“Did you bring these in the house?”
Cedric was tired, and his head was hung low and he was looking at the surface of the island in the center of the kitchen. Several of the children were rummaging through the cabinets looking for sweets after dinner, but he was not interested. He was sitting on one of the stools wondering when it would be appropriate to go back to his room. He had been waking up very early in the morning for several days in a row, unable to get back to sleep, so by the time the sun had set, he was very tired and he did not feel at all himself.
“Cedric?”
“Huh?” Cedric snapped to attention when it was apparent that Friday had been directing her question to him. Only half her face was visible, but he did see her roll her eyes.
“Was it you who brought these into the house?” she asked again.
In her right hand, she held a bag that was printed upon in several blocks of bright color. Through transparent windows of plastic, he recognized the contents.
It was a bag of marshmallows.
“Davian bought those,” Cedric said wearily, and lowered his head again.
“…Disgusting,” she said, and turned and threw the bag back into the cupboard and said again, “Absolutely disgusting.”
“Hey, gimme those!” Elmer called out. Cedric was looking down again and settled a little further into the cushion of his chair, exhausted.
“I like them! They’re tasty!” Elmer said.
Friday removed the bag from the shelf and Cedric could hear the material wrinkle as she squeezed it. She tossed it toward Elmer. “Yuck. Not even food,” she said with disdain. “All yours.”
Elmer opened the bag and put one in his mouth and bit down on the soft, sugary sweet. His mouth was closed, but Cedric could hear him chew.
“Hey, can I have one?” Owen asked, walking behind Cedric and toward Elmer. “They’re alright.”
Myrtle came in too, and Cedric knew because she did not walk at all like the others. Cedric was thinking about sleep and he did not immediately look up. She probably stood there for a moment, watching the children make a fuss, but Cedric had begun to doze and was paying little attention to the passage of time.
“Cedric?” she asked him.
He raised his neck a little, but mostly just turned his face toward the sound of her voice. “Yeah…?”
“You received a letter,” she said, and laid it on the countertop and pushed it into his field of view.
15th December, 1992
My dear Cedric,
I trust this missive finds you in tolerable spirits and your lodging has been proving to your satisfaction. Mrs. Marscapone informs me that you have been applying yourself with admirable diligence to your studies, though I must confess I take such reports with the customary grain of salt, knowing her time and resources must be stretched quite thin over the full house.
It is my very great pleasure to extend to you an invitation to spend Christmas Eve in my company. I shall be receiving a small gathering of acquaintances — nothing grand, mind you; merely a handful of the more tolerable specimens one accumulates over the years — and I should be most gratified by the addition of your good self to the company. I should also immensely enjoy to hear about your academic pursuits personally, ‘straight from the horse’s mouth’ as I’ve heard some say. Gossip and hearsay belong to the realm of lesser gentlemen.
Dinner will begin promptly at eight, though I rather hope you will arrive somewhat in advance of that hour, as I find the prelude to such occasions infinitely more agreeable than the events themselves.
Should Miss Eloise wish to accompany you, she would of course be most warmly received. I am given to understand the two of you have struck up something of a friendship, and I should be sorry indeed to deprive her of an evening’s diversion on account of a mere oversight in correspondence. Do convey my regards.
I shall not press you for a reply by return of post, as I know how these things are at your age: one’s elders may become tiresomely earnest when chasing after a youth’s scant time. Send word when it suits you, or, failing that, simply present yourself at the door on the appointed evening.
Yours, with the warmest regards the season permits,
D.
P.S. Do dress for dinner. The season warrants a certain degree of ceremony and I find I am increasingly intolerant of its absence.
“Hey, they’re actually pretty good,” Owen said with a mouth half-full with the fluffy treat.
Cedric read the letter again, this time lingering on certain words. It was undoubtedly English, and he could read it, but as for the rest of it—
Suyon came in and reached her open hands up toward Elmer and he handed her one of the marshmallows. It was too big for her mouth, so she took a bite to divide the thing in two. It was lightly shiny where it had been severed and she held the second half in her hands while she chewed.
He looked down at the Mage’s ornamented handwriting in blue and the lines were uneven in places, and he wondered idly about the writing implement that had been used to pen the letter, and whether he’d been drinking more of that fancy wine. But it made him faintly dizzy to trace the ink and so his mind wandered.
Cedric looked up from the note to search for Myrtle, but she must have slipped out of the kitchen while he’d been reading. Zahra entered instead.
