Blood on the Moon.
by Jess Lewis.
2017. Semifinalist in the Saints and Sinners International Literary Competition. Excerpt acquired by TWANG Anthology.
Dedicated to Katharine Min, who taught me how to live writerly.
CW: Dysphoria, dissociation, family dysfunction, verbal abuse, sex, drug and alcohol abuse.
The four of us raised our middle fingers in a collective salute of AB-Tech Community College as we sped away from summer college prep classes and into Marshall, our one light town. Jenna drove us to a parking lot in the shadow of an art gallery. After sifting through the piles of books in her backseat, we unloaded unmarked bottles and jars from the car and tucked them into our bags. We left her rusting Volvo and walked in the middle of the street to the abandoned railroad leading out of town. After safely escaping Sherriff Hewitt’s sidelong glances, we took them out: Jenna’s Coke bottle hid liquor cut with soda, Kayla’s mason jar brimmed with elderberry wine, Nick’s silver flask sloshed with rum, and my water bottle held not-water.
The railroad led us from our small town out to the country alongside a river that twisted in and out of hollows. As we walked away from the white town hall and struggling shops in renovated brick buildings, the clocks and steeples gave way to clear sky. The town thrived once, but when the factories left so did the people, chasing jobs out to big cities or surrounding states. A husk remained: old buildings, a music hall, a few thousand people, and a lot of shiny start-ups that never made it past five years. The music hall only played shit old people and tourists liked, so we took our business to the wild and ramshackle side of Madison County.
One by one we uncapped our bottles and took the first drink of the evening. The day was still bright then, and it revealed everything that was decaying. I held my bottle close to my side. I wanted to taste and feel twilight, where I felt most like myself. In the burn, I slipped away from the last few days, from my grandma’s words, from the uncertain future.
I stayed behind the group and watched everyone walk ahead of me. Nick jumped between rotted wood ties, trying to stay on the gravel between them. He made a big fuss when his foot went right through one, laying spread eagle between the ties so we couldn’t walk across them without stepping on him. Jenna cackled, called him a drama queen, and tapped his butt with her foot until he moved. Kayla laughed so hard she could barely hold on to her mason jar. We moved on under the dying daylight, teasing Nick the whole way.
The further we got from town and the closer we got to the bottom of the bottles, the freer we became. Kayla locked arms with Nick and Jenna followed close behind. I watched them walk as silhouettes against the sunset. They moved with a kind of looseness I dreamed of having. Their sighs and laughter reached my ears and, wanting to be part of them, I ran to catch up.
Kayla ranted about a professor.
“She calls on me every single time because she knows, she just knows, I can’t fucking answer. I never answer the way she wants me to. Is it my fucking fault? No! I just don’t think the way she does. Fuck. Like, I know it’s just a bullshit Gen Ed course to get a little college credit out of the way, but it really pisses me off.”
“Just learn the answers, spout them back, and get through,” I suggested.
“Or get them so wrong it makes her head explode!” Nick suggested. Kayla quieted, unlatched arms with him, and stuck her hands in her pockets.
“What if their heads did explode when someone did that?” Jenna said, eyes lit up, “or anyone for that matter. Just suggest something totally fucked up to anyone and – like, like, a robot or something, it just doesn’t compute. Fries their systems. Beep-boop-beep-boop, malfunction, shutdown!”
“Then we would have taken over the world by now, my friends,” Nick said, grabbing us by the shoulders and holding us in close. I smelled Jenna’s sweet pea perfume from her thin brown neck and breathed in deep though it made my chest feel tight. We crowded in close together until we settled.
By dusk, we sat in a row along a section of the tracks, in our places as if appointed by a higher power. Cleared of saplings and rotten toppled oaks, the section gave us a clear view beyond the road, into the mountains and forests ahead. Nick crouched, looking over the river and into the woods, probably tracking the birds that made top branches quiver. Jenna and Kayla sat whispering together about their fucked up families, a warm up to venting sessions that occurred like clockwork when the first star appeared.
My body grew light and my hands sweaty with anticipation of the questions. I stayed in the middle and witnessed the last strand of sunset become swallowed by dim clouds. Soon, a small star peeked out from behind the grey sky.
“Hey, Sam, you look rough as hell,” Nick said, “what’s going on?”
“I spent yesterday moving,” I replied, focusing on the way my shirt button felt between my index finger and thumb. “Well, sort of.”
They all turned to me, eyes wide.
“Wait, what?” Kayla said.
