When the Moon was Ours

by Anna-Marie McLemore

They were too much entangled, Miel and her roses, like two trees that could not be pulled apart without killing both. Ivy had pulled a rose from her by its roots, and enough blood came with it to dye her clothes, to turn every breath into a gasp. She was bleeding out so much red her skin looked like countless petals, enough for a wide, endless garden of scarlet roses.

  She wished her roses were the magic Ivy thought they were. She wished a cup of fluffy petals, their bay-laurel-oil-and-lavender smell, could make a woman realize she was in love with a man who sold las flores de calabazas at the market. She wished its perfume could make that woman brave enough to tell him that the soft pumpkin taste of the blossoms he grew was forever making her think of kissing him.

  Her poor mother. All the stories Miel’s father told her, those tales about the treachery of those roses, how they would turn Miel against her, how they would make her nothing but a creature possessed by the things that grew inside her. Her mother was right to try to save Miel from those petals. Because those petals, and the fact that Ivy and her sisters had wanted them, were killing her now.

  Light swam through her vision, like gold glitter from the cascarones they broke at Easter. Blood slicked her collarbone as she held her forearm against her chest.

  Her body was not a garden. It was not earth waiting to be rid of brambles and weeds. Ivy had bled that rose out of her body, and now her life was coming with it.

  She raised her head, hoping to see the road, or the edge of any farm except the Bonners’.

  But her eyes found only the shine of stained glass, those etched stars and planets, brightened by flashes of moon that slipped through the trees.

  She could not get away from it. She’d thought she was crawling and dragging herself away, when all she was doing was dragging herself back. No matter where she pulled her body, it would wait for her. She was too lost to find a straight path away from it, and all those stars and planets of jewel-colored glass would draw her back.

  The Bonner girls would make the moon—the one in the sky and every one Sam had ever painted—disappear. They would take all that light into their skin.

  Miel resisted the feeling of her body going limp, but she was collapsing onto the ground. Her hands were too weak to do anything but open and close her fingers. The blood and air went out of her, and there was nothing but those whorls of green and violet.

  sea of cold

  The truth—Sam wasn’t afraid to admit this, and he doubted Aracely would’ve been either—was that this town liked his mother better than they liked him, or Aracely. Even though his mother was a generation closer to not being from this country, even if they would count that against anyone else, she charmed them. She laughed easily. She enchanted children into practicing instruments and trying foods and reading books their own parents couldn’t convince them to.

  That made her the best choice to ask around if anyone had seen Miel. Aracely took the farms, the orchards where she bought bergamot oranges and the families that sold her Araucana and Faverolles eggs. And Sam searched the woods, these trees he’d mapped with the light of his moons.

  He carried with him a moon, cold and blue as the one in the sky. It lit the ground as he walked. It chilled the warmth of the rust-colored trees.

  It found a ribbon of deep red cutting through a carpet of gold leaves.

  The thought of Aracely’s wrist, bleeding the same as Miel’s, made the leaves look like they were turning to blades, each branch covered in knives.

  “Miel?” He held up the moon, following that band of red.

  A soft gasping sound pulled him deeper into a grove of yellow trees.

  He stopped. In front of him was the stained glass box he’d found her locked in.

  The gasping sound flared again, pulling his eyes down.

  He dropped the moon. The candle flame flickered before the wick caught again.

  She was a dark shape, clutching her arm to her chest, her hair fluttering with how hard she was trying to breathe.

  “Miel.” He knelt next to her, saying her name again, and again.

  His body felt like it was turning into one of his own moons, his skin and muscle a frame of paper, his heart a lit candle.

  Her eyes were half-closed, her shirt and jeans patched with stains that were drying red-brown. A slick of new red, wet and bright as pomegranate seeds, covered her forearm.

  Her rose. It had been pulled out by the stem, and its absence was costing her all this blood.

  “What happened?” he asked. “Who did this to you?”

