Every Bone a Prayer

by Ashley Blooms

  “Wake up,” she screamed to them, though her mouth remained cinched tight, her teeth biting into the soft skin of her cheek. “Wake up!”

  The birds startled, their wings fluttering before they even felt the need to fly, their bodies responding to Misty’s call. “Wake up. Please wake up.”

  William said, “I just wanted something nice to happen, and the garden seemed so lonely, and I was…”

  The birds took to the air, the birds a lightness in her chest, a weight without a fall. They swept through the trees and flew toward the barn.

  William said, “You touched the bottle and I kissed your cheek and now it’ll be even better, what grows next. It’ll be even better because of this.”

  The birds landed on the roof, a dozen, then two—their bodies red and brown and gold and blue. Their feet scratched the tin as they skittered for purchase, crowding together on the far side of the barn, the one where the sun took the longest to reach every morning. The garden sensed her fear and confusion and it called out to her, but Misty ignored its voice. She pushed the garden away and focused on the birds even as her connection with them began to falter and her body started to pull her back again. Her body, aching. Her body, afraid.

  “Please,” Misty said to the birds. Their heads turned back toward the woods, wondering why they had gone, yearning for the warmth of their nests. “Please don’t go.”

  William said, “It’ll be even better now.”

  A car pulled into the driveway.

  William jumped away from Misty, and she sagged to her knees. She let out a long breath and the door in her chest slammed shut. The birds lifted from the barn, scraping and screeching, their wings buffeting the air. Misty pressed her back against the wall and turned so she could see William standing above her.

  “Are you okay?” He stooped in front of her and squinted at her face in the dark. He stroked her hair with his hand, his fingers barely grazing her scalp like he was afraid to touch her now. “It’s not bad, what we did. Okay? I have to go now. But it’s okay, Misty. Everything’s going to be okay.”

  William tore a splinter from the wall where Misty’s hand had been, and then he was gone, ducking under the sawhorses and running through the door.

  Twenty-Two

  The sheet that Penny tacked onto the ceiling rippled when Misty opened the door and revealed, in a glimpse, her sister lying on her back with a flashlight in her hand, a book propped against her knees, three training bras slung around the end of the bedpost, and a backpack lying open on the floor. Misty walked to her side of the room and stood before the bedsheet.

  She opened her mouth to call her sister’s name, but something else came rushing up—heat in her cheeks, tears to her eyes. She could think of no name for what had just happened to her. If she made one up herself it would sound like the heavy suck of mud against bare toes, glass broken and glittering, glass cutting into skin, glass shattered and put back and shattered again.

  There was a frantic feeling in her palms, as though they wanted to split at the wrist and sweep to the sky like bats circling. They wanted to never come back again, never to be part of a girl like Misty.

  How could she tell Penny that?

  How could she explain what happened in the barn without explaining why? If she told Penny about the barn, then she had to talk about the statues, too, the green bottle, and about how she spoke to the world, and how William thought that she was the thing that made the statues grow. That all of it, somehow, was her fault.

  Penny’s flashlight shifted. The beam landed on the middle of the sheet, its light concentrated in the center like a small, pale sun.

  “I don’t care where you went,” Penny whispered. “I won’t even tell if you just leave me alone, all right?”

  The light clicked off and the springs in Penny’s bed creaked as she turned to her side, her back pointed to Misty.

  Misty sat down on the floor. She couldn’t think of going to bed now. She didn’t want to feel anything pressing against her back, no softness, no quilt, nothing. She drew her knees to her chest and touched the sheet that hung in the center of their room. The sheet shared its name with Misty—the feeling of fibers twining together, of many small things making one—and it waited for Misty to share her own but she couldn’t. Not when she knew what would be waiting for her within it.

  Tears spilled down her cheeks as she drew her hand away. She hiccuped and clenched her toes against the carpet to keep from sobbing, and she let the tears fall without really feeling them.

