Meeting the Littles for the first time turns out to be an experience all its own.
Ms Little doesn’t greet me. She just stares at me, somewhere between fascination and disinterest. She sits on her rocking chair, a glass of sweet tea in a mason jar next to her on the wide porch. Her grey hair is braided down her shoulders and frizzing, with spectacles buried somewhere towards the front of her forehead. She looks at ease in her chair with her half-finished star quilt draped over her legs. She is the clear matriarch of the family, conveyed through her central positioning of the three chairs on the front porch, only two of which are currently occupied.
Hong sits on the left of the sweet tea end table, a mug of coffee in her hands. She greets us with a nod, but says nothing as she stares at Diana and I. She does not blink once. Sharing a matching star quilt draped over the chair she sits in, she puts down her mug of coffee and continues to thread her needles through the fabric in her hands. Her midnight hair is glossed in a single braid down the right side of her face and her luminous almond eyes stare intensely at Diana as she threads. Not a glance is given in my direction, nor at the needle in her hand.
Diana gives a short introduction about me to the two ladies, but I don’t pay any attention to what she is saying. My gaze is focused on the exterior of the house I’d be occupying for at least the next week, and possibly longer if things went well.
The faux stone walls of the first floor are dark gray, bordering on black in the shadows, and they trail up haphazardly to meet the wooden paneling of the second floor. Three windows are spaced evenly along the second floor.
A face stares at me through one of the windows. His eyes match Hong’s, and there’s an uncanny resemblance between the two in the way they stare through me without noticing me at all.
He disappears into the house.
I mentally rejoin the old ladies and Diana under the porch overhang. Diana chatters like an excited mouse as she stands there, introducing me to the ladies and explaining the expectations. My attention is split - I saw Aiden. I’m positive of it, and he was not what I expected.
I wasn’t expecting a tall Asian guy with dark green hair and matching eyes.
“So what d’ya think so far?” Diana interrupts my thoughts. “Can you agree to those rules?”
“Uh,” I stutter. “Say what now?”
Diana laughs at that. “I’m joking, nobody said anything about rules. Just seeing if you were paying attention.”
“Cat got your tongue?” Hong’s deep voice resonates in my bones. She’s got a powerful voice. “Maybe if Aiden fed them more, they wouldn’t be going for tongues.” Her tone gives no reason to believe it’s humour, although it could just be a dryer joke than the Atacama.
Ms Little chuckles at that, turning to look at me fully for the first time. “Fifi and Tito are lovely little cats, but I can’t say they’re the friendliest.” She’s got the voice of an old smoker. “Wouldn’t surprise me if they went for you.”
I really can’t tell if she’s joking.
Diana seems to assume she is, giving Ms Little a smile and a chuckle. “Well, I gotta head out soon. Mind if I show Markus to his room?”
Ms Little smiles and gestures towards the front door, an imposing and heavy wooden door with a single narrow window running the height of it on the left side, surrounding the door handle. Diana raps the glass with her manicured fingernails as she turns the doorknob.
She guides me into the dimly-lit room - from the looks of it, the front room relies mostly on natural lighting to be comfortable in. The entire north wall is a series of floor-to-ceiling windows and I think there’s a sliding door somewhere on there that opens into a railing-less deck. I can see pine trees beyond the edge of a fairly sizable garden in various stages of autumnal colouration, but no fencing to speak of.
There’s a staircase going up and a staircase going down to my left. A quick look around shows a bathroom on this level alongside the living room (they have a projector TV - nice) and a U-desk, strewn with what looks like schoolwork. There’s a laptop in screensaver mode on it, sharing space with an ungodly large desktop.
Makes me wonder where the hell the kitchen and the dining room are if all that’s on the main level is a study and the living room.
Diana guides me down the staircase. My first question is answered as we descend into a kitchen and dining room that should in no way fit in a house this size - something is off, because this kitchen is massive, and the dining room is across on the other side of the kitchen. I can see a table with enough chairs to fit a dozen people or more, a massive chandelier hanging above it.
“What the hell is this place?” I ask Diana. She just snorts at me.
“They built into the cliffside their house rests up against. Their house looks small from the outside, but there’s a lot more to it than just the building.”
“Seriously?” I say, incredulous. “How much money do these women have?”
“Enough that, should you stay, you’ll have the entire world to look towards for university when the time comes.” Her eyes flash at me.