  She opened her mouth like she was trying to answer, but there was no sound except her breath rasping against her dry lips.

  He saw his hands doing the things he knew to do. Unbuttoning his shirt, wrapping it around her forearm, tying it to slow the bleeding. Taking her arm, the one not coated in blood. Putting it around his shoulder. He felt her damp skin, sensed his hands moving.

  But the candle at his center had turned cold, a wick darkening to an ember and then going out. And all that cold pulled so deep into the core of him that he didn’t even feel the bite of the air against his bare forearms. He didn’t feel the chill of the earth against the shins of his jeans, or through his undershirt and his binder.

  “Hold on to me, okay?” he said, and the words were as unsteady as his breathing. There had to be a way to move her without hurting her more. They had to be able to help her before the empty place in her forearm gave up all the blood she had.

  Her body trembled against him, the movement slight as her petals underwater. Sam held on to her, trying to steady her, her wrist held between them. The wound let off water and blood. It soaked through the shirt he’d tied around her forearm.

  Sam found the recognition in her eyes. The hollow in his chest turned tight and hot.

  Her roses were as much the life in her as her heart. And the way she bled was killing her.

  Miel grabbed Sam’s other hand, the blood on her palm slicking his. She held on so hard her fingers trembled.

  He tried to ease his hand out of hers. “You’ve got to let go, okay?”

  She didn’t loosen her grip.

  “Please don’t leave,” she said, the words dry and wrung-out.

  She put all the force and will she had into holding his hand, hard enough that he could feel her slowing pulse against his palm. Hard enough that he was losing the feeling in his fingertips.

  “I’m not leaving you,” he said.

  But her eyelashes flickered, the recognition leaving her. Her skin felt damp, fevered. She was too far away to hear him, but close enough to hold on to his hand so hard he couldn’t get his fingers back without hurting her. He needed both his hands to help her, but she held on so tight he felt it wringing the blood out of her. She was giving what little strength she had, the force left in her heart and her breathing, to keeping her grasp on him. And if he waited until she was weak enough that it slackened, he’d lose her.

  He was losing her, this girl who built with him each night a world so much softer and more beautiful than the one he woke to in the morning. She was the wild blossoms and dark sugar that spoke of what the world could be. She was the pale stars on her brown skin.

  She was the whole sky.

  That was the cruelest thing about losing someone. In being lost, they became so many different people, even more than when they were there. To Aracely, she would be the lost sister who had only begun to understand that the woman she lived with was made of a boy name Leandro, and a hundred thousand yellow butterflies, and the bright, wild wish to be as she really was.

  To Sam, she was the girl who gave his moons somewhere to go. She was the dark amber of beechwood honey, the caramel of sourwood, and the bitter aftertaste of heather and pine. She was every shade of blue between two midnights.

  And she was slipping from his grasp because she would not let go.

  lake of perseverance

  The world darkened and brightened. The wind cupped the thread of her mother’s crying, weak and soft.

 
; Only the slowing rhythm of her pulse in her wound made her sure she was still alive.

  His hands on her took her out of these woods, back to a night when he left a rose moon in the beech tree outside her window. And she let herself slip out of the feeling of bleeding from her wrist, and into that first rush of light that had made her wonder if it was spring. It had brought the sudden feeling of being in a different month. Thinking winter was months away and realizing it was October.

  This pale, rose-colored light had made her expect to look out her window and find all the trees blooming. A million blushing petals against a midnight sky. Spring descending over fall in countless pink blossoms. That blush on the whole world had turned her next breath into something between a gasp and a laugh. She could almost feel it in her mouth now, almost laughed like that again, but the salt at the back of her throat choked it out of her.

  She sank under the memory of finding the trees outside not in blossom, but all amber and gold, tinted with that rose light. Instead of disappointment, it made her feel covered in the sound of his name. Sam. Samir. Moon. All the names she knew for him. Only one of his moons could make the world slip into another season.

