• PROLOGUE
    It was one of those days. One of those days that was suspended in the enchanted limbo of spring, that wonderful time of year between the time in which everyone complains about the cold and the time when everyone then begins complaining about the heat. Now the sweaters and the wool socks are falling away but the shorts haven’t quite been pulled out from their lonely corner of the closet. Now a gentle breeze caresses the joggers and the dog walkers going to and fro in a lovely community called Lantern. Lantern seemed to be one of Those Places, ones referenced with awe, which some scoffed at as the stuff of myth, one of those places where it seemed that nothing bad ever happened, that nothing bad ever would happen once you were safe within Lantern's parameters.
    However, it has been said that nothing is as it seems, and one can be almost certain that whomever coined that phrase had places like Lantern in mind.
    In recent times, it seemed as if the lives of everyone in the town had all begun to fall to pieces at once. No longer were there some people who suffered and the others who just had hushed discussions about it over glasses of wine, now everyone had a slice of that good old suffering pie. It seemed almost as if Lantern had been invaded by the noxious, poison influence of the outside world, that the floodgates had been opened to allow all of life's little cruelties in.
    This is, quite simply, the story of what happens when things fall apart.








    ONE
    In one of these lovely houses on a peaceful Sunday afternoon on which our story begins, a young woman lay in her bedroom. The room is darkened despite the afternoon sun; the curtains are drawn over Venetian blinds.
    The young woman was quite pretty, with fair creamy skin, long dark hair and eyes the brown and green of a forest. She was pixie-like at five feet nothing and only about a hundred and seven pounds. She lay in bed atop her rumpled red and white sheets and blankets. Had a stranger walked into the room at that moment, they might have thought the woman was dead. Carnelian Bright- or Carnie, as everyone close to her called her- lay on the king sized mattress that she shared with her husband(when he actually slept at home), her eyelids open just enough to expose glassy, glazed over eyeballs, and she was limp as a rag doll. There was a vague half smile across her lips. Carnie Bright was not dead- but it was an incredible simulation. Carnie was just very, very high.
    Carnie was a wholly unhappy woman. She was married to Gordon Bright-or Gordie, as he was less formally known. Gordie was an executive with an extremely lucrative and successful company. Carnie had no real idea what her husband did for a living- something to do with toilets, maybe? Oh well. She didn’t care all that much. She only knew that he brought in the money. Carnie and Gordie had been married for only five years, and already she was tired of him. Was he tired of her? She didn’t know-or care, for that matter. Carnie had other problems. She was a serious pill-popper and she often spiraled into binges of hard drinking. Carnie may have seemed like an incredibly lucky woman to those outside- other women on the block were always going on about how great Gordie was, and of course Carnie would smile and nod, all the while knowing that he was really nothing special.
    Carnie had grown up in a trailer in a small Florida town with her mother. Carnie’s father was, as far as her mother had told her, a naval officer who had run out on Carnie’s mother right after her birth. Carnie’s mother was a drunk. But Carnie vastly preferred her mother drunk.

    When Phyllis Glenn was sober, she was meaner than a junkyard dog, for reasons only she herself would ever understand, and most of her rage was aimed in Carnie’s direction. Not only was she abusive physically and mentally, but Phyllis had managed to mortify Carnie on a daily basis. Often she would stumble around the trailer park thoroughly hammered and yell at the neighbors, sometimes in the early hours of the morning. As a result, Carnie and her mother were ostracized by all but one individual. This was Clarisse Beaumont, a kindly woman in her fifties who treated Carnie like a granddaughter, and tried to protect her from Phyllis’s misplaced wrath when it was possible. Carnie eventually moved in with Clarisse when Phyllis finally drank herself to death shortly after Carnie’s sixteenth birthday. Carnie found Phyllis dead on her crumbling couch one afternoon. At fist Carnie had assumed her mother was in a drunken stupor, nothing to be surprised or alarmed about. Then Carnie realized that Phyllis was not breathing. Clarisse’s trailer was the first place she went, before even calling an ambulance. Not that any hospital could help Phyllis now. Following Phyllis Glenn’s modest funeral, Carnie lived with Clarisse until she was eighteen. After high school, Carnie attended college for a brief time, where she met Gordie and married him quickly.
    She found herself here now, entrenched within the despicable false veneer of perfection that was Lantern. Carnie hated the town.
    She loathed the perky neighbors, with their immaculate lawns and private school children. Carnie couldn’t stand it. Nor could she quite figure out where her life had gone wrong. Before she met Gordie, Carnie had wanted experience and travel- all things Gordie had promised, and God knew he had the money for traveling. But he was always working somewhere on something, and he refused to take Carnie along. He felt she would only become an hindrance. Carnie had tried to argue with him, but eventually gave up, finding other activities to keep herself occupied. Exhibit A, the half empty bottle of vodka and the pill bottle on her bedside table.


    Carnie was vaguely aware of the ringing telephone. She had taken some pills about six hours before, but she was thinking a bit more clearly now. She made an attempt to move her body. Her limbs were leaden, but somehow she managed to pull the upper half of her body over just enough to reach the phone on the table. She threw her arm forward, reaching the phone but knocking over the lamp in the process. Carnie cringed as she heard the sound of the ceramic lamp base shattering. She remembered that it had been a gift from Gordie. He would want to know how it was broken. He wasn’t home often enough to be fully aware of Carnie’s recreational undertakings.
    Carnie placed the phone to her ear. “Hello….” she said in a subdued , far away voice. She grimaced-her mouth was dry and there was a terrible, gravelly taste to it. Side effects of the pills, she decided. You have to pay to ride. There was a woman on the other end of the line. “Yes, is this Carnelian Glenn?”
    The woman sounded serious, formal. Carnie decided that this could be bad news. “Carnelian Bright, thank you.”
    “This is Madison County General Hospital. We’re calling on behalf of Clarisse Beaumont.”. Carnie sat up so fast pain rushed into her head. Oh Jesus not her . Why couldn’t it be Gordie? Or that stupid Louise down the street? “Is she alright?”
    Judging by the silence on the other end of the line, Carnie could figure that Clarisse was more than not alright.

