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Books. Change. Lives.
Copyright © 2020 by Ashley Blooms
Cover and internal design © 2020 by Sourcebooks
Cover design by Mumtaz Mustafa
Cover image © Karina Vegas/Arcangel Images
Sourcebooks and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks.
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.
All brand names and product names used in this book are trademarks, registered trademarks, or trade names of their respective holders. Sourcebooks is not associated with any product or vendor in this book.
Published by Sourcebooks Landmark, an imprint of Sourcebooks
P.O. Box 4410, Naperville, Illinois 60567-4410
(630) 961-3900
sourcebooks.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Blooms, Ashley, author.
Title: Every bone a prayer / Ashley Blooms.
Description: Naperville, Illinois : Sourcebooks Landmark, [2020]
Identifiers: LCCN 2019042346 | (trade paperback)
Subjects: LCSH: Psychic trauma--Fiction. | Healing--Fiction. | Self-actualization (Psychology)--Fiction. | Speculative fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3602.L667 E94 2020 | DDC 813/.6--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019042346
Contents
Front Cover
Title Page
Copyright
A Word from the Author
Shift
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
Twenty-Two
Twenty-Three
Shed
Twenty-Four
Twenty-Five
Twenty-Six
Twenty-Seven
Twenty-Eight
Twenty-Nine
Thirty
Thirty-One
Thirty-Two
Thirty-Three
Thirty-Four
Thirty-Five
Thirty-Six
Thirty-Seven
Thirty-Eight
Grow
Thirty-Nine
Forty
Shift / Shed / Grow / Shift / Shed / Grow
Reading Group Guide
A Conversation with the Author
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Back Cover
A Word from the Author
Dear Reader,
I wrote this book because I wanted (and needed) to explore the ways that trauma impacts individual, familial, and community identity. How trauma takes shelter in our bodies, passing from one generation to the next. And, most of all, I wanted to write a story about what comes after the hurt—how we find a way back to each other and to ourselves.
It seems impossible to write a book about trauma, vulnerability, and healing without considering the reader’s own history. I don’t know what you’re carrying in your hearts or bodies, but I want all of you to be able to engage with this book on your own terms. As a survivor and as someone with PTSD, trigger or content warnings have helped me live more comfortably and experience the media that I love safely. These warnings are, essentially, about transparency and choice. If you know what you can expect from this book, then you will be better equipped to know if you can engage with it.
So, before you read Every Bone a Prayer, I’d like you to know that it contains depictions of sexual abuse between children, domestic violence, emotional abuse, portrayals of Evangelical faith, and body horror/grotesque imagery. If you’re interested in further details about the appearance of these things, you can visit my website for more information.
And please know that if you need to set this book aside, there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s okay to protect yourself. Misty would want you to be safe, so would the crawdads, and so do I.
With love,
Ashley
Shift
Before a crawdad can grow, it must shed the hard shell of its body.
First, a new skin forms beneath the shell. This skin is soft, but grows stronger.
It is a process of separation, of letting go of the old shape.
A slow goodbye to the body that existed before.
One
Everything that Misty needed was behind her bedroom door, but she couldn’t open it. She planted her toes into the carpet and leaned her full weight against the wood, twisting the knob back and forth. For a moment, the door slipped open, revealing a sliver of darkness about an inch wide. Somewhere inside that darkness was her bed piled high with pillows, her favorite T-shirt, and her box of treasures. Misty stretched her fingers, hoping to slide them through to grab the door, but it slammed shut before she could.
“Penny, let me in,” Misty said.
A muffled “no” came from the other side.
Misty tried again, but her sister was too strong, no doubt digging her heels into the same carpet, her sister two years older and three inches taller, her sister a weight Misty could not move. It would be so much easier if Misty could talk to Penny the way she talked to everything else, so much better without words.
“You can’t keep me out of my own room,” Misty said.
She pushed again, and again the door jerked forward an inch, a space just big enough for Penny’s voice to slip through: “Then go tell Mom on me.”
Misty let go of the door and it slammed back into place. “I can’t.”
On the other side of the trailer, her parents’ voices rose and fell in argument. Misty could only make out every tenth word from behind their closed bedroom door, and those words didn’t make sense alone—won’t, should, really, right, leave. They needed everything in the middle to be complete, all the parts that Misty was missing. Her mother’s voice stood out the most, a sharp spike against the dull rumble of her father’s voice, and together they made a slow, slack creature whose fists pounded against the trailer as it dragged itself closer and closer to Misty.