“You’ve got to be shitting me!” Nick said.
“Like I said, I moved out of my grandma’s place. You know why.”
“Fuck, man, are you serious? So they just kicked you out?” Nick said, voice rasping from a slug of rum. He leaned closer and ruffled his afro, which he liked to grow out when he got bored. Right then he looked half-mad with disgust.
“My grandmother did,” I said. I paused, then added, sorting through the fuzziness of what happened, “My father wasn’t there. Well, I also sort of walked out. It was mutual?” I paused to think, was it? I swept away the thought and continued. “Anyway, I’m staying with my sister right now, but I’m not sure how long we can put up with each other.”
“What happened?” Kayla asked as she twisted the tip of a ginger dread between two fingertips. I didn’t want to answer. But they cared, so it was okay. Wasn’t it?
I focused on the glowing craters of the moon in the distance, the texture of the gravel under my feet, the sweat forming on my palms. I focused on anything but me. Anything to rip off the band aid of saying what happened.
“I told her I wasn’t sure if I was a lesbian… because I wasn’t sure if I was a girl.”
Crickets and cicadas grew thunderous in their silence. I made the mistake of looking up at them and saw their faces slowly contort with the anger and shock they felt for me. I felt small.
“Oh, fuck,” Jenna finally spoke.
“I’m not even sure what I expected. Everyone knows how she overreacts.”
“Like with your sister,” Jenna said gently.
“Yeah, like with April –she just wouldn’t put up with the lectures or the pamphlets. Grandma’s… Grandma. I don’t even know why I told her. It just sort of came out.”
“And your dad gave a shit?” Nick said, fists clenched against the ground.
“Naw, he doesn’t care, and he’s always off somewhere else. I haven’t even seen him in a week. But Grandma did…” I stopped, stumbling over the heap of memories left unsorted.
“What a bitch,” he said, and came to my side. No one seemed to know what else to say, and neither did I, so we huddled in close so our body warmth could reach where words couldn’t. I wanted to just sink into dusk, but they wouldn’t let me. At the beginning of summer when the world seemed to be ending, we made a silent pact to keep each other safe from ourselves. They kept me sane with no words and small gestures. I felt their bodies close to mine and grew calm.
I buried my hand deep in my coat pocket and took out my grandma’s ruby-circled gold ring, then held it up for everyone to see. A manic grin distorted Nick’s face in the growing moonlight.
“Is that what I think it is?” Jenna said.
“A war trophy! Won at the cost of bodily harm. You should wear it,” Nick said, so excited by the thought that his Caymanian lilt peeked through.
The suggestion numbed me. During this short, stilted conversation, the dusk had faded into darkness. In the high moon’s light, the world stood still, and I felt far away. I watched myself from above my body, paralyzed in the middle of them. White light outlined Jenna’s long black hair and deeply curved waist, Kayla’s open legs and nervous full sucking lips, as well as Nick’s broad shoulders scooping down to his narrow waist. They formed a trio huddling around a lump of genderless flesh. The real me was set apart somewhere in the distance over the mountains where I was kept suspended in the middle of a breath. They fit into their skins so effortlessly, moving with ease, and I wondered at that moment if I was too worthless to be given that gift. I hurdled back into my body when I slipped on the ring. It glinted on my forefinger. It fit perfectly, even though it felt wrong. I told myself I wasn’t a man and I wasn’t a woman so wearing her ring didn’t matter.
It was the way Grandma looked at me when I said it – that was what hurt the most. The thin brow wrinkled over narrowed eyes and pursed lips, head tilted in question.
I wanted to turn away but couldn’t. I knew what roadkill felt like the moment before tires crushed bone.
Sharp words pierced the fuzzy memories.
“Now is not the time for joking.”
I said something Not Okay.
She paused. She looked me in my eyes. She pushed the groceries off the counter. Bananas and sloppy joe mix fell and scattered across the room. They tried to bridge us. But the bridge had so many gaps, so many spaces where the pink tile wasn’t covered.
I tried to reach her with my voice, but she got to me first.
I backed away, wounded. Stomach turned. Eyes grew hot. I clenched my fists and found a few words: “I’m still m-me. That’s the point?”
I could not feel my body.
Her voice grew louder.
She felt further away.
Louder.
I backed up and hit the wall. She was still reaching me and it hurt.
Louder.
I tried reaching out.
“Oma, you didn’t do anything wrong, there’s nothing wrong, please just –”
She began telling me to get out, over and over.
