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I slammed the front door closed behind me and screamed.
“How could she say that?!”
I didn’t understand at all! Why would Emma do this? What happened to her? Who on Earth was Sophia?
Tears streamed down my face as I stumbled into the dining room. Dad had left for a work thing after I’d gotten home, so it was just me in the house. Even if I wanted to burden him with this, I couldn’t, not right now.
The dining room didn’t comfort me either, exactly. The fancy chandelier had appeared after Mom’s death; according to Dad, it was hers, hence he refused to get rid of it even when money got tight. The photo on the table, on the other hand… well, I’d seen Dad take it off the table, more than once. But he always ended up putting it back within a few days. He never sounded happy about it - which I guess made sense. I didn’t like looking at it either.
But somehow, when I sat at the table for long enough, things always felt… less. Not better, exactly. But quieter. Less painful.
I sat down there, staring at the picture. It was from just after Mom and Dad’s wedding. They were in some kind of museum, a dusty old mansion by the looks of it. Mom was wearing her favorite dress, all greys and blacks with a high waist, something she’d had since before she met Dad. She looked - radiant was the wrong word. Mom had never looked radiant. She’d always been dark. I’d inherited her dark, ethereal hair, though I kept mine out of my face - Mom had bangs between her eyes as long as I could remember. But she was always beautiful, and she was beautiful in this photo, her prominent eyeshadow accentuating those big dark eyes, a little smirk on her face, possibly related to the arm she had wrapped around my Dad’s butt. The other hand held an antique-looking oil lantern.
Poor Dad looked utterly mortified. That was Mom, alright: anthropologist, occult researcher, and a million other things, but first and foremost a prankster.
My tears puddled on my glasses. I sniffled, took them off and wiped them on my shirt.
I went to put them back on… and paused.
In the haze of my vision, the chandelier almost looked like it had a face.
I blinked, but the impression was gone. I put on the glasses, frowned, and decided to talk to it anyway. It was one of the last things we had of Mom’s, after all. She’d been buried in her favorite dress.
“Emma… Emma doesn’t want to talk to me,” I mumbled. “She has a new friend and she says she doesn’t want to see me anymore. She… I don’t get it. She said such horrible things, and about Mom too, and…”
The chandelier creaked.
I blinked again. Wiped my nose.
It swung to one side, then the other. Was there a draft? No, I couldn’t feel anything.
The lights flickered, and then the chandelier simply - fell off the mounting. Or - maybe it’d never been mounted to begin with. It fell almost halfway down before coming to a jerky halt, and when it did, the arms and center erupted in flame, casting the room in a purple, flickering glow.
It definitely had a face.
“Chandeluuuuuure,” it moaned, a weird creaky almost-human voice, so full of sadness and regret, and then it slammed into me, shoving its arms against my body. The floating chandelier was weighty, but - despite the initial impact, it didn’t hurt. The chandelier was warm, but it didn’t burn me, or maybe it was very careful not to burn me.
Very gingerly, I wrapped my arms around my mom’s pet chandelier and hugged it back.