But it was getting harder to be honest with the world as her name gathered sadness and heartache and weight. Her name growing heavier by the day.
Then the crawdads answered with their name—a stirring in the dark, a rustling, deep-blue something. The crawdads were silt running between her fingers, the hushed crinkle of a morning glory closing its petals for the day, the pop of a bone from its socket, and they were there, in Misty’s head, in her chest, in her legs. They shared her body with her and they helped her carry the weight of her thoughts, her memories.
“Come see me,” she said.
And though she only meant to speak to the crawdads, the light Misty shone into the world attracted all sorts of things and they called out to her with their own voices.
A black snake shared the crunch of a field mouse’s neck, a bright bubble of blood bursting in the center of Misty’s chest.
The minnows shone silver flashes against the backs of her eyes, and the force of the water against their scales as they swam against the current, the dim green taste of the deepest water filled her mouth until her tongue was mossy and thick.
Her fingers spasmed with the flutter of a bluegill’s tail a few feet away.
But it wasn’t just Misty that got a sense of the other creatures’ bodies; they got a sense of hers, too. They were always shocked at first. She knew them as a little weight that perched along her spine, looking up at her like someone walking into a cavern and finding that it was a cathedral. They marveled at the space of her, the strange proportions of her body. They rocked with the rhythm of her lungs and curled against the hollow of her clavicle, but all of them eventually settled in her legs. They begged her to walk, to carry them a while. They asked her to wiggle her toes, to jump, to kneel. They crowded in her joints, their minds like a hive of bees, their excitement pumping Misty’s heart faster, faster. They’d never felt anything like her before, never known a body so small but so great at the same time, and they filled Misty, however briefly, with a love of herself as a strange thing, marvelous and new.
And though she couldn’t see it with her eyes closed, all around her, a circle formed. All manner of things that lived in the creek swam closer. The air itself rippled with a faint heat as Misty called the crawdads near. Even the birds felt a certain pull, a shift in the wind that drew them to the trees that lined the creek, and they looked down with small, black eyes at the little girl standing below.
The crawdads hurried through the water and grabbed hold of the bend in Misty’s knees, pulled themselves up in pinches and stutters. They clung to the hem of her shorts and crawled over one another’s backs, grasping for purchase.
Misty opened her eyes and ended her call. She swayed to the side, part of her still convinced she was the water. She took a deep breath and wiggled her fingers. She pressed her tongue against the roof of her mouth and swallowed just to feel the muscles in her throat contract. The door inside her chest was heavier now, harder to close, and a little piece of her remained open as she straightened her back and waited for the dizziness to pass.
It was hard to share her body with something like the creek that believed absolutely the truth of its existence when she didn’t believe the same of herself. It was hard to convince her body to return to her when it longed to be clawed and slick or hard and slithering or winged and feathered and gone, gone, gone.
But it was a girl body instead.
It was small and pale-skinned and freckled with squat calves that were bruised from falling. It was a here-and-now body with a sore spot on her tongue from eating corn bread straight out of the oven last night and an ache behind her eyes from crying that morning. It was still a short body, a good-at-hiding body that fit into the dark corner by her parents’ bedroom door and listened to the things they said to each other when they thought no one was listening. Dark-haired and dark-eyed and at least three inches shorter than she wanted it to be, it was her body and it was impossible to ignore.
Misty stood up slowly and walked even more slowly in the direction she had come. The crawdads clung to the sleeves of her T-shirt. They tangled themselves inside her hair and swayed with her as she walked through the water. Her body felt wrung out, emptied of everything she had brought—every need, every worry, every fear. When she reached the creek bank, she dropped to her knees on the soft sand. She rested her forehead against the ground and closed her eyes. She heard, in the distance, the familiar grind of her mother’s car engine. Misty was supposed to go grocery shopping with her this time since it was Misty’s turn to pick out the ice cream, but the tires crunched over the driveway and were gone without her. A pang of sadness rippled through Misty and the crawdads felt it, too, as they fell from Misty’s clothes one at a time. They gathered around her, worried. They searched for wounds on her body, murmuring back and forth, and the sound of their shared conversation was like leaves crunching inside her head.
“I’m okay,” Misty said as the crawdads worked at the hem of her T-shirt, trying to find a way beneath.
They didn’t believe her. They shared images of small things—acorns and newly laid eggs and the round blue pebbles buried beneath the creek bed. This was how the crawdads, how everything, spoke to her. Not with language that she understood, but with a mix of images and sensations that Misty translated. Sometimes it was hard to interpret what the crawdads meant, and even harder to make herself clear to them. But Misty knew what they meant when they shared these images with her. They were telling her that Misty was like the acorn, the egg, the pebbles. She felt small that day, and the crawdads wanted to know why.
Misty turned her head so she could see a half dozen of the crawdads keeping watch over her. “I’m just tired. I don’t want to go back home.”
And at once the sensation of fifteen small hands holding her in place, asking her to stay.
“I can’t.” Misty held out a finger and the crawdads crowded around it, touching the tips of their claws to her skin. “I have to go back. My bed is there. And my mom. She’d be sad without me.”