Don’t fuck it up. I can speak fluent Diana, despite what my actions might say. She’s just daring me to fuck this one up.
She guides me around the kitchen, showing me where everything is at. It’s clear that Diana knows the Littles far better than she initially let on, as she’s able to direct me to which fridge has the Dr Pepper in it and where to find my favourite cereal.
I have a Rice Krispie problem, I know this. Diana rolls her eyes when hungrily look at the box.
After giving me a quick tour of the kitchen and a very stern Do Not Enter speech on the dining room (apparently the table is mostly for decorative purposes, and we’re to eat at the bar up against the kitchen), Diana finally guides me down yet another staircase.
This one is made of metal, and I feel awkward as I clang down the loud steps. Feels almost like… a prison or something.
Gods, I hope it isn’t.
The lowest floor of the “house” turns out to be a single wide room with two beds on opposing sides. The entire room is clean and neat, and I can see a few covered canvases of mine hung up around the far bed. Both beds have blue sheets and a black comforter, and the carpet is a similar shade of strange blue.
The walls are a pale peach, and it makes a weird contrast that’s going to take some getting used to.
“There’s a door at the top of the stairs,” Diana begins to monologue about the room I’ll be staying in. “Generally there’s curtains at the bottom as well - unfortunately, there’s not technically enough rooms for you and Aiden to have your own, so the basement floor is just converted into a double bedroom with enough room for you each to do your own thing. The bathroom is shared - do be clean, Aiden has issues with neatness - and there’s a small room down the hallway where Ms Little had Aiden set up the rest of your canvasses, along with a fair amount of other things for you she thought you’d enjoy.”
She takes a deep breath and looks at me. After a quick glance to the top of the stairs, she continues with her justifiable monologuing.
“Look, Markus - you can’t fuck this one up. I know you want to. I know what you think - that you don’t think you deserve this -” I got to protest, but she just shushes me and continues talking over me. “- but you do deserve this, or I wouldn’t have fought so hard to get you placed here.” Her eyes flash a dangerous hue again, and I shrink inwardly. Diana is scary when she wants to be. “You’re almost seventeen now, Markus - you aren’t gonna find a better chance than this, and if you fuck it up… well, your whole life is gonna go down the drain.”
“I can’t have you fucking it up.”
I can’t have you fucking it up.
Diana’s words echo in my head as I lay on the blue bed. Diana left a few hours ago after giving me a short tour of the downstairs - there’s not much down here. There’s a water heater on the other side of the bathroom, beyond even my painting room. I have to go through the bathroom to reach my painting room, and it makes me wonder what idiot designed this basement.
I’m lying on my bed, idly staring at the ceiling and not really sure what to do when suddenly clanging erupts on the stairs.
I sit up immediately at the noise and realize how useful the loud stairs could be. Really helps to tell if someone is coHong.
Aiden appears at the bottom of the stairs, coHong around the wall with a bundle of cloth in his hand. I watch him as he pulls a stepstool out of nowhere and hangs the cloth over the entrance to the staircase.
“Had to take it down - the agency doesn’t like it over the staircase. They also don’t like the lack of windows in this room, so the Grannies are having that wall -” he nods towards the one our headboards are pressed up against, “- busted down to make an emergency exit. I’m gonna see if I can convince them to make a patio for us there.”
“That’d be cool,” I say. Kinda surprised. Didn’t expect that kind of thing to happen.
Aiden shrugs. “So what’s your name?”
“You don’t already know?”
Aiden laughs - a lilting sound, full of joy and greener in feeling than his hair. It makes me want to make him laugh again. “Of course, I know - it’s just more polite to ask.”
I shrug, again not really sure what to say.
“So, Markus,” he takes a moment to say my name slowly. “You hope to be here for the long haul,” he states to me, green eyes staring me up and down as he crosses his arms and leans against the wall.
“Yep.” My response comes across as thin and unsure. I mentally hit myself and cough, clearing my throat. “Yes, I hope to be here for awhile.”
A small smile comes across Aiden’s face at that. “Define ‘awhile’.”
I shrink into myself. “I, uh… um.”
The smile grows on his face, reaching into his grace-green eyes. “A fair time, but you don’t know?”
I swallow. “Basically, I guess.”
Aiden just smiles broadly at me, shaking his head. I realize after a moment that he’s laughing at me.
“Well - I mean! I’m try - uhm, I’m trying.” I finish lamely.
