A Storm of Blossoms

Chapter Twenty

The fire started a little before five in the morning.

I had to admire it, in a way. The timing was very precise. I was a night owl by habit, but by this point even I would normally be starting to wind down for the night and considering sleep. It was late enough that if someone were planning around the intuitive time of midnight, they would be starting to let their guard down. But sunrise came late in December, and it was still solidly dark out, so they had all the advantages associated with that.

Similarly, there was no warning. I just felt a sudden sharpening of Raincloud’s attention, and then a moment later I could smell the smoke too, and it was getting stronger rapidly. It smelled like woodsmoke, but I could smell something else under that, just a hint of something less pleasant. An accelerant, I was guessing; gasoline would be the most obvious pick, but there were plenty of hydrocarbons to pick from, and it might be something less mundane than that.…

Chapter Nineteen

The next day, once everything was arranged and it was starting to approach sunset, I went home, for the first time in a while now. It felt…strange, being there again. It was familiar, but at the same time felt somehow alien. It wasn’t just that so much of my stuff had already been moved out; that definitely played a role, but there was also an element that felt more intrinsic. I felt out of place, like I didn’t belong here anymore. I’d lived in this house for fifteen years, but tonight I had the same sort of derealization that I sometimes felt in unfamiliar places, like I was moving through a dream.

You can’t step in the same river twice. The world looks different depending on where you’re standing, and I’d gone a hell of a long way in the past week, though what direction this path led was impossible for me to guess. Regardless, the view from here was different, and my own house now looked like a strange, alien environment.…

Chapter Eighteen

Okay, I see why you hate these things.

I snorted and pulled Raincloud more fully onto my lap. She wasn’t exactly allowed to be there—pets were supposed to be in carriers unless they were service animals—but the bus driver had not been able to resist a puppy who knew very well how to exploit her intrinsic cuteness to get what she wanted. Part of it, at least. There’s a lot to hate.

On some level, I supposed I was being unfair. Public transportation was a vital resource, and from what I’d heard Pittsburgh’s bus system was actually pretty good by American standards. The fact that using it was miserable for me really wasn’t their fault. I got sensory overload easily, didn’t handle crowds well, and was prone to collapse in a convulsing heap if I wasn’t careful with those things. I also had serious emotional issues around the topic. When I was a kid, I really hadn’t been equipped to understand the details and context of my mother’s death. I just knew that she’d gotten sick because of poison on the subway and it was probably part of why she died. Hadn’t left me with great feelings on the topic.…

Chapter Seventeen

Nothing much happened on Christmas.

I was, on the whole, glad for it. In part, this was because it meant no catastrophes happened. But there was no celebration either, and I was glad for that part, too. I didn’t love the holiday; it didn’t haunt me the way it did Pepper, but holidays in general weren’t my favorite thing, and this one in particular I didn’t care for. There were several sets of moods associated with Christmas—rampant materialism and conspicuous consumption, family with the implication of traditional values and structures, and Christian theology with overtones of orthodoxy and martyrdom.

The first of those I just didn’t like much, and I could acknowledge that part of that was my relatively privileged position. It’s easy to disdain materialism when you don’t lack for the material, and I’d been coasting my whole adult life on an inherited trust fund. The second, well, family was not something that had good associations for me. I was hardly going to be calling my relatives to wish them well. And for the last, when a large portion of Christian sects would place me in Hell from birth as a demon, a large portion of the rest would put me in Hell because I slept around and wasn’t picky about gender, and most of the remainder would be convinced by the blood on my hands?

Yeah. Not a fan. I didn’t hate the religion, didn’t go out of my way to antagonize them or anything. But I wasn’t fond of it, either. My usual policy was to leave them the hell alone, and I appreciated the faith most when they returned the favor. I didn’t celebrate their holidays.…