“What’re you all eating?” she asked with her customary affect. It was dry, but there was a subtle warmth that Cedric wondered if he had imagined.
“Maws-meh-woes,” Elmer said with his mouth full.
It occurred to him how very strange was the scene, and part of him was drifting and floating above it. Cedric could smell the thickened sugar that had become white, and he could hear them mashing the things in their mouths and he thought he could smell the syrup becoming moistened by their eating. He looked at Suyon, who had just popped the second half into her mouth.
He thought he should go to bed, but at the same time, he saw them through the corner of his eye and tried to ground himself—
“Y’know,” Cedric said with effort. “They’re even better if you toast them.”
The yard behind and around the Magicademy was simultaneously kept while also being lost to time. The story told was that over the years, parcels of the original land had been sold off when money had been tight, and where structures and flower beds were now found were not necessarily where they had originally sat. But there was no clear marker where decades became a century, so the orphans donned their coats and strode upon the mud and hibernating grass.
Zahra led Cedric to a shed partially done in panes of glass. Where the glass had apparently broken, it had been patched with large slabs of wood, but the door was still intact and it creaked on its rusted hinges when they opened it. The whole thing had a musty warmth that was unexpected for the month of December and it felt to Cedric one of the most ordinary things he’d encountered on the plot since he’d arrived two months ago. He saw that the Mages did not spend much time where they could be spied upon by the rest of the world.
“I really don’t know what’s in here,” Zahra said. “So I hope I’m not sending you on a fool’s errand.”
Cedric took to his self-appointed task with unexpected vigor, moving aside pieces of cut timber and gardening supplies that felt as aged as the old woman herself. His response to Zahra was a little muffled amongst the bric-a-brac.
“We need a big steel bowl or something, I don’t know,” Cedric said, disturbing the dust of decades as he rifled through the shed. “Something we can use to make a big bonfire; a firepit. I know it’s winter but I still don’t think it’s a good idea to try to do this on the ground.”
Zahra was just standing there watching, arms folded against the chill, and then she remarked with a dubious tone, “We can’t just do this inside?”
He let her skepticism sit for a beat and then responded with a quip, “Now where’s the fun in that?”
She let him continue digging in the fading light, and soon he located an enormous basin, round and deep such that it formed a near-half sphere with a lip around the top. There wasn’t a seam that indicated it had ever been welded, and the process by which it had been made remained a mystery. It did, however, have two large handles on either side that had been wrapped in wood.
“This’ll do great,” he declared, and put the thing outside the shed.
Cedric continued to search around the backyard and he found several spare bricks, seven if he’d been counting, and laid them in a regular shape to hold the enormous bowl in place. He wiggled it back and forth to test the structure and then filled it with wood: some that had come from the grocery store, and some that had been stored beneath a small shelter outside. Zahra, Owen, Suyon, and Elmer had all crowded around the thing while Cedric was bringing down chairs from the back porch. He realized that there were only four, so he gave one to each of them and took the largest log to be a seat for himself.
He sent Owen and Suyon to find sticks fallen from the tree on the second lot and he sent Elmer back inside to fetch the bag of marshmallows. Zahra had sat on one of the chairs, and when Cedric sat down on the log, he was almost on the ground looking up at her, and his knees were pointing up at the grey sky so she raised her eyebrows and looked at him curiously.
“You sure you’re okay with that?” she asked with one eyebrow arched. “That can’t be comfortable.”
Cedric shrugged and his face was relaxed.
“Doesn’t bother me.”
The sticks Owen and Suyon offered were a little wet from the snowmelt, and if he’d still had his buck knife, he’d have used it to clean off the wet bark and expose the smooth part beneath. But his buck knife was long gone so he used his nails to scrape off what he could and then gave to the other four their implement.
Suyon saw what he had done and started to pick at her own.
They each took one of the large marshmallows, and, following Cedric, pierced it at one end and made to hold it toward the fire Owen had lit. The fire was getting larger as it ate the wood, and the wood cracked noisily when it found a vein of water in the fuel that had been stored near the snow.
Cedric was last to puncture his sweet, but he was the first to hold it into the fire. He held it just where the flames licked the air and were so disperse they were yellowish and almost transparent.
“You catch the thing on fire,” Cedric instructed, watching the fire caress the white treat, “and it quickly cooks the marshmallow.” His feet were on the ground, and he was cold where his jacket did not cover him — except for where the fire was throwing heated air on his face.
“It will get seared on the outside,” he said when the sugar finally caught. He pulled it out and watched it for a while. “And it’ll get molten on the inside.”
