Laycee Daniels

“No Josh!” Andrew’s eyes were a fit of rage as he punched his younger brother in the arm.

 

Andrew quickly turned his attention back to the I-Pad. The Han Solo Angry Bird he had just launched didn’t hit its designated target because he had to put his brother in line.

 

“You made me lose again!” He hit his brother again out of spite.

 

“Oww! MOMM” Josh whined loudly from the last row in their fourteen-passenger van. “Drew’s hitting me and won’t let me have my turn!”

 

“Don’t make me come back there! Drew! Don’t hit your brother. Josh, why don’t you look outside, we’re almost to the campsite. Look how beautiful it is.”

 

Drew smirked at Josh and stuck his tongue out, knowing it would take at least three more cries for help before their father actually pulled over to reprimand them. He gave Josh a reminding punch in the arm when his parents weren’t looking.

 

“I don’t want to go camping it’s gay.” Josh stated. “I want to play XBOX.”

 

“You know I’d kick your a*s at Battlefield Four.” Drew whispered.

 

Andrew who was a slender young man at age eleven was already outranking his father on Battlefield Four. His mother hated him playing the bloody war games, but Drew and his father were very careful not to play it around her.

 

“Battlefield Four is gay, I want to play Halo, and you’re a stupid noob b***h on Halo.”

 

“MOOOOMMM!!! Josh is calling me a stupid noob b***h!”

 

“For Christ’s sake, shut up!” His mother burst out, “If I hear anything else from either of you before we get there, no one’s roasting marshmallows tonight! Drew, give Josh the I-Pad you’ve been playing that almost the whole way here.”

 

Josh smiled sarcastically while Andrew looked like he had been the most unfairly treated boy.

“I almost got all the Eggs!” He protested.

 

“Andrew Daniels you do what your mother told you to right now.”

 

Andrew rolls his eyes and shoves the I-Pad in his brother’s ribs as he passes it over to him.

Josh smiled despite the jabbing until he saw there was a mere five percent battery life left, he tossed it on the floor and stepped hard on Andrew’s foot. He flashed Josh a warning look, but didn’t want to waste another one of his father’s threats so they sat staring out the window.

Four-year-old Laycee Daniel’s sat looking straight ahead with the tip of her thumb in her mouth. Her eyes were wide, and her thin long brown hair contrasted her pale skin and her azure eyes. She didn’t seem to hear all the arguing the two brothers were carrying on in the row directly behind her.

She had a sense of wonder in her eyes, as if seeing the world for the first time and being in shock for it.

 

“Laycee’s been quiet this whole trip,” Debra said glancing in the backseat.

 

“Sometimes I think there may be something wrong with her.” Steven Daniels said shaking his head.

“When we get home maybe we should put her in more activities outside the house.”

“I love her so much.” Steven whispered. “I just don’t know what we did to keep her in that shell she hides in.”

 

“Maybe we should take her to therapy.” They both nodded at each other understandingly and smiled.

 

Steven look at his wife and shook his head to himself “I know we’ve had three kids, but Jesus F*****g Christ Woman, Laycee is four and you’re still a cow.” She looked back at him with another smile and rested her hand on his leg. He returned the smile more enthusiastically than a fake smile should have been.

“I wonder What Cherise is up to these days.”  

Cherise had been new talent with Steven’s production company. They had fallen into lust one hot afternoon when the crew was on lunch break. He still thought of her perfectly round young breasts, her smooth body, over twenty years younger than his. Her young sweat dripping down her neck, cascading over her attentive n*****s and spilling down to mingle with his body.

She had matching small moles on each side of her pelvic lines; he had placed his thumbs on them and grabbed her small a*s with his fingers. He could’ve broken that girl.

After f*****g her, he had to let her go, with a settlement of course after she had threatened telling his wife. He still sent her company checks, checks for adult films she had never been in. He had never slept with the talent before, and never did again, but he always remembered Cherise.

Perfect, young, unscarred, untainted.

Even after the blackmail he didn’t stop thinking about her, didn’t stop dreaming of wanting her. Just wanting one more taste of that forbidden fruit.

