The Sand Witch Part 3

*You can find the first part in this series here and the second part is here. 

Edna Jean

The town of Renaissance will burn and I will dance in its ashes.  The day I left, I should have never looked back.  My money.  My career.  My power.  They should have been enough to sustain me.

But I had to come back, didn’t I?  All because he was here.

Logan.  My son.  I couldn’t just give you to her the way I promised, could I?

My only thought from the day I could take my first step was leaving Renaissance.  When I was five, I tried to ride my bike all the way down the Kris.  I imagined that, by sunset, I’d arrive somewhere like the Emerald City where there’d life and color and activity.  But I made the mistake of taking Rory, the cry baby.  After an hour on the path, he skinned his knee, turned back and told on me.  Aunt Eddie, his mother who really isn’t my aunt, came to pick me up in her truck and told me that I must never ever think about running away again.  Bad things happen to little girls who run away from home.

Such stupid Renaissance superstitions.

I didn’t talk to Rory for a whole two weeks after that.  And we only started talking again because he brought me a printed map that he found in the dessert.  I pasted it on the wall inside my closet, staring at it night after night after everyone went to bed and wondering about magical places that weren’t full of forgotten old women and children with no fathers.  Rory brought me maps every Sunday for years and I really started to like him after that.  I started to like him best of all.

By the time I was twelve, I was the smartest girl that the town had ever seen.  I taught myself to speak French from books and I built a computer from a kit that I sent away for.  Aunt Eddie said that I couldn’t go to college though and Mama agreed.  Only bad little girls run away from home.

Stupid superstitions.

Gawd, it’s college, not prison, I’d say.

They’d cross themselves and look the other way.

I had Logan when I was sixteen.  Rory had grown up big and strong—nineteen then, but he already belonged to her.  But he still brought me a map every Sunday and it was sort of like a promise.  I imagined that we could still leave and never look back.  That’s why I let him touch me and kiss me even though I knew it was her telling him to do it.

They let me nurse Logan for six months before they took him away.  They locked me in the basement of the old church and told me to pray for my soul.  I had child-sickness, they said.  That’s what they called my wailing and my sore breasts. 

But in the end, I got out, took my old bicycle and peddled away down the Kris.  Found myself an old half-dead miser to marry and when he died, I went to college and started my own company.  A tourism company—amusement parks, resorts, reenactment towns. 

For my son, for Logan, I bought the town of Renaissance and tried to make something of it.  But they gave him away anyway.  And today I will hire an arsonist to burn it down.  At least I will re-coup the insurance money.

The Sand Witch is a four-part story I'm writing for The Rule of Three Blogfest.   You can find the first part in this series here and the second part is here.  If you like what you've read, please check back next Wednesday or Thursday for the third part in this series.

The prompt I chose this week was "The impending misfortune foreshadowed in the 1st prompt comes to pass, but one or more characters laugh at it."This entry is 566 words.