When it was warm and toasty, pale brown with tiny bubbles erupting, he breathed on it and put it out. “Everyone likes it different, and it’s all about getting it just the way you like it.”
He looked at the steam coming out of the surface, and remarked, “If you let it go too long, you could burn your mouth, but some people like it when it’s all melty like that. It’s up to you.”
It was not long for the marshmallow to cool in the winter air, and after a moment, he put it in his mouth and ate it and it made him warmer than he was before. They were watching him like a curiosity, but he was inside a memory that was new and bright. He was still clearing his mouth when Owen spoke.
“Can I light it myself?”
Cedric paused for a moment, looking at Owen until he could say something.
“I don’t see why not.”
The central fire was throwing off generous heat and the five of them forgot for a while that the solstice was only days away.
Cedric watched each of them as they looked at their marshmallows and lit them one right after the other. Owen, Zahra, and then Elmer lit their sweets ablaze and doused the flame with the power of their thought. And when it was done to their liking, they ate it and it was gone.
Cedric watched Suyon, too, because he wasn’t sure he’d ever seen her work this feat, and in the cold air he forgot to blink and when the fire rose on her stick just as he expected, he found his eyeballs had become a little chilled, so he had to close and reopen them several times.
And then they looked at him. And he looked away, glancing first at the fire, and then at the second marshmallow of the night, on the dark grey stick that was a little crooked in the middle and he knew what they wanted him to do. And he thought he should just give up and not even try because he was done being the fool and the invalid and he was tired of people watching him fall. And he thought back to the house and the magic and about all the tools behind the doors and realized nothing there could help him.
In the deep recesses of his mind, in a place he did not wander often, was a small voice, and when it spoke, it spoke without words and he did not know what he was hearing, much less understand whatever it was trying to say.
[ be brave ]
[ be tough ]
And he was looking at the marshmallow then, while they all were looking at him.
[ be you ]
And when he opened his eyes again, they were all clapping for him.
Cedric found himself in the Cavalier. And it was a good homecoming, and it felt good and warm and happy and all the things he associated with the car that had been his first real taste of freedom.
He did not think about whether it was real or not because somewhere he knew if he inspected it too closely, the whole thing would fall apart. Yes, he knew that the Cavalier had been drafted into service, or perhaps she’d been stripped to her components, and her muffler and catalytic converter and whatever else were strewn against a fence in a bodyshop in Brooklyn or wherever else. Or maybe even… melted.
Somewhere in his mind he knew that, so he tried to look elsewhere so what he had now that felt nice and pleasant didn’t collapse while he had it in his hands.
The steering wheel was what he had now, and it felt good to have his left hand on the top of it, and he had a loose hold on it, letting his fingers grip the leather while the thumb went flat and out or in or whichever way it was going.
And it felt good to put his right hand on the gearshift, and he pressed on the clutch with the other side of his body and everything was balanced and he was going at an easy speed and the engine wasn’t making that sound it did sometimes so he knew he was driving it well and right and just the way he was supposed to.
And it all went like that for a while, and he was very aware of that tan interior and how it felt warm and brown and —
[ toasty ]
Then he looked, because he couldn’t make any other choice, and then he was worried and the path broke.
On the passenger seat were blocks, blocks, blocks he recognized and knew belonging to the little girl with the black hair and big eyes who was sweet and friendly but never said anything. And she didn’t say anything but she also never said anything that hurt either.
[ her name her name what is her name lost her name ]
The blocks were falling on the seat and sometimes they were falling on the floor but he must stop them from falling on the floor so he leaned over the center of the car to stop them from falling but when he did that he knew he wasn’t watching the road and he knew he absolutely needed to watch the road because if he didn’t watch the road, if he neglected to hold the wheel and watch the road—
[ CAR ]
And when he didn’t catch the blocks and he didn’t watch the road either, he blinked and the Cavalier was gone.
He thought he woke up, because he didn’t have the car anymore and it was gone, but when he looked around he knew he hadn’t woken up because he was flying.
[ flying? ]
Cedric was not used to flying or even imagining that he was flying because he knew he couldn’t so it was easier just not to think about it because if you don’t think about the things you can’t do or the things you don’t have then you don’t have to think about the things you don’t have,
So it was strange for him to find himself flying, but something, too, was not so strange at all and he very much felt like he knew what he was doing but that was probably just imagination too but he let himself keep going because it was a simple thing to do and he found he very much enjoyed the view from above and he did not find it difficult to do so he kept doing it and he was alone until he very much realized that he was not.