  Eventually, the sun came up and pale-yellow light filtered through the room. Penny’s snores softened and a cabinet door opened and closed in the kitchen as their mother started to make breakfast. Only then did Misty turn away from the sheet, when morning came and she knew that she wasn’t alone. Only then did she roll onto her side there on the carpet and close her eyes.

  * * *

  That day, a spiral appeared behind the green glass man.

  It was nearly as tall as Misty, its bronze back curved and curving. The spiral chased itself until there was nowhere left to go, until it ended in the center, its tip as sharp as a needle. When Misty looked at it she saw herself. She saw the way she felt—the tightness in her chest, the swirling of her stomach, around and around, unending, and she was more sure than ever that the statues grew from her and from William.

  Earl touched the tip of the spiral once and jerked back his hand, gasping. He lifted his finger to the light where a bright-red dot of blood quivered on his skin.

  Twenty-Three

  It rained. A heavy, driving rain whose fists pounded against the trailer and overflowed the clogged gutters. A rain too much for the ground to hold so the water stripped the dirt from the driveway, carried it away to someplace new, someplace the dirt hadn’t chosen. The rain pooled in the yard in shallow puddles, turned the crawdad chimneys into mud that weighed the grass down.

  Misty wedged herself in the narrow space between the couch and her father’s recliner. She pretended that it was a boat and the storm outside raged around her on a dark and choppy sea. She’d been traveling with a team of other boats but they’d gotten separated and now she was on her own. She’d taken a bag of chips from the kitchen cabinet and a handful of M&M’s and those were her rations, all the food she had to last until she found land again. Her mother’s green strings swayed on the walls and ceiling. Misty had taken a shed crawdad skin from the box under her bed—the last one the crawdads had given to her—and she ran her thumb gently over its translucent back. She tried to reach out to the crawdads in her yard, but they still didn’t answer.

  Or couldn’t.

  She wasn’t sure exactly what the garden did to make the crawdads do what it wanted, but now it seemed as though the garden was the only thing the crawdads could hear. They were shut off from Misty in a way that made her uneasy. They hadn’t even reached out to her when she’d been in the barn with William, even though they had to feel what was happening. They were the closest thing to her in all the world and now they were gone, too.

  The front door flung open and Misty’s mother hurried inside, little raindrops hanging like diamonds from the messy bun that drooped across her shoulders. The storm yanked the door from her hand, slammed it against the trailer, and held it there as the wind poured inside, bringing the scent of cold water and drenched earth. Misty tugged on the green string taped to the wall behind her, drawing her boat away from her mother. She huddled deeper into the shadows of the recliner.

  Misty’s mother watched the storm for a moment, silhouetted in the open doorway. The statues in Earl’s garden glinted beyond her right hip. She seemed to be remembering something before she shook it off and pulled the door closed. She dropped a soggy envelope onto the coffee table and didn’t notice Misty wedged in the corner.

  Her mother carried a dish towel and a cold can of pop from the kitchen and knelt behind the end table. She sho
ok the envelope until a stack of money slipped out, then dried each of the bills, even the ones that didn’t look damp at all by pressing them gently between the folds of the dish towel before stacking them into narrow towers.

  Misty felt a knocking at the back of her mind, like someone pounding on a door at the end of a long, dark hallway. It was the garden. It had been calling all morning just that way, a gentle, persistent push, and every time Misty had pushed it away. The trailer had called out to her, too, and the figurines on the television stand and the crows that lived down by the creek, and she’d pushed them all away. She didn’t know how much the garden had seen last night in the barn or how much it felt through the connection it shared with Misty. But the garden had been there, briefly, and even that was too much. Even thinking of the barn made her feel frantic, like there was something small and clawed inside her chest that would tear her apart to get free. Her fingers felt sticky and warm so Misty wiped them on the carpet, but the feeling lingered, as though the damp was underneath her skin.

