Every Bone a Prayer

by Ashley Blooms

  “I don’t know,” Misty sobbed. “I don’t know what it’s called. I ain’t never met nobody who could do it but me. I talk to things sometimes. Birds or crawdads. The barn. And sometimes they talk back to me. In my head. They use pictures. Sometimes they use words. I want you to look now, Penny.”

  Forty

  Misty walked through the garden to the place where the statue of the bird stood on its clawed feet, its wings outstretched, always on the edge of flying, but never really leaving. A thin crack etched its way over the bird’s eye and splintered across its beak. If she wanted, Misty could use her name to make the statue turn back into what it had been before. She could split herself into even more pieces and undo what Caroline had done. Everything would seem normal again.

  But then she wouldn’t be any different from Earl or William or Caroline.

  It didn’t have to be that way, though. She could give them a choice, like the one she had made to come back to her body.

  “You don’t have to do this,” Caroline whispered.

  “If I don’t, then everything’s going to get worse. There’s already cracks in the statues. Some of the crawdads died.”

  “I didn’t know that at first,” Caroline said. “I swear. I didn’t know that calling something out of its name hurts it. But if you do it long enough, it can kill it. I think—I think when you rename something like your skin, it stops changing. Stops growing. And names have to change to be names. They have to grow. I should have known. That’s how I felt my whole life. Stuck.”

  “It don’t have to be that way,” Misty said.

  She cupped her hand around the birds’ feathers. They were hard and cold beneath her palm, and Misty shivered. She aimed her words at Caroline. “I thought these statues were about what William did to me in the barn. That maybe I was making them, somehow.” And just the thought was enough to make Misty’s shoulder slump again, her body eager to fall to her feet, to abandon her to her bones, but Misty held on. “But then I figured it out. You made the statues. You said you didn’t when I asked, but you mixed your name in with theirs and made them change. Didn’t you?”

  Caroline didn’t answer.

  Misty said, “There were birds in your tree that night. When Earl found you. They were scared for you. They didn’t want you to get hurt.”

  “They were the only friends I ever had,” Caroline said. “Nobody else cared what happened to me.”

  “That’s not true. My aunt Dolly wishes she had helped you when she could. She remembers you singing ‘Prayer Bells of Heaven.’ Do you remember that?” Misty hummed a few notes from the chorus, and the ground shuddered beneath her feet. “Dolly feels bad all the time for what she didn’t do.”

  “She should!”

  “I know,” Misty said. “It wasn’t fair. But it’s not fair what you did to these things, either. What if this doesn’t want to be a bird? Are you going to keep it like this forever?”

  “No,” Caroline said.

  “Then let it go. Let it choose for itself.”

  Misty opened her chest and called out to the thing that William had buried, the thing it had been before Caroline turned it into a bird—a Christmas ornament with a manger scene painted on one side. Misty reached back to the day she had held the ornament in her hand, the cool weight of it in her palm, the glitter of its stars scratching her fingers as William backed her against the barn wall, and all the while she had been worried about breaking the ornament, worried about squeezing too hard, afraid that it would shatter. And the ornament had spoken to her. It had shown her every tree it had ever hung on, filled her head with the bright reflection of green and red lights, the smell of pine needles and plastic, the rip of wrapping paper, a dozen faces reflected in its glass. It had been there for her when she needed it most, and she thanked it over and over again. She shared the memory with Caroline and she smelled the barn again—musty and dry—and she felt the heat of the day collect on her skin and the sticky touch of William’s palm on her wrist, and her whole heart ached.

  She said, “You don’t have to be a bird anymore. Not if you don’t want to.”

  The sound that came next was like ice cracking on a frozen pond, something deep and shifting, giving way. There was a jolt in the air, like something had fallen from a great height, and Misty felt it resonate through her.

  When she opened her eyes, the bird splintered.