The crawdads sent her a fuzzy feeling in her lips and the image of a night sky, which had always been their way of asking why or telling her that they didn’t understand.
Misty sighed. “I don’t know. I don’t think my family is happy.” She shared a rush of images. Her mother standing by the front door with her head in her hands. A window in an empty house that they passed every Sunday on the way to church that made Misty feel lonely. Penny slamming a door in her face. The little lines of light that etched across her favorite quilt when she hid beneath it, the light tracing the seams, the light pointing out all the places that were worn and frayed and falling apart.
The crawdads gathered nearer.
“I wish I could talk to them like I talk to you,” Misty said. “They don’t listen to me much when I do talk, but if I was in their heads, then they couldn’t ignore me.”
Misty laid her cheek against the sand. She’d thought of telling her family about how she could speak to the world but she wasn’t sure how they’d react. They might not believe her at all. She had no way to explain what she did, no proof besides a few crawdads crawling over her skin. Or worse, if they believed her, they might also believe she was bad. Her aunt Jem told stories sometimes about strange people and strange things that had happened in their family, and Misty’s mother hated the stories. She never wanted to listen. If she found out that Misty was a strange thing, too, then she might hate her or turn her away, might never trust her again.
After a while, some of the crawdads returned to the creek. Some started to burrow beneath the ground, digging narrow tunnels where they could hide, until only one crawdad remained before her. It was almost impossible to tell them apart, and even if she could, it was impossible to give the crawdads names of their own. She had tried before, but the crawdads rejected them. They knew themselves as crawdad and nothing else. They were a collective, a group. When she called, they answered
together, and when they left, they left together. They didn’t want to be known apart.
A crawdad returned from the creek with a shed crawdad skin in its claws. The crawdads had shared their memories of molting with Misty, the way they shed their old bodies so they could keep growing. She’d felt the itch of a too-tight skin, the fevered panic of shedding, the need to be released. She knew what it was like to expand, to grow, and she loved to look at the shed skins, to touch them, gently, and feel the way they gave beneath her, like she was holding light inside her hands. The crawdads shared them with her, and Misty collected them in a box under her bed. Looking at them made her feel steady, like there was nothing in the world that couldn’t be undone or redone.
Misty stroked her finger along the back of the molted skin. It was only partially intact—the tail and one claw had been torn away, leaving a fragment of the crawdad who had shed its body. A bell chimed nearby and Misty jumped. She kicked her feet out of the water and scrambled to her knees. She’d hung a string of bells in the bushes weeks before to warn her when someone came too close. The only person who came looking for her these days was her neighbor, William. She hadn’t known him before they moved into Earl’s trailer, but now he was the closest thing to a best friend that Misty had ever had. He was the same age as her, but a grade behind because he’d missed too much school last year. William could tie knots and spit, and he cursed when no one was around to hear. He listened to her when she complained about Penny and he was nice enough, but she didn’t trust him with her crawdads. His BB gun had been taken away for shooting at robins from his back porch. Without the gun, she worried he might turn his attention on the crawdads. They were so easy to corner, to catch.
So Misty pounded her fist against the ground three times. With every blow, a jolt shot through the air, something like a shout, like thunder. The crawdads skittered back to the creek or crawled into their burrows. As William crashed through the underbrush on the hill above the creek, the last crawdad’s tail swished into the water and disappeared.
“Hey!” he called. “What’re you doing?”
“Playing,” Misty said.
“Is them your bells back there?”
She nodded. “That’s my alarm.”
“That’s pretty smart,” he said. “Have you thought about adding something? Like some spikes. Or maybe digging a pit or something for people to fall into. The bells is good but they won’t stop nobody from coming down here.”
“It ain’t supposed to stop nobody. It’s just got to tell me they’re coming.”
William shrugged. “Let me know if you change your mind. I could draw something up for you and show you how it’d work. If you’re interested.”
“Yeah,” Misty said. “What’re you doing anyway?”
William smiled. “Going to the barn. All of us are.”
“Who’s us?” Misty asked.
“Me and Penny and you.”
“Why?”
He grinned. “I got a game for us to play.”
“What kind?”
“You have to come and see. I bet you ain’t never played it before though.”
“What is it?”
William turned and ran through the high weeds without answering. He sent the bells ringing again, louder this time than before, and Misty felt the pluck of his fingers against the string inside her chest, her own ribs fluttering with the sound.
She dipped her hand into the creek before she left, searching for any crawdads that might have lingered. The slow current altered the image of her hand, making it appear as though her finger crooked away at the knuckle, like somewhere beneath the surface of the water her hand was broken and she just hadn’t felt the pain yet.
