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Title: Laugh For Me
Genre:General
Rating: PG
Length: Short Story
Summary: Jennifer pulled her traveling cloak tighter and gazed at the road in front of her. As long as it seemed, the journey she would end up taking would be even longer.
Warnings: None
1
Jennifer pulled the crumpled map from her pocket and glared at the cramped handwriting. A crease obscured one of the river names – was it Kalata or Ralata or something else all together? Jeremy’s writing was never easy to read to begin with and Jennifer’s temper was stretched almost too far. She paused by a large rock vaguely shaped like roosting bird and glanced up at the sky.
It was mid afternoon and late autumn – never a good combination. The shadows were long and disproportioned as if someone had grabbed hold of one end and ran as far as he could. The wind from the morning had slowed and then stopped about an hour earlier. Now the air hung like a damp rag around her face. The clouds threatened to let loose a torrent of over-sized snowflakes.
Jennifer very much wanted to get to her destination before the sun went down, but of course that wasn’t going to happen. She let her eyes fall back to the map in her hand. Slowly she tipped it to the left, hesitated, then quickly reversed the rotation. It didn’t help. Handwriting wasn’t the only thing Jeremy did horribly: his map-making skills lacked the quality usually referred to as accuracy. They were detailed enough. The little rivers even had fish, but Jennifer was much more interested in the actual purposes of the map than aesthetics.
In the moments that Jennifer paused to study her map, the sun had sunk a little more in the sky and the shadows had been pulled even more out of shape. There was no way she was going to find her way at night. Her best option at the moment was to set up camp while there was still light to pitch the tent and build her fire.
She was an experienced woodsman, having grown up as she did. Her brothers and she would often transverse the mountain path between their home and the village for supplies. This was hardly different.
But it was.
It was different in such a fundamental way that Jennifer felt a pang run through her. Not only her heart shivered but her conscious too. Benny wasn’t there to tell her spooky stories over the fire and Jeremy wasn’t there to comfort when Ben’s stories got a little too terrifying for the little boy.
She stared as the flames licked around her cooking dinner, and remembered a different trip over this pass, one that included all three of the Calwell siblings. Jeremy was only eight, Ben only thirteen. She was only ten. That was fourteen years ago and yet, if she squinted she could make out Ben’s face in the eerie shadows across from her, and if she concentrated, she could feel Jeremy’s tiny fist tightly clutching her wrist.
“ ‘I’ll cook him
slowly in the pot’ cackled the witch as the little girl struggled against the cage bars. Hans stared helplessly at the boiling water at his feet. He didn’t even pull away when the witch lowered him into it. At first it was just a shocking sensation then a searing pain shot up his leg as his flesh began to cook and peel back from the bone. In the cage, Gretel could smell her brother being boiled ali-”
A small head with thick golden hair buried into Jenny’s lap. High pitched squeals came from Remy as he clutched at his sister for comfort.
“Stop, Ben.” Jenny hissed at her brother. “You’re scaring him. Do you have to be so graphic?”
Jenny placed a comforting hand on Remy’s shoulder and rubbed it until the squeals turned into sobs. Benny always did that. He always went too far with his stories. Sometimes they even scared her, too. When Remy wasn’t there to take care of, when they were alone in the loft or in the barn or by the river, she would let Ben continue, relishing the fear that burned in her throat and then the sleepless hours with which she paid for it.
But when little Jeremy was with them, such stories were not appropriate. There would be hell to pay if mother ever found out about it. Ben just shrugged and poked at the fire, sending a shower of sparks into the darkness.
“Remy said he could handle it.”
Jenny looked down at the back of her young brother’s head. He had said he could handle it. He had stared straight at Benny with his wide hazel eyes and nodded his head. He had even drawn an ‘X’ across his chest to cross his heart. And Benny believed him.
Jeremy was already eight years old, after all. Jenny had been younger than that when Ben started telling the stories and she listened, spell bound, until the hero met his horrible fate and the heroin expired from heartache or fear.
