Every Bone a Prayer

by Ashley Blooms

  Her stuffed animal lineup rotated every night so that each animal got a chance to be at the head of the bed, which meant they were closest to Misty. She rearranged them as she said good night, moving Carol the Octopus from the head of her bed to the foot and shifting the line along until Culver Penguin was just beside her cheek. She scratched at a stain on his belly until something pale yellow flaked away.

  “You know them animals don’t care who sleeps beside you, right?” Penny said. “They got fuzz for brains.”

  “So do you,” Misty said and smiled when Penny scoffed.

  “Isn’t it time to give those animals away?” Penny asked. “I gave all my stuffed animals to the church when I was ten. Mom and Dad got me a bike for giving them all up. Don’t you want a bike?”

  Misty rolled her eyes. Ever since Penny turned twelve, she liked to pretend that she was grown. “I have what I want.”

  “Well, if some of them animals start disappearing, don’t blame me. It was probably a wolf that ate them.”

  Misty walked to the center of the room and drew a line down the middle with her finger. “The force field is up.”

  “Oh no,” Penny mumbled.

  Misty climbed into bed, and a pillow flew across the room. Penny giggled. “That’s some force field you got there. Can’t even keep a pillow out.”

  Misty closed her eyes.

  “Hey, will you get my pillow for me?” Penny asked.

  “Get it yourself.”

  “Please?”

  Misty held out as long as she could, but the minute she refused her sister, she had begun to feel guilty about it. If she didn’t pick up the pillow, Penny might never speak to her again. She would pretend that she couldn’t hear Misty talking like she sometimes did, until Misty panicked, convinced that she’d slipped through the cracks in their home at last, become a ghost at last, and she got so afraid that she would yell at Penny until Penny yelled back at her. Sometimes the only way that Misty knew she was real was if someone else told her it was true. Misty kicked the covers away, picked up Penny’s pillow, and tossed it at her head.

  Penny smiled with her eyes closed and adjusted the pillow beneath her. “I won’t bother your dumb animals, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  Penny turned off the lamp beside her bed.

  “Hey, Penny?” Misty said.

  Penny sighed.

  “Do you think Dad’ll come home tonight?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  Penny didn’t answer for so long that Misty thought her sister had fallen asleep, so she said a little louder, “Hey, can I ask you something else?”

  Penny sighed.

  “It’s important this time. Dad said something before he left. About how Mom had done something and she was supposed to tell us. What do you think he meant?”

  “I don’t know,” Penny said. “I didn’t hear him.”

  “But if you had to guess.”

  “Then I’d guess it was something bad,” Penny said. “Or sad, probably.”

  “Yeah,” Misty said. “I thought so, too.”

  Penny’s mattress creaked as she turned over on her side, and the sheets rustled as she tucked them under her feet.

  “Hey, Penny,” Misty said.

  “What?”

  “Can you do the thing?”

  Penny’s hand was a silhouette in the darkness as she reached up and loosened the tack holding the quilt in place over their window. She wrenched it loose and tucked the quilt onto the frame so a thin sliver of light shone through from outside. The light came from the sodium lamp beside Earl’s barn. It was the pale orange of a dying fire, and it wasn’t much, but after a while it was enough to see the whole room by.

  Misty leaned over and slid a shoebox from under her bed. Inside, the crawdad skins in her collection were thin and papery white. They rustled like dry leaves when Misty lifted them into her palm, and it was the sound she imagined ghosts made. Like someone’s pale lips pressed to a keyhole and whispering every secret they’d ever kept, fierce and quiet and gone. She counted the skins three times—seven in all—before Penny finally began to snore.

  Misty counted to one hundred, listening to the rattle of Penny’s snore like there was a leaf caught in her chest that kept catching her breath and shaking and shaking. Only when she was sure that Penny was totally asleep did Misty stow her collection under her bed and slip from under the covers. She and Penny were never allowed to go outside after dark, never alone, and never, never anywhere near Earl’s trailer unless their mother was with them, but sometimes Misty liked to do all three. She’d taken to sneaking outside after everyone else had fallen asleep. She’d never gone much farther than the barn, once going so far as to stand on the one-lane blacktopped road that twisted along her holler, just to feel the heat of the day rising up from the pavement and into the soles of her feet. She liked being alone, and she liked doing something that even Penny wasn’t brave enough to do.

  And no matter what their mother said, or their preacher, or the show about the missing women, or their teachers at school who told them never to trust strangers, it was hard to believe that anything bad could happen to her so close to home. Still, Misty held her breath as she crept through the living room, unlocked the back door, and slipped outside into the night.

  Six

  The bottom felt strange at night, like the darkness had swallowed the world Misty knew and left something else behind—a place filled with different animals, different sounds, different light. The withered maple tree at the end of the yard called out its name to Misty. Its trunk was full of beetles, and the beetles called out, too, roaming restless through the tree’s graying bark. They made Misty feel many-limbed and deeply rooted, her body stretched across a dozen smaller bodies and through more branches than she could count. The earthworms beneath her feet filled her arms with slick, wet earth, and an owl showed her what she looked like from above.

