Someone to watch over me

#

The rhythm of the music rushed from the screeching floorboards to the soles of her feet, surging through her muscles and coiling around her spine before shooting up to her chest. The room was hot and crowded, swamped with kinsfolk and church folk who had gathered to mourn Emily's passing. They sang and wailed like they could see Emily's soul tossing, spinning and humming before passing from this world to the next. They cried as though they were begging her to stay, praying for her to become one of them spirits that had bound themselves to Georgia by them cypress roots.

Bonnie wanted to scream, she wanted to yell 'run Emily run, keep on running and never look back cause this life sure did you wrong! 'Then the other part of her wanted to rope Emily in, hold on to her and plant her spirit deep in the rich soil outside her bedroom window so that she could sprout right up and look over Bonnie for the rest of her natural life.

She wriggled off the sweaty bench to kneel down and pray, Jamie's clammy palm pressed against her wet palm, fingers clamped around each other like ten vice-grips.

"I sing because I'm happy, I sing because I'm free…"

Bonnie pried one eye open to catch her father slouched inside the humming sea of kinsfolk, like he was dangling from some hanging thread looking empty and drained save for the small beads of sweat spurting from the skin on his forehead that verified he was still alive. Everything about him looked dead, from his slack hair follicle to the dead grey nails of his yolk toned fingers. Some people died with the dead, their own souls departed with that spirit from the sheer hurt of losing their soul mate.

"His eye is on the sparrow and I know he watches over me…"

When the prayers were finished and condolences murmured over soft buttermilk biscuits and sweetened iced tea with lemon slices, Bonnie stole away upstairs to the attic to be alone with the nostalgia of her momma. She wanted to forget about the folks downstairs; forget about the funeral that was taking place in a few days. She wanted to amuse herself with the strange patterns of her gram's vintage lace dresses, old sepia coloured family pictures and the synthetic scent of her momma on her old wedding dress. No one had mentioned Abby, no one had hollered 'see, your daughter's dead, think I'll write it on a darn postcard' and whenever Bonnie asked or mentioned their mother she was met with scowls, grunts and snorts. She was starting to wonder if the woman even existed out there in balmy California or if she had been a figment of her fervent imagination like the postcards she'd written.

Bonnie dragged the trunk along the squeaking wooden floor and tucked herself in a dimpled red leather sofa with an elongated back. She rummaged through the tragic treasure of collected things, hunting through memories until she found her momma's battered tin box.

She undid the stack of postcards slowly like she was opening a delicate gift. She traced her finger along the words, cramped letters struggling to hop all over the paper. She pressed the mark of a spattered tear with her thumb before leafing through the bunch for another postcard and finding one with a blossomed coffee stain. The writing was different like a forgery of the last card. The postcards had lost their magic, they were just dull and heavy stacks of thick paper with no movement and no life or love. Pressing them against her nose, she closed her eyes and hoped to smell wild unbridled oceans and shuddering grass shooting up from grainy white sands. Disappointment knitted her brows when all the scent she caught was dust and mould from the recesses of the redwood trunk. She listened to the news about a protest in Hong Kong before she switched off her father's radio, this was it, life. Life wasn't dusty Moroccan streets in Africa or brooding beaches in Asia. Life was Emily lying cold and dead in a metal slab in a mortuary, gutted and empty.

xXx

Giuseppe's Range rover swung around the gravel driveway, wheels skewering against the dotted grey grit and yellow dust. As soon as Damon's sneakers touched the rutted ground, sweet heat moulded around his face like a thick cobweb, and magnolia clung to the walls of his nose and his sullied flesh. His spirited eyes followed the commotion of matted crowds, plates of food and the endless parade of flowers. His blue eyes wandered, widened and slanted until they caught something in the top section of the house. The window was half hidden behind big oak trees, branches clothed with violet Spanish moss. She stood inside the dank and dusty room like an apparition haunting the old house, chestnut brown hair rippling around her shoulders, her dress swirling like black dust in a Mongolian desert.

Once they were inside the house, Damon mingled with the crowd, shoving past them in an attempt to up the stairs to explore. He made light work of the creaking stairs as he climbed up to investigate the phantom that had flickered from the window like dust and fog. Careful not to stomp or shuffle around too much outside the door, his eyes made haste for the rusted keyhole and peeped inside. Pressing his soggy palm against the shedding wallpaper of flowered tendrils that crept up to the vanished ceiling, he flinched as the wall groaned under his touch.

