Storm Girls (The Juniper Wars Book 4) by Aaron Ritchey (best books to read for students TXT) 📕

She was the nice mother and I was the dutiful, sweet daughter, and we made cakes of dirt and drank from broken plastic cups of air pretending it was tea. And it was nice and kind and quiet. Quiet.

My real home was always so loud.

The semi disappeared behind us. Next came the start of our fence line. Every post I’d fixed, adjusted, repaired, for all the years of my childhood.

We hit our driveway too suddenly, and it surprised me. I’d been watching for our house but hadn’t seen it. It was our driveway for sure ’cause it had our mailbox, which Wren liked to shoot up when she got drunk. She’d blow it apart and then blame it on neighbors. We’d know the truth, and Sharlotte would re-build it again. Noise, gunshots, yelling, cursing, and screaming, that was our home

Not quiet like me and Aunt Bea’s tea party.

But how could I miss our house? How could I? It was visible from the road, our Victorian house on the hill, riding like a blue ship on an ocean of yellow prairie.

Then I realized the house was gone. Just. Gone.

The steam-truck rolled to a stop.

I leapt down and fell into a limping run.

“Stop!” Captain Atlas yelled.

A gunshot rang out followed by a bullet skipping across the ground next to me, but who cared about that?

I raced up the driveway and leapt over the little trench of concrete we’d put in for better drainage. I crunched over the gravel we’d hauled in from town a decade ago. Wren had liked the effort and sweat of laying the gravel. We thought we’d have to fight her to get her to work, but she had been up early every morning to shovel rock until her hands bled.

The ice house still stood, where Sharlotte had put Mama’s body, where I’d wept over my dead mother while Pilate held me. The ice house wasn’t blown to the winds, but it was pocked with bullet holes and scorched on the side that faced the back of the ranch house. The old trench where we’d fought Queenie was still there as well, though it was now mostly filled in with trash and debris.

But ...

Our pretty blue ranch house, two stories and an attic, was gone. No more. No more.

I circled the foundation, the blackened concrete, walked over bits of wood, nails, bullet casings, spent mortar shells; grasses all burned up. Our barns were little more than stacks of kindling.

Gone. Our ranch gone. The whole reason why we’d taken our headcount west was to save the ranch. Now it meant nothing. All of our suffering and death meant nothing ’cause war had come and blasted my home from the earth.

Now only a burned-out crater marked the place where I’d grown up, where I’d been held by my mama and laughed with my daddy, cracking jokes even as he cracked open beers. All the candles Mama had given me weren’t even puddles of wax any more. They were gone.

Gone.

Gone.

Gone.

I tripped and fell and looked up to see my mama’s headstone. Without thinking, I’d come to where Mama and Daddy and my baby sisters lay buried.

My fingers tore at the soil. And then I felt that brittle layer of liar ice crack open ’cause the truth of our sorrows can never be covered for long.

The ice broke, and I fell onto the sharp stick of my heart. Impaled, I howled up at the stars now appearing so cold, so far up in an uncaring sky. The wind and sun had fled my fury, and I felt the tears, the snot, the spittle from my mouth fly as I howled some more.

Gone.

Sharlotte Jeanne.

Irene Marie.

Daddy.

Mama.

Dead.

I fell into the dirt, face first, scratching at the ground, sobbing. Beyond words. Beyond thought. Like Alice. Gone coco.

Oh, how brittle our psyches are. Oh, how we like to pretend they aren’t anything but weak glass bottles, and once broken, all our sanity drains out onto the ground.

Right then, if I’d had a spool of Skye6, I would have covered every bit of my skin. If I’d had a bottle of Pains whiskey, I would drain it down. If I’d had a gun, I would put it to my temple to shoot where the crazy lived in me.

Life wasn’t just awful, it was mean, a monster, and God was a hog in heaven, squealing at our sorrows before being butchered by something bigger and meaner than Him.

No. Nothing was in heaven. Like a lyric in that old LeAnna Wright song, “God don’t live in Texas anymore.” He don’t live anywhere, ’cause He couldn’t exist. If He was alive, He was a jackerdan in need of a bullet between the eyes.

Revenge for Wren. Sharlotte. Rachel. Alice.

Revenge for Pilate and Micaiah.

Revenge for our ranch.

Mama talked to me then. She couldn’t, she was dead, but I heard her. I heard my mother’s voice on the wind.

Wren had seen her when she was dying on the floor of the Silver Island Casino. And Sharlotte had seen her after we cut off her leg.

Right then, in my own death, I didn’t see Mama, but I heard her.

“What’s in your heart, Cavvy, baby?”

I didn’t hear that. I couldn’t. I was crying too hard, a mess in the dirt, broken, broken-hearted, broken-souled. Never to be repaired.

“What’s in your heart, baby, baby, Cavvy?”

I fell quiet. I went still on top of my mother’s grave next to our burnt-out house.

I heard it a third time. “What’s in your heart, Cavvy?”

A memory came to me. I was in Mama’s arms. It was an autumn night, chilly, but still warm in its bones. We were on the porch, on the swing, she was facing forward, and I was little, so little, and I sat on her, facing the house—facing her. I traced the line of her jaw to her chin, and she looked at me with soft, happy eyes. For most of my years on the ranch, I never got to be close to Mama like that too often. She