a sequence – hellebore

Thirteen.

There's an older boy at school who keeps following her home. Helly pretends that she doesn't notice, maybe the first couple of times she really didn't. He stares at her so much in the hallway between classes that she now knows exactly what his gaze feels like on her skin. She thinks about telling her brother about it but she doesn't. He's been really busy lately, out all day and night, home only for a few hours in the morning to sleep.

"They keep giving me overtime at the factory," he says.

He blinks too much when he's lying though.

She hasn't worked out what he's doing instead yet but she's trying to get there. Even if she's better off not knowing, she still always wants to know.

Still thirteen.

She’s kneeling beside the bathtub. Her brother sits on the rim.

There’s a piece of gum stuck in her hair and he works carefully, trying to cut away as little as possible.

“You gotta stop falling asleep with gum in your mouth,” he grumbles, "This is like, the third time, Helly.”

"Uh huh," she says.

Her hair's grown so long that she never even felt it when the gum got stuck. At first she thought she'd just caught some strands in the strap of her bag. It wasn't until she was hanging up her coat that the matted hair fell against her back. For a moment, she thought that maybe a bird had dropped it on her.

Sometimes a bird will pick up a piece of brightly coloured gum because it looks like a flower to them, or something else that they can eat. The gum will get stuck in the bird's beak, glueing it closed, or they'll drop it. It's happened before.

It probably wasn't a bird this time though.

Her brother's hands are rough and callused against the soft skin of her neck as he works as gently as he can. He never really has much free time anymore and the money he makes pays for all the fish that they can eat. They haven't been back to the dock in nearly two years.

"Where do you work again?" she asks suddenly, "It's for homework."

She's a better liar than him, not by much though. If he can't see her face, he isn't able to catch the way her mouth flickers into a grimace with the lie, like she's tasted something sour.

"I'm a mechanic," he says and then cuts away a lock of her hair, "You know, at the ammunition factory."

"Just that?" she asks.

"They give me a lot of overtime," he says lightly, "Because of how dad can't work."

Feels like half a lie. She picks at the bath mat and waits for more but gets nothing. He just reaches past her to put the scissors down on the counter beside her head.

Three years ago when her mother left, her father ground to a halt.

It started slow. First he grew a little quiet. Then he stopped smiling, even when Helly tugged on his cheek, trying to draw one out. A few weeks later, he couldn't seem to sleep. She'd hear him at night, pacing the hall, as if he was waiting up for his wife. Maybe at first he hoped she was going to come back.

Sometimes in the morning, he'd be asleep on the armchair in the living room, his glasses still on his face.

After some time had passed, he gave up. Things started to be okay for a bit. Then two years ago, a packet came in the mail. It was divorce papers. He stopped going to work and so they turned off the electricity. Then her brother went to the factory and asked for a job.

They turned the electricity back on but her father liked it better with the lights off so now they live in the dark.

"We could go," Helly whispers, "Just us two."

Her brother runs a brush through her hair.

"We can't," he says softly, "It'd kill him."

The fish hangs limp on the silver fishing hook.

She gazes down at the tiled floor and thinks about telling her brother about the boy that's been following her home but she doesn't. His voice is already ragged, he doesn't need more to worry over. Besides that, maybe she's been overthinking it. Maybe he just has the same route home as she does.

Even so, Helly thinks about the way it feels when his eyes are on her and she remembers the heron, looking down into the river, so still until it wasn't.

"I know," she says but pulls away from him, a current under her skin. She stands up and beelines for the door, unable to look at him. It feels a little like she's underwater, her thoughts blur together unclear. She pauses at the bathroom door and says quickly, "Thanks for helping with the gum," before slipping through it.

"Always, Hells," her brother says.

But she's already halfway down the hall and doesn't hear him.

She's sixteen.

Sometime between now and a week ago, the trees became barren. The wind ran through the district, there'd been a sudden storm that lasted three days and it took anything that wasn't tied down with it.

It took an extra day for Heath to assess the damage taken by the house. He'd had to work overtime to get through the long list of repairs that the factories needed after it was all over. A window had been left open in one, sending a part of the line crashing to the ground. It took him hours to fix and by the time he was done, the streets were dead silent.

He noticed the trees on his slow walk home, branches cold and empty, no remembrance of what they once held left on the ground at their feet even. It made the hollows under his skin feel vast in a way he couldn't name.

The house was dark on arrival, the porch light having broken in the storm. Heath slid his boots off and left his tool bag by the door. His father sat silent in the living room, eyes following his child as he wandered into the kitchen, the rising sun at his back.

A single setting was on the kitchen table, cold from hours of sitting alone. A note was beside it, his sister's longhand scrawled across a white-dyed page, 'love you.'

There was a container in the fridge with a meal for him. He recognised the scent as soon as he opened it. It was fish, fresh from the river, steamed with lemongrass, but he hadn't been down to the dock in years. He hadn't needed to, neither did Helly, the cod he'd gotten from the market two nights ago was still there on the shelf, wrapped.

Morning sun crept slowly across the kitchen floor as he stood there in silence, there was no point in checking.

He knew what else the wind had taken.