  They were still hesitant with her, these night things, but they were growing more and more accustomed to her presence. Misty treated that trust like a piece of glass—something fragile, to be protected. Some people might look outside and never even wonder about the way that bats played games with one another or how owls sometimes told stories going forward and then in reverse and Misty could never really tell which way was the right way. They might seem dull, these animals. Just responding, never thinking, never dreaming, but it wasn’t true. Some people just didn’t look hard enough or didn’t understand that there were a lot of ways to pray, to hope, to feel. A lot of ways of being alive.

  Misty stopped as she rounded the corner of the trailer. Miss Shannon walked onto her front porch with a man following close behind. Misty crouched in the grass, her knees sinking into the soft dirt.

  The man was taller and broader than Misty’s father, and when the moonlight struck his face, it revealed a full, dark beard and small, dark eyes above it. As Shannon walked down the steps, he reached under the long T-shirt that she wore and lifted the hem, revealing her underwear. Shannon laughed as the man pressed her against the hood of his truck, his hands buried deep in her hair. Shannon’s back arched against the metal. Misty’s cheeks burned so she stared at the shadows on the grass instead, inspecting the quick, skittered movements of the bugs crawling through the yard.

  When Misty looked back at the truck, the man had picked Shannon up, hoisted her onto his waist. Her legs were long and pale as they wrapped around his back, one foot swaying back and forth in its own little rhythm. It was easy to forget that William’s life was very different from Misty’s despite the many things they had in common. William talked about his mother often and the men that she brought home—her boyfriends, her flings, her test subjects, she called them, jokingly. Sometimes, William said, he listened to the noises that his mother and the men made together at night. Sometimes, she sounded like she was drowning.
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  Finally, the man set Shannon on the ground again and they parted ways. She watched his truck from the bottom step until even the dim red of its taillights had disappeared around the road, then walked back inside alone.

  Misty slunk along the wall of her trailer, one hand gliding over the thin metal of the underpinning. Their front porch was squat and wooden. It had been painted white long ago, but the paint had chipped and faded until it was nearly gone. The bottom was covered on three sides by white latticework that someone had nailed into the boards but never secured to the ground, so over time the lattice got tossed by the wind until one side broke away completely and the other three sides were damaged, bloated with rain and age. A wasp’s nest hung from beneath the far corner of the porch, but its edges were dried and brittle, long abandoned. Spiderwebs stretched from one rail to the next, connecting the porch with thin, glistening threads, and a roach skittered out of her way as she crawled beneath the porch. A crawdad chimney that Misty had never seen before hid among the shadows. She knelt before it and strummed her fingers gently against the dirt until a crawdad broke through the chimney. Its claws were cool and slick and a little damp against her finger. The crawdad shared its name and Misty shared hers, building a bridge between them.

  “What’re you doing here?” Misty asked.

  The crawdad shared an image from earlier that day—Misty lying on the bank of the creek—and then other images—acorns scattered across the ground, flies buzzing above something long dead, the heaving thrum of their wings like drums inside her head. The crawdads still believed that Misty was sick or that something was wrong with her.

  “So you came to check on me?”

  An image of a crawdad with eggs attached to the underside of its long tail. The water pulsed past them, warm and steady, but it never separated them. The feeling of something so close that it was almost herself, a second self, twinned. The crawdads hatched into babies with shells so thin that they were nearly transparent. The hatchlings stayed near their mother’s side.

  When something was small, it needed to be protected.

  Misty was small, so she needed them.

  Tears welled in her eyes. She ran her finger gently along the length of the crawdad’s back. “Won’t you get all dried out under there?”

  The crawdad showed Misty the water inside its burrow. Deep down beneath the earth, cold water, pure and sweet smelling. Water buried in pockets if one knew where to look. Water coursing beneath them and around them all the time. The crawdad would make a home there for a while so it could be near Misty. So she wouldn’t be alone.

  A door creaked and Misty jolted, thinking it must be her mother looking for her, but the porch remained empty. Across the yard, William walked through the high grass and stood in front of Earl’s garden. He wore a white T-shirt that glowed under the moonlight and a pair of ratty shorts. His feet were bare and his hair was flattened in the back from the time he’d spent in bed trying to sleep. His shoulders bowed slightly like he might have been searching for something on the dark ground or he might have been praying.

  He looked different at night. Different alone when no one else was looking. Smaller, somehow. More like her. Misty hesitated. It felt wrong to speak to William without anyone else around in the middle of the night. Like something that her mother wouldn’t approve of.

  But he looked so small. So familiar.

  Misty crawled from beneath the porch, sharing one last thing with the crawdad—the feeling of her aunt Dolly’s hugs, the warm, tight embrace of someone who loved you through and through, the kind of feeling that made it okay to be smaller than something else, to fit inside something else.

  Then Misty crept across the yard toward William. She paused before she reached him and said, “Are you okay?” in her smallest voice.

