I only truly knew morning had come when Jacob took it upon himself to pry me from the screen and interrupt my studies on the creation of gasoline from wood chips. He tapped the edge of his hoof against my shoulder with a quiet ‘clok’ and in that moment, I felt a rush of warmth spread through my body. Unfortunately, the sensation faded as quickly as it came, and all it did was make me keenly aware that I was a touch peckish.

“Pete?” His voice was low, and I could sense something bitter in the air whenever he spoke. “How’re you feeling?” I looked to my brother. The little, quivering ball of soul stuff in his chest had returned to the size and strength it was when I first laid eyes upon him, but looked distinctly blue. It occurred to me that my brother was shaking all over.

“Uh.” I rubbed a hoof against my forehead—not like I accomplished much other than make a little scraping sound. “Better. I’m feeling better.” I nodded at him. “A little hungry, though. Did—” I stopped dead when I saw his soul flash a brilliant, deeper shade of blue and physically shrink away from me. I paused, before I looked up into his eyes, with their jittery, dilated pupils. There was no denying it. “Jake?” I blinked. “Are you afraid of me?”

He shook his head, but didn’t say anything. I slowly reached up with both my long, porous forelegs and pulled him into a hug. He wriggled and squirmed in my grasp, and made pitiful, whimpering noises. “N-no…! No…!” It wasn’t long before I found myself physically recoiling at a sharp pain in my chest and a bitter taste on my lips. I looked up at Jacob, dumbfounded, only to realize he was on his back, halfway across the room.

“Sorry! I’m sorry!” I hissed, when I realized I’d sent him skidding across the polished concrete floor. “I just...I don’t, I, I—” I rolled onto my side and turned a blank stare in his general direction. “You’re really—I just.” I cussed an almighty cuss; loud enough that the house shook and summoned Beth. She scrambled into the room, flailing her wings for balance while her hooves slipped and slid around.

“What’s wrong?” she wheezed, wide-eyed and a little winded. She looked between us, but neither of us answered. Jake was curled up where he landed, and I was busy wallowing in my own self pity. “Guys?” she tried again, “What just happened? What’d I miss?”

After a few more seconds of dreadful silence, Jake muttered something.

“What?” Beth leaned in closer.

“I‘snot a drim,” I heard him mumble. And then he burst into tears. Beth looked on for a few seconds, then turned to me. I looked up at her, folded over myself in a mess of black and blue ceramics. She was pitying me. I could feel it. I could see it. And I couldn’t help but be disgusted that it made my mouth water.

I rose my head a little, and the tangled, blue mass I called hair draped over my field of view. I could see the look on her stressed face. Even from my terrible angle, I could count the ridges in her brow. “Are you afraid of me, too?” I quietly asked her, even though I already knew the answer. I could see her soul, blue with fear. Not so brilliant and violent as my brother’s, but notable all the same. “It’s okay,” I groaned, “I don’t blame you.”

I heard her hooves on the floor, before I felt her trembling hoof on my shoulder. “You look even worse hiding your face behind your hair,” she said, before she scraped her hoof over my face and pushed my messy locks aside. “I… Peter, you’re absolutely terrifying. I’m pretty sure you’re a demon. But you haven’t led me astray yet.” She paused, before quietly adding, “Admittedly, we haven’t actually done much yet.” She huffed. “Whatever The Lord’s plan may be, I’m sure this will all work out if we stick to our principles.”

My cheeks twitched. It was a little uplifting to know Beth was willing to put her trust in me. It was something I wanted on my deepest levels. The trust of others. I needed that trust, to give me the strength to go on. I couldn’t survive by myself. I couldn’t survive for myself—that much I realized very quickly. I pushed myself upright and craned my head around until I could get a clear view. Jacob was still where he’d landed, losing his figurative shit. I looked between him and Beth, and made the motion as deliberate and noticeable as I could.

She didn’t need much prompting to settle down next to my brother and wrap a foreleg—and a wing, I noticed—around him. It didn’t seem to help much, but at the very least, I could see a reaction to the contact in both of them.