She slid to the floor and pressed her knees to her chest. Muffled sounds came from behind her, too—Penny crying alone in their room. It would normally hurt Misty to know that her sister was sad, but it only made her angry this time. She pounded her fist against the door, t
rying to jar Penny’s head. Trying to punish her for shutting Misty out.
But Penny just balled her fist together and punched back, and the wood reverberated between them, their spines pressed to the same spot on the door, and together they made their own strange creature with its own strange heart pounding and pounding.
Misty didn’t stop punching until her father walked out of the bedroom with one hand held in the air and the other empty by his side.
“I’m done talking about this,” he yelled.
Misty’s mother followed him. Her ponytail slumped against her shoulders, little baby hairs catching the light around her face, making her glow. “You don’t get to decide everything on your own, you know that? You’re married. You’re a father.”
“I don’t need you telling me who I am.”
“Apparently you do. You sure seem to have forgot awful quick.”
He snatched his keys from the coffee table and turned toward the door. “Like you’d ever let me forget a damn thing.”
Panic rose in Misty’s chest at the sight of her father leaving. She looked for something to distract her parents with. She’d done it before, stepping between them when they started to argue, holding up her art project or reciting the Bible verses she’d memorized from Sunday school, and the sight of her was often enough to startle them out of their fight. Misty became a blush rising to her mother’s cheek, the spasm of her father’s hand clenching tight and then releasing—a freckled truce with her father’s wide nose and her mother’s brown eyes.
But then her father opened the front door and light flooded the room so quickly that Misty and her mother winced against it. Misty’s father turned to say something else until he spotted Misty sitting on the floor at the end of the narrow hallway. He stopped.
Her parents stared at her and Misty stared back at them.
This was usually the part where they would stop fighting. Her mother’s voice would lift to a false high, her father hugging Misty even though he rarely showed affection. Even their attempts at happiness felt wrong.
But this time Misty’s father looked away from her without smiling. He looked at her mother and said, “This is what you wanted, Beth. You’re the one who has to tell them,” then slammed the door hard enough to rattle the glass in the windows.
Misty’s mother stood with her arms crossed over her chest. She stared not at Misty but through her to some far and foggy place that Misty had never seen. She went there often enough that Misty knew how to handle it, how to be patient, to wait for her mother to come back to herself. Back to Misty. But this time, her mother touched her fingers to her mouth, walked back across the trailer, and disappeared into her bedroom.
The trailer was quiet without her parents’ noise. There were so many small and empty spaces in need of filling.
Misty dug her heels into the carpet one last time. She pressed her full weight against her bedroom door so fast that her sister didn’t have time to prepare. Something thudded behind her and the door jerked back a few inches, the dark space of their room yawning by Misty’s side until her sister growled and pushed back even harder. Misty’s feet burned as she lurched across the carpet, and she fell to the floor on the outside of everything she wanted.
Two
After Misty cried and the tears dried on her cheeks and left her skin feeling tacky and brittle, after it was obvious that neither her mother nor her sister were coming to check on her, Misty walked through the same door where her father had left. Her body carried her to the creek by muscle memory, back to the place she always went when she was sad or lonely.
She climbed down the steep embankment before the creek using a chain that was sunk into the ground with concrete. The chain was old and thick and rusted. Her mother told her it had been part of a swinging bridge once that spanned the width of the creek and connected this ground to the road above. It used to be the only way to get to their holler until the new bridge had been built. Earl had the swinging bridge torn down when he bought the land and cleared the trees to make room for his trailers. It always made Misty sad to see the chain all by itself, torn away from what it used to be.
She stood with her toes on the edge of the place where the sand gave way to the water. The sun was warm on her shoulders, but she didn’t feel warmed by it. She rolled the hem of her shorts up until the denim cut into her thighs and walked barefoot into the water, careful for broken glass that sometimes shifted loose from the sand and craved something soft to tear into.
The water inched higher as she walked, wetting ankle, shin, and knee. It settled at her midthigh, just below the line of her shorts as Misty stood in the deepest part of the creek. She waited, listening for the slam of a screen door or the call of her mother. When nothing came for her, Misty bent at the waist until her back was parallel to the water. She closed her eyes.
Beneath her were minnows and crawdads and tadpoles. There were copperheads and cottonmouths slicking along the grass on the bank. There were bluegill not far away, small for their age because the creek was a small place and it was hard for any creature to outgrow its home. The fish stayed small because they had no room to get bigger, and because they were small, there was always just enough to go around—enough food, enough light, enough water—and they all got to go on living, if not growing.
