Thida's Origins - The Year No One Comes Home

[agent3]

Your mother returns home when autumn’s chill creeps in through the cracks in the floorboards, when the mountain mists make you shiver and the leaves on the trees match the color of your father’s favorite kind of ink. He’ll make pine mushroom soup, her favorite food, and as it simmers he’ll sit with the sliding doors open and look down at the valley, strumming his guitar to the melody always in his head. He’ll stop only to check on the soup and to greet her, your summer-green mother with a smile bright as sunlight, exhausted and happy to be home, her old goggles slung around her neck. In warmer months she works at Camp Triggerfish, a beloved counselor to cityslicker squids; she takes them out on adventures they can’t have amongst the concrete jungle of Inkopolis. Your mother eats heartily and tells stories, and your father laughs and smiles like he hasn’t since she left, and you drink it in. They are so in love, and even though you can’t name it as such, you can feel it wash over you too on those first nights when she’s back home, when you yawn and your father carries you to bed and your mother presses a kiss to your inky forehead.

The three of you live sparsely. This house is old, older than your parents’ parents, and like every family in this mountainside village you live primarily off the land. Your parents stretch the salary your mother makes at Camp, and your father teaches guitar and plays at parties to supplement income, and they don’t hide how hard it can be sometimes to afford things, but it’s not treated with despair. The two of them tell you, “Thida, there is always a way to live in this world,” and your mother will fix things in exchange for clothes and food, your father will care for pets when other squids make treks into the city in exchange for workbooks for you (for there is no school in the mountains, no one goes to school), and you are happy, and that makes them happy.

On your thirteenth birthday, your mother gives you her goggles. “Should’ve waited for next year,” she says, slipping them on your head. “But I just can’t wait! Promise me you’ll be careful with them, Thida?”

You nod. Of course you will! These are very precious to your mother. They were her great great grandpappy’s, and now they are yours. You’ve seen pictures of him with them on, holding a funny ink pump and posturing pridefully.

Your father chuckles. “Abyssi, they look ridiculous on her.”

“Oh, and should I go get your old hipster poncho out of the attic, Joubin? She’ll be swimming in it!”

They’re light jabs, nothing meant to hurt. You laugh, too, the sound bubbly and sweet. This time next year, they’ve promised that you can go to Camp Triggerfish too, and you’ll go with your mother’s goggles and this hipster poncho of your father’s and finally, finally have a form like theirs that can do things other than plip ink all over the floor. They take a picture with you and frame it, and they promise.

They promise.

They promised.

That autumn, your mother doesn’t come home when the chill arrives. Your father stares out into the valley all day and all night, and the pine mushroom soup boils until the broth evaporates. The next day he’s gone, left you a note promising that he’ll be home very soon, he just. Went looking for her. Just went to check. Perhaps something happened at Camp that got her caught up in things? Perhaps the car she took down in the valley got stuck? There were instant noodles in the cupboard, Thida, you know how the hot water machine works, and there’s batteries for it in the drawer just in case.

The day dragged on into the night, and then another day and another night, and it gets colder and colder and your neighbors check on you with wary glances and little news. None of the other children can afford to go to Camp, so no one has a line to what might’ve happened to your mother, and your father seems to have disappeared into the mountain mists. Winter comes, blanketing the mountains in white, and you shake like you’ve never shaken before as you sit near the home’s creaky heater, wrapped up in the poncho you finally dug out of the attic, and you don’t know if you can hope for anyone to come home anymore.

When the snow melts and your birthday comes again, fourteen years now under your belt, you feel solid for the first time in your entire life. Stable. Your shape is malleable only through your will, and your ink feels most right when it smears a color like the sky. Only one neighbor checks on you anymore, an old friend of your parents’, and she brings with her a little cake and fresh catfish from the valley.

“Thida, dear,” she says as you eat, “I…I wish they were here to see what a lovely Inkling you’ve become. You look like the both of them, you know?”

Her gift to you is a bus ticket to Inkopolis, round trip, and an ink-gun she called a Splattershot Jr. You should go do something fun, she says, get away from ghosts for a while. You hold the ticket in your hands, and you close your eyes, and you know immediately that you’ll only use it one way.

When you board the bus, you take very little with you. Just your parents’ stash of cash, the Splattershot Jr, the picture you all took last year, your father’s poncho, and your mother’s goggles. You can see the city miles before you’re even close, scraping the sky and glowing in the night, and stepping off the bus is like being thrust into an entirely new world. Inkopolis is loud. Inkopolis is crowded. Inkopolis thrums with Inklings your age, yawns wide as they make their way home, ink weapons of all types slung over shoulders. They look at you with curious glances, some snickering behind hands at your attire.

“So not fresh. Amirite?”

“Newb to the extreme!”

“Yo, toss that trash in a can! Hahah!”

Those…seem like insults. You think. But you don’t get why they’re insults at all, so you ignore them. Quick enough you find a tiny place to live, an apartment by the train station that’s loud as anything at all times of the day. The landlord mentions Turf Wars as a good source of income, should you need something to pay the rent, and the next morning you make for the central plaza, Splattershot Jr in hand. As you enter, you see two grown squids delivering a news report on a big screen – their pictures are plastered most anywhere, so you already know they’re Callie and Marie, the Squid Sisters who sing like sea sirens and whose songs play from most any café you’ve passed. There are pictures behind them of the green tower where the Turf War lobby is, and they look nervous as they indicate a missing Zapfish – The Great Zapfish, apparently.

As you approach the tower, putting the news report out of your mind, you have no idea that your life-changing move is about to be even more life-changing than you ever expected.