That was when he looked at the ground and saw the thing he did not expect to see because he was not used to seeing things that were not real.
When he dreamt things, he saw places that he had been to and people he had known and sometimes they were backwards or diagonal or criss-cross but still the little pieces that made them them were laid in an order such that he always knew what he was looking at even if the colors were inverted. But when he looked at the ground and saw what was chasing him, he did not know where it had come from.
[ zombie ]
Shambling, scrambling, lumbering were the corpses and where he had once felt he was flying perfectly, suddenly it was not fast enough because he was afraid. And he had not realized before that he was in a jungle but he was in a jungle and there were tens of the corpses coming out from amongst the ferns and leaves and trees. And the further Cedric went and the faster he tried to go, the more of them appeared as he realized he didn’t know how to go any faster than he was already going and maybe there were a hundred but he couldn’t look back to know.
They were a mass of tangled bodies that covered every exposed inch of the ground and he kept going because he thought if he kept going and flying then he could eventually get away but then one of the rotting corpses did something different than just running through the path and like a thing made of rubber instead of flesh, it flung itself into the air and hurled itself at Cedric.
And Cedric dodged the first, and the second, but then more of them got the idea that they could do that so they were launching themselves into the air and when Cedric moved in one direction, it was like sliding on ice and his flying was hard to stop and he moved closer to one as he moved away from another and it became ever more difficult to evade them until he failed altogether.
The skeleton from which the flesh was suspended wrapped itself around Cedric’s leg and when it did this, he was heavier than he had been before and he found he could not fly like he had been doing before easily or easily enough so he became afraid and he tried to pry the body away from his own and become free again but the more he struggled, the more difficult it became and his desperation became rage.
He was encumbered, and his anger made it hard for him to focus and he hated them and he hated their grasping and in his singular thought to wrest himself back from the clutching undead, he let another, and another mass of flesh catch him in the air and scrape at his body. And those fingers were like claws and they dug into him and something inside faltered because he thought this was the end and he had lost and the dead things that walked and crawled and would not stop and tore into his body and tried to take it from him had won and when he thought they had won, the voice spoke because the despair had become rage and when the rage made his insides quake, the nails they were using to crawl on him had not severed the throat and he knew the throat was all he had left and then he heard
[ “Faggot!” ]
And when he heard it he wasn’t sure where it had come from because he could not notice the direction so much as he felt that word like glass he had swallowed that had become lodged in his throat and then the rage disappeared because the bodies did too and Cedric was completely alone in the darkness. The jungle was gone and the zombies were gone and the air was silent and he wanted to feel relief but he could still hear the echo of that shattering and even if the air had stopped and become still and black he could still hear that word.
And he knew the shard was his own.
He only saw darkness but he knew he was still flying and when he looked around he did not know why but he felt there was something in the darkness that he could not see but he knew that he had been heard and he had not been alone because he had been seen and the darkness that was not nothing but was something and very much something had heard the word just like he had.
He was afraid. But the darkness was reflecting, and pleased.
Light in furious packets struck the surface of his eye and the pupils became constricted in an effort to reduce the incident pain but still photons of every color went through and hit the retina and he knew he was up.
Cedric knew he was up, and so, he was awake.
He was becoming not so ill-adjusted to rising before the winter Sun. It had been days that he’d been waking like this in the early hours, and where at first he had felt disoriented and uncertain of the time, curious of the hours and the minutes like reflex, slowly the routine was becoming him, and he was becoming it.
When he was no longer tired, he rose, and when that happened, he rose into a quiet house with doors shut where even the mice did not expect his footfall. And when the children were asleep in their beds and he was not, he felt warm and glad and satisfied behind a curtain that had fallen on the last show of the evening.
‘Fire,’ he thought, remembering the night before and what had transpired outside.
When he’d needed the act, the act had risen, and they had seen what he had seen and he had shaped the real.
What had once been impossible was no longer that.
As he stirred from slumber and considered the day ahead, he looked at the candle on his bedside table. And the glimmer of something he was not used to feeling stuttered in his heart and he wasn’t sure what it was at first, but then he realized what it was and he let himself feel it.
‘…Hope.’
And he tried to stay in it for a moment longer, but he was still not accustomed to standing still, so his mind changed and he thought he should try to set the wick to flame. And still again he was not used to sitting with his own thoughts, so then he stepped back and resolved that he wasn’t ready to try again because he knew what could happen.
‘Not yet.’
