Читать книгу The Radiant City - Lauren B. Davis - Страница 4

The night is the wrong colour.

The first sound he heard was the horses. They sounded like eagles torn apart, like metal gears stripping, like speared whales. Matthew ran to the window. The barn was firelit from within, and orange tongues flickered up almost gently from the roof. His parents and his brother were already in the yard. His father strained to keep his mother from running headlong into the inferno. She twisted and turned in her husband’s grip and Matthew knew there would be bruises up and down her arms tomorrow. Her cries mingled with the horses’ shrieks. Ashes rose and swirled in the heated air. Hellish snowflakes. If he had wanted to, Matthew could have caught them on his tongue.

Everything made sense then—the kerosene can, the rags, his father’s flustered irritation, his sharp, “Nothing, you hear! I’m doing nothing!” when Matthew asked him what he was up to yesterday in the tack room.

Matthew ran down the stairs and out the door to his mother’s side and saw what she saw inside that burning barn. The horses’ manes flashed and shrivelled, their teeth bared, their hooves flailed at the flames, the skin crisped, going black along their backs, chained in their stalls while the hay went up all around them, so hot they burned, denied even the cruel blessing of suffocation. Matthew stood his ground, faced his father and pointed his finger. He said what he knew.

Matthew’s mother broke away from her husband and turned to her son. She slapped him in the face, so hard he fell to the ground. She had never hit him before and his shock left him speechless.

“Shut your mouth,” she said. “You’re lying. Don’t ever say that again! You’re lying.”

Matthew looked up from the ground at her tear-streaked face, the skin so bright in the fire spray that she might have been burning. In her scalded eyes he saw she knew the truth, and that it made no difference, and that she would not forgive him for it. She would never forgive his father, either, but she would stay nonetheless, even if it killed her, which it would.

His father stood, fierce in his power, fierce in his victory. He did not smile. There was no need to hide anything behind smiles.

His brother took their mother by the arm and led her into the house. “We’ll call the fire department,” he said.

His father stared into the collapsing barn. “Go telling tales on me, will you, you little shit. All right, then. Let’s see where that gets you.”

Matthew pressed his face into the dust and begged the dust to swallow him, the ash to bury him.

And nothing was the same after that.