“Well, Remy can’t handle it,” Jenny snapped. Ben winced at the tone or her voice but came back with nothing. There was nothing he could say. He should have known Remy wouldn’t make it. It happened every time.
When Remy was finally sleeping, he apologized.
“Look, Jen, I’m sorry. I got carried away.”
Jenny didn’t look at her brother, but she knew he was wearing his familiar sheepish grin. He only had two grins. The other was a crazy, wide smile that terrified her. It always meant he was going to do something stupid.
“You know, Hansel and Gretel are supposed to win.”
Ben laughed. “I know, but why should two such greedy little children win. They were eating her home!”
It was Jenny’s turn to laugh. He had a point. He always had a point. By now, the fire was little more than burning coals. Jenny sobered.
“Why are you so obsessed with the morbid part of life?” she asked quietly.
“Because that’s the only part of life that’s really real.”
“It is not,” Jennifer muttered into her dying fire. She disagreed with him all those years ago but didn’t have the courage to say it. She never did. It wasn’t until after she could no longer disagree with him that she could voice her objections to his crazy ideas.
“It is not, Benny,” she mumbled. “And one day, I’m going to prove you wrong.”
She stood and retired to her tent for a restless night. In the morning, she would be gone before the sun was properly hung in the sky. She had a destination to reach and she was already behind schedule.
2
As predicted, the morning ground was hidden beneath a layer of snow. The sun was still peering over the horizon when Jennifer packed her bag and headed out. With any luck, she’d be able to decipher the map and be back on track by noon. For now, however, the map lay folded at the bottom of her satchel. The grey light was hardly good enough for reading and she wasn’t about to wander off the road, so until she came across a fork, she had little need for a map.
A soft snowfall dusted the already white landscape and began the process of filling Jennifer’s footsteps. She was heading southeast, judging by the sun. She was supposed to be heading almost due east, but by this point, she was certain any way she went would be wrong.
“I’ve marked out all the big landmarks,” Jeremy had told her two days before when he handed her his map. She had stared at it dubiously then glanced in her brother’s eyes. Over the years, he had grown to be quite tall, and now hovered over her. His eyes were still wide to the point of always seeming surprised but his tiny frame had bulked up into the perfect inverted triangle that girls seemed to love so much.
He wrapped his work-hardened arm around his sister and squeezed reassuringly. “Don’t worry, sis,” he said, soothingly. “I’ve used this map several times and it’s never steered me wrong.”
“Yes, but you’re moderately insane, bordering on very insane.”
Jeremy feigned indignation and pushed her lightly away. Jennifer laughed. She did have her doubts about the map, but Jeremy was frequently traveling, frequently in this part of the country. It had to be a least accurate enough to bring him home whenever he left.
Now she kicked at the snow building on the path. She should have known it would go wrong. It always did. He might be able to understand his maps, the maps with no compass and no scale and no legend, but she could not. It didn’t help that she was in a hurry. If she wasn’t so anxious, she wouldn’t have minded wandering around the countryside. Jeremy never minded.
“The only reason your stupid maps work for you is that you never actually use them, Remy!” she snapped into the cold air. Nothing responded. A shot of loneliness wriggled in her chest. She was a couple of mountains and a few rivers away from home by now, and about twenty miles from those who loved her. She missed Jeremy so much and she knew, just knew, Jeremy would be missing her too.
Jeremy was always the family person. “I’m going
to be an adventurer!” he proudly told his sister. He was eleven by now, and she thirteen. They were dangling their feet into the spring current of the river. Benny was hiding away in the barn or the house, or maybe even the outhouse, writing another of his horrible stories. Jenny had outgrown the enjoyment of fear long ago and now only listened to appease her brother. Jeremy no longer tried to brave them. He didn’t have the kind of mind to withstand the gruesomeness.
