Every Bone a Prayer

by Ashley Blooms

  And every time Misty looked, she felt a gentle nudge at the back of her mind, a faint knocking like the night before. She waited, still, for it to offer a name, but it never did. It just waited at the edges of her thoughts like a cat stalking through high grass.

  “Come away from there, Little Bit,” Misty’s mother said. Her hand was warm and clammy as it cupped Misty’s elbow and pulled her away from the window. Their mother frowned as she glanced outside, then closed the blinds with a snap.

  Penny had been scraping a small black stain in the corner of the kitchen, but she stopped and lifted her head. “You know it’s just a piece of glass, right? It ain’t like it’s done nothing to hurt anybody. And even if it did, you can’t hold us hostage for the rest of our lives.”

  Penny looked right at their mother as she said it, and Misty wanted to pinch the back of her arm. Sometimes it seemed like Misty caught all of the sadness, the grief, and the guilty that Penny refused to take as her own. Penny shrugged it off and Misty was there to pick it up because somebody had to feel it. Somebody had to be sorry. Somebody had to be quiet, or else the whole world would be filled with noise and nobody would stay together and there’d be nothing left for Misty to call home.

  “Hostage?” their mother said. The knuckles on both her hands were scalded bright red by the steaming dishwater.

  “I just meant…” Penny dropped her head. “I’m bored. I want to go out and do something else for a little while.”

  A muscle in their mother’s jaw clenched and unclenched. “You can go sweep the porch for a little while. But I better not hear your feet hit the grass, all right?”

  Penny waited until their mother turned her back to roll her eyes, then crept onto the front porch without looking back. Their mother’s shoulders slumped when Penny shut the door. Whatever held her up when she was angry must have cost her a great deal, because she was always wrung out afterward, all her joints suddenly loose and yielding as a sheet hung out to dry.

  She said, “Sometimes I just want to throttle her.”

  Misty smiled. “Me too.”

  Their mother leaned against the kitchen counter for support. “I told Aunt Jem and Aunt Dolly about that thing of Earl’s.”

  “What’d they say?” Misty asked.

  “Dolly’s going to pray. Jem wants to see it, of course. She’s always been that way. Casting about looking for something new while Dolly tells her she can’t have it and I run along behind trying to keep them both from getting hurt or hurting each other.” She smiled and looked about to say something more, but paused. It was a familiar gesture. Misty’s mother had probably eaten more words than she had spoken, bitten them off mid-syllable and swallowed them somewhere deep inside, someplace even beyond the reach of echoes.

  She walked over to the front door and, without looking outside, shouted, “Both feet on the porch, Penny Lee, or it’ll be my switch on your hind end.”

  Their mother had turned to the vacuum when she noticed a faint crescent of lime-green light against the wall. The light had been there all morning—Misty had seen it trembling over her mother’s shoulder once and mistaken it for a moth. The light was the exact shade of green as the statue that had grown in the garden. Their mother walked over and placed her hand against the light like it was a stain that she could rub out of the paneling. The light shone on her hand instead, and she yanked her hand away as though she’d been burned.

  Misty watched from the kitchen floor as their mother rearranged the curtains on the living room window. She cinched the blinds open and closed. The outside world stuttered to life for one too-bright moment before the living room fell back to dimness.

  But still, the light persisted.

  It landed on a different place each time—first in the very center of the wall, then it retreated to the corner of a worn throw pillow for almost half an hour before Misty spotted it. Their mother descended on the window again, and this time the light glinted off the thin glass frame of a family photo. It hovered at Misty’s throat, small and bright and green. Their mother pulled the photo from the wall and laid it on the kitchen counter, facedown.

  Penny walked back inside and said, “The sheriff is out there, Mama. Earl’s building a fence around his garden and talking about intruders and how he wants a patrol or something. And Miss Janet from church and her sister are there, too. And my old history teacher Mr. Morris is out there with his uppity daughter Heather, and they’re all talking about—” She stopped and looked between Misty and their mother. “What’s going on?”

  “There’s a green light,” Misty said. “We’re trying to find it.”

