Last month, a year after the Awakening, four children gathered in Triton Park. Woke Portland: a Year After the Awakening I want to look away so that the last thing I see isn’t Tavia Philips. I want to look down, to see my body, that it’s still there. It feels like nothing, except that it’s spreading. What else am I supposed to think when thinking is all I can do? I can’t feel anything, once the hardening starts. I just know I’m terrified that my lungs will start burning any moment from the air I can’t force into them, that the legs I can’t feel anymore aren’t there, that the stone has broken somehow even though I’ve never seen it happen. They’re watching me turn gray like the other promgoers in this courtyard, and the man in the cemetery, and the kids in Triton Park-but I don’t know if it seems fast or slow.
I don’t know how long it takes from the outside. Which means the sisters don’t know either, and they’re doing it anyway. Am I going to suffocate? Is being Stoned by a siren and her snake sister actually dying? No one knows. Deep inside my body, something goes hard. There’s no time to run, when what was a wobbling pillar of scales and haunted hair stiffens-and then I do, too. To tell her that I am through playing nice, that you don’t threaten Eloko, and that she and her snake sister had better start thinking of what comes after Portland because they are never going to live this night down.
Not to think, she wouldn’t dare do this to me, and not to dare her. I’m standing across from a siren and there’s a call in her voice.
“Effie,” I hear her say, and even though her voice is calm, it carries a telltale vibrato that I register too late.
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