The Reactor in the Shed

Chapter 2

I was about three when I began to suspect my family were a bit peculiar. Not that I had much to compare them with, after all, my cousins and aunt were peculiar too. The neighbours were distant figures, but those I met seemed quite nice and somehow different to my family. But I was only a little girl, a toddler, so what did I know? Well, quite a lot really, since I could read their minds. Most of the neighbours thought my family were peculiar, but couldn’t understand why. After all, the house and garden were neat, the nature strip regularly mowed. Dad went to work at some important secret laboratory, and mum stayed home and did mum things like cooking, cleaning, and fine-tuning the vortex generator.

It’s all so long ago now, over a century, but occasionally I still feel the tingle of apprehension when I discovered dad had a nuclear reactor in the back shed. It was a beauty, a cold-fusion reactor, so it was quite safe. But I’m jumping ahead. I should give you some context to the story, starting with how I came by my name, Lightwings Freestar.

This is not the name I was given, that old moniker is long gone, used now only for legal documents and presented to people who can’t handle Lightwings. Yes, there are people like that, heaven only knows what type of lives they lead. Boring I expect. I won’t bother you with it. Suffice to say the people in my life who count all know me as Lightwings, and that is how I like it. My family name is irrelevant as it wasn’t their real name. I heard mum say it once, a gargle of consonants and chirps. She was usually very guarded but they’d had a few glasses of sherry, at least I thought it was sherry, it was in a decanter so I couldn’t tell what it really was. It was red, and smelled strange. Dad brought it out from the shed and it sparkled and fizzed for a while until it settled into a red sherry-like liquid. They never offered it to guests, but did enjoy imbibing on the odd occasion, and there were lots of odd occasions, mostly after I was packed off to bed.

Thinking about my childhood bed, it was disconcerting mum insisted on tucking the sheets so tightly around me I could barely move. The chain attached via a padlock to the bed frame made it even more difficult, and although I could squeeze out the rattling and clanking invariably brought dad into the room to scold me. I thought all little girls lived in a locked, windowless bedroom and slept in a chained bed.