Cedric’s hair was still wet when he left the third floor. And because his hair was still wet, he could smell the shampoo that had left some of its fragrance behind. He had found that he liked to use the bathroom in the early morning because he never found a child in the hallway waiting their turn while draped in a towel. And when he knew there was no one waiting for him to finish up and get out, he could wash himself at a pace that suited him instead of someone else.
The first time he’d taken a shower here, he’d found the scent sharp and flowery and overwhelming. And he thought for a while that he had no other options, so he’d assumed it was just something he had to get used to. Free is free, he had told himself. But then, one moment where, for whatever reason, he hadn’t been rushed, he’d looked around and found a container of another soap that wasn’t already on the shelf and it smelled round and it did not slap him in the face because the shape was full and deep and a little quiet, sort of like wood or pine and yet still unlike any tree he’d ever smelt, and he liked it, so he took it out of the cabinet and used that instead.
Cedric needed a haircut and whenever he passed by a mirror in the old house, he thought he looked rather disheveled and even younger than whatever age he could usually pass for. The summer in Newburgh had been oppressive and when he went to the barber he wanted to save a few bucks so he had them cut his hair shorter than he actually liked it because he wanted to get an extra week or two out of it. And that had served him well, because now it had been months that he’d been in Astoria and he didn’t know where to get a haircut and he didn’t have a dollar to throw at it and he knew he was going to have to ask eventually but it always seemed that if he had waited this long, one more day wasn’t going to make much of a difference.
So when he went downstairs, his hair still smelled like old trees and crushed grass and it hung lower over his forehead than he would have preferred.
Eloise was in the kitchen, and by the looks of it, she had just poured sugar into her tea because he could hear the spoon clinking gently against the sides of the cup and when he came in, she was leaning over the liquid and looking into it and she didn’t look up until he spoke.
“Hey,” he said plainly. “Morning.”
Her head whipped up, seized away from whatever it was that she’d been thinking about, but she seemed to have spent too much energy on that involuntary gesture, and the gaze she returned was foggy, like she was looking through him rather than at him.
“Good morning,” she replied with her best effort, eyes changing somewhat curiously as she considered him.
“…This is getting to be a habit for you, isn’t it?” She smiled when she asked, and her teeth were shiny, but she could only manage to gesture with part of her face and she looked rather tired.
“Yeah…” he said, and brought his hand to the back of his head to seek the safety of his hair, but when he found it was cold and wet and damp, he realized how stupid he looked and he put his hand back down and into his empty pocket. “I’ve been having bad dreams.”
“Oh,” she said, forlorn; voice dropping a little. “Every night?” she asked, looking at him again.
He didn’t like it when she was sad because of him, so he tried to return that half-smile. “Not every night,” he said, shrinking. “Most nights, I guess—”
“Yeah,” Cedric said then, truth leaking out. “More nights than not, but I don’t know; it could be worse.”
He moved fully into the kitchen and made like he was going to sit across from her. “I know they’re not real,” he said. “So even when I have a bad dream, I wake up, and I know it was just a dream, you know?”
He was asking, but she didn’t respond because she was trying to figure out the state of her tea. And when she was stirring the tea to see if the sugar had finally dissolved, he thought he should just keep talking because the silence made him wince.
“Last night was a bit of a doozy though,” he said. “Kind of just…”
He struggled to find words, and she looked at him while he thought, which made him feel cold and he found it more difficult to say whatever it was he wanted to say.
“Just came out of left field. Nightmare, sure, but…”
Her eyes were dark and dilate and looking right at him.
“Worse than that,” he said. “Something… different.”
She blinked, and again she was looking toward him, but he felt her two eyes were converging on a point that was somewhere beyond wherever he was standing. “I—” she said. “I’m sorry to hear that.”
Cedric was remembering, and he didn’t like what he was thinking about, so he didn’t say anything.
“You’re right that what we see there isn’t real,” Eloise said soothingly. “But the fear—”
She paused for a moment, and then continued her claim when Cedric caught her eye. “The fear we feel when we see those things: that is real.”
Cedric finally sat down.
“Those feelings,” she said, “Our reactions… Just because no one else can see what we see doesn’t mean it’s not important.”
Cedric’s thoughts were a little muddled and he could not look at her, so he averted his eyes and started talking.
“I don’t normally have dreams like that,” he said. “I know lots of people have dreams with monsters or whatever; y’know, dreams that they’re Superman and stuff like that. But that’s not usually my thing.”