I ran to my room and packed a duffel bag. I put in a copy of Where the Wild Things Are and my binder and my journal and my father’s moonshine. With each addition, my fingers shook. I never realized fingers could shake. My toothbrush and my pastels and my mother’s picture. The breath in my chest grew shallow and quick. My socks and my wallet and–
I saw it glinting from out the corner of my eye, on the edge of the dresser in Grandma’s open bedroom. My grandma’s ruby ring. It had been in the family for eons, passed from woman to woman. It gathered the stories of the women who wore it as it traveled through generations. Grandma told them to me as bedtime stories when I was young: great-aunt Rita the British spy, great-great grandma Josephina the ex-pat writer, aunt Theresa the nomadic artist. Grandma rarely took it off.
In ten minutes, I rounded the corner of the hallway between my room and the kitchen. When I saw grandma sobbing between the eggs and the oatmeal, I felt her devastation like lead sinking into my chest. Then she looked up, and I hated myself for feeling like her.
She stared beyond my head like I was nobody or nothing.
Anger pooled in me, burning. I took the ring out of my pocket, held it up, and looked my disbelieving grandma straight in the eyes. The thin band anchored too-large rubies that threatened to overflow, like welling blood.
When her head tipped to the side, I knew she couldn’t grasp what I’d done. The anger felt good.
“You are dead to me,” I said, the cruelest words I could think of, and left. The evening air chilled my wet cheeks.
After the three-mile hike along the side of the highway to my sister’s trailer in the dark, my whole body ached, beating and raw with pain: my hands from carrying my duffel bag, my back and stomach from sobbing, my feet from nearly running the whole way, and my eyes from blinking away tears so I could follow the lines of reflective paint. When April answered the door, she nodded and hugged me and made up the couch, all wordlessly. We couldn’t find the words to describe what just happened, or what might happen. I thought about it a lot, and figured they might not even be invented yet. They would be too big, too overwhelming, too hard.
I looked up.
House lights flickered on, one by one, across the mountains. The inhabitants of distant hollows jeweled the ridges with light. For once, Nick crouched motionless. At that moment, the silence curled in between us four, drew us closer, and spread its warmth. Somewhere in the distance wood burned – a bonfire or brush burning or pig smoking – and pierced my nostrils along with the night air. I breathed in deep and released the gravel I had been clenching in my hand.
A fox darting past us in the moonlight stirred us to noise. When our slurred cries calmed, we formed a circle and made the rounds venting about family.
Jenna’s mother tried to have “the talk” that morning, about four years too late.
“Get this - she even got out a pickle and a condom so I could practice,” Jenna said, “Who the hell uses a pickle? Aren’t bananas the standard or something? Well, anyway, when I told her I knew how to put one on she made the huge mistake of asking what else I knew.”
“What did you teach her?” Kayla asked.
“I explained the mechanics of muff diving.”
Kayla tossed back two small pills, then began telling us all about her father’s fifth girlfriend after the divorce.
“He knows how to pick ‘em. This one is obsessed with hippos. I mean, batshit obsessed, like, the way old ladies are about cats. Tuesday, my favorite couch pillow disappears and in its place – a stuffed hippo. Wednesday, it’s the table lamps – all replaced with these hippos in tu-tus holding up the lampshades. It’s creepy as hell. What’s next, the fucking cheese grater?”
“At least I know what to get you for Christmas,” Nick said.
“Oh, fuck you,” she said but smiled and leaned into him.
Nick discovered his step-mother read all his emails and browser history when she sat him down and asked him, stone-faced, “So, what exactly is a reach-around, Nick?”
Kayla snorted, which set Nick to guffawing. Jenna and I joined in and clutched at each other to hold ourselves up.
“Well, did you tell her?” Jenna managed to say.
“You bet your sorry ass I did!” he responded.
That was too much. The still air reverberated with our cackling. Jenna and I fell back onto the gravel between the ties. She twisted my tank top between her fingers as her laughter calmed, then she curled into me. We pulled away and sat up after a long moment of stealing each other’s warmth.
Sated and aching, we started back to town soon after. First we marked the bank where we left our worries. One at a time, we placed our empty bottles in a row before the clearing. Jenna walked barefooted to the appointed place, where she kissed the bottle lips and cleared a circle in the rocks for it. Kayla concentrated on keeping her footsteps straight, then shoved the mason jar deep into the earth with shaking hands. I leaned my half-emptied bottle against Jenna’s after taking a last sip of moonshine. Nick uncapped his flask and tipped it upside down, anointing the bottles and jars with the last few shots of rum.