He could barely see her behind the gauze of sweaty heat inside the room. She was a secret behind a melancholy of spider webs that were swept once every other week and so he screwed his eyes tighter to see her.

"Damon!" Stefan hissed through clamped teeth when he finally found his brother. He stomped his foot on the floorboard shaking his head and like a dog that had stolen an egg, Damon tucked his tail between his legs and followed Stefan back down the stairs. He swung his head back over his shoulder once to look at that door one last time.

xXx

Bonnie was standing at the vantage point from the attic window when grams called her to come downstairs. She approached the small crowd of polished white people with hesitation; they looked too cultured like they didn't belong around the soft vibrating gospel music of black folk or even around the swamps of Georgia. They were Charleston people, right down to their seersucker suits and imported cigarettes.

"This is Bonnie" her grams announced, stifling her shoulder with her arm. Bonnie shrunk back when Mr Salvatore drew a sparkling silver coin behind her ear and her fingers sprang up to rub the shell of her blushing earlobe. Her eyes stuck on his frightfully colourful tie and only leapt back when her grams said, "Bonnie, go and git your friends some sweet tea and biscuits"

"They aint my friends," she quipped, arms crossed over her chest and eyeing the boys up and down.

"Miss Bennett!" grams dug her nails into her shoulder "Take these boys out back for some biscuits this instance, you aint too old for a switch!"

Bonnie nodded, rested her chin on the indentation between her collarbones and examined the dusty scales of her sandals. The shoes were old, their pink colour faded two summers ago and all that was left now was the shrivelled pattern of their shedding scales. She clamped her teeth together and fixed her lips over them as tight as two crabs mating. Dodging her grams lashing eyes, she hunched her shoulders and managed to disguise the scowl on her face with the wide lace collar of her dress.

Then one of the boys spoke, in a soft hushed tone with his lips barely moving, "My name's Stefan and this here's my brother, Damon"

Bonnie's eyes sprung up to the boy standing next to Stefan. She remembered him from the steps outside the courthouse.

His blue eyes were playing dirty tricks, looking at her like he had second sight and could burst out all her secrets from this life, the last and the next. Bonnie shook her head, shaking the blood that was beginning to course up to her cheeks. She settled her gaze on Stefan's generous green eyes and relaxed to the harmony in them. She preferred him, favoured his bland brown hair and the pensive look on his face like a hitchhiker who perpetually stuck his thumb out to go somewhere, anywhere. He wasn't restless about his longing search for someplace, but rather patient and dream locked inside his nowhere.

"Well, come on 'en" Bonnie mumbled gesturing with her head toward the garden or what her family deemed to be the garden. This sentence, she expressed to the bashful dreamer while the other one lagged behind seemingly studying the way her dress leapt around her calves as she marched toward the rubber tyre swings and makeshift wooden table outback.

Moments later she was growing restless and Stefan was already lost in his dazed world of tyre swings and sweet tea as he whipped out a frayed sketchbook and began sketching something. Bonnie groaned and rolled her eyes as she stood up brushing dust off her dress. She licked hot dust off her lips before making her way out of the guarded yard. She scanned around for her brothers and uncles and everybody was too fixed on their own business to worry about her and so she trekked down the road, dust flurrying about her ankles as she marched. With a hasty halt, Bonnie whirled around to find the strange boy behind her.

"You following me?"

Damon shrugged his shoulders, swatting a black fly that was hovering too close to his pretty face.

"I'm going down to the river for some noodling; you can come with if you like" Bonnie spoke slowly as if she was talking to some seer child who didn't quite comprehend the magic of this world. Damon nodded and motioned toward his father's range rover with his chin. Bonnie pursed her lips and rapped her nails against her folded arms. It was bad enough communicating with the strange boy out in the open but she wasn't sure she could handle being alone with him in such an enclosed space.

X

Damon lay on the hood of the car, legs spaced out and head rested against his arms as Bonnie dipped her feet into the water. She was still clothed and so Damon shut his eyes because there was nothing to see beyond the shape of her sleek thighs in her Christian dress. After what seemed like only seconds to him, he awoke to her tolling shrieks, the burble of rough water and then nothing.

