The Mill

The house was dark and empty. Devoid of sound or life. Floorboards groaned as Amilia mounted the stairs. She was still in her grass-stained soccer uniform. Flakes of dried blood crusted to her limbs from small cuts and scrapes.

“Dad?” she called out. Her voice resonated through the stairwell, a hollow tremble.

He was supposed to pick her up from practice hours ago. Aunt Ruth had to drive from half an hour away just to take her home. She didn’t even have time to come in or visit because of a high-end wedding order for two hundred bouquets due the next day.

“Dad?” she called again, cresting the top step.

There was no answer.

What was it he’d said to her the other night? She woke up from a nightmare, and he had been standing in the doorway, a silhouette staring in the dark.

Do you think there’s still room in Heaven for the angels? That’s what it was.

He must’ve been sleepwalking again because he didn’t wait for an answer before retreating from the bedroom, sauntering down the hall toward the upstairs living room where he did most of his sleeping these days. Usually in front of the TV.

Amilia checked there first, but the living room was empty. She went to her bedroom next. Nothing.

“Dad?”

Downstairs, the kitchen and living room and bathroom and porch were all empty. She finally went into his bedroom. Ever since her mom had passed, he spent as little time in there as possible.

One night, while heavily intoxicated, he had admitted to an unsuspecting Amilia: I can feel her in there. I can hear her calling out to me. She wants me to be with her. She gets in my head.

Amilia opened the door ever so gently. The nob thudded against drywall. The bedroom light was on, casting a soft yellow glow against the walls.

Around the corner, her dad sat in bed, his back slumped against the headboard. Blood and viscera painted the wall behind him, splattered against the painting of a poppy field her mother had made years prior.

She was suddenly very alone and at the mercy of an unfathomable tragedy. All she could was scream and cry and pray for it to be over.

***

Amilia awoke to her phone. It buzzed and chirped, lights flashing in the dark. What time did she fall asleep last night? Must’ve been late. Her head felt fuzzy, face sunken. Her sleep schedule had been atrocious for the last four years.

The phone screen read: Aunt Ruth with an icon of her aunt’s face scowling at an arrangement of flowers inside her shop.

“Hello?” Amilia croaked.

“Did I wake you?”

She checked the time, almost nine o’clock. “No!”

“Are you okay?”

“Yeah, fine,” she lied. “Just getting ready to leave for classes.”

Her first class started in about ten minutes. She rushed around the room, grabbing clothes from the closet, socks and underwear from the dresser, a sweatshirt from the back of the door, and whirling into the bathroom to get changed while brushing her teeth and combing her hair. What hair there was to comb.

She put Ruth on speakerphone. “I was just calling to wish you good luck,” her aunt said. “And to remind you that there’s nothing to fret about, alright? You’ve got this. You worked hard, saved up all you could, and now, you’re gonna make college your bitch.”

As her aunt talked, Amilia stuffed her arms into a checkered flannel comprised of irregular black and white divisions. She danced and wiggled her way into a pair of skinny jeans, cuffed at the ankles and torn in places. She wasn’t exactly fashionable, but she might as well make an attempt for her first day.

“Are you still there, sweetie?” Ruth asked.

“I’m still here,” Amilia clambered with a mouthful of minty toothpaste. She brushed rapidly, ferociously scrubbing away the buildup of plaque.

“Now, remember to take all your medication, and if you run out, the pharmacy should already have your insurance information,” Ruth said. “Take them with food, and if you can, try not to drive on them.”

Drive! With what car?

“Don’t stop taking your medication unless a doctor tells you, okay? I know it sucks, and it’s easy to forget, but what do I always say?”

“I’d rather be medicated than exasperated.”

“Exactly. You remember what happened last time, don’t you?”

She stifled a groan and spit into the sink. Last time was a fluke. The pills were making her too drowsy to focus, and she could barely concentrate when she was at work. Then, she’d be up all hours of the night, tossing and turning in bed.

When she voided her obligational prescription, the lapse of drowsiness had been replaced by an irrational discombobulation intermingled with the flames of irritation and the chill of depression. A literal maelstrom inside her head.

“Did you eat breakfast yet?” asked Ruth.

“I’ll grab something from the commissary when I get to school.” If she had the time. This conversation was slowing her down exponentially.

Amilia grabbed the phone from the counter and lifted it to her ear, turning it off speakerphone as she walked into the living room. She grabbed her bookbag from the kitchen table, or more accurately, the oversized nightstand she used as a table.

Her entire apartment had been furnished with crude imitations of name brand furniture. The apartment itself seemed something like an imitation of an apartment as opposed to an actual living space. Hollow walls with little insulation. Windows that needed something heavy to prop them open. Creaky hinges and squeaky floors. Neighbors who blared music into the late hours of the night and yelled at the TV. But the overhead was low, or as the realtor said: cost-effective.

