Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

May, 1979. CANESHEAD, TX.

A bellow of flowers and the soft sing of church bells; they rung and hung out like cherubs in the sky, all pink and something perfect. Today lay grim, although. The spine-chill burn of no afterlife and death slipping through the nights of it all. It was cold, drowned in rain like dead-eyes of a flood. A phantom who haunts the halls, creeping and slowing and floating around the clusters of crying folk.

A simple dance where hearts lay as one; a performative alley where people sing out praises for the mother. The father, good man at heart, they shout. Hollow thy ashes out on city streets and sprawl behind the church steps, lift beyond the graveyard and have the angels call back to you. No one could determine the slot of death, no one lay wishing they could.

Instead they ponder around a sullen tree, listening for the wails of an untrained mother and father. The impatient stomps of an older brother; the cries of a younger sister, and a baby just about young enough to never know.

They would press her in the graveyard if they could stomach it. Her mother didn't wish for it and the church found themselves appropriate enough. Enough to hear the winds chime and the taste of death arrive.

"Today we all gather. A memorial for Christine Clements. A beloved sister, a beloved lady of our church, and a dreamer nonetheless." He passed a flower around in his hands, eyes cast down in their solemn. He heard those raucous cries and terrored screams.

Around them all, did a family of one feel like an outlie. A pit of black sheep in pools of feathered wool.

"The first major death to effect our town," A sentence that twisted like a dagger. A felt name that should all have been said first. A split wound cured with salt; some abominable pain, he knew it. "A lovely girl who will be missed."

"I pray you all, send your condolences to the Clements family during this hard time."

The same words be recycled by the night Judy died, some worthless care-roster with kids they hadn't mentioned for whiles. This town knew Clements girl was as good as dead.

Upon his time in the most fancy suit he could find— some hand-me-down formality, soaked up and washed into the rain, did Marshall take the grace of leaning his head up. There was the warmth of a body pressing just at his shoulder. Something discreet.

"Marshall," He began. "Can I speak to you?"

Marshall'd recognize a voice like that in his sleep. Clenched fists, the uncomfortable stick to his sleeves as he wallowed in something akin to his own pity. "No. No, you can't."

"Can't I?" Marshall felt above the guy peer down at him, but he stayed where he was. He hadn't looked beside him, he wouldn't.

"Now's not the time." He sighed.

"It could be, though."

"But it's not."

"But this is the only time I could get you alone." Marshall froze up in a guilt-ridden cauldron of mixed emotions, perhaps his own anger. "You won't speak to me otherwise."

Marshall barred his teeth, whipped his head towards his man of interest at a speed enough to hurt. "God. Your sister is dead, Adrian. Have some fucking compassion."

December, 1974. SOMEWHERE, SOMEWHERE.

A disgraceful lodge of a human body makes way into the door. Clutching at its body as it hunched in its pain. A mass of blood washed through a peculiar hole shot through their stomach; a pain mixed thorough with a snap of cheap alcohol— running thrums through rummaging secular thoughts. A bag of flesh lay bleeding at it's points like an animal attacked; bruises placed onto skin like holy scriptures in their wake.

He stumbled like a madman, sopping buckets of blood onto the porch in the dim lights haunting orange. Through his mouth did this carnage shed, blood pressure spiked at the edges of his teeth.

In her venture to the door did Allie turn around. The cup she had in hand shattered towards the ground as she looked, stared at the sight beyond her.

Similarly did a bottle in hand crash to the floor, in herds of feathered glass.

He saw her in the kitchen. "Allie? Allie, what are you doing up? 'S so late, Allie."

"I- I couldn't sleep. I just wanted something from the kitchen." Allie spoke hushed. She stared at the blood on his hand, running simply as it slipped through the webs of his fingers. It would spiral onto the floor of wood and make it's mark as something irreplaceable.

"Well," He grunted as he applied more pressure to a pulse-point in his stomach. Allie just saw the blood rush out faster. "Why don't you head to bed, Allie kiddo?"

"Bed?" She willowed.

"Bed, Allie," He confirmed.

Allie nodded. She was pliant. Scared. Or even weak. Something hysteric and of disgust.

