laughed with exhilaration as she pushed the others away, feeling them reel back like feathers under the power of her arms. She ran off across the fields toward home, laughing like crows.

She heard one of the boys shout “Roscoe, get!” but she didn’t know what it was until she was more than halfway home and she heard a dog barking behind her. She turned in mid-run to face it, and it nearly ran up to her, all teeth and slobber and little, angry eyes.

She dove to the side and rolled. She came up with a rock in her hand. She threw it and it bounced off between the dog’s eyes. The dog stopped in its tracks and whined, shaking its head.

It wasn’t really injured. Maureen found the rock again. There was only one way to stop the dog, to get the power she deserved, to make those boys understand just why they shouldn’t have tried to hurt her.

The dog had gotten over its hurt and was growling at her again, getting ready to leap. She stepped forward fearlessly and bashed the rock against its head. Again and again, until the power rippled through her, making the world around her glow, telling her without a doubt that there was no power left to get from the dog but there was power back at the barn, in the houses scattered about, home in the trailer park…

She walked back, alert, the bloody rock still in her hand. She took the rock into her room with her and hid it in her desk. Her father would never find it, never know what it was, never criticize her anyway because what place did he have to criticize?

She reached out with the power. She could hear the couple two trailers away arguing, could hear their daughter crying into her pillow. She could hear the drug deal going on in the next trailer past that. She could see it, see the faces of the people involved well enough to describe them to the police, but they would never be able to see her or catch her. She could hear them using each other’s names. She smiled to herself as she wrote them down and tucked the paper into her purse and thought about how she might use them.

—

By the next morning at school, Maureen had burned through all her accumulated power, but she was enough of a student of human behavior to tell that the story had gotten around. Everyone was afraid of her. One of the basketball boys was more angry than afraid, but his friends held him back. It must have been his dog.

When she touched a boy, he shied away from her. Even the teachers didn’t want to look straight at her anymore. Disappointed, she lost her taste for blackmail; she lost her taste for everything in this tiny Wisconsin town. When her father came home early from work smelling of beer and announced that he was tired of this place and wanted to go traveling some more, she was only too happy to agree with him.

They packed up that same night and took the trailer back on the road. West, west, always west. Away from the memories.

—

In Iowa her father again lost his job at the same time as she decided she wanted to leave, and she began to wonder. She was thirteen now, nearly fourteen; were her powers growing, or had they always been this way? Did things linger for her beyond how they lingered for her father?

And, too, she’d never seen him kill another thing. They were never allowed to have pets, a much less breakable rule than the one about television. He kept himself away from animals and women alike. Perhaps he didn’t know how it worked.

Maureen, on the other hand, had been practicing. She caught animals in fields and in houses. They almost had a mouse problem in the trailer, but she ended it. She would crush or smother them at first, but quickly discovered that it was blood that was the best, the warm rushing releasing the most potent powers. She learned the secrets of every trailer park they lived in almost without effort. The only difficulty was what to do with the small bodies so that no one would know she was strange (for she was strange, and she understood that, and she knew how to hide it). She buried them, mostly.

When they stopped in South Dakota, she did not like it. It was too cold. She wanted to go south and west, to warmth and baking desert. She killed a rabbit and decided that her father would not find a job here. Less than a week later they were on their way again.

They stayed in Las Vegas for almost two years. It was a big city, bustling and bright, and Maureen found it fascinating. She couldn’t see the stars, but what did it matter? The stars in the heavens were no longer the thing. The stars in the city were, and she could touch those. She did, again and again.

Vegas seemed to agree with her father, too. He found a job that was less physically demanding than others, and it put him in contact with showgirls. Maureen didn’t remember willing that, but if she was happy in a place, she decided, her father would have to be as well. He even found girlfriends.

Then there was a fight and a dead showgirl and they were fleeing. Maureen was disappointed and furious. There hadn’t even been any blood—no more than a trickle where the girl’s head had been crushed by the kitchen fixtures. He could have gotten so much more power from her. Maureen had managed to grab a tendril of power, but it wasn’t enough to turn him around, to find a way to hide the murder and keep their bright, shining life. It was barely enough to keep him driving west instead of north; her own words had some time ago failed to be enough to convince him.

The last straw was when they landed in California and she met a luscious surfer boy and he tried to prevent her from going out. She almost thought she would take her father’s power, but there would be too many questions. So instead, after she came back from the sea (so late it was almost morning), she caught someone’s pet and slaughtered it and decided that the police were going to catch up with her father.

She screamed and cried and told them that she’d never suspected, no, it couldn’t be true, he was her father and he loved her, but they had his fingerprints and his DNA and two dead bodies. She begged them not to take her father away from her, but they had to.

She was taken to a foster family. They told her how she looked like an angel and welcomed her into their house. They told her how they loved children, how she should consider this her permanent home until she turned eighteen and longer if she wanted, how it was sad how easily foster children seemed to come and go from their lives.

Maureen looked around at all the young children running around the house, at the wilderness beyond the backyard. She smiled.