“Usually it’s places I’ve been or people I know,” Cedric explained. “Like I’m walking through my memories, and little details might be changed, but I don’t usually find that I completely make stuff up.”
He was trying to figure out what to say, and when something from the past rose into his mind, he chuckled a little, because he did not expect it, and because there were a lot of things adjacent to that memory that were heavy to hold.
He looked toward her, and maybe they saw each other, and maybe they didn’t.
“D’you ever seen Return of the Living Dead?”
She looked at him and searched, and she was quiet for a moment, and then she asked with an awkward smile, “Is that… a movie?”
Cedric looked away and he had the instinct to bring his hand to his hair again, but he tried to resist and instead laughed a little as he descended into his memory.
“Yeah,” he said. “It’s a movie.” He took in air, and his tone changed. “Came out a while ago now I guess; I was a kid at the time.”
She was watching him, but he found it difficult to see her at the same time he was remembering.
“Sixth grade was tough for me,” he said. “New school. I didn’t have a lot of friends.”
She nodded.
“I had one friend, but he was in the eighth grade, so after that year was over, we weren’t going to be going to the same building anymore.”
Her eyes were dark and open in the dim light of the kitchen.
“His dad owned a little movie theater downtown,” Cedric said, and then veered off, raising his hands in defense. “Now, downtown there wasn’t like downtown here, but… anyway—”
“His dad had him work in the theater, y’know, nothing major: taking tickets, sweeping the carpet, shit like that.”
She looked like she was enjoying herself to listen.
“So I used to hang out there and talk to him; guess I was probably a bit of a hanger-on but I thought he was really cool, y’know… part of being twelve, I guess.”
“He used to get me into movies for free,” Cedric said. “I saw a movie or two a week that whole summer.”
“This one, though—” he said, “Scared the living daylights outta me.”
“I dunno what it was, exactly. I’d seen a lot of horror flicks, blood and guts; it wasn’t that exactly. There was just something about that movie, not the gore, but the kids, and the ending—”
He trailed off then, because when he looked at her, he saw that her eyes were glassy like she had no idea what he was talking about and was just humoring him by listening. So he didn’t say anything else and put the memory back on the shelf.
When the air was quiet for a minute, she changed the topic.
“I don’t want to seem like a gossip,” she said, warming to him. “But a little birdie told me about yesterday with the marshmallows.”
His cheeks became a little less pale than they had been before, and he was blushing.
“Yeah, uh, about that—” he started.
“I think it’s great,” she said, beaming. “You don’t have to be modest. I was hoping I could see, because I missed it.”
His heart dropped because he thought of the candle from his room and he wished he’d made a different choice, because the universe was forcing his hand and she was looking at him and her face was bright and cheerful and he couldn’t say no, so he just took a breath and said, “…Sure.”
“Zahra told me,” Eloise said when they were outside. She had taken the bag of marshmallows from the cabinet and they were very nearly gone, but a few still remained behind the plastic.
And then Eloise addressed another matter entirely. “The Matron knows what she’s doing,” she said. “She doesn’t bring anyone here who doesn’t belong.”
Cedric could feel that he was cold on his face, his hands. But beneath his jacket, sweat was leaving his shirt damp, and he hoped that she couldn’t smell his nerves.
The four chairs from yesterday were still there, but they only needed two, and they each sat in a chair, and the chairs shared a side.
“I had a marshmallow the other day,” she relayed. “I’ve had them before, I suppose. But it’s probably been years. We don’t usually have those kinds of things in the house.”
“Davian bought them,” Cedric said, defensively.
“…Oh,” she said. “Okay.”
The wood was burning and Eloise opened the bag of marshmallows but she stopped for a moment and put her nose in the bag and scrunched up her face.
“They smell funny, don’t they?”
Cedric felt strange and he was afraid and his mind was blank just watching her and he forgot to react, so she just shrugged and took one from the bag to give to him.
Her lips parted and she smiled when she was presenting it but when he put his fingers up, she let go because she thought he had it when he didn’t, and the white cylindrical thing fell to the ground.
“Fu—” he said as his gaze fell, stopping himself just short of the thing he didn’t want to say in her company.
He was quick, so he’d already grabbed it from the ground when she said, softly, “No.”
And he looked at her.
“Don’t eat that. Don’t eat things that have been on the ground.”
And it was something new, and something he hadn’t heard before, and though it seemed miles away, the fire was crackling and splitting the wood through the center.
“I’ll give you another one.”
And he was sure for a moment that he didn’t even breathe.
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