  When her mother finished drying the money, she brought out a separate stack of envelopes from inside her purse. In her mind, Misty was still on the boat and her mother was an old witch woman who lived alone on an island. She was hunched inside her little cabin checking her spells, sorting her ingredients. The envelopes her mother pulled from her purse were weathered and worn. Some of them were coffee-stained, and others held together with pieces of tape. They were all labeled in her mother’s neat handwriting: one for each of the bills their family had to pay.

  The money disappeared from the table by inches, whisked into the envelopes. By the time the table was empty, most of the envelopes had been filled. Misty’s mother looked down at each of them and frowned. Then she bowed her head. Her lips moved but no sounds came until she whispered, “Amen,” and Misty mouthed the word like an echo.

  Her mother reopened the envelopes like a magician reaching into his hat, hoping for a rabbit. She snatched a five-dollar bill here, a ten there, and eventually she took the only bill—a twenty—from an envelope marked SAVINGS and sat the money on the corner. She sighed, leaned back, closed her eyes. She seemed so still that Misty was tempted to reach out to her mother, to share her name and try to build a bridge between them. There was something about the softness to her mother’s features and the quiet drumming of the rain that made it feel suddenly possible. Like maybe everything Misty wanted could come true after all.

  But speaking to her mother would mean speaking her name, and that meant her mother would see the barn and William. She would see Misty pressed against the wall, and the thought of that alone made Misty’s throat close up and her cheeks flush. Her mother had been so angry when she found out that Misty had played spin the bottle with William. She might think she was just playing another game, that she’d caused it somehow, and she’d never forgive Misty for what had happened. She’d never see her the same way again.

  Her mother’s eyes snapped open, and she caught sight of Misty’s face peering between the couch and the recliner. She jumped. “Misty? Good Lord, I didn’t even know you were there. What’re you doing?”

  Misty pressed the tape on the green string back into the wall and her boat pulled into the sand of her mother’s island, creaking and leaking. She swallowed the sadness in her throat and whispered, “I’m on a boat.”

  Her mother lifted her eyebrows. She looked around Misty, and for a moment, the boat almost shimmered into existence, solid and whole, its great wooden sides creaking as Misty peered through a porthole. “Oh, I see. And what’s the boat called?”

  “The SS Crawdad.”

  Her mother laughed. “It’s a very worthy vessel.”

  “You want to join me?” Misty asked. “There’s plenty of room.” She scooted back to make an empty space for her mother to crawl inside. If she came, they could go anywhere. They could sail the open sea and discover someplace no one had ever seen. They could do it together.

  Her mother smiled. She leaned forward to inspect the narrow space and Misty thought that, for a moment, she might really join her. Then she shook her head and said, “Why don’t you come out here on land with me?”

  Misty’s heart sank a little, but she climbed out of her boat anyway, leaving the shed crawdad skin behind to guard her snacks. She poked one of the envelopes on the coffee table. “That’s a lot of money.”

  “Mmm, it sure seems like it, don’t it? It gets gone quicker than you might think. The electricity eats it up and the trailer eats it up and little girls eat it up.” She pinched Misty’s sides until Misty smiled.

  “Where’d it all come from?”

  “Your daddy left it for us.”

  “Is he here?”

  “No, he dropped it off in the mailbox. He’s working again.”

  “Oh.” Misty leaned her head against the couch, and her mother smoothed her bangs away from her face. “Is he going to come back?”

  “He’ll be by for a visit soon.”

  “What about for good, though?”

  “I think so. Sometimes grown-ups just need time apart for a while. To get things right.”

  Misty nodded as though she understood, but she wasn’t sure what her parents had gotten wrong in the first place. Being apart seemed like the wrong thing to do, not staying together. She said, “I wouldn’t mind some time away from Penny.”

  Her mother smiled. “I thought that way about Jem and Dolly when I was your age, but now I don’t know what I’d do without them.”