The river snarled, shrieked and gurgled. It whipped her bruised cheeks, tangled her hair, tossing her waif limbs like a rag doll in the yelping current. Bonnie clawed at the water, swallowed torrents of it before she felt something brush against her leg. Broad ribbed spine, slinking and twisting in the water like a river serpent.

"Alligator!" she mangled her scream, tongue twisted with the current as the water closed in hastily over her head.

xXx

Without a second thought, Damon dived in after her ready to fight a gator for her life. He swam frantically, eager stroke after eager stroke spitting and swallowing water until he got to her. Breaking the surface, they kicked savagely while she slurred something, squirting and spitting water. She was heavy pressed against his chest, waterlogged heaviness that seemed to drag her further into the depths of the river and closer to the circling gator. She thrashed out and coughed water while he kicked and struck the gurgling current, swimming for the both of them. They scrambled onto the shore, panting and coughing but had little time to rest when the gator bounded for them, big jagged jaws snapping and racing for their heavily drenched and aching limbs.

Crack-Zip-Crack-Zip-Crack-Crack-Zip

They both swung around to the sharp crack of a rifle, bullets snarled and zipped past Damon's leg tearing into the gator's hind leg. Damon flinched back, the noise ripped through his sinews, hastily turning his belly into knots. Tyler lunged forward, finger jerking the trigger for another snarl and then a spluttering zip and crack. The gator thrashed and kicked creeping back into the water as the last flying zip and crack of a snapping bullet hit it square on its spine spraying blood into the water.

"Darn it, I had him" Tyler screamed while Matt hollered like a banshee perched on the tailgate, screeching and guzzling a six pack of beer. The drenched couple was coughing, Bonnie's right arm draped around Damon's waist and his arm swung around her shoulder.

"Mattie, be a good boy and go seek him!" Tyler yelled, rifle cradled at his waist. Suddenly, the blond hurdled over the tailgate and rushed for the water, wading through it to hunt for the wounded alligator.

"You ok?"

"Yeah"

"You sure, Bon?"

She nodded vigorously, fighting through her coughs and her fright and still holding on to Damon's shirt.

"Mattie aint so crowded with brains though, aint that right?" she hollered, watching as Matt tackled the swirling water trying to wrestle the injured gator. He cackled loose and hoarse like a swamp witch, corn-coloured teeth lining his cavernous mouth. The gator snapped and snatched, invigorated by its familiar element and Matt leapt and screeched, whooped and with a gleeful gibber retreated back to the muddy shore.

Marching back to the three spectators with an ape like gait, he pressed so close to Damon's neck that he could feel his hot beer breath seething down his wet spine.

"What we got here 'en?" Matt praised; reaching for Damon's wet hair.

"Don't bother him, he's a mute!" Bonnie snapped through chattering teeth and hurled her green eyes at a soppy Damon.

"I aint mute" Damon scoffed rolling his eyes. The rotting smell of the swamp was persistent pushing up into his nostrils; pricking his eyes and making them water.

"Naw, this boy aint deaf an dumb. He just one of em stinkin rich Salvatore's" Matt chuckled, greatly delighted by this new turn of events as if meeting a Salvatore was good as discovering Big Foot. He sniffed his soaked armpit before crowding in on Damon, insipid blue eyes darting around Damon's tan face like a baboon looking to pick some nits.

"Salvatore, ha?" Tyler's face skipped into a broad smile, cheating the tension in his brown eyes "you probably reckon we just a bunch of dumb rednecks don't'cha?"

"You called it"

"Ya want me to kick your ass?" Tyler sneered, probing his ribs with the muzzle "Then keep talkin"

"Why don't I set my balls over there, make it a fair fight?" Damon challenged, driving his chest against the rifle. Tyler waited, his eyes digging into Damon's before he stumbled back and shouldered his rifle.

"What you know about a fair fight college boy?" he inquired keeping his narrowed eyes on Damon.

"Is this how y'all entertain company?" Damon looked from one boy to the next, his heart beat painfully against his chest and every single bone in his body ached but he refused to let on. It wasn't so much the fact that the redneck was holding a rifle as big as that gator itself but the fact that she was there to bear witness to these boys pissing all over him, and that he couldn't have.

"What of it? She's one of us and you aint got no right being here"

"It's a free country and last I checked she wanted me here"

"Yeah, I've known her since before she even had breasts" Tyler drawled, stomping the butt of his rifle on the ground. "What you know about Bonnie?"