The smooth sweet liquor stung my throat as I breathed out, and I stepped back to look at them, all in a pretty row far away. Jenna’s soft hips curved under her flowered dress, Kayla’s thin hands grazed the swallow tattoo on her breast, Nick’s strong arms bulged under his thin shirt – they knew who they were. It came with breathing. They turned to me, smiled, and Jenna extended a hand.
“Are you coming?” she said. For a second I wasn’t sure, but her smile drew me in and I followed them back to town.
photography and photomanipulation by Emmy
Jenna’s car squealed out of the community college parking lot and toward the train tracks. We cursed the sky, celebrating the last day of classes. After wandering the backroads, we landed at the train tracks as if dictated by a higher power. It was a quiet Friday at the end of June, and everyone in Madison County had gone home to their families.
The railroad led us from our small town out to the country alongside a river that whispered its secrets at dusk in a tongue we’d never understand. As we ran from the churches and food co-ops, the crumbling brick and wood gave way to the clear sky.
We unfurled ourselves. Our pain-cries of conversation oozed over the train tracks.
Half-yelled, half-slurred conversations carried on the wind up to the treetops. Nick asserted the birds would send our secrets halfway around the globe. Jenna stopped to laugh in his face. I stayed toward the back and watched them, tucking my worries away. I fiddled with the ruby-circled ring, rocking it back and forth on my finger.
Kayla, ballsy as ever, lit up a blunt as the sun died. The blunt passed to Nick, who gave it to Jenna where it lingered. She raised it up to the orange sun until the burning tip blended with it, then put it to her lips and breathed deep. Her shoulders leaned into the breath. She didn’t cough as she breathed out.
Kayla lifted her arms to the sky and spun in a circle, eyes closed, screaming.
“It’s done! She’s done! I’m done, you motherfuckers! Goddamn, we fucking did it! Next up: university!”
Jenna took a third hit and saluted her.
Nick crossed his arms and half-smiled, saying less than usual as his high set in.
I walked, past him and past the haze of their smoke, into the blaze of orange sky.
The last few rays beat on my forehead and shoulders. I wanted to be burned up by it. The others filled their lungs with burning. We all sank down deep into the feeling.
By dusk we settled, leaning back against the wood and ties and rocks with our feet in the cool grass. Our bodies soaked in the burning sun’s last light and the stars’ first light.
Jenna spoke.
“I’m going to cut my hair.”
Everyone turned. Jenna’s father once threatened to kick her out if she ever cut her hair – it hadn’t been touched by a pair of scissors since she was born. The next day at school she had a bruise circling her arm. She was fiddling with her split ends now.
I took her hand.
Nick touched her knee.
Kayla put a hand on her shoulder and reached into the bag beside her. Her eyes were fire and her voice was whispered rage.
“Let’s fucking show them.”
She summoned a small switchblade from her purse and I retrieved a spare hairband from my wrist.
Jenna blinked, then smiled, staring at the way the edges of the hairband and knife caught in the moon’s light. She took my hairband and tied her hair at the nape of her neck.
Jenna stood, and Kayla put a hand on her shoulder to steady herself. Jenna stared at the moon, as if she were focusing on its glowing craters, the lines of tree limbs against it, the ringed halo surrounding it – anything but herself.
The blade shimmered against the low ponytail.
“Wait,” Jenna said. She turned to Nick, who held the end of the blunt. He handed her the rest of it without a word. She stared at it a moment before putting it to her lips and breathing in. After exhaling, she dropped it and crushed it under her boot.
“Okay?” Kayla said, softer now.
Jenna bit her lip and nodded.
Kayla cut.
Jenna gasped. The hairband slipped from her hair, nothing to hold it in place, and fell to a tuft of grass. Little hairs fluttered down with it, nestling deep within the longest blades.
“It’s so light,” she said, half-there.
Her long fingers twined through her hair, feeling the rough sharp edges of the places her hair was cut.
“I feel so light,” she said, her face brightening, and looked around to us.
Her eyes stopped at the pile of hair at our feet.
“Woah.”
She knelt to it and ran her fingers through it for a few seconds, feeling its weight. Breathing out slowly, she picked up as much of the mound as she could and ran over to the river, trailing long strands that fluttered away into the mountains on the wind.
Standing at the edge of the river, she looked over and her eyes grew wide. Her body was a rich dark outline against the moon’s light hitting the distant trees and water. Who knows what she saw in the water, but she stared it down for a few minutes as we all watched on, entranced and unsure of what we were witnessing.