Amilia stepped out the door and descended the whiny staircase, walking out the front door onto Mainstreet. Cars already populated the roadway, gushing thick black clouds of smoke into the air. People crowded the sidewalks in jumbled packs like a stampede of wildebeest. They moved as one, a conglomerate of faces angled down toward their phones, swiping and pecking at the screens. Amilia slipped in, fighting the crowd’s direction until she finally broke free of one pack, enroute toward another.

“How do you feel, sweetie?” Ruth asked.

Anxious. Overwhelmed. Annoyed. Mortified.

“Like I have a lot of catching up to do,” said Amilia begrudgingly.

“Why’s that?”

“Because I’m twenty-one. Most people are close to graduating by my age.”

“Well, you don’t worry about most people. You worry about you. What you’re doing, going to school, pursuing…pursuing a career, that’s not something you’re doing for them. That’s for you.”

“I know.”

She didn’t fully believe it. Neither did Ruth. This career she had mentioned wasn’t so much a career but a dream. To become a published poet. A narrow pipe dream with very little possibility for success. Sometimes, Amilia thought she might be asleep forever with how much dreaming she did.

At the intersection, Amilia took a right and followed the crowd of young adults to the grand staircase at the entryway, quickly climbing them by two before entering the main campus. Inside, she skirted around lethargic groups and dashed past lecture halls for her first class: Literature 101.

“Just take a deep breath,” Ruth said. Amilia couldn’t discern what exactly they were supposed to be discussing. Ruth tended to digress and blabber. “That’s what I told her. Then, Marianne has the gull to talk back to me. You know me, I wasn’t going to take that.”

Another riveting tale from the flower shop. Marianne was Ruth’s best friend and co-founder of the shop. They often bickered like an old married couple. Trouble in paradise apparently.

“Look, Ruth, I’m sorry but I’ve gotta get going,” Amilia said. Her nostrils flared, lungs gasping for air. “I can call you later tonight.”

“Okay, kiddo. Have a good first day.”

“Thanks.”

She hung up and entered the classroom. The instructor was already going through rollcall. Everyone turned toward her. She froze in place like a deer in headlights.

“Please, take whichever seat you like,” the professor said, gesturing to the spread of empty chairs. Then, he grabbed the wheely chair from behind his desk and smiled. “Except for this one, of course. This is my seat, and it’s what you get after ten years of dedicated service.”

The class offered a pity chuckle in response.

Amilia went to the nearest empty seat and collapsed into it, trying to ignore the eyes that still lingered on her. Some whispers rose in the audience, tamped down by the instructor’s call for silence.

“Name please,” he said.

“Amilia Glaber.”

“Ah, perfect. We’d just passed you.” He jotted something down on his clipboard and continued through the list, calling out a name and looking up when the person raised their hand and said, “Here.”

After rollcall, the instructor retrieved a stack of papers from his desk, handing them to someone in the front row to pass back.

“This is a syllabus for the semester,” he announced. “It includes everything we’ll be studying, reading, classroom etiquette, assignments, expectations, phones…” He dipped his head, eyebrows raised at a girl in the center of class texting. She slid it into her pocket and smiled by way of an apology. “Now, as you can see on the syllabus, our first unit will be over classic literature. What exactly does this mean, you may be asking. We’ll be taking a look at some of the old epics like Homer’s The Odyssey. There’ll be lots of Shakespeare, so I hope you folks enjoy William’s work as much as I do. Jane Austen is a must read. Orwell, for sure. And a few other short stories and excerpts. Don’t worry, we’ll have plenty of time to read and discuss, and for some of you, to look up the answers on Google. Which brings us to the next bullet point, Plagiarism: What is it and how do we avoid it?”

The class went on for another hour and twenty minutes. They covered the course’s curriculum, performed brief introductions, and received their first assignment: to read selected excerpts from The Odyssey and be ready to discuss by Friday.

After that, Amilia went to the commissary and bought a granola bar to satiate the growl of her stomach. The remainder of her day was spent collecting syllabuses from various teachers before heading to the campus library to pick up her textbooks which must’ve weighed over fifty pounds and cost an arm and a leg. Thankfully, she’d saved money and applied for as many scholarships as possible. She would get to keep all her limbs and appendages for now.

When she returned home, she had another phone call with Ruth, talking mostly about the numerous fiascos at the flower shop. Amilia didn’t have much to say about school other than that there were already so many assignments due by the end of the week or early next week.

She had a paper on Edvard Munch’s The Scream painting for Art History. Assigned chapters from The Odyssey for Lit 101. Two textbook chapters in preparation for a test in Plant Biology. And whatever tomorrow’s Religion class would bring.

“Just take it one day at a time,” Ruth said in a soothingly gentle voice, trying to placate her like she used to when Amilia would have nightmares as a child.

She used to wake up in bed screaming at nothing. The doctors said they were night terrors due to traumatic experiences, negative emotions, and an overactive imagination. Thankfully, those had stopped around the time she became a sophomore in high school.