And in that night, Allie hadn't slept. But, she could never really sleep, anyway.

April, 1979. CANESHEAD, TX.

Marshall stood alone in a room that used to breathe life. He felt the wind spill through the windows; shattered and sharp perfections, kinder days and hollow nights. He felt that laugh again and a hole in his chest that time wouldn't fix.

He heard the floors creak. The room grew colder. A looming presence he couldn't stand. "Marshall, son."

Marshall didn't answer. He could never find words to rip out. Not much anymore, anyway.

"What day is it?"

"April 4th." Absentmindedly.

His father hummed, stepping closer to Marshall to encase a hand across his shoulder. "It's been a while, hasn't it?"

"Has."

"We worry about you, son." Marshall's father looked at him with a narrow short of nothing in his eyes. "Me and your mother."

"Mama hasn't worried about me. Ain't no good use in lying to me." He shuffled awkwardly— the length of his clothes spiraling awkward shadows in the beams of light that grew through the windows; the one's that seemed so dull as they wafted through this room. "'M not a kid."

"Don't be a pessimist, son."

"No. 'M being true." He shuffled his feet as he stared down. "She hasn't looked at either of us."

"This is a hard time for your mother, Son." Marshall's father cleared his throat with a roughened fist to his mouth. "Have some compassion."

"Fuck that."

March, 1979. CANESHEAD, TX.

Marshall watched beyond him as he saw his sister strike out of a spare room. Intently he saw the way she held her face and a contusion of sorts. Between his observance he see Christine Clements tunnel behind her. He couldn't explain his unadulterated rush of anger; hot and pooling into the synapses of his system that ripped like fluid through his spinal chord.

He wanted to ask what was up, push all his washed up emotions to the forefront of his brain. Let them all leak out— slow, invasive, formaldehyde.

Instead, he didn't.

Marshall was never the kind to listen to himself; he only could if He told him such. In his dreams he was well aware of his wrongdoings, and in this life they never existed.

In his head, they did.

April, 1979. WEST LOTSVILLE, TX.

"Marshall, can I ask you something for a second, son?" A hand on the steering wheel and a "man" who wouldn't dare look at him.

A form of bile lumped into Marshall's throat. He hated conversations— hated them to all God almost as much as he hated himself. Aside that, he swallowed his pride and something else. His dignity. Maybe even his divinity, if he thought about it all too long. "Yeah. Uh, sure."

"You're okay, aren't you, Em?" His father turned slowly. Solemnly— like he was afraid his awfully, pitiful, and fragile son would crush under the weight of nothing itself.

"Em," Marshall thought. "Em, huh?" Though, he responded differently.

"'Course I am. Why'd'you ask?"

"You're— God—" Under this one would His name never be said that way. "You're— How'd I put this to you, Em?"

"You'd put it exactly how you think it." Marshall picked at a lone part of the car door where it had worn dry. The ride across town had gotten much longer than he wanted.

"You're— You're pulling away from us, Em. You and Ginnie." Marshall groaned audibly and sunk down into his seat. "Son, I just wan'ta know why."

When Marshall soaked up in his own silence and objective self pity, his father spoke up again: "And I know it's hard, Marshall, son, okay? You gotta believe me. I know it is— it's hard on us all. But, you gotta— y'gotta talk to us a time."

Marshall hoped the rain cascading down the windows he looked out of would find an answer. Something good to give and enough to stop. "We gotta talk about this now, all of times?"

"Em.." His father began. "Come on, son. Talk to me." In some sort of false earnesty. "You can."

Marshall didn't identify that worthy of responding. He never could, these days. He was silent far more than he ever talked.

His mother called that a curse.

April, 1979. LOTSVILLE, TX.

She sat on the couch as still as stone. Wasps buzzing in her ears as she sat; crochet beading laid into her hands but remaining unfinished. She looked forward into the far off distance, almost like a break would kill her existence.

The house had begun to fall into what no one would figure was a home, the decorations of crosses hanging down like chandeliers. The wallpaper peeled far more than it ever had; it was as sullen as the rest of this house, sleeping throughout the fights and untamed departures.