"Don't you dare say my name, it don't deserve to grace your tongue!" Bonnie hissed, suddenly awake again. Tyler swung around to gape at her, his brown eyes startled and confused by her ambush.

"You're the last person I wanna talk to Tyler Lockwood", her bare feet squelched into the mud as she barked and snapped" your brother killed my sister!"

"I'm sorry about Em, I really am, ok?" Tyler growled right back, "I'm sore about it, hurtin worse than that gator right now"

"So, you believe he raped my sister?"

"I aint my brother's keeper, Bon" he pleaded, shaking his head.

"You the worst thing that ever happened to me Tyler Lockwood" she huffed, stomping toward the range rover "and I caint wait 'til they gas your damn brother"

"Don't say that, he still my brother"

"He's a monster, the whole lot of y'all are monsters!" she hollered slamming the door shut.

"Do us all a favour; keep your swampy paws off her" Damon swooped in on the attack.

"Or what?" Tyler grinned "You gonna send your lawyer daddy after me or maybe your Klan granddaddy?"

"Bonnie know about her new friend?" Matt chortled, nudging Tyler's elbow.

"Don't know what you're on about" Damon spat, jaw muscles kicking.

"Sure you don't"

"Ask yourself this Salvatore, who's worse between my brother and your granddaddy?" Tyler sniffed, stepping back to shoulder the rifle again "One is a poor soul who rapes little girls, the other lynches black folk"

Damon shook his head and shoved past him, he had to get away from the rednecks. He had to get away from their endless lies and fables. Sure, he loathed his family, thought them vile and sickening but to call them Klan members was a whole other ballgame.

"You think it's my fault?"

"What's your fault?" Damon asked looking at her.

"That my sister's dead, maybe if I hadn't been friends with Tyler…maybe if I'd spent more time being a big sister-then-"she stammered wiping her arm against her nose.

"T.S Elliot once said we die to each other daily, so death is really-"Damon began, pushing his hair back and wiping his wet forehead.

"Think I prefer you mute" Bonnie scoffed with a snort and fixed her eyes back on the marshy rutted road with thigh high reeds.

xXx

The day of the bail hearing came and the world didn't stop spinning. No flaming comet plummeted into Georgia, the laws of nature stayed the same and Bonnie watched as her father sawed wood in the backyard, sawdust fleeting and exhausting the torpid air. He was talking and joking with Jamie, Jamie with his tongue poking out between his pressed lips as he held the board for Rudy and Rudy with his glazed eyes looking at nothing. He was a walking, breathing corpse trying to jostle through the days leading up to Emily's funeral. He wasn't even bothered by the terrible racket them hogs made in their slippery pen.

Bonnie turned to watch as another one of her aunts walked down the stairs with a plate of cornbread smothered in beacon grease for her father. They were everywhere now, fussing around like plump headless chicken trying to keep the family busy cause maybe if they were too busy living then they wouldn't think about Emily.

An hour later, she chanced upon her father climbing into his car and setting his newspaper on the leather seat like an old ritual before he started the engine. She caught a flicker of a long barrel and the gleaming walnut butt of a rifle but thought nothing of it because everyone and their mother were packing since the courthouse incident. They called it their God given right to bear arms, her daddy called it democracy.

When he looked up and caught her gaze, his top lip curled into what would have been a smile if the action hadn't hurt him so deeply and so Bonnie took it for what it was and smiled back.

"Get away from the window, child" her grams said, her silver needle darting in and out of the black cloth, its silver metal glinting in the late afternoon sun. She was mending one of Jamie's Sunday suits for the funeral.

"A storm's coming soon" she said, studying the stiff dark cloth.

"A storm is always coming" Bonnie replied, rolling her eyes and fanning herself with an old magazine.

"The good Lord's lookin after Emily now" her grams moaned in a dry lowly voice disregarding her sarcasm "he'll be looking after all of us" she affirmed nodding her head.

Bonnie shook her head, shrugging off the feeling that her grams half expected her to yell Amen. She hated the religious talk, questioned how and why the good Lord allowed all this nonsense to happen.

xXx

At exactly 5pm when the low haze of shimmering yellow dust flurried over everything inside and outside the house, when the cornflower blue sky changed its shade to a sombre grey with flashes of dull silver whenever lighting sparked, the police came to look for her father.