PodCastle 836: Flight PodCastle

* Author : Charlie Sorrenson

* Narrator : Rebecca Wei Hsieh

* Host : Matt Dovey

* Audio Producer : Devin Martin

*

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Previously published by Tor.com

 





Content warnings for violence, assault, misogyny, and PTSD.





Rated PG-13

Flight

by Charlie Sorrenson

 

Now

They are coming out of the woods when Mateo grabs one of Maggie’s wings and tugs, hard. This has long been his way of getting her attention and she has always let him do it, wanting to be a good mother, reminding herself that this is a phase, that he is only five years old, that little boys who do bad things are not destined to become bad men.

But now she wheels on him, the force of her movement yanking her wing from his grasp. “No!” she says, and he blinks and reels back. Two women are walking ahead of them with their children. At the sound of her voice, their heads flick back to watch. “You’re a big boy now,” Maggie says, her voice rising. “You can’t touch them anymore.” Out of the corner of her eye, she sees the women murmur to each other. Turning their smooth, wingless backs to her, they seize their children’s hands and hurry away. Maggie doesn’t care. Tears pool in Mateo’s eyes but she ignores them, stalking up the big, sweeping lawn toward the place where everyone parked.

Further up the slope, the man who is not Trace walks quickly, gripping his daughter’s hand. On her arm is a bruise the size and shape of Mateo’s fist. As Maggie watches, the girl tugs her hand out of her father’s and takes off, her empty Easter basket bobbing in her grip. Her father calls out but she keeps running and Maggie urges her on, her heart pounding on the girl’s behalf, as her head says: faster, and her heart says: it will never be fast enough, and all the places where the Brothers took her apart pulse with remembered pain.



Ten minutes ago

The man who is not Trace kneels in front of his sobbing daughter and hushes her. Neither he nor Maggie was there to see what happened, but the girl has just told them that Mateo hit her when she wouldn’t give him an Easter egg she had found. Now her father says, “I’m sure he didn’t mean to hurt you.” He winks at Maggie; an invitation to a game she does not want to play. “You know boys.”

Maggie looks from her son to the bruised girl to the man who is not Trace but who is so much like him, and something flares within her that has been dead a long time.

“She has a right to her pain,” she says. “She has a right to it.”

“We’re going,” the man says, to no one in particular, and pulls his daughter away, his fingers wrapping around her hand and enveloping it completely.



Seventeen minutes ago

The Easter-egg hunt takes place at the home of some friends of her husband’s, wealthy investor types who live in Marin County and own several acres of old-growth forest. Maggie hasn’t set foot in a forest like this in years, but her husband is out of town and the things that happened to her were such a long time ago and so she agrees to take Mateo.

The moment she gets under the trees, she knows she has made a mistake. She sees the bobbing lights, hears the Brothers’ laughter, remembers running until she couldn’t. She grasps the trunk of a nearby redwood and inches her hands along its fibrous bark, noting its texture as her therapist has taught her. Gradually, her heart slows.