  William whipped around, startled. He dropped the bottle that was in his hand, and it clanked against the ground.

  “Shit,” he said, and then grinned. “What’re you doing out here?”

  “I come out here sometimes,” Misty said. “Is that the spin-the-bottle?”

  William picked the green bottle off the ground and twisted it slowly between his fingers, letting the moonlight glint off its dark surface. “Yeah. I was gonna take it back to the barn. I didn’t think Mom’d like it if she found it in my room. I think she’s afraid I’m going to grow up and be a drunk just like Earl.”

  “I saw her outside a few minutes ago…” Misty bit back the words, but William already knew what she meant. He sat down on the grass beside the garden and twisted the bottle in his hands.

  “She was saying good night to her boyfriend.” He said the last word like it tasted bitter in his mouth.

  “With the big beard?”

  “That’s him. Harold. He’s training to be a boss in the mines.”

  Misty sat down in the grass, careful not to let her bare feet touch the garden. She didn’t think anything bad would happen if she did, but it still felt wrong somehow. Sadness crept into her throat just looking at it.

  “He’s hung around longer than most of the men has,” William said. “But they all leave eventually. And then it’s just me and Mom again. She says I’m the only one who’ll never leave her, and she’s right. I just wish he’d get to the leaving already. Mom works all the time, but now she spends half her time with Harold. I don’t see her near as much as I used to.”

  Misty nodded. “My dad ain’t home much, neither. And when he is…”

  “What?”

  Misty shrugged. “I don’t know. Him and my mom fight sometimes.”

  “About what?”

  “I don’t know. They just seem mad all the time. About everything.”

  “He don’t hit her, does he?”

  “No.”

  “That’s something, at least,” William said.

  “I guess.”

  William turned the bottle upside down and tried to balance it on the dirt, but the ground was uneven and the bottle kept tipping to the side. They each tapped the bottle with their fingers, bouncing it between them, trying to help it catch someplace in the middle, someplace it wouldn’t fall. The bottle finally fell onto the garden and rolled across the torn-up ground. Earl had tilled it that very morning, so the dirt was still loose and dark. William stretched across it, careful not to touch the ground, and he dragged the bottle back into the yard.

  “I don’t know why Earl keeps trying to make this into a garden,” he said.

  “I wish he’d leave it alone. It feels mean to keep trying to make it grow when it don’t never grow. Maybe it don’t want to be a garden.”

  “Yeah. He’s done everything he can to it already.” William twisted the bottle in his hands. “You know what I was thinking before you came over?”

  “What?”

  “That it kinda looks like me. The garden.”

  Misty looked at the side of William’s face. There was a scratch on his cheek, its edges ragged and red even in the dark, and his nose was freckled from all the time he spent in the sun. His hair had grown out more over the summer, and it curled behind his ears and fell into his eyes no matter how many times he brushed it away. She looked between him and the garden, and she could almost see the sameness in them. The sadness.

  “That’s stupid, ain’t it?” he said.

  “No, it ain’t stupid.”

  William lifted his chin and smiled at Misty. She smiled back at him.

  She said, “What if we left it something?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The garden,” Misty said. “What if we gave it something. Like the bottle.”

  Misty pressed her finger against the long, green neck of the bottle, spinning it around until it faced her.

  William frowned. “What good would that do?”

  “I don’t know. It’s better than leaving it alone again.”

  �
�Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, I guess it is.”

  William knelt over the garden and began to dig into the soft dirt with his bare hands. Misty watched, but didn’t offer to help. The thought of touching the garden still made her stomach feel queasy. She took the bottle in her hands instead and called out to it with her name. The bottle answered her the same as it had that morning, except not. Now its name included the game Misty had played and the weight of all three of their hands around its neck. She asked the bottle if it could hold a message from her to whatever was inside the garden.

  “Tell it we’re sorry,” Misty said, “and we hope that it feels better soon.”

  William stared at Misty when she opened her eyes. “What were you doing?”

  “Oh,” she said. “I was giving it a message. You know, to give the garden.”

  “Oh.” William took the bottle from her hand. “I don’t think that’ll work.”

  Misty shrugged. “It’s worth a shot.”

  He closed his eyes for just a moment before he set the bottle into the hole that he’d dug. Then William covered the bottle with dirt, careful to make it look just like the rest of the garden in case Earl noticed something different in the morning.

  “There,” he said when he was finished. “What if it don’t help anything at all?”

  “At least we tried,” Misty said.

  William trailed his fingers through the dirt slowly, his eyes almost shut, and Misty wondered what he might be saying to the garden, to himself. Something rattled nearby and they both jumped. The sound of muffled footsteps from inside Earl’s trailer.

  “Hurry,” William said. “Go!”

  They both scrambled to their feet and took off in opposite directions. Misty paused at the corner of her trailer to look back at William. He waved frantically at her from inside his front door as a light flicked on in Earl’s kitchen, spilling golden light onto the dark ground where they had sat moments before. Heart in her throat, Misty crept back into her trailer as quiet as she could and slipped back into bed.