Wildcat Fireflies

Also by Amber Kizer

MERIDIAN

Dunklebarger Rehabilitation Center was not a center by modern definition; more an old drafty mansion converted over generations from family home to funeral home, to sanatorium, and finally an iteration where the old and unwanted were dumped to die. “Guests” transferred there shared the same profile: elderly, no living family, friends awaiting them on the other side, critical-life-taking conditions. Their hourglasses dribbled grains of sand into abundant piles below, coughing up the last bits in spits and spurts. Medicare paid guests’ bills. When possible,
the invoices reflected state-of-the-art care, top-of-the-line medication and therapies, even weeks of life beyond when bodies let souls pass. Miraculous or fictitious. Fraudulent, most definitely.

Life and living were never confused at Dunklebarger. Guests didn’t leave alive. Of course, patients arrived there as a last resort, by design and with fanatical deliberation. Human neglect and greed at work? Perhaps. Or maybe the reality was something else entirely? Maybe the elderly deaths served a purpose, beyond the money, below the surface? Perhaps there was a greater plan that turned the headmistress and the elderly guests into victims of the light-sucking darkness.

To truly speculate, it must be mentioned that the rehabilitation center also served unfortunates at the other end of the timeline. Children who found themselves unwanted, abandoned, removed for their own good from homes and streets. Children ages six to fifteen from the foster care system were placed at Dunklebarger, which pretended to be a group home. But the children quickly learned to call themselves inmates. To call the center DG, tagged so because Dunklebarger was a mouthful for the smallest kids, though no one remembered the child who stuck it with DG instead of DB. The eldest inmates knew the initials truly stood for Doom and Gloom. Disgusting and Gross. Death and Grief.

Dunklebarger was a prison for old and young alike. The old were prisoners at the whim of bodies drowning in deterioration, crushing the souls within. The young were
prisoners of those in power, battered and tossed about by a system not suited for anything but killing time. Of course, the child welfare system was taxed beyond its budget, time, and human ability. Even in the best of circumstances, it was appallingly easy for kids to get lost in the piles of paperwork. These weren’t the best of circumstances.

The kids served two purposes for those who profited from the establishment. They brought in income from the state, and they cared for the infirm. Which was why children under six weren’t accepted as residents. Six-year-olds can do a lot of work, and they don’t eat as much as twelve-year-olds. Child or adult, resident or staffer, anyone who questioned, who spoke up, who complained, disappeared quietly. And ignorance doesn’t know to ask certain questions, to notice certain unusual things. Like all the children had one single, solitary social worker. One woman, of indeterminate age, was the sole connection for these kids to a system intended to protect them from the very existence they experienced at DG.

Someone,
something
, else manipulated the greed and careless ambition of the headmistress to put handpicked children into the presence of death.

Juliet Ambrose was approaching the end of her time at Dunklebarger. She remembered nothing from before her arrival there around her sixth birthday. Told by the headmistress that she was unwanted, neglected, and unloved, Juliet accepted abuse while trying to save those around her. She knew sixteen-year-olds left Dunklebarger for
boarding schools and job training, but she had not yet heard what was planned for her. Now, nearing her supposed sixteenth birthday, even with new companions, Juliet had never felt more alone than she did counting down to February tenth. She dared not ask the headmistress directly about her future.

Juliet dreamed of city lights and the noises of bustling traffic. The smell of a bakery in the wee hours of the morning, the aroma of Christmas goose, and the texture of sea urchin straight from the ocean. She dreamed of people she felt she’d known since the beginning of time but had never met. She saw faces, and sights, in her sleep that she couldn’t name upon waking. She knew recipes, secret ingredients, and how to make almost anything ever eaten by a guest who died at DG. There were moments when she felt utterly insane, incomplete—as if a crowd lived inside her head. As if she were a chef puppet desperately trying to cook up a tender future full of sweetness and spice and abundance.

Awake, she dreamed that at sixteen she could take the little ones with her to a safe, warm, free place and burn down DG. Preferably with the headmistress inside. But in the end, she simply hoped to survive the storms waged on the fields and farms of Indiana when late winter collided with early spring. The tornadoes that ripped and gutted, and turned the sky to pea-green mash. The lightning that cracked silos, stirred stampeding cattle, and started fires. The hail that pounded the corn shoots flat and flooded the creeks and rivers.

With a measly ten minutes to herself, while Mistress ran errands and Nicole minded the other children, Juliet poked her toes into the rushing, laughing waters of the Wildcat Creek gurgling behind DG, tucked her head into her knees, and sobbed.

Juliet was sure she was in this world alone, but the cavalry was on its way. Everything she knew about her life was about to change.

From the shadows, side by side, allies beyond time and space and earthly knowing scrutinized and watched her. These unseen eyes belonged one pair to
Felis catus
, and one pair to
Canis lupus
.