Misery's Chosen

Why am I even here? Is misery my only purpose?

A purple flash lit up the sky, jolting Micco out of her state of existential dissociation and bringing her back to herself. The fireworks had gotten farther apart and fewer in number as the night dragged on, and she had become so lost in thought that she had almost forgotten why she was staring at the sky in the first place.

Why do people go out of their way to watch this? It’s just the same boring spasm of color over and over again.

Of course, she had nothing better to do, so she kept on looking up, glued to the rickety plastic lawn chair her mother had set up for her in the front yard. Her mother sat beside her in an identical chair, slumped over and snoring peacefully into the warm night air. It was only ten thirty, but Micco had been the only conscious member of their two-person party for almost an hour.

It was lonely, but preferable. Before her mother had fallen asleep, Micco had to deal with being constantly interrupted with half-baked questions like, “How are you liking Miami?”. “How did you do on your final exams?”. “Have you met anyone you’re interested in?”. It was hard to hate her mother for wanting to know more about her life, but it got a little easier every time she was forced to answer with another half-hearted lie.

The truth was that Micco didn’t like Miami much more than she liked living in Tampa. Her exams didn’t go well, given that she wasn’t enrolled in a school and never took them. She hadn’t met anyone interesting, because meeting someone was not what interested her. There honestly wasn’t very much she found interesting anymore, and that was the hardest part to explain. By and large, Micco’s grand life in Miami consisted of spending her nights working at a shitty dive bar, and then every other part of the day reading books alone in her shitty studio apartment.

Micco didn’t have a boyfriend or some grand future career planned for herself like a normal twenty-two year-old girl. She had always been repulsed by the trappings of a “normal life”, but not wanting to be normal was not a concept that Madeline Abraham was capable of wrapping her head around. No matter what Micco did, her mother couldn’t see her as anything more than her beautiful flower waiting to bloom, so at some point it became easier to fake the beautiful petals and just tell her mother what she wanted to hear. Micco was tempted to hate her mother for her willful blindness, but she knew they were both dealing with being lost in different ways since her father went missing ten years ago. At least the white lies seemed to bring a little color back into her mother’s pale, rapidly aging cheeks.

Micco would try from time to time to open some cracks in her mother’s preconceptions. During this most recent trip home, she was working on getting her mother to stop calling her “Christine”. It had only been half-working, but she was proud of herself for trying. Her given name had always fit just as poorly as the uncomfortable church dresses her mother used to force her to wear. Her dad had always called her “Micco” whenever she was being bossy, and she never felt more like herself than when he’d say it. “Micco” is the Seminole word for “chief”, and even though he was teasing her, it always made her smile. “Micco” felt like her. “Christine” felt like the person her mother wanted her to be. Besides, even if she somehow really became Christine, her mother would still get that sad twinkle behind her blue eyes every time she looked at her. Going by the nickname her dad gave her was only one of many glaring parts of Micco that acted as a painful reminder of the lost love of her mother’s life.

Everyone would always tell Micco how strongly she resembled the great Halian Abraham. Everyone knew Hal, and when she rode on his shoulders through town or the reservation, everyone knew her too. She had inherited his dark skin, strong jaw, and straight black hair. She even wore her hair the same length he used to, coming down past her chin. There was some maternal resemblance, of course, but her mother was extremely Irish, pale as snow and red-headed as a Gaelic fairy tale, and most people would have to squint to see the resemblance.

Micco’s blue eyes were a small genetic victory for her mother, but even that had its thunder stolen by the fact that her grandma on her dad’s side had blue eyes too. Grammy Mae had passed away a few years back, but she was a fierce little woman with the same dark skin and blazing blue eyes as Micco. Her grandma always used to say her eyes were blue because of the family’s ancestral ties to a magic tribe that used to live in the Tampa area before the Spanish wiped them out. The magic “Alien Indians” had always been a fun folklore for the Tampa locals, who assigned them all sorts of far-fetched powers like mind reading, superhuman strength, and maybe even the power of flight, by some people’s telling.

It was easy to make up fun stories about a people who were massacred so thoroughly that even their language was wiped out of the history books. In truth, the Lacusa were a particularly egregious victim of Spanish colonialism, and her grandmother’s blue eyes came from the recessive traits that snuck into her genome when those same colonialists raped her ancestors. But that’s a mean thing to say to your grandma, so Micco would listen thoughtfully to every long-winded story, even the ones that barely made sense as poor Grammy Mae got closer and closer to the grave.

A faint, high-pitched sound and a slight tickle on the back of Micco’s neck made her hit herself with a sudden “smack”.

Damn mosquitoes, this is what you get for choosing to live in a swamp, Mom.

Micco’s mother continued her snoring in a half-upright position despite the sudden noise. Her harsh breath sounds had begun to itch at the back of Micco’s brain and made her question even more why she let herself be cajoled into extending her visit home for such a pathetic excuse for a holiday. The anniversary of the day her father went missing was the twenty-eighth of June, a day of solemn grieving she always set aside to spend with her mother, but staying for Independence Day had not initially been the plan.

“Happy Birthday, America,” Micco whispered to herself. She shook her mother’s shoulder and said a little louder, “Okay Mom, let’s get you inside.”

The gesture wasn’t even enough to break the cadence of her mother’s snores. A little more effort would be required to get her mother to bed and prevent her from getting totally eaten by bugs. It wasn’t something Micco felt like doing on a full bladder, so she decided on a quick pit stop to pee inside first.

Micco made her way across the front yard and climbed up the steps to the porch. The wooden boards creaked beneath her feet as she approached the fraying screen door on the front of the house and swung it open with a sharp creak. Her mother had recently moved to a small, ranch-style home in the suburbs because the stairs in her old place were getting too hard on her knees. In only four short months since the move, the house was already filled with her signature clutter. A menagerie of paintings, ornaments, and statues of different Catholic saints hung on every wall. Her old place was a lot bigger, but it didn’t seem like she was able to part with a single one of her possessions in the move, so there was barely a sliver of the house’s original wall color anywhere to be found in the place.

Micco grew up closer to the city, and her current apartment was right in downtown Miami, so it had been a struggle the past few days to get used to the eerie lack of ambient noise. Every little sound made her want to jump out of her skin without a constant hum in the background to blend it all together. A sudden “pop” filled the void and made her choke on a quick intake of breath.

It’s just the fireworks, Dum Dum. You know, the ones you spent the last two and a half hours staring at.

Even knowing there wasn’t a logic to it, she still kept her head on a swivel as she crept to the bathroom, hyper-focusing on the sound of every step. Sweat began to bead on the back of her neck as she got far enough inside the house to no longer hear her mother’s snoring. The noise that had made her want to crawl out of her skin minutes before was now sorely missed as she made her way down the dark hallway to the bathroom.

What was that!?!

A sudden creak in the house made her freeze in place. The noise didn’t seem like it came from her feet.

Chill out, Micco! You’re a grown-ass adult and you’re brave enough to take a tinkle without holding your mother’s hand.

With a deep breath, she pushed her way towards the end of the hall. The only sound she could hear was that of her footfalls, so she started to regain her confidence a little.

See, weirdo, it’s only the sounds of a quiet house.

Before long, she reached the end of the hall and pushed open the bathroom door. Her hand moved for the light switch, but she suddenly found herself pulled into the grip of something unnaturally powerful. Micco’s eyes searched the dark for what held her, but could only make out a pair of glowing purple eyes.