Debra didn’t even know that Steven had been in the pornography industry for the past ten years, but she didn’t ask any questions about the money they made either.

The shopping, the dinners, the chocolate, the over self-indulgent lifestyle, either she was stupid or she didn’t want to ruin a good thing.

 

Laycee’s thumb was still in her mouth, watching her father in the rear view mirror. A young naked woman was on top of him, moving up and down, moaning and screaming.

Steven caught his daughter’s eye and she slowly moved her gaze out the window and plunged her thumb deeper into her mouth.

 

Laycee stood thumb in her mouth, her dirty sundress that had ice cream sandwich handprints to compliment the red polka dots, barely moved in the slight breeze. The lake was placid and deep blue, reflecting the canopy of open sky above that was scantly spotted with cotton candy clouds. The water on the man made lake lapped up softly against smooth stones. Mountains rose up in the backdrop, large naked mountains made of only dirt and dry brush.

There were a few trees on the perimeter of the lake with patches of grass, but beyond that point everything was dry and dead. The lake was a virtual paradise in the middle of an unforgivingly hot California desert.

Andrew and Josh were competing throwing rocks as far as they could. That quickly escalated to seeing who could hit a duck first. Laycee’s eyes moved from the landscape to her brothers only momentarily before sitting down in a patch of grass.

“There she is.” She thought she heard a faint voice being carried over the water, but looking out she couldn’t see anyone out there.

“Boys! I’m not going to tell you again to get your sleeping bags ready in the tent and then you can play. Leave the ducks alone don’t hurt them!”

“We were just playing war Mom, the ducks were going to take all our rations and leave us to starve.” Josh said running up and let himself fall onto the stack of sleeping bags Steven had just taken out of the truck.

“That’s my creative little guy.” Steven said roughing up his hair a little bit. “Don’t let those b*****d ducks get to any of our stuff soldier.”

“No sir!”

“We’ll kill all the b*****d ducks first Dad! I’m the General, they won’t get away with it on my watch!” Andrew chimed in kicking up dirt as he ran back to the van to help setup.

 

“Laycee.”

 

“Yes Mommy?” Laycee stood and quickly turned to her parents. Steven and Debra paused looked at each other questioningly.

“I didn’t call you baby, but you can come put on sunscreen so you don’t get burned.”

“Laycee has albino skin!” Josh laughed, “She’ll burn up like a witch.”

“Now Josh that’s not nice, you need some sunscreen yourself. Then you and Drew take your sister out to play for a little bit, Mom’s going to take a nap, it was a long drive here.” Debra said fanning herself with a paper plate, the sweat already forming stains under her large arm flaps.

Steven cracked a beer; the tent was set up and the canopy as well. He tossed a lawn chair under himself before plopping down and staring out into the vast nothing. Debra lay on a patch of grass next to him under the canopy with a towel over her face.

Sweating like a pig.

She started to snore.

 

Josh and Andrew walked along the lake throwing sticks and rocks into the lake. Laycee followed behind slowly, walking through long grass that came up to her shoulders. She moved slowly.

 

“Fear.”

 

She froze in her tracks, and slowly began to bend down. She moved blades of grass aside until she could see about half an inch of the lake.

 

“Flee.”

 

A small frog leapt up from the water and landed on Laycee’s bent knee. It seemed like it realized it had jumped right on its predator and crouched to jump, and then stopped with its head cocked.

 

“Trust.”

 

She scooted him onto her hand and smiled while looking in his eyes, he closed his eyes slowly and opened them again and croaked.

 

“Let me have that!” Andrew came from nowhere and clapped his hands over the frog and grabbed him away from Laycee before she could stop him.

 

“We’re finding lots of frogs!” Josh said running up with an empty beer bottle with a few frogs sitting at the bottom.

 

“No let him go!” Laycee said defiantly.

 

“Laycee their just frogs! We can keep them if we want.” Andrew said as he funneled her frog into the bottle. The two boys were running around quickly gathering frogs and stuffing them into the beer bottle.

