EVANORA

“Are you ok to drive remember Ev is in her kids seat and I don’t want anything to happen to us all?”

“Shuddup of course I can drive I know where we live and I've been drivin longer than you av so shuddup and buckle up!!!”

Frank and Elaine Dawson had been fighting all night and to sooth the angst he was feeling Frank was downing beer like there was no tomorrow. He was drunk and nasty and Ev was watching her mum become more and more upset as the night progressed. Ev could feel the warmth of her mothers body next to hers as she hugged her close while her father was distancing himself from the family with an excessive intake of alcohol.

The club was smoke filled and tacky. The meal was barely edible and the noise from the juke box only served to fuel the drinking habits of the young adults all hell bent on finding a mate or starting a fight. Not a good atmosphere for children and Elaine wanted to leave with Ev and leave now. Frank was stalling and staggering back from the bar with yet another round of drinks to consume and literally push him over the legal limit for the state and every one drinking in it.

Human beings have a great capacity for wrong doing and Frank was a gleaming example of “what not to do” his entire life. He failed school, was fired from all of his jobs bar one and upset everyone he came into contact with because he was basically a nasty drunk who would rather fight than be friends with anyone. Frank just added to being mean by taking it out on his lovely wife of 6 years Elaine.

They dated for about two weeks then Elaine fell pregnant with little Evanora. Elaine loved being pregnant and feeling Ev inside her moving around and how nurturing it was to breast feed her. Basically everything that was to do with being a woman Elaine loved. She dressed Ev in floral baby clothes and dresses, fussed over her regularly while Ev’s father was the exact opposite. He kept saying as soon as Ev was born that he was on the outside and just a pay cheque to Elaine. He hated being isolated away from how close Elaine was with Ev. This just made him drink more and care less about his families well being and concentrate on how much he could consume before he blacked out.

Tonight at the club was no exception.

Elaine wasn’t happy and Ev wasn’t happy that her mother cried a lot and she couldn’t stop her or make her happy. Ev would dance around like a ballerina and see her Mother smile at how sweet her dance was then the smile would all but vanish from her face upon hearing her father come home hammered again yelling and swearing and smashing things he could reach for and throw at the walls. To Ev her mother and father seemed like two completely different people and she found herself being more loyal to the one parent who gave the love back to her and that was her mother. She loved her voice because it was always soft and gentle laced with ups and downs that made it wonderful to hear her read a bed time story.

She loved how her mother dressed in the 1950′s floral puffed up dresses and she always smelled so fragrant. More and more Ev stayed close to her mothers side when her dad came home because she didn’t like the way he cuddled her. It was rough and abrasive and she didn’t understand why he touched her 'there' when it was his time to read a bed time story at night.

Everything was wrong. Everything was festering into a situation that would change the way Evanora would act around her father forever this night at the club. Tenaciously she clutched at her mothers hand and listened as her father hurled insult after insult at her on the way to the car and the volume didn’t subside even after her mother strapped her in to her seat and her father started the car. It just got worse. Ev looked at the floor of the car and tears welled in her eyes as the yelling increased in pitch and finally her father lashed out and struck her mother with a closed fist to the side of her head and in doing so lost control of the car and it hit a tree then rolled into a ditch upside down.

Evanora was upside down hanging from the straps of her car seat looking into the dead eyes of her mother who was staring straight back at her. There was no movement. Everything went quiet. The yelling stopped, the engine stopped and her father was slumped across what was left of the steering wheel unconscious but alive. Ev was trying to reach to touch her mother and she started to speak in a quiet voice

"Mum....mum hold my hand,... mum....", but her mother was no longer able to hold her hand or comfort her in any way.

She was gone.

“MUUUUUUUUUMMMMMMMMM’, Evanora screamed inside the car and this echoed around her mothers body over the broken glass and blood and into the trees.

The forest the car had plummeted into moved like god had turned on a fan and then switched it off just as fast. There were mass branches bending and stretching towards the car then springing back into their previous calm positions. It was as if they heard Ev’s painful scream for her mother and they wanted to help her. Comfort her.

Eventually the smoke from the destroyed car engine alerted a passing driver and he stopped to see what was happening then sped off back into town to alert the local authorities to the accident and very soon Ev was being cut from her car seat and her mother and father taken by Ambulance to the local hospital. Ev was given a sedative and she fell asleep directly.

When her sleeping form was placed into the ambulance next to her mothers lifeless body the trees all moved again and lowered their branches as if in a mark of respect, but as Ev’s father was raised into his ambulance there was a cracking sound that even the driver of the Ambulance noted on his report sheet that he heard several times. The tree’s sounded their disapproval of the father and a branch from the tree the father hit with the car came off its very top and plummeted directly through the roof in the same spot Ev’s father was sitting impaling the drivers car seat and puncturing the car so thoroughly the branch went through the car and into the ground.

The ambulance with Ev and her dead mother pulled away and headed for the hospital.

The trees thrashed around as if speaking to each other.

Ev’s fathers ambulance pulled away and the forest erupted, leaves, twigs and debris fell onto the bonnet and windscreen of the ambulance and it was hard to negotiate the road as a result for the driver. He only just made it out and as he cleared the forest the forest settled. The debris was blown off the ambulance and the driver could now accelerate, but his nerves were shattered just as Frank started crying wildly coming back into a conscious state.

The Ambulance and Police lights flashed and blinked all the way to the hospital lighting the streets up as they approached and Frank was charged with drunk driving but not charged for the death of his wife, Ev’s mother. He was heavily concussed with glass cuts to his face, arms and legs but he would pay his fine and walk free. Evanora had some scars but not the kind of scars you could see, her heart was broken and her spirit irreparably damaged. It was going to take a long time for her to get over this...if at all.

The doctor who was looking after her wrote on his notes that she would need a lot of love to come back from the edge of this kind of despair. Then he returned his clipboard to the holder on the end of the bed and left to check on other patients.