Prodigal

Susan, so far as she could tell at least, was a decent human being; she made mistakes, yes, but they never added up to anything more than a few drops of oil in holy water.
At least, she liked to think she was holy. She wasn't entirely sure after the fire.
She must have left the oven on, or maybe the stove, or something to justify the blaze. Her husband, Pan, got out quickly, though he didn't save anyone in the house. Susan didn't have the time to question why; she just looked for her children, John and Margaret. She found John rushing out his room and into the living room, alarm screaming in the background. He got out safely. But what about Margaret?
The odd part is that she didn't really know how she felt at that moment, blue wallpaper turning black. Even afterwards, she couldn't quite identify the emotion. She was depersonalized, cleaved from all feelings.
Margaret was nowhere to be seen. The firemen were there by then -- Pan must have called them -- and they carried Susan out. Her expression was blank. She was blank.
She finally started feeling something when the firefighters came out with no Margaret.
"We have bad news," one of them said.

It had been about a year since the fire, and Pan was detached from Susan's life for good. The divorce wasn't too messy -- it was like cutting a chicken's head off, clean and simple, but still painful for the chicken.
Susan never saw Margaret again. She wasn't 100% sure when the last time she saw her was -- definitely the night before the fire, but when? And what were her last words? She was only five, for Christ's sake. She didn't want to see the body the fireman pulled out, nor did she want to know where in the house it came from. It must have been charred. Disgusting. Broken beyond repair. Or maybe it wasn't, and it was the lungs that were affected more than anything.
The house was repaired, save for Margaret's room. They washed the home over before the whole house could be ravaged in the inferno.
Was it a home? It must've been -- they loved it. The kids grew up in it. It had people in it, wasn't that what made it a home? The old, tired phrase "home is where the heart is" didn't cut it. There was some other force at play.
Regardless of the definition of a home, one thing was certain: Pan was not a part of it. It took Susan a while to figure out that punches were not a sign of love -- and that was after the divorce.

Susan got into her bed and pulled the blanket over her eyes. And cried. Eventually the crying became a ambivalent action. She felt something, which was, to her knowledge, grief. Or at least something related. But at the same time she felt absolutely nothing -- crying became a routinely thing. A ritual, as if she were praying to some kind of god. She took a drink of the glass of water on her bedside, sighed, and fell asleep.

(Dreams dreams etc.)

"Mommy?" Margaret said.
If Susan had learned anything in her time of