  A crack raced along its middle and then spread into another crack and another until there were dozens racing across the bird’s wings, its throat, until the bird collapsed—a thousand little pieces falling. The pieces stirred a cloud of dust as they landed, and when the dust settled, the ornament was lying on the ground just as Misty remembered it.

  Penny didn’t move an inch. She gripped the fence beneath her, her mouth hanging open slightly. All she saw was Misty touching the statues. She didn’t hear what she said to Caroline or to the bird, and Misty couldn’t imagine how it must look to her as Misty turned to the ax.

  “This is what he used,” Misty said to Caroline. “And it was terrible, and I’m sorry that he did that to you. I’m sorry that you didn’t get to be what you wanted.”

  “He killed me,” Caroline said.

  “I know.”

  “And nobody even cares. Nothing even happened to him. He gets to live. Still. How can that be fair?”

  “It’s not.” Misty’s whole chest heaved. She felt so full of sadness and hurt—her own and everyone else’s. She wasn’t sure that she could bear it much longer. Misty’s trailer reached out to her. It offered her a different feeling—a dozen different hands reaching for its front door. A lighter touch. A so-glad-to-be-here, can’t-wait-to-rest touch. Misty let the feeling settle over her as long as she could.

  “Earl’s alive,” Caroline said. “And I’m not anything anymore.”

  “You’re Caroline,” Misty said.

  She wrapped her hand around the blade of the ax. She closed her eyes and thought of the toy car that the ax had been before, the slick of its wheels on her palm, the dent on its roof, the scratched paint that she’d stared at as she lay on her back. The car had spoken to her. It had shown her the pinch of fingers on its sides, the steady, guiding weight of a hand as its wheels grated over pavement and carpet and tile and dirt. The way it felt to be lifted in the air, to do impossible things, the sunlight glinting off its windshield, and further still, back to its making, back to heat and compression, back to the earth, back to where Misty lay with her eyes cinched closed counting off the seconds in her head. There had been a rock grinding against her shoulder then as William’s weight doubled on her chest, and she’d been so thirsty. That was all she could think of, her whole body narrowed down to the heat in her mouth, the frantic desire to get up and get a drink of water.

  “You were a toy car once,” Misty said. “You can be that again. Or be something else. Or stay the same. I don’t know what you want, but you get to decide.”

  As she touched it, the ax seemed to melt, its blade liquefying and pouring down, taking the handle with it, until the whole thing dissolved onto the ground and the dust lifted and settled, leaving the toy car behind.

  Misty stepped back and traced her finger along the spiral. Her reflection stared back at her, her eyes puffy from crying, and the dark shadow of Penny sitting on the fence behind her.

  “Caroline?” Misty said.

  Her voice was small when she answered. “I’m here.”

  “You used to sew these onto your clothes. My mom remembers that. She said she thought you was brave.”

  “No,” Caroline said. “She didn’t like me. None of them liked me.”

  “My mom did. She remembers you sewing these onto your clothes in class. In bright colors. She said she always liked them, but she never told you.”

  “Why not?” Caroline asked, and the why echoed through Misty, reverberating between her ears, her ribs, unt
il her whole body buzzed.

  Misty pressed her hand to the spiral.

  “Wait,” Caroline said. “If you take them all, then I won’t have anything left. I won’t have anything at all.”

  “They’re not yours,” Misty said.

  She closed her eyes and thought of the first night in the barn, how afraid she had been, how unsure of anything other than that something wrong was happening to her and that there was no way to stop its happening. The day replayed in front of her and in front of Caroline, all those moments Misty had run from, all those seconds she would have done anything to avoid.

  The spiral snapped in half and then in quarters and then in countless little pieces that fell to the dirt. The piece of wood that William had ripped from the barn was all that remained when it was over.

  Misty wiped her cheek against her shoulder and kept going, kept crying. She pressed her palm to the golden hand scarred by the birds’ claws and it crumbled into the brown glass bottle that William had brought to her in the woods. She traced her finger along the arc of the swinging bridge and it fell, piece by piece, to the ground, returning to the nails she’d clutched in her hand. She pressed her forehead to the dogwood tree that Caroline had been, briefly, the thing she’d wanted most in the world, but it fell, too, and became Shannon’s gold earring.