He waves a hand at me, still smiling with his pearly whites. “Don’t worry ‘bout it, man. You’re one of Diana’s, I’ll go easy on ya.”
I don’t know how to take that, so I just thump down onto my single bed. He follows suit, laying back on his bed.
“The Grannies will go easy on you. I expect you’ll be given a week before they push you into school - you’ll have the option of attending public - the high school is about an hour’s drive away, so I don’t recommend unless you really want out of here - or you can attend their personal homeschool, which takes place in the living room. And outside.”
“Outside?”
Aiden grins at me at he lounges back on his bed. “Yep. Black Feather teaches this wilderness survival class, and she helps Hong with a multi-functional cooking class. Combines them to teach you how to cook with what you can find outside.”
I cock my head, interest piqued. “What other kinds of classes do they teach?”
“Ms Little is a mechanic,” he starts to list off, “And she’s got a few different shop classes she can run you through, and both the Littles are medical doctors, licensed to practice in the grand ole state of New York.”
“New York?”
He shrugs at me. “They worked and lived there for decades, then retired and came here. Never bothered to figure out if they could work here as well.”
“Seems like it wouldn’t be difficult,” I observe.
Aiden shrugs again. “The Littles don’t care, they’re retired.”
“Fair.”
We lay in silence for awhile. Aiden says nothing, and he begins breathing slower as time goes on.
I decide to get up and check out my painting room for a bit.
Moving quietly through the bathroom (thank god the toilet is in its own little closet with a sliding door) I find myself in the painting room. I have no idea what this room was before, but now it’s a bare concrete room not much larger than the bathroom is. There’s an art easel, big enough for any canvasses I’ve ever used, and a small desk with a wooden stool shoved in the corner. I recognize both of my notebooks on the desk, along with a couple more. The others all look new.
The remainder of my canvasses are hanging on the wall, still covered. I let out a heavy breath as I walk up to each of the three portraits;
The first is my Auntie, painted with the smile I remember her always having. Her chocolate hair is cascading freely down her face. I used the same shade of brown for her eyes as I did for her hair, but gave her hair some maroon highlights to give it some depth, shading her brown skin with the same colour again. I was limited on colours when I recreated her.
I caress her face as I fondly remember her. I toss the cover in the corner onto the desk.
Secondly uncovered is grandma, the brilliance of her white hair taking up the majority of the canvas. I chose to paint her with shades of silver and a matte white to make her hair pop. Her wrinkles and her cobalt eyes, flecked with silver, are the most notable part of her portrait. I tried to make her look as happy as she was when mom was still alive.
I wish I could hug her. My hand rests against her face for a fleeting moment.
I approach the last one with apprehension; Mom is the last canvas I painted. I don’t know how to approach even a picture of her without feeling a mix of anger and frustration, or how to just not cry. I take a breath, willing myself to relax as I stare at the covered canvas.
I uncover the painting.
Her hair is the same bright shade of rusty blond she was fond of, while her roots remained her natural brown. She never bothered to dye the roots and preferred to bleach everything else, as she absolutely loved getting paint everywhere with me. Her hair was bleached so the paint we’d throw around would stain in her hair, and she loved letting me put paint in her hair.
I made sure to make her hair as colourful as I could, but it led to her face coHong across as bland. I don’t mind terribly - her hair is amazing, and it conveys who she was quite well.
There is no hint in the portrait as to how she died.
“Who’s that?”
I jump, squawking in embarrassment as Aiden’s voice comes from the doorway.
“Uh, it’s uh… um.” I quickly stand in front of it, trying to block it from view.
“The painting is still a good half-foot above your head,” Aiden says dryly as he leans against the door frame, arms across his chest. “It’s incredible. Who is it?”
My face burns red as I stutter about trying to answer what he says. “It’s, um. That, I… it’s. Drawing.”
Aiden sighs. “It’s a drawing, I get that. A beautiful painting, more, but pedantics. Who is it?”
My mouth goes dry as I breathe deeply.
“Mom,” I finally say.
Aiden’s eyebrow raises. “Yours?”
I nod slowly. “Mine,” I say quietly. “As best I remember her.”
Aiden looks at me for a moment before speaking. “I love her hair.”
He doesn’t say anything else. I’m grateful. He slides down the wall in the brightly lit room (seriously, how many lights did the Grannies put in here?) and proceeds to just stare at me.