 

“Pain”

 

“Panic”

 

The beer bottle was about half full, but the frogs were becoming restless, stacked on each other, squirming, pushing down on the others heads trying to escape through the small hole of escape at the top.

 

“Look their cannibals!” Andrew said laughing, “That one just bit the big ones leg off!”

 

“Stop it!” Laycee screamed, all she felt was pain and fear and confusion.

 

“Boys! Leave your sister alone! Put that beer bottle down Josh, you don’t know where that’s been it’s dangerous.”

 

“Alright Dad!” Josh said tossing the fear-ridden frogs, bottle and all about ten feet out into the lake.  A tear slipped down Laycee’s face as the bottle sunk out of view.

 

“Yes she could feel and communicate with it I saw.” The same faint voice that she heard earlier coming from across the lake reached her again. She snapped her head in each direction.

“She is aware of us too.”

 

“Who’s there?”

 

“Uncertainty.”

 

The lake was quiet, except for the antics of Josh and Andrew, no one answered, and no one felt, there wasn’t anyone there anymore.

 

The campfire was dying down to low embers and a whole blanket of stars shone above, with the white ribbon of the Milky Way running through the middle of the sky. Orange embers popped up and flew into the sky to join the stars. The boys had mostly settled and were now just burning their marshmallows to a crisp before slapping them on gram crackers with chocolate in the middle.

Debra had eaten five.

                  Steven sat back in his chair with a beer in hand looking his children over. He loved them; at least he thought he had. Without them, he found it hard to believe he and Debra would have kept their s**t together.

                  He looked at Laycee who was staring into the fire entrapped by the glowing embers on the log. She glanced up at him for a moment then immediately returned her intense gaze into the fire.

                  “She never looks at me, what did I do to make her hate me. That b***h.”

 

“I’m not a b***h.” Laycee said not looking up.

 

“Language Laycee!” Debra said shocked, “Steven do you let our children talk like that?”

                  Steven’s mouth was agape and his eyes were large and not blinking. He put his hand to his mouth, then looked at his feet and drank half his beer in one gulp.

 

“Laycee.”

 

“You’re not real,” She thought to herself staring into the fire.

 

“We are and we’ve come for you. We’ve watched you, we need you to watch us.”

 

“Stop talking to me, you only get me in trouble.”

 

“We’re going to take you away, is that alright? We need you.”

 

“I’ll get in trouble.”

 

“No you won’t Laycee. Look.”

 

Laycee looked up, her dad’s face was locked in shock, but he wasn’t moving. Her brother’s were frozen sucking the chocolate from their fingers. Her Mom still had a bite held up to her mouth, the chocolate smudged around her lips.

 

“Follow the light Laycee.”

 

Over the dirt mountain a large orange light began to illuminate the night sky, giving a vibrant glow.

                  She stood and began to walk toward it, she looked back at her family sitting frozen, the campfire as still as them. Embers still burned hot glowing in the air as they had sparked off.

 

“Soon Laycee this will not be a safe place for your kind either.” The voice continued as she moved toward the memorizing light. “We are bringing those that can hear us, those that can talk to us, help us, because you can hear and understand us and others too. We come from a place that will never die, that will never have pain, we need good creatures like you to come with us and build a new world.”

                  She had been walking for so long now, but there was no time, everything was still, the whole world had stopped. All had ceased but the growing brilliant light over the mountain.

“We need you to help us find others like you to help us build, to make us strong and diverse.”

She reached the top of the mountain and found herself staring down into a glowing field of orange poppies, radiating from within.

                  “Come with us, will you come with us.”

                  “What about my family.” Laycee asked as she descended the mountain slowly, staring at the million glowing flowers.

                  “They are bad people, but they won’t even remember you. Come lay in us, let us take you there.”

She walked through the field, her fingertips brushing the petals softly. She brushed her stringy brown hair away from her face and swallowed.

 

                  Steven opened a new beer and smiled at his two sons and wife, and then he stared across the campfire. He strained his vision for a moment in thought, and then shrugged.

“I wonder what Cherise is doing tonight.”