What did you think about, lying here at night? Did you have nightmares, too? I began to cry. When your parents died, did you know it? Could you feel them go? I cried harder. I didn’t want to, but I couldn’t stop myself. I couldn’t stop myself, so I thought about all the bad things and I fed it and fed it until I was crying so hard I had to gasp for breath between sobs. I thought about how my great-grandparents had starved to death. I thought about their wasted bodies being fed to incinerators because people they didn’t know hated them. I thought about how the children who lived in this house had been burned up and blown apart because a pilot who didn’t care pushed a button. I thought about how my grandfather’s family had been taken from him, and how because of that my dad grew up feeling like he didn’t have a dad, and now I had acute stress and nightmares and was sitting alone in a falling-down house and crying hot, stupid tears all over my shirt. All because of a seventy-year-old hurt that had somehow been passed down to me like some poisonous heirloom, and monsters I couldn’t fight because they were all dead, beyond killing or punishing or any kind of reckoning. At least my grandfather had been able to join the army and go fight them. What could I do? When it was over, my head was pounding. I closed my eyes and pushed my knuckles in to stop them from hurting, if only for a moment, and when I finally released the pressure and opened them again, a miraculous change had come over the room: There was a single ray of sun shining through the window. I got up, went to the cracked glass, and saw that it was both raining and shining outside—a bit of meteorological weirdness whose name no one can seem to agree on. My mom, I kid you not, refers to it as “orphans’ tears.” Then I remembered what Ricky says about it—“the Devil’s beatin’ his wife!”—and I laughed and felt a little better. Then, in the patch of quickly fading sun that fell across the room, I noticed something I hadn’t before. It was a trunk—or the edge of one, at least—poking out from under the second bed. I went over and peeled back the bed sheet that hid most of it from view.
Riggs, Ransom (2011-06-07). Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children (pp. 104-105). Random House Inc Clients. Kindle Edition.
For April, I am reading Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs — I started it years ago, but didn’t finish it, so guess it’s my “put down book and try to read it again” one. I want to read it before the movie comes out by one of my favorite directors, Tim Burton. The book is always better, but the movie helps bring it to life.