    TWO
    A few houses down from where Carnie Bright was receiving the worst phone call she would ever experience, Helen Jones was climbing out of her boyfriend's new car. Helen was seventeen and attractive. Her hair was flowing, long and golden, her legs were long, and her eyes were naturally wide and the deep blue of sapphires. Her skin had a slight bronze shade from natural tanning. She was intelligent as well, straight A's for all of her high school career.
    She was a cheerleader, and her boyfriend, Thomas Witherspoon the III was a star football player at their school, who came from a wealthy blue-blooded family that had a Harvard legacy.
    Yet, Helen had begun to tire of it all recently. These things that had once thrilled her now wore on her nerves. Helen's home life was, quite simply, a mess, despite the sparkling smile she wore and the fiction of joviality she maintained for the sake of her teachers and social circle.
    Her mother had left the family less than a month before, had simply stolen away with her car and everything she owned, in the silent, glittering frost of the February morning. This sudden abandonment came as a shock to everyone, for all that had known Corrine Jones(or thought they did, at least) had seen her as a bubbly, earthy woman who was happy as a homemaker, loving and devoted to her two children Helen and Austin, and her husband, Winston. No one could possibly begin to suspect what was beneath the surface, that Corrine hid the abject misery in which she secretly lived.
    Helen stood on the sidewalk before her home and brushed herself off absently, almost as if she subconsciously hated the idea of having the smell of Tommy's new car all over her. Actually, forget the “subconsciously” part- Helen did hate this idea, despised it in fact. She could not explain the depth of this newfound hatred she held for the world in general, only that she blamed her mother for it.
    “Hey, Midge?” Tommy called from within the confines of the sleek black sports car. No one else called her “Midge”. Only Tommy did, and he had ever since his discovery that Helen's middle name was Margaret. This little quirk that had once made Helen feel truly loved now annoyed her. Out of all the things she had started hating, Helen hated the feeling of hating everything, the hollowness in the chambers of her heart that had lain waste to everything she had once loved.
    Helen turned to look at Tommy, and met his brown-eyed gaze. There was nothing but pure love in those eyes, despite the frustration Helen had detected in him as of late. Helen could remember the way she was once content to stare into those eyes for a long time, to dwell in their seeming endlessness, and somehow this recollection made her more acerbic than anything else.

    He called to her again, and this time his tone was one of a man who knows that he is losing his battle. He was trying to call her home, in a sense, but she could not go back, not even if she had wanted to. Lately Helen has been overwhelmed by the sensation of needing to shed her proverbial skin, to rid herself of this old life that has been ruined in her eyes forever. This is why she plans to break up with Tommy once and for all, why she has decided to leave the cheer leading behind, to abandon her old ways entirely, on what has turned out to be a most momentous Sunday. Forever she will see this day as the one on which she had a revelation of biblical proportions. She has made the conscious decision to be a Phoenix, rising from the ashes of her own personal apocalypse.
    “This isn't working” is all she is capable of uttering, despite her acute awareness that this is one of the most hackneyed lines in the big book of break-ups. Tommy initially took on the expression of a man who had been backhanded suddenly and without apparent provocation. Then the realization hit him; he fully processed what Helen was trying to say. Helen could almost see the color leaving his face, as if there is a drain somewhere within him, the plug of which had just been pulled out. Left behind was a ghostly pale countenance, and a once-boyfriend who knew that the girl he loves is forever lost to him. Helen looks away, unable to bear the sight of this devastation, this idea that she might as well have ripped out Tommy's heart and danced on it. She says nothing, deciding not to waste time with apologies, nor does she try to explain herself, for that would only be condescending to them both.
    “Okay,then. If that's what will make you happy.” He managed a weak smile and met her eyes. “You know I only want you to be happy, right?”. She nodds, her voice having deserted her. Tommy gave her one last smile, more forced than the one that preceded it, and drove off into the fading day.
    Helen sighed loudly, as if she were releasing all of the breath she had held in upon breaking it off with Tommy. She figured that he would recover quickly.



    In fact, she was completely confident that by the middle of next week at the latest, Thomas Witherspoon the III, whom Helen had once affectionately referred to as Tommy the III, and who would from then on be only Thomas Witherspoon to her(she felt something of a pang-could it be regret?- within her as she thought this, but it passed quickly), would be parading around the school halls with another cheerleader on his arm.
    Helen turned on her heel, beginning to walk up the path until something halted her. She noticed, with staggering dismay, that her home was going to hell. The grass, once cut and trimmed and free of the menace of those rebellious weeds, had degenerated into a close cousin of a jungle. The weeds had taken control, strangling the life out of the hydrangeas and violets that Corrine Jones had once taken such pride in. The grass almost reached Helen's knees, which said a lot due to her five feet and ten inches of height. She then realized with renewed bitterness that the Jones home was descending into chaos because her mother had kept it together. Helen steeled herself and opened the front door, truly afraid of what the mayhem that she would find within.

    THREE