“Where are you going to go?”
Remy paused and watched a salmon struggle to get back upstream. His blonde hair had darkened to a light brown dusted with gold and the sunlight sparkled in the curls.
“Everywhere,” he said at last. Jenny didn’t look at him. Instead she tipped her head back and studied the buds growing on the tree branches above their heads.
“Everywhere,” she repeated quietly. “Remy, you can’t stand being away from home!”
“I can always come home in between!”
Jenny laughed and gave Remy a small push. Remy scooted back and gave Jenny a good shove that ended with her up to her chest in cold river water.
“Remy Calwell!” She shrieked, but she couldn’t keep the smile from her face. A loud splash and a wave of water from her left signified Remy’s presence and she proceeded to dunk him until he was crying and laughing and sputtering.
As they dragged themselves out of the water (Jenny declared the defending champion) Remy turned serious again.
“I am going to explore,” he said. Water dripped from his ears and from the end of his nose. Jenny used her thumb to catch the drip from his nose and smiled sadly at her brother. “There’s too much of this world to just stay put.”
Secretly, Jenny agreed, but she worried that his dreams would be bashed by his fears.
Remy positioned his body so that he could lay his head in Jenny’s lap. “Benny has his stories, his odd fascination with horrible dreams and terrifying deaths.” Remy closed his eyes and fell silent for so long that Jenny thought he was finished. She started a little when he continued, “The world is so full of secrets and legends and myths and promises. Let Benny have his gruesome thoughts. Adventure will be my story.”
And it was. Jeremy was the only man in North Humberton to explore all the woods south of the Cappican Mountains and to map all the lakes north of the Ba’ajorg Ridges and pass through all the towns in between. Jeremy was an explorer.
He’d come back with so many secrets. His eyes were so wise and his smile so knowing. Ben would be so proud to see what Jeremy had become: Jeremy who had to sleep between his siblings because he was afraid of the dark, Jeremy who wouldn’t go further in the yard than the clothesline unless he was with someone, Jeremy who was afraid of the lake because of the monsters lurking below the surface. This was the Jeremy who had gone into the world and saw it.
Jennifer’s footsteps were nearly covered by the now heavily falling snow and she walked right off the road twice. She was beginning to fear that it would be a total white out, something she hadn’t expected this early in the year, when the sheet of white in front of her eyes was gone, the sky shone a marvellous morning blue, and a wooden sign marked the roads to Rossville, Marccan and Strattan.
3
By mid afternoon, the snow had turned into a slushy rain that pulled the snow away from the road and into the full rivers and ponds. The mud sucked at Jennifer’s boots as she tried to maintain her present pace. She was on the losing end of the battle.
She swore loudly as the mud pulled her boot right off and she found her sock-foot sliding along the ground. She would have to stop until the ground dried out and that put her back at least another half day. She mumbled a string of unlady-like curses as she laced her boot around her now dripping foot and made her way to the side of the road.
An army of fir trees were waiting for her there, with thick branches and cool, dry alcoves by their trucks. Jennifer didn’t dare start a fire amid the crackly needles lining her temporary shelter and so had to make do with the chill that bit into every aspect of her. The rain pattered against the ground a few feet away, as if teasing her.
If she had been given the chance, Jennifer had no doubts that she could have made it to her final destination by night fall, but now that wasn’t going to happen.
“You look
at things too clinically, Jenny.” Ben had told her when she was fifteen. He had interrupted an argument with her father over a slight technicality hardly worth mentioning. The oil lamp shadowed his features and gave him the grotesque look of one of his villains as he sat with his pen was poised over one of his stories. He was editing it.
“I look at things in the way they are,” she retorted, “not the way we want them to be, or believe them to be.”
Benny laughed and crossed something out on his page.
“No,” he demurred. He paused to add in a word then set down his pen. His dark hair and dark eyes appeared nearly black in the soft, flickering light. “You don’t give yourself a chance to interpret things. You say the sky is blue and then never stop to wonder why it’s blue.”