  The sun was higher by the time Misty turned to the green glass man. It was the first statue that had grown and the last left standing. Its body was webbed with a series of thin cracks, Caroline’s hold on it stretching, almost breaking already.

  Misty put her hand on the statue’s chest. “This was Earl, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes,” Caroline said.

  “You didn’t deserve to be hurt,” Misty said.

  “It was my fault. I should have left. I should have hurt him first, and worse than he ever hurt me. I shouldn’t have done what I did to that tree, but I was so afraid. I was so afraid that he’d kill me before I had the chance to leave.”

  “You did bad things,” Misty said. “That don’t make you bad. Not if you try to do better afterward. Remember?”

  “I don’t want to be her,” Caroline said. “I don’t want to be gone.”

  “I know.” Misty knelt on the ground, her fingers trailing down the green glass man’s body. She rested her head against the place where his knee should have been and shivered as his cold seeped into her. “You know what I hate?”

  “What?”

  “That I don’t get to pick my name,” Misty said. “I get to pick some of it, you know. But not all of it. I don’t want William to be part of my name.”

  “I don’t want Earl to be part of mine, either.”

  “But I can’t change it.” Misty wiped her hand across her face. “But that don’t mean I ain’t other things, too.”

  “You are,” Caroline said. “You’re a sweet girl. And brave and funny and smart.”

  “So were you,” Misty said. “I think we would’ve been friends, don’t you?”

  “Yeah. Yeah, I think we would have.”

  Another crack appeared in the green glass man. It raced from the bottom of his feet to the top of his head. It raised up a little, just enough to cut Misty’s hand if she wasn’t careful. Then the crack spread out, multiplying until the statue was more broken than whole. Misty turned her head as the statue crumbled in front of her and the dust rose around her face. When she looked back, the green glass bottle was lying on the dirt.

  “Misty—” Penny said.

  “I’m not done yet.”

  Penny nodded.

  If Misty picked up a shovel and tore the garden apart, she might find William there, somewhere. Or at least parts of him that she might recognize. But whatever William had been was gone, and there would be no bringing him back. He’d made his choice, and now Misty made hers.

  She pressed her palm against the dry, cold earth. Her whole body ached for Caroline, and she poured every ounce of that into her hands, cast it around the garden like a gentle touch.

  “I liked myself,” Caroline said, “a long time ago.”

  “I like you now,” Misty said.

  Caroline curled in Misty’s palms like two heavy stones. “I did all this so Earl might have to answer for what he did to me. I thought it would make it better if he did, if I could see it. Isn’t it better now that William’s gone?”

  Misty ran her fingers through the dirt. William would never come back, and that meant he would never take her to the barn again. Never hurt her again. But just the thought made her fingers loosen and numb, the skin slipping from her knuckles until she clenched her hand into a fist and held on.

  “He’s gone,” Misty said. “But it’s not.”

  “I just wanted both. To see him punished and to let go of what happened so I could move on. But it looks like some people only get one of those things.”

  Misty didn’t know what to say so she sent the feeling of her family through her fingers—the excitement she felt when she heard her father coming home from work and the way her mother would brush her bangs off her forehead so she could kiss the skin between Misty’s eyes and the feeling of Penny and their cousins gathered close together, trying to do all they could to make Misty feel better.

  In return, Caroline filled Misty’s palms with tree branches, her chest with bark as hard as bone, her fingertips with bright, new leaves just blooming. “Will you remember me when I’m gone?”

  “I will,” Misty said. “I promise.”