  Miel opened her eyes as much as she could, her eyelashes shading her vision. She slipped her fingers tight between Sam’s.

  She felt his heartbeat in his chest. She heard him saying her name over and over, the two of them breaking against each other.

  Her eyes stung, and stayed dry. She had nothing left but the will to hold on to his hand, not to lose him. The water had taken Leandro. It had almost taken Sam. She wasn’t letting go. All the strength in her body she let pour toward her fingers like sand. The night would not turn to water and tear his hand from hers. No matter how much the dark became a river and the wind a current, no matter how much blood Ivy’s pale fingers had taken from her, Miel would not let go of Sam.

  Through the slow, loud rhythm of her own pulse in her temples, she heard him sobbing into her hair. The sound was so low, it disappeared. He was holding it tight in his throat, like he meant to stay quiet. His breathing was hard enough that she felt it staggered with his heartbeat.

  She wanted to lift her hand to his cheek, to still any drops on his face before their salt reached his lips or his neck. There wasn’t a reason to cry, or be afraid. She wasn’t letting go, wasn’t losing him. If her lips had given up any sound, she would’ve told him.

  A lock of his hair brushed Miel’s cheek, like a whip of cool air. But her skin was so hot she barely felt it. He was holding her so close his eyelashes feathered against her cheek. And she meant to hold on to these things, not lose them like silver charms slipping from her fingers and falling into dark water.

  The soft brush of something small and wispy grazed Miel’s cheek. She thought it was his eyelashes, or another lock of his hair, but then she felt it again.

  The cool film of petals.

  She looked up at Sam.

  Instead of the salt of his tears, tiny rose petals, red as the blood she was losing, clung to his cheeks. One had caught on the inner corner of his eye. Another had stuck to his lower lip, a third on his temple.

  He blinked, and another fell from his eyelashes.

  A flicker of movement tilted inside her forearm. She felt a new burst of growth breaking through to the light. She held her gasp in her lungs, and glanced down at the green shoot, covered in tiny new leaves.

  It was curling out, taking on the woody look of a rose stem. Then it uncoiled, turning green and pliable, like a morning glory vine.

  One thorn snagged the fabric of Sam’s shirt, pulling it back enough to find its way out of the cloth he’d tied around her arm. Then it unfurled and reached Sam’s bare wrist, pressing into him. He flinched but then relaxed, and for that second she thought she could feel what he felt, the pain clean and sudden as a needle.

  Then Miel felt the pull, a shift between her veins.

  Red lit up the stem, the leaves and thorns tinted gold like sun on a dragonfly.

  The stem was drawing blood out of Sam. Miel could feel it dripping into her.

  She tried to twist away from it, to stop taking from Sam when she had already taken so much from him.

  But now he held on to her, his fingers sure. Before his hand had been tense and twitching against hers. Now it kept her still.

  The glow traveled from his wrist to hers, like the stem was pulling from his body not blood but light.

  He held his wrist closer to hers, giving his blood to the lit-up stem. She didn’t want to take it from him, to strip from him something that belonged to his body. But now he held on to her harder than she’d held on to him. Now he wouldn’t let her break away from him any more than she’d let his hand go.

  The few petals clinging to his cheek rained onto her neck and collarbone. The stem curled away from Sam’s wrist, drawing back so close to Miel’s that it tucked under the fabric of Sam’s shirt around her wrist. And her body began to feel like a living thing again, her heart no longer shuddering.

  The world came back to her in time to hear the Bonner sisters, their voices twisting in the air like strands of a braid.

  eastern sea

  Giving her his blood had left his wrist sore, a good kind. His body felt that way after he’d spent the afternoon hauling in the biggest field and Cinderella pumpkins. The stem had pulled back toward Miel’s wrist, and the cut from the thorn felt clean, already healing.

  He felt Miel shifting her weight.

  “Can you help me get up?” she asked.