Jenny shrugged. She knew it was blue because of the atmosphere. She had read it in a book once. Benny laughed again.
“You’re going to kick ass in court one day, with all your facts.” - Here Jenny shuddered at his choice of words. “But sometimes, dear sister, you have to see beyond the facts and see the essence of what is.”
They lapsed into silence. Father retired, Jenny tried to read her book in the faint light, and Ben scratched his pen across his page, changing and adding and removing bits of his story. Finally, when her eyes hurt too much to continue, Jenny closed her book and watched her older brother.
“I am going to be a lawyer,” she told him. He nodded without looking up. “I’ll go to the City when I’m all grown up.” Benny’s mouth smiled but his eyes avoided her. “Someday I will, you know.”
Finally Ben set his pen back in the ink well. He shuffled his papers, folded down a corner and then stared straight across at Jenny.
“Why not now?”
The girl shrugged. A hundred reasons swam across her mind. The City was too far away; she was too young; Mum and Pa and Remy all needed her; she was a girl. She shrugged again. “Why don’t you go to the City to publish your stories? I’ll go with you and find out about lawyers.”
“People don’t want to read about the bad guys winning, Jen,” he said, so straightforward that it almost hurt. “They want to read about the bad guys losing, and that’s not what I write about. I write about creatures and horrors and fear and hopelessness; all stuff that folks find unnerving.” Here he paused and placed an ink stained hand over hers. “Even you can’t stand my stories anymore, even though you listen to them. Don’t think I don’t notice. You hate them, but to me, they are my life.”
Jenny opened her mouth to protest but didn’t get her chance.
Ben continued: “I’m going to die in one of my stories, you know.”
Jen coughed. “Ben, witches and werewolves and giant bees don’t exist. How can you – ?”
Benny flashed a sly grin. “I know that. That’s not what I mean. I mean that I’m going to die alone, helpless and terrified.”
Ben was still smiling, but Jenny was frowning. “And when you’re alone, helpless and terrified,” Jenny asked, “then what?”
“I’m going to laugh. Why my very last breath, I’m going to laugh like a lunatic.”
The sun was setting as Jennifer rested her head against her pack. The rain had stopped a while ago, but the road was still marked by little rivers and sticky mud. She was going to make no headway this night. She was about eight miles from finishing her journey. The map had finally panned out - once she located the crossroads on it - and she was confident she would not get lost again.
But now there were funny prickles inside her chest. She was so close. Was she sure she wanted this? Jeremy was sure what he wanted, and Ben too, but Jennifer was never so certain. With a head full of doubts, she tucked a strand of hair behind her ears and closed her eyes.
4
It was the singing of the birds that woke her as the sun was still rising. Since she had not unpacked the night before, she didn’t need to repack this morning. She was on the road moments after waking. She was too close to hesitate now.
Overnight, the mud had dried to a point where it was wet only it patches, and then the frost came. The greenery that had not yet died was painted grey with the layer of ice and the gooey slicks of mud that remained glistened where the frost tried to claim them. The sun was out, unlike the previous day, and Jennifer could tell it was going to be warm. Crazy autumn weather, she thought to herself. But she was trying to think of anything that would distract her from what lay only eight miles ahead of her. She thought of the first time she had planned to make this trip.
“How long
are you going to be gone?” a fifteen year old Jeremy asked Jennifer, He’d stopped going by Remy the previous fall, but Jen still had trouble remembering that.
She dropped a pair of underpants into her bag then threw a pair of trousers in after them. She hesitated, then tossed in her green dress.
“I don’t know, Jeremy,” she confessed. “I may not come back.”
Jeremy knew this of course. He asked her everyday since she announced her plans. He wasn’t overly pleased with her. He said he would miss her, and that exploring would mean nothing if he had no one to come home to. She pointed out that Ben would still be there and Jeremy only wrinkled his nose. They both knew that Jeremy and Ben had nothing in common.