But it was the crawdads that Misty came for, the crawdads that kept her coming back. They seemed small and murky brown at first, but up close the crawdads were a wash of colors, their arms stained woodsmoke blue with a muddy green along their eight trembling legs, their backs speckled with small dots the color of old lace, a yellow that still remembered what it felt like to be white. They were small enough to fit inside Misty’s palm. Most of them four or five inches long with thin legs and two large claws at the end, which always seemed to be opening and closing, always searching for something to hold on to.
Misty spoke to the crawdads as she stood in the creek, though she never opened her mouth. Some words weren’t made for speaking, not by tongues like hers, so small and flat. So she called out from inside herself instead.
It was easy. Her mother had taught her how to pray when she was five years old. She knelt beside Misty on the threadbare carpet and said, “Now open up your heart. It’s more listening than saying anything, but you can ask for things, too. You open up and wait for God to speak to you. Close your eyes now. Close your eyes.” So Misty listened to her mother and she listened for God—her chest a door flung wide open; her heart the golden light spilling onto the floor, eating the darkness whole. She invited everything inside.
But instead of God, Misty heard the mouse living in the walls of their trailer.
The mouse showed Misty the tangled nest she’d made for her children from the torn scraps of the science folder Penny had lost the week before. The mouse filled Misty’s nose with the scent of mothballs and her bones with the hum of the pipes in the walls. The mouse showed Misty what it felt like to be a mouse, furred and quick and small.
Eventually, with practice, Misty got better at reaching out to the world. She learned that everything had a name. Not the name that most people knew them by, but something different, an underneath name made of sounds and memories and feelings, a name that shifted and grew and evolved. Some things had many names, and some had only one. Some things had names that she couldn’t speak inside herself, they were so long with age, so heavy with time.
Misty had a name, too, that lived beneath and beside her other name all the time, and this name was long and twisting, filled with memory and sound. She could choose parts of her name, selecting the memories or moments she held closest, but other parts were beyond her control. The crawdads had tried to explain it to her once—how names were made from things remembered and lost, things passed down from generations before, and things that the body knew that the mind forgot. Sometimes she understood how names worked, but sometimes she still wasn’t sure.
But she kn
ew that in order to speak to the world, she had to offer her name, like holding out her hand, one half of a bridge built between her and everything else. The crawdads could respond with their name and join Misty, sharing thoughts and memories and feelings. Misty knew what it felt like to be small and clawed and slick. She knew the safest places to hide during squalls when the creek swelled with water and the current threatened to tear the crawdads away. She had seen the pictures the crawdads etched into the sand with their tails in the deepest parts of the creek, messages like prayers that the minnows carried downstream. She could smell an oil spill in an eddy and she had felt the weight of eggs gathered on her belly and she had molted with the crawdads a hundred, hundred times. And she knew all of this because the crawdads knew and they shared it with her. They shared themselves.
Misty conjured her name as she stood in the creek with her nose hovering inches above the cool water. The name bubbled inside of her, dozens of images and feelings connected by the thinnest of strands—her hand reaching out for her grandmother’s when Misty was barely old enough to walk, the paper-thin feeling of the older woman’s skin inside Misty’s palm; the rattle of her mother’s breathing when she and Misty were both sick and her mother carried Misty from room to room, rocking her, shushing her, begging her to sleep; the first time Misty had ever tasted snow, bright and shivering cold; her father’s voice from a different room, muffled and rumbling; a doe in the woods, blood on its hip and pain in Misty’s leg, pain in her chest; Penny standing beside her in church and singing along to a song she didn’t know, making up the words until Misty’s sides ached from trying not to laugh; the feeling of a crawdad skittering over her shoulder, tangling in her hair; her mother sitting on the couch with her head in her hands; her father’s truck peeling out of the driveway, gravel pinging against the metal sides of the trailer; her mother’s arms crossed over her chest that morning, the faraway look in her eyes, a feeling of sadness like many small stones stacked inside her stomach, weighing Misty down, down, down.
Misty’s chest ached with the memories and she almost pulled away, almost ended her name before it ended itself, but she held on. Names were honest things. They didn’t hide. They didn’t lie. They couldn’t, as far as Misty knew, and the only way to speak to the world was to be true.
Every Bone a Prayer Page 1