  An image flickered in Misty’s mind, weak at first, then stronger, as Caroline shared her name with Misty. A woman stood in front of Caroline, and when she smiled, Misty’s chest filled with warmth; an old house sat on top of a hill with its front door open, the smell of warm bread wafting through the door; the taste of cherries, bright and sour; a bird landed on the curve of her knee and sang her a bright, pretty note; a red feather tucked under her pillow for good luck, one in her pocket to keep her safe; someone pounding on her door, yelling, as she hid in her closet; a grove of dogwood trees, their branches heavy with white blooms; the feeling of a branch puncturing her arm, her body changing, morphing; the taste of cold water and earth on her tongue; the smell of honeysuckle and hot coffee; the whisper of a cotton dress against her skin as she walked barefoot down a long, empty road; Earl holding out his hand to help her up; the tip of an ax glinting in the moonlight; and Misty was there, too, her fingers brushing through the dirt; birdsong, all around her, endless.

  Then it was over.

  Caroline was gone. So was William.

  For a while, neither Misty nor Penny said anything. The sun rose a little higher and its light warmed their shoulders. There was a slight breeze that rocked the door of the barn back and forth, its hinges creaking. Misty dug her fingers into the garden’s soil. It wasn’t as cold as it had been before. It would be a long time before it was warm again, but it might be, one day. Something might even grow there again.

  Penny slid from the fence and toed the green glass bottle, frowning as she touched it. Misty’s skin felt loose around her throat, and it would have been so easy to tilt back her head and let her skin slide away. Then she wouldn’t have to hear what Penny had to say. Then she wouldn’t have to know what her sister thought of her now, or if she blamed Misty, if she thought she should have run from William or fought harder.

  Penny said, “I’m sorry.”

  Misty squinted up at her. “Why?”

  “For you being hurt,” Penny said. “And for not knowing it. Not helping. I’m sorry.”

  Penny brushed Misty’s bangs out of her face like their mother did. She tucked the longest hairs behind her ear. It was a gentle touch. Soft and light. Misty cried. Penny knelt down and wrapped her arms around her and Misty buried her face in Penny’s shoulder. They held on to each other and Penny rocked gently from side to side, the way their mother did, and they both cried until Jem opened
the front door and squalled.

  “Is that Misty? Misty. Dolly, get out here!”

  Jem stumbled down the front steps and across the yard. She wore a long, purple nightgown hemmed with lace. Her hair was braided but falling fast apart, and her thick calves were covered with pale-blue veins. She ran to the fence, reached over the top board, and pulled Misty up and over. She pressed Misty to her chest, and Jem smelled just like baby powder and cheap laundry detergent.

  “Oh, honey,” Jem said.

  “Misty?” Dolly yelled from the porch. “Lord, Jem, if you’re strangling her, save a piece for me. Oh, I could just skin you alive, little girl. Move now, Jem, let me lay hands on her.”

  Jem replaced Misty with Penny and the aunts traded the girls back and forth, laughing and crying and asking questions without giving anyone enough time to answer.

  “Good Lord, look at the garden,” Jem said. She looked between Misty and Penny, their eyes swollen and puffy from lack of sleep. “You girls have a story to tell,” Jem said. “I can see it. Now ain’t the time for it, but I know it’s coming. Tell them, Dolly.”

  “The doctor just called. Your mama woke up. She was asking for you girls first thing. Come get your clothes on and we’ll go see her. We’ll get breakfast on the way.” She kissed them both on the forehead. “We ain’t done with you, Misty, not by no long shot, but we’ll be happy for a while. Are there any biscuits left? Beth always loved my biscuits.”

  Jem rolled her eyes and followed Dolly back across the yard. “Come on, babies. We can’t keep your mama waiting.”

  “We’ll be there,” Penny said. “Just a minute.”

  Jem looked between them again, nodded once, and hurried Dolly back inside.

  “You fixed it,” Penny said.

  Misty shook her head. “I just helped a little.”

  “And Mom. She’s better.”

  “I hope so.”

  “We should tell her,” Penny said. “About what you told me. She’ll want to know. You can decide when, but I’ll be there when you do, all right? If you want me to.”