“Not a dream, not a dream,” Jacob repeated to himself, over and over again. I couldn’t help but scowl. His denial of our reality made me angry. Frustrated. That he had the gall to simply refuse to act like a functioning human being. We didn’t have time to spend hugging it out. We only had a couple more days to set up a secure homestead in the city. Or find a new home, or something that would see us better off than we were currently.

“Jake?” I prodded at him with my voice.

“Aaah, it’s not a dream!” he responded.

“Jake.”

“No way, no way, no way—”

“Jake—”

“Nonono not a—”

“Jaco, come the fuck o—”

“Peter!” Beth yelled, glaring at me. I immediately deflated, ashamed.

“I just. I can’t.” I laid back down. “I can’t deal with this.” There wasn’t much to do but wait it out.

Only, we waited for an hour. Then we waited for two hours, and then almost three hours. All three of us, doing nothing but feel sorry for ourselves. Three hours wasted on their weak minds.

“What happened to my brother?” I mumbled to myself. And to my shock, he answered. Although, it was hard to hear him at first, muttering something about nightmares.

“It was terrible,” he croaked. I waited, and when he didn’t elaborate on his own, I took my chances.

“Do you want to talk about it?” When I spoke, I saw his soul flash something unfamiliar. It was gone as quickly as it appeared, much to my frustration.

“Not right now.”

His answer didn’t sit right with me. My brother was never one to give in to such intense feelings—never in my presence, at least. Suddenly, that flash made a lot of sense. He’s hiding something, I thought, but, the situation was already sensitive. I would have to try and interrogate him later.

“Maybe, you and Beth should go out and do something,” I suggested, “Take a walk, pick up some groceries.”

I was surprised when he agreed. He didn’t seem keen on talking to me, but he at least listened to what I had to say. The two of them wasted no time firing up the big pickup truck outside and rolling away, and, in a way, I was relieved to be rid of them.

Having the two of them occupied with scavenging for the day left me to something more important for my own mental health. I had personal belongings, many of which I had abandoned in yesterday’s confusion. I took it upon myself to return to my old home and retrieve them.

Fortunately, the walk back to my house wasn’t a very long one.

Finding the front door already unlocked confused me, at first. It took a few seconds to remember that I’d deliberately left the door unlocked—one part for my own convenience, and another part simple lack of ability. I pushed it open and stepped into the front hall.

The musty smell of home washed over me, and the sight of the ancient wallpaper, browned with age brought a smile to my face. A smile, despite the eerie silence that hung over the house—that hung over the whole city. In a city like Boston, you noticed the quiet. I could no longer hear the trucks and buses rumbling along the main street just up the hill. There were no more trains roaring through the trench in the parkway a couple blocks downhill. No shouting children on a pleasant summer day, or loud neighbors, or anything. Just birds, and the buildings moaning in the wind.

From the front hall, I followed the small path of destruction my brother and I had made yesterday morning, all the way back up to our bedrooms. I ducked into mine, and only gave the hole in the wall a passing glance.

It was here where I faced my first true obstacle inThe Fine Manipulation of Small Things. I had a ‘safe’ built into my desk that had to be unlocked with a key. In truth, it was only safe from sunlight and maybe some critters; it was entirely wood, and any dedicated criminal could break into it in short order. But it had a lock all the same. I used the tiny hooks on my hoof to open the top drawer of my desk and peered down into it. Exactly where I expected it to be, was a small key, attached to a springy ring of steel. It was the key to my safe, the container of all my most precious belongings. It took far too much effort to get the thing clamped between my lips, and the only bright side to the ordeal was that I eventually mastered the art of maneuvering my freakishly long tongue into a hook.

The second challenge was that the key to the safe’s door also doubled as the handle. That is, I had to hold the key turned and use its friction with the lock to help me pull the door open. Suffice to say, I failed that part with flying colors. Not only was I unable to maintain a proper grip on the key, I also broke it in two—inside the lock. It was at that point I held my hoof up to the door and smashed it to pieces with a quick shove of my weight. Getting the locked cabinet open was a cinch after that, specially with one half of the door missing.