  Penny leaned her broom against the wall, and Misty left her dishrag on the floor of the kitchen. The air was heavy with the scent of lemon and burnt grease as they chased the light all across the room, from crease to corner to ceiling. They followed it over the sagging couch with its creaking springs, over the recliner where Misty’s father sat in the evenings, a ring of coal dust staining the place where his neck rubbed against the fabric. The porcelain figures shook as Misty and Penny stomped back and forth, taking turns in front of the window, blocking the light’s path, but it always found some way through, some slight slip that they couldn’t catch, never for long. Their mother’s face was pulled into a tight expression as she searched, all the little muscles in her face knitting themselves together like they were scared to be alone.

  Hours passed this way, and if Misty grew hungry, she didn’t notice. None of them stopped to eat or drink. None of them even mentioned stopping.

  “How’s it keep getting inside?” their mother asked. “I know it’s coming from that thing in the garden. The light’s the same color.” She clutched her hands in front of her chest, and the air grew heavy with something that Misty couldn’t name. She’d felt it before on the nights when her parents fought the loudest or in church before the Holy Ghost fell. It was moments like this that Misty felt most desperate to speak to her mother, to close her eyes and call her mother’s true name and hear her mother’s voice inside her head. It would be her only chance of reaching her mother in moments like this when she seemed so far away, so separate and alone.

  There was no way to know exactly where the light was coming from, but it made Misty even more wary of the garden and the strange things happening around it. She still felt the nameless presence hovering near her like a ghost staring over her shoulder. It put her on edge, like any moment she might scream at the garden or the statue or her sister—anything at all to let the feeling loose. Maybe that was how her mother felt, too.

  Finally, the sun dipped behind the trees and the green light darkened to the color of a holly leaf. One moment it was there, on the middle of a couch cushion, and the next moment, they had lost it. Misty sank down the wall nearest the kitchen, her shirt crackling like static behind her. Penny squatted near the door, and their mother stood with one long-fingered hand on her throat.

  Even when it was gone, the light still didn’t feel gone. It felt hiding, waiting. It felt almost. Their eyes darted over the ceiling, the furniture, each other, but the light still didn’t come back. Half an hour passed in silence before their mother’s hoarse voice croaked, “Get ready. We’re going to church.”

  * * *

  The church smelled like fresh lumber, wooden but not woody, not like the trees behind Misty’s house, even though the two had been nearly the same once. The church had been rebuilt a year before, but still seemed unused, like the doors had been unlocked only that morning. The newness made it hard to feel comfortable. There was always a sense of something being undone by the presence of people—flattening the fresh carpet as they walked, smudging the gleaming pews with their fingerprints, cracking the hymnals’ spines with their searching.

  The church resisted this intrusion, resisted its new self. There was a shock to being remade. A time of forgetting, of mourning as the church accepted that it was home to different kin
ds of things now. The blue jays and gray squirrels of the woods had been replaced by instruments and leather shoes and prayer requests. A few years from now, the church would start to remember who it had been before, the memories surfacing like dreams, all muddy and blue. It would join its selves together, the then and the now, and it would be easier for it to speak to Misty. Until then, the church was quiet as it searched for itself, roaming through its own walls, scouring its foundation, and the hum of it trembled in the back of Misty’s mind.

  Misty’s aunts were already waiting in their pew—two round-faced women with soft hands that smelled always of baby powder. Dolly sat with her husband and her daughter, Charlene. Dolly’s older child, Sam, had refused to come to church, claiming that God was a story people told to make themselves feel better. Charlene was only eight, which made her the baby of the family, and she had no choice but to come. So she sat in the floor of the pew with a book propped on her seat, mouthing the words under her breath as she read.

  Aunt Jem was at the other end of the pew with her two sons, Jerry and Jamie. Jerry’s head was bent toward a sketchbook on his lap. He drew something that Misty couldn’t make out from this angle—a curve that might have been a face or a wheel or a sun. His older brother, Jamie, wore a bandanna around his long hair. As Misty sat down, Jem plucked the bandanna from Jamie’s head and tucked it into her purse, mumbling about blasphemy under her breath all the while. As she did, Jamie took another bandanna from his pocket and tied it over his hair, which had grown out almost to his shoulders. Jem’s eyes widened when she looked back at him. This time she ripped the bandanna away and stuffed it into her bag as Jamie pulled yet another bandanna from his pocket—this one bright yellow—and tied it back into place.

  After the fourth round, Jem finally relented and asked Jamie what he