Some phantoms, forever. The ghost of what a family once was had lingered throughout the home, endless sprees of homegrown tragedy thrived though booking spines, pavements of bibles ripped into fleeces on the wooden floors. The rugs, the rugs lay off-white and stained and speckled with hardening blood. Marshall recognized it everywhere he stood, and it all was the blood of his mother.

Seeing her ripped his skin out through his teeth. "Mama?" Marshall asked, taking the slow steps towards the shell of a woman.

She stared at the blank TV ahead; nothing playing but static channels. She croaked when she talked, almost like a poisoned frog. "That's not my name."

He decided all higher powers damned that he would not study that statement. He rolled around something in his hands, vast colors a spark different from the grey and white toned haunted house. "I found an old birthday card. Might make you feel better—"

"God took my baby away. He beckoned him to come up, and He took him." She began her crochet job again. A little blanket with a cross situated in the middle. Something she made for Owen, something most likely never finished. "My baby. My son."

Marshall opened his mouth like he wanted to speak, cut off only by incessant noise. "How would you feel?"

"I would—"

She interfered. "I think I wasn't Godly enough. That must be it. The angels didn't speak to me like they spoke to him."

"You're scarin' me, Ma—"

"What do they say to you, Marshall?" She rose up like Christ, attaching her arms to Marshall in a wailing grip. Violently, she shook him around as her nails dug crescents into his skin. "What do they say, angel?"

Marshall froze up. Never had he ever had such a comparison dropped upon him like that. He would never be honored like that the time he died. "They don't, ma."

"Come on. What do they say?"

"Nothing, ma, just—"

"I think you might be next to go," She whispered into the wind, hair disheveled as it fell above her face. Her eyes were withered and she was unrecognizable; strings falling between her eyebrows and mounted in her dilated eyes. "What will be left of you?"

And suddenly, she stopped.

In her weakness she dropped to the ground, arms at her sides. She strained her hands into the carpet as she looked up, eyes reflecting the dimming light as she cried out. "Lord, you can't take him from me, too!"

Marshall just scratched at his own injuries, feeling the blisters of her nails embedded into his skin, subjected to the torture to stare.

Then, because he could never handle himself, he started to cry. Bronze-metallic tears streamed down his face, but he remained silent; a silent like killing, a brutal truth situated between the sickest parts of his head, cracked open his skull to read his thoughts only to find nothing besides the black emotion of grief.

And as he wept, he fell to his knees in front of her. His mother braced her arms upon his shoulders, almost to bless him. And she bestowed unto him a final cry:

"Don't take away my daughter. Don't take away my only son!"

January, 1968. LOTSVILLE, TX.

"Look, Mama, look!" Marshall smiled widely in his new-found discovery. He wobbled slightly as his arms released the handlebars of his bike, but he pushed himself to hold them again. "I did it! I can ride a bike!"

"I see, honey! Look at you!" His mother smiled about as wide as he did, but world's across knew she would never touch his excitement.

"There's my boy!" Marshall's father laughed loudly, scooping up his son to lift him in his arms. "'M so proud of you, Em!"

"Ginnie's gonna be happy!"

"Yes," his mother smiled. All his efforts in impressing his older sister. "Yes, yes she will!"

Marshall hadn't smiled like that since.

April, 1979. CANESHEAD, TX.

It took Marshall a while to arrive; a door he said he would never walk through again, a house he damned, and a family he hated— much was mutual. But for an ungodly reason, he couldn't figure out who else to find his time to.

A hand to the doorknob. A slow open. A dramatic reveal.

"Marshall," Adrian choked out, shock written in waves throughout his body.

"I'm not here to start anything up again," He sighed. "You were just the only person I could think of."

Adrian smiled wearily. "Lucky for you, no one is up."

"Damn lucky for me," Marshall muttered before heading inside.

April, 1979. CANESHEAD, TX

Marshall's father could never quite look at his wife. The once brightened woman now a shell of herself in a mystery of mortification; she never spoke besides cracks of her demeanor and shedden tears. Sometimes he hear her cry the nights away, far off as she slept in the room of her son. Besided the bedroom floor with nothing to lay her head.