Three
The barn was old and creaking and filled with things that Misty shouldn’t touch—things sharp and jagged and flowered with rust, things sagging with stale water, bloated until it was impossible to tell what the thing was in its life before. The wooden planks that made up the barn’s walls and roof might have been golden once, but they had since faded to a cloudy gray and grown soft in places where they shouldn’t be soft. Even the breeze stopped at the barn’s door, so the air grew stagnant inside, too warm. It seemed that nothing stirred except for the dust, which lifted from the ground, from the tools, even from the walls, like the barn was shedding itself by inches. One day Misty might wake up and the barn would be gone, carried off by a strong breeze a few miles down the road, rearranged slightly so no one might notice it had been a barn once instead of a bird or a church or whatever barns became when they forgot their making.
The barn belonged to their landlord, Earl, and he had forbidden Misty and Penny and William from going inside. He called them a liability, saw them like a wound waiting to open. He lived in the trailer across the driveway from the barn. Earl owned the bottom where Misty stood and everything on it—three trailers, the barn, the crumbling fence, and the tilted mailboxes. His front yard was a garden where nothing ever grew, no matter how hard he worked. The garden soil was dark and dry and peppered with small stones that Earl tossed across the road when he dug them up. All summer long the stones plinked and skittered across the blacktop and Earl grunted and cursed and sighed, needing the earth so much to be something that it wasn’t.
The garden was one of the few things that Misty didn’t speak to. Earl had begged the ground for so long to be something that it wasn’t—called it growing, called it now, and green, and hurry, that the garden had become something else. Misty felt it like a loose tooth, an aching, unsettled feeling that buzzed in the palms of her hands every time she looked at it. There was something different about the garden, something sad and strange.
Misty had thought of reaching out to it before, of offering her name, but speaking to something that was injured could be dangerous. Misty had learned that the hard way the summer before. She’d been trying to befriend the deer that sometimes grazed in the woods behind her trailer, but they were cautious things. Wide-eyed and slender-legged, they moved through the trees like shadows, and no matter how hard she tried, Misty could never seem to get close to them. She’d offered them pieces of her name, waiting for them to offer their own in return, but they never would. Prey animals were often more guarded. They made Misty work harder to get to know them and took longer to share themselves with her. She still didn’t understand why they saw her as a threat, but she tried to respect them.
She’d gone to the woods every day for weeks and was on the verge of giving up when she found the wounded fawn.
It was the first time she’d seen one alone. They were usually close to their mother’s side, their wide, dark eyes peeking out at Misty from a distance. But this fawn was alone, and bleeding. Its back hip was covered with dark-red blood, the fur matted and thick. Its back legs had slumped to the ground, but the front legs were still standing. They trembled so hard that the whole doe was shaking, its ears twitching back and forth like a light bulb blinking on and off, like any minute the fawn might disappear altogether.
Bloody as it was, the fawn still tried to run when it saw Misty, but it was too weak to do more than shuffle a few steps before tipping into the underbrush. Misty thought about turning back. She could get her mother, or her father, or even Earl. Anyone might know better than her what to do with something this hurt. She’d never seen that much blood before, and the smell of it was enough to make her stomach twist.
But she stayed. And she did the only thing she could think to help the deer.
Misty offered her name, which was shorter back then, and not quite so sad. Her name spilled out of her all in a rush, and the moment it ended, Misty was racked with pain. She dropped to one knee and cried out, but there was no one there to hear her but the fawn, who struggled toward her. Pain swelled in her hip, spreading to her knees and ankles, all her joints on fire. Her fingers spasmed, and her mouth tasted like dirt and blood. Shards of the fawn’s memories lodged in
Misty’s mind, temporarily blocking out the fawn in front of her. Misty saw the woods and trees as the fawn did, and she saw her mother, a doe, and the smell of their den, and then there was a shot.
A crack like thunder, but there was no rain, no clouds in the sky.
Her mother bolted through the trees and the fawn tried to follow, but her leg wouldn’t move. Then the pain came. Bright. Strange. She’d never felt anything like it before.
She stumbled through the trees. She cried out for her mother, but her mother was gone.
And the fawn cried out still, filling Misty with its pain, with the scent of its mother. Misty tried to pull back, to shut the door in her chest long enough to breathe—all she wanted was a breath of air—but there was no way to do it. The fawn was so panicked, so afraid. It was in so much pain that it couldn’t stop itself. It just wanted not to hurt anymore, and it clung to Misty as long as it could.
And without the fawn’s name, it was harder to break the connection, harder to see beyond anything but its hurt, harder to know herself as something separate from the pain. Without something to anchor the fawn, all its feelings bled over into Misty, became Misty. She struggled to breathe, to speak.
Then the fawn’s mother came.
Misty wasn’t sure where she’d come from, but she was there and the world dimmed like the sun was setting in the middle of the afternoon. Misty had never passed out before, but she felt a kind of looseness behind her eyes, a sense of falling. A cold muzzle pressed to her throat once, briefly, and when Misty looked up again, she was alone. The grass rustled in the distance. The wind dried the sweat on her forehead and she shivered.
It took nearly half an hour for Misty to walk the quarter mile back to her trailer, and by the time she stumbled into the yard, her mother was looking for her. Misty had collapsed into her mother’s arms and smelled nothing but warm fur and milk.
Every Bone a Prayer Page 2