“Well?” He finally asks. “Are you going to paint?”
“Oh!” I redden again and turn to look at the notebooks. “Uh, well, um. I don’t know.”
“When did you paint last, anyway?” He gestures around the room. “None of these paintings look recent.”
I sigh. “The last house I was in threw away a few of my paintings. Said it was the work of the devil or some fucking shit.”
“Man, that’s shitty,” he empathizes with me. “What did you paint?”
I shake my head. “Some animals,” I say. “Chimera, unicorn, stuff like that.”
“Ah,” he says knowingly. “Not a family for mythoi?”
I shrug. “I loved them. I was thinking of painting more, doing the thunderbird. Do you-”
“-know what that is? Yep.” Aiden’s left eyebrow twitches. “Didn’t expect you of all people to be drawing it.”
I shrug haphazardly again, somehow realizing I’ve forgotten my nerves. “Grandma - the middle portrait - loved thunderbirds and phoenixes.”
“Did she now?” Aiden’s curiosity about Grandma is unsettling. “What was her name, if you don’t mind?”
“Uh,” I blank out for a moment. “Uhm.” I panic momentarily. “Oji.”
“Interesting name. Short for something?”
“Ojinjinkta,” I stammer out. “Ojinjinkta Chahotun, same last name as me.”
Aiden’s left eyebrow shoots up. “Interesting…”
I give him a questioning face, but he dismisses me with a change of topic.
“So what inspired you to paint?” He gestures to my canvases. “Clearly you’re a bit of a Michaelangelo.”
I blush at the compliment. “I don’t think I am,” I say quietly to him. “My mother was a lot better painter than I am.”
“Got any of her paintings?”
I shake my head. Not now, I think to myself. No tears today. “They were all destroyed in the fire,” I say, trying not to sniff. It’s been over a decade and it still makes me cry.
The day after Mom died, her house was burned down. Grandma and Auntie were both there, trying their best to fight the fire, but neither of them is a firewoman. The house went down, along with a lot of both Mom and mine’s things. Grandma took me there once and sage’d the whole place down, talking to Mom as though she were there the whole time, telling her to move on and it’s not your fault. That was the day she started talking about the thunderbird so much.
“Damn, I’m sorry,” Aiden looks guilty as realizes I’m started to cry. “Fuck, man, let’s go get some food.”
I perk up at that, and give him a quiet smile. “What’d’ya got?”
Aiden barks a short laugh. “Triple contraction. Don’t let the Grannies hear that, they’ll make you write an essay on your next English assignment.”
I giggle at that, but his goofy grin vanishes and he gets serious for a quick second. “I’m not joking,” he says with a raised eyebrow, but still good-natured. “First week here, I was given an essay to write on the history of contractions.” He shakes his head, shaggy green hair whipping side to side. “Wasn’t a fun assignment. Turns out there’s nothing interesting in the world about contractions.”
His grimace makes me smile inwardly. “Well, let us get food, then,” I say cheekily. “What is there?”
Aiden laughs, an infectious bell tolling. I can’t help but grin as I listen to him.
As it turns out, Aiden can’t cook worth shit. Despite his protests that the Grannies have been having him take culinary lessons, his ability to use the kitchen is mediocrely disastrous at best and downright dangerous at worst. I quickly shoo his fire hazardous-ass out of the kitchen, and he sits himself on a barstool with a direct view to me.
“So what can you cook?” Aiden questions as he drinks a can of soda.
My mind races as I search through the cupboards - holy shit there’s a lot of food here - and finally come across my favourite go-to food;
Oatmeal.
“Oatmeal?” Aiden’s voice of surprise comes from behind. “I haven’t eaten that in years, the Grannies use it for cookies down at the Jubilee.”
I raise an eyebrow as I look back into the pantry where I found the oatmeal - there’s a few large boxes of it. Probably ten pound bags, each.
“You don’t say.” The sarcasm drips off my voice as I talk into the cupboard, doing my best to avoid looking at him.
“Are you making cookies?” He’s hopeful. “The Grannies make some bombass cookies.”
I snort. “No,” I scoff. “I don’t do cookies.”
“Then what’re you making with oatmeal?” Wariness replaces the hope. “I don’t know how much a fan of oatmeal I am.”
“You’ll like it,” I say mildly. “Everyone else always has.”
“What do you call it?”
I don’t answer.