He knew of a woman, though, a woman all written as who his wife used to be.

Perhaps he wanted her back, perhaps she knew the church, perhaps she was the wife of McNeil.

And perhaps he went to her every night while husband nor wife were aware.

April, 1979. LILITH, TX.

"I just think you're showin' out on me for that Clements guy," Francis shrugged.

"I haven't spoken to him in 2 months," Marshall mumbled as he kicked a spare rock.

Something skeptic. "Yeah. Yeah, I believe you."

July, 1979. WILSHIRE, MS.

Marshall's skin grew cold just as it grew pale, the glass of the windows lay like the broken bottles of wine; he was tired in a way that churned a sickness, but beyond that sickness did he see the blood in her eyes and how her body collapsed. The other man not bother pick her up. She lay, curled up, bible between her hands.

No one dared to say anything. No one found themselves able to speak.

"Marshall," McNeil called, voice grating as it shattered against the echoing walls. "I bid you forth.

Marshall didn't want next. He couldn't ignore the essential corpse of his sister as she sit dying. He couldn't ignore all it was; all he sought, all it be of him, how unholy he was in his days if he just sat and not tend to her, not ask up on the all-he-had. He could hear those whispers as they ashed-out praises in his head, only the opposite.

Marshall couldn't move. He was cemented into the ground with the decaying bones.

"Boy, I bid you forth." His voice got louder, piercing, as he beckon Marshall sing along. "I'd pray for you as I did her," as he kicked Georgia's body around; direct hit to the spine.

She wouldn't be dead had he thought. She'd have not been gone, but what God deny the cries of his own woman? He heard his mother, He heard all as she screamed take neither of them away.

Georgia was not away.

And she wasn't.

She was restored to life, not dead but closely lifeless, brought herself up to her feet, inconsolable, slowly, did her ascension come. She got up, eyes still pooling but only with tears; the curvature of her spine hunched over as where she had been kicked.

Marshall almost wanted to show his excitement, show maybe his mother's call wasn't so far off. Maybe the angels call down on them all that day. Maybe luck she wasn't dead.

"Must you make my life hard?" McNeil grumbled, kicking Georgia once she was close to up again. "Stay down," in a voice that could only be his.

"Marshall," Pastor McNeil challenged with a voice like a mouthful of chlorine. "Last time," he was stern like on old clock that attempted be wrong.

Marshall crossed that aisle saddled up with his own thoughts, miserly and wallowing in delusioned sadness, once at a foot of reach did McNeil tug at his arm to urge him closer.

"Come on," and suddenly he was on display.

And it felt disgusting.

"Now," Pastor McNeil reveled a hand onto the young boy's shoulder. Suddenly that act changed when he was let go and felt a puncture wound to his side; one that knocked dust off onto his arm— a bible that his sister held in hand came pulverized at a hit to his ribs that brought him to his knees. "This is what a damned man looks like, everyone."

Besides all his pain was all his fear. One he hadn't have felt until a few days prior, one that settled over the weekend and never bothered to shed her own skin.

A fistful of his scrappy brown hair into McNeil's hand. Maybe it was bias, maybe he was treated like an animal.

Maybe he was an animal.

And there both siblings stay, glistening in cold wind with shivers wracking sobs through breaking remors, and all it was was a worthless feat because no human emotion could ever make McNeil see them as what they were.

René Descartes, French philosopher, once said "I think therefore I am," but Marshall saw this as a stake that wouldn't apply. He thought, but he was not. He never felt like nothing but an object of speculation; whether as man of a church, whether as a son, whether as a man himself.

Marshall White was made to be seen.

And here he was, under God, being seen. It wasn't a congregation or a church, no, but it was for a collection of six people, six people and one who knew him far more than he knew himself.

"These are what two kids born of sin look like." Supposedly, they were.

But if God give him grace; he bowed his head down to a harsh pull that brought it back up again. "I want to repent. I'm tired."

Just a bit louder: "I said I want to repent. I'm tired."

"Repent for what?"

Those were words he couldn't say out loud.