The ring glinted out of the corner of my eye, even though I tried to ignore it. I focused on Jenna, on the beauty she might be witnessing, on the release she might be feeling.
Suddenly she reeled back and hurled the mound into the river with something that resembled a scream.
She turned back, eyes red, and cried into us.
When the tears slowed and the night settled, we turned away from the river she still stared at. We smiled at her and I extended a hand.
“Are you coming?” someone asked her.
Jenna took my hand and we dragged each other back to town.
photography and photomanipulation by Emmy
Nick and Kayla left in early August to their new lives at Warren Wilson, a hippy college an hour away. In late August at the summer’s close, it was just Jenna and me. We took our walks together, growing so close through the drunk secrets we shared that we began to step in time with one another. On that last night we walked the railroad tracks, just us and the moon and the future ahead.
The August heat invaded the night. Our clothes stuck to our bodies, our hair stuck to our necks, and our fingers stuck to our palms, all slick with sweat. Cold water beaded on our bottles, so we pressed them to our foreheads, our necks – playfully, sometimes each other’s chest. The cicadas buzzed in tune with our voices, which rose over otherwise quiet forests.
There was blood on the moon, a ringed halo that childhood folktales taught me signified death. I held my hand up to it so the red of the ring melded with the red of the moon, and I smiled, letting myself feel the anger well.
Halfway to night and halfway from home, we picked our perch along the wooden ties and looked over the river, the school on the island, and the mountains inlaid with hollows. Faint stars pricked through a veil of sunset. Our voices faded into an awed silence. When I felt her body heat, I pulled my grandma’s ruby-circled ring off my finger and twisted it on, then off, then on. My heartbeat quickened when I saw her breasts curving above her camisole to the place where her neck met bone. We sat a long time in that silence until I made peace with it. When the moon rose high and red, Jenna spoke:
“You’re a stunning conversationalist this evening,” she said, and smiled at me.
“Sorry. I was just thinking,” I replied.
“Ooo, thinking. About what?”
“About you and me, mostly.”
She scooted closer.
“What about us?”
“You’re going. I’m staying. I want to go, too.”
She laughed.
“What’s funny?” I asked.
“But I want to stay,” she said. She paused for a few seconds, chewing on her lip, then continued. “That sounds so weird when I say it out loud. I never hear it, ever – even the good old boys with Confederate flags on their pickup trucks are excited to go away.”
“So why stay?”
“You know, my mom talks about Puerto Rico like it’s Eden or something, but when we visit grandpa none of that feels right. I don’t know how, or why, but this place feels like home. It’s fucking sick.”
“But you’re…”
“Yeah, I know, I know what I am.” she snapped, probably to keep me from saying the word. She sighed and pushed her hair out of her face and swallowed hard to keep back tears. “That’s the hardest part. Do I stay and feel like I have to walk on eggshells, like… like I can’t ever really be myself with anyone? Do I leave and never really feel as at home,” her hands dug into the grass and dirt beside her, “as at peace, as I do when my feet are touching this earth? When my eyes are on those mountains. When… fuck, I… it’s just hard.”
The cicada’s low buzz drowned the sigh that followed. She looked out toward the house lights and stars, raising her voice.
“What a shitty compromise: the place you feel like yourself for the place you can be yourself.”
Her face grew distant though she was inches away. I detached and floated above my body. The round face looked like a brown smudge with large, sad etched eyes and her shoulders hunched forward. When she took my arm in her hand, I hurdled back into my body and I realized my hands were shaking.
“Hey. Sam? Sam, are you here?” she said. Her voice seemed alarmed.
“Yes?”
The small brown hands closed around mine and squeezed them. The ring pressed into my flesh. Jenna looked at me as if she saw me for the first time. The corners of her mouth curved down as she stared into me.
“I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how to feel. But at least we’re both feeling that?” she half-asked, searching my face for signs.
Words tried to bridge the gap but couldn’t fill the space between us.
When I looked out toward the mountains, our mountains, I felt lost.
She nodded, as if she could hear the words knocking around my head. She pressed her forehead then her lips to my bare shoulder, and slid her fingers between mine.
We laughed because there were no words. We laughed, then breathed into the night together. I reached out and touched her arm with my other hand. Our moonlight-licked skin skimmed one another, and by invitation we unbound ourselves from the weight of expectations. The rest happened in an easy daze under end-of-summer stars. It was almost like we fell into each other.