  If she hadn’t been so streaked in her own blood, her shirt so dyed red, he would’ve laughed. She couldn’t stand on her own. The flush had come back into her cheeks and her lips, but she was still shaking enough that he was ready to carry her if he had to.

  She was already leaning on him, trying to get to her feet. He steadied her, standing with her, holding an arm around her waist.

  “You have to leave,” she said, but she wasn’t looking at him. She was watching a point between the trees, a dark space among the fingers of yellow leaves.

  It wasn’t until the wind calmed that he heard why.

  The sound of the Bonner girls’ voices, the mingling of higher and lower pitches, their shared cadence. But instead of reckless and laughing, their voices sounded taut and pressing. They hushed each other.

  “Did they do this to you?” he asked. Every time he’d covered for Peyton, every time he’d tried to remind Lian that she was not as slow as everyone thought, each hour he’d worked for Mr. Bonner, stuck him like the thorns on his mother’s Callery pear tree. Not the short, clean thorns on Miel’s roses. The Callery pear’s were little daggers, rough, and each as long as Miel’s fingers.

  He felt the warmth of Miel’s palm on his collarbone. Her blood had stained his undershirt, and her hand left a soft imprint of red.

  Now she was looking at him. “You have to leave.”

  “Miel,” he said, their faces close enough that he could see her pupils spreading and contracting. “Are they the ones who did this to you?”

  “Go,” she said. “You have to leave.”

  “So do you,” he said.

  “I’m not backing down on this,” she said, looking toward the trees. Fear cut into the resolve in her voice. “I’m not backing down from them. Not anymore.”

  “And I’m not leaving you alone.”

  “Dammit, Sam.” She broke away from him.

  The sudden movement must have hurt her. She clutched her wrist against her, rubbing the back of her forearm with her other hand. Her steps wavered, and he set a hand on her back.

  Her eyes were so coated in tears she was a blink from them spilling over. She stared, her mouth half-open.

  The trembling in her eyelashes and lips was more than pain. It almost looked like pity. Her pursed lips, the slight tilt to her head, the cringe of a lost cause. Like Sam was a child trying to bring back to life a bird fallen from a nest.

  “They know about you,” she said.

  Each w
ord was another thorn off that pear tree. Their points didn’t slide all the way into him, like the thought of the Bonner sisters hurting Miel. But they pricked him, left him scratched.

  “What?” he asked.

  “They saw your birth certificate,” she said. “They have a copy.”

  Now those thorns were shredding his clothes, cutting them away from his body.

  “They could out you to everyone,” Miel said. She stumbled forward, away from his hand. That film of water spilled over and fell down her cheeks.

  He could not shrug away the sense that his shirt, his binder, his jeans, were all turning to pieces. They were falling away from him, leaving him naked to the night and all these trees.

  But it was his body. It was his to name. And he was under this roof of gold and darkness with a girl who would learn to call him whatever he named himself.

  He would never let go of Samira, that girl his mother imagined when he was born. She would follow him, a blur he thought he saw out of the corner of his eye when he stood at the counter, making roti with his mother. Or he would see the silhouette of Samira crossing the woods, wearing the skirts that fit her but he could never make himself fit. Maybe one day he would see her shape, her dark hands setting the lantern of a hollow pumpkin into the water, candle lighting the carved shapes.

  But this was what she would be now, his shadow, an echo of what he once was and thought he would be again. She would be less like someone he was supposed to become, and more like a sister who lived in places he could not map, a sister who kept a light but constant grasp on both his hand and his grandmother’s.

  No one could make him be Samira. Not him. Not the Bonner sisters. Not the signatures on that piece of paper.

  The girl he needed did not hide and wait inside him. She stood with him. She always had, this girl of wildflowers and feather grass, this girl he’d painted a thousand lunar seas, a hundred incarnations of mare nectaris and sinus iridum.

  Sam pulled Miel into him, her forearm the only thing between them. “I don’t care what they have,” he said.