I cleared away the debris and began pulling things out. Old papers, my medicine, the prescription labels for said medicine, my copies of Pokémon Red, Blue, and Silver, and the Gameboy Color I’d played them on, a homemade rosary...the list went on and on. I swept it all aside and, with the greatest care I could muster, squeezed a little, black box between my hooves and set it on the desk in front of me, took a moment to prepare myself. Then, I slowly opened the lid and felt my heart melt.

Inside the box was a golden pocket watch. My father gave it to me as a birthday gift just this past winter. A few years before then, I had bought a pocket watch of my own. A Mechanical one. I never did it for the fashion or for use as an actual timepiece—I had my phone for that. I got it because watching the tiny gears in motion fascinated me. I would hold it to my ear and listen to the faint, rapid tick-tock it would emit. It was such a simple thing, and I loved it. Then, one day, I dropped it. It was barely an inch from my hand to the desk, but the impact was enough to misalign the delicate machinery inside, and that was that. It was so cheap, getting it fixed would have cost more than buying a new one. Then, two years later, my father called me into the kitchen and handed me this little, black box.

And as desperately as I wanted to fiddle about with my greatest treasure, I resisted the temptation and closed the box. It snapped shut on its own, and I left it there. I pulled open my wardrobe and dug around until I found my favorite coat. That is, my only coat: a tundra camouflage, double-layer coat I’d gotten from the army navy store downtown. And despite being made of fabric, it was durable, water-resistant, and most of all, familiar.

I pawed one of the coat’s pockets open and swept my boxed pocket watch into it, and I was satisfied. I had what I came here for, and I no longer had a reason to stay. If my brother wanted any of his important keepsakes, he’d have to get them himself; I had no clue what he considered important.

When I made it back to the first floor, I stopped in the doorway to what had become my mother’s bedroom. At one point, it had been a nice dining room, with a linoleum floor and a big table, with fancy patterns carved all over it, and when I was young, we’d all gather around it and eat together.

“Together,” I mumbled to myself. “Wouldn’t just fucking grab a plate and retreat to my cave.” I looked down at the floor, then up to my mother’s bed. “If I’d known I would never see you again...if I’d known.”

When I was still in high school, her hips collapsed. She couldn’t climb stairs anymore; we had to cut a ramp into our back porch. And now she spent her days sitting in the same chair, in the same spot, sleeping in this hospital bed, with her husband—my father—in a futon in the den.

Before I knew it, I was curled up on my mother’s bed. I laid there for hours. In the first of those hours, I noticed the small depression the mattress had gotten from where she always slept, and I spent the rest of my time wallowing in it.

What the fuck are you doing? I thought to myself, eventually, You have better things to do. You have more important things to do. And so I got up, with not a single tear shed, nor a sigh huffed, and not for a lack of trying.

I went straight back to my new home after that, and neither Pete nor Beth were around, although I did find more produce in the refrigerator, and a shrinkwrapped palette of soft drinks on the bottom shelf. I hadn’t even looked at the drinks for more than a few seconds, before I tore the wrapping and picked out a lime and strawberry flavored one. It tasted like the depressing nothingness I had experienced in the supermarket yesterday, but the fizzy, carbonated texture gave me something. It wasn’t enough to compel me to finish it, so I opted to dump the rest down the kitchen sink and stuff the bottle into a trash can that popped out from beneath the granite countertop.

I took a moment to check the internet and see if I could do any more research. But, the world was closing in on forty eight hours since The Happening, and I quickly discovered that the world wide web was no more. Or at the very least, on death’s door, judging by all the ‘This website does not exist,’ errors I bumped into.

“Well,” I sat back and mumbled to myself, “This is really happening.”

This is really happening.

Author's Note

The chapter where nothing particularly exciting happens.