Jenny plunked her blue dress on top of the green one, closed the bag and turned to give her brother a hug. She was going to miss him. She missed him already. She missed Ben too, who was out writing on the hills. He’d promised he would be home before she left. That was four hours ago, but everyone knew Ben had a tendency to lose track of time. He never was very precise.
“I should go.”
Jeremy just clung tighter. He didn’t want to let her go. He needn’t have worried just yet. She was going to wait until Ben came back. She kept telling herself she wasn’t going to, but she just couldn’t leave without saying goodbye. Ben, however, didn’t come back.
At noon, Jennifer ate her soup with annoyance. At supper, she drummed her fingers on the table. At dusk she stared out at the darkening sky with apprehension. Not long after that, Pa sent out search parties. Jeremy was among them, but Jenny had to stay at home. Mum was at the neighbours’ being comforted by the large lady who lived there and had too many small children.
At nine o’clock Jennifer paced in front of the fire. At ten o’clock, she climbed the ladder to the loft but only sat there for a few minutes before her unease forced her back down. At eleven o’clock she unpacked her bags. At midnight she threw open the door and stood listening to the night.
It was a cold spring that year and damp, too. Jennifer shivered. Something wasn’t right. She could feel it, and it caused her heart to beat unevenly. Wrapping her shawl around her shoulders, she ventured out into the yard and stood by the well. The wind tore at her hair and a damp mist sprayed down from the sky.
Everything was silent except for the crickets and the bullfrogs and the wind and the grass. It was a busy silence that Jenny knew well. And then it stopped. Everything seemed to freeze and from nowhere and everywhere she heard it. It was a hysterical laughter; laughter that danced in the now silent wind and that hung with the raindrops. It came from no direction and sounded so strange, yet Jenny recognized it.
Slowly she turned and went back inside to wait for her parents. When Pa came back to check in on her, she turned a calm face to him. “Benny’s dead,” she said. He didn’t believe her.
“How do you know?”
“I heard him laughing.”
Pa sent her to bed and made mom come back and watch her. He returned to the night and continued looking for his son.
They found Ben the next morning. His lifeless body was cold and stiff. A makeshift tourniquet bound his leg but it was obvious he had already lost too much blood. He had lost too much blood and the night was too cold. He blank eyes stared out under dark lashes, and there, on his cherub face, a grin played on his mouth as if he had laughed to death instead of froze.
Jenny never cried. Not at the funeral when Marie, Ben’s love, placed a handful of lilies in his grave before dissolving into tears, not seven weeks later when Ben was to turn twenty-one, not three months later when an unhappy Marie married John from the town and not eight and a half months when Marie gave birth to Benita. Mum was furious at Marie for falling in love so soon and forbade Jenny to go see Benita. Jenny went anyway. Benita looked exactly like Benny.
Mum never saw Benita, never spoke to Marie again. Mum had died four years ago, and Pa not long after her. All that was left of their cozy family was Jennifer and Jeremy.
“Remember where you were going to go?” Jeremy asked when Pa died.
“I don’t want to think about it,” Jennifer replied.
Jeremy let it slide until a few months later when he asked her again. He got the same response. He got the same answer every few months but he never tired of asking.
Jennifer smiled when she thought of his persistence. She was breathing heavily, having climbed a steep hill he had not marked on the map (mostly because this road wasn’t even on the map). At the top she took a moment to rest and felt herself become even more breathless. There, at the bottom of the hill, spread houses and shops, a jail and a schoolhouse, and a park. There were people, barely visible from this height, and horses and wagons and chickens. She was finally there.
“I made it Benny!” she whispered to the sky. She had made it to the City. She could become the lawyer she was going to become seven years ago. For the first time, tears streamed down her face as she tore down the hill toward the bustling settlement. Joyous, crazy laughter floated after her.
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