The clothes came off piecemeal: my shirt lingered on my arm until we rolled from the ties to the grassy bank, our pants remained hooked around our calves until we explored deeper, Jenna’s lipstick refused to smudge until she left my lips to stain my thighs. When we took off the last of our clothes and pressed our bodies to one another, we were marked by the world around us. The soft patch of grass on the nearby bank creased our skin with imprints of the blades we crushed, mud caked on our legs, and gravel snuck into our pockets. It could have only happened there in a soft patch of grass by the rail lines, surrounded by high peaks and hollows that twinkled with electricity like fairy lights.
Our bodies, curled into a nest of clothing and mud and grass, glowed in the moonlight, anointed by fireflies that danced around us. I circled her body with my hands, feeling all her softness and roughness and scars. I kissed the bruises on her arms, her hips, her breasts. She grabbed my hand and kissed the dirt off my fingertips, one by one, until she reached the ruby ring. Her tongue flicked it and recoiled. She pulled my hand to her face, where the bright rubies mingled with the rough cut edge of her hair before she kissed it long and deep. Breathing out, she pried it off with her teeth, then put it in my coat pocket under her hip. She nestled into the center of my palm and covered it with small kisses, locking eyes with me. Her hands guided mine to the rest of her.
Under me her body quivered with nerves, electric. I drank in her trembling-firm-smoothness, slurped it down in thirsty gulps, cherished her crest and wane. Our eyes met, and we saw each other’s rawness in the moonlight, and we understood the voice in our eyes.
We rested in our languid aching, side by side, strewn among the ties. I rested one hand in the small hollow below her breasts, stroking her skin with my thumb. The breeze picked up and wound around us, drying our wetness in a shock of cold. We giggled and stretched out, letting the wind wash over us and the earth cradle us.
After we felt the air skim our naked bodies, we picked up our clothes and put them on reluctantly.
When she walked to the river bank, I followed. We looked over the side together, into the churning blackness of the tide held back by the dam wall. Blackness folded in on itself, crashing and slinking and heaving against the thick concrete. My shoulders leaned into their aching, and I looked for answers; a way to make things right again, a way to make me not broken. The wordless expanse left me cold and empty and clean.
My free hand dug into my jacket pocket for warmth, but found the ring. It grew heavy when I took it in my hand. I traced the outer edges with my thumb, and crushed it against my skin. It would make an imprint that would turn red then fade in a few minutes, even with the rubies piercing deep.
It was not right. It was not mine to keep.
Jenna stayed by the bank when I left her to give my past away. Long strides took me to the soft patch of grass we marked, where I found an uncrushed tuft still growing wild and tucked the ring between the longest blades. Held deep within, I could hardly see it.
Floods happened by the rail tracks all the time in the fall, so maybe one of the coming floods would wash it downstream. From there, it would toss in the muddy river and get caught where no one could see it, or maybe it would be found by someone who could give it a new history. Maybe it would be carefully washed of mud and adopted as an heirloom by a happy family who would whisper tales of its imagined history to one another over holiday dinners.
My grandma’s words crested in my mind. For the first time, I heard the love in them. There were so many moments before this, when her words guided me to seek more than my deadbeat dad and runaway mom had to offer. She was a solid foundation on which I built my life. Though it hurt to say, no part of me could deny that.
As I stared into the tuft of grass that hid my grandma’s ring, one of the few things I learned in seventh grade geology returned to me suddenly.
When stone endures the seasons, water seeps down into its hairline cracks, freezes then melts, and this process repeats until the cracks open to become deep ravines. It takes years and years of hard times and bad weather for this to happen, but when it does it’s irreversible. There is no mending the rock. It simply begins to crumble.
Grandma was solid as rock, it’s true, but she couldn’t go through any more weathering. Her hundred thousand hairline cracks changed, through years of disappointment, to ravines.
With me, she began to crumble.
One night when I was a toddler she said something to me when she found me crying under my sheets because my dad’s slurred insults sank too deep: “Just because he says you’re this or that doesn’t mean a damn thing. He doesn’t know you, baby, and he never will.”
All her words, all in the past, rushed together in my mind–good and bad and everything in-between.
“Sam? Are you coming?” Jenna hesitated to say, probably seeing tears streak my cheeks. I turned away from the grass and ring and water. Something red glinted out of the corner of my eye, far behind me now.
I walked to Jenna, took her hand, and she nodded.
We started back to town, our path lit by the red-ringed moon.