  Misty snorted. “I know just what I’d do without her.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  Misty nodded. “What’s that money over there for?”

  “Well,” her mother said, “you know it’s the Fourth of July soon. There’s going to be fireworks in town tonight, and I thought we could all go together. Take some blankets to put on the hood of the car and stop at Dairy Queen for some chicken tenders.”

  “And a Blizzard?” Misty said.

  “And a Blizzard.”

  “I’m going to get Oreo.” Misty smiled and for a moment she forgot all about the barn and the garden and her father and the statues. “Is Penny coming?”

  “Yes, your sister is coming.”

  “Is she getting a Blizzard?”

  “Yes.”

  Misty sighed.

  Their mother smiled. “We just have to hope the rain lets off, or they might have to cancel it all together.”

  The rain did let off, and they all piled into their mother’s car that evening and drove into town. Town was the place where Misty and Penny would go to high school one day, the place with four restaurants and two stoplights, the Save A Lot, a long bridge decorated with little American flags on sticks, and a crowd of people. The fireworks always took place over the football field near the high school. People parked all along the road, and some walked to the field with blankets and folding chairs while others sat in the beds of their trucks. They bought food from the restaurants in town or brought food of their own, and everyone milled around talking and laughing.

  Their mother found a parking spot behind Dolly’s truck. She spread a blanket on the hood of the car and helped Misty and Penny on top. She tucked napkins into the collars of their shirts and spread the food they’d bought between them.

  “Don’t let it get cold now,” she said, stealing one of Misty’s fries.

  Dolly and her daughter Charlene came pouring out of the trunk, and Jem followed in her favorite pair of coveralls, one buckle undone to show a bright-yellow shirt beneath.

  “I swear you just about glow in the dark in that thing,” Misty’s mother said.

  Jem grinned. “That way you’ll never lose me.”

  “There’s no chance of that,” Dolly said. She hugged Misty and Penny both, but she hugged their mother the longest.

  “You been on my mind a sight lately,” she said. “Every morning I wake up and
see your face when you tried to cut your own bangs. You remember that?”

  “It’s hard to forget,” their mother said. “Where are the big kids at?”

  “Sam said they were all going to LeeCo for a fireworks show with their friends,” Dolly said. “They’re supposed to be back before ten.”

  Jem snorted. “I swear Jamie told me they were going to Caney Fork. It’s untelling what’s going on between the three of them. They’re as bad as we were.”

  Dolly straightened the hem of their mother’s shirt. “Did you talk to Mrs. Gray yet? She was asking about you.”

  “If you’re wondering if she’s still alive, the answer is yes.” Jem shook her head. “That old woman’s going to outlive everything but the cockroaches.”

  Dolly smacked Jem’s arm. “She’s three cars down. In the blue van. Go on and say hello. We’ll keep an eye on the girls.”

  Dolly waited until their mother was out of sight before she twisted Misty’s calf to the side to reveal the pale ghost of the cuts from her whipping. “Them’s some awful mean-looking marks on those legs.”

  Misty pulled her leg away. She didn’t like anyone seeing the marks, especially Jem and Dolly. She didn’t want them to think worse of her for what she had done to deserve the whipping.

  “I’ve had worse,” Charlene said.

  “Please,” Dolly said. “The worst you ever got was a pat on your behind.”

  “Which explains some things,” Jem said. Charlene stuck out her tongue, and Jem nodded to the child as though her tongue were evidence. “The good Lord said it Himself: ‘Spare the rod.’”

  “It must be nice to pick and choose the things you and the Lord agree on,” Dolly said. “I don’t reckon I’d have turned out worse if Daddy had spared me the belt a few times.”

  “I swear that man could catch a bare piece of skin thirty feet away in a dense fog.” Jem rubbed her arm as she talked, but there was a hint of pride in her voice. “Daddy couldn’t walk a straight line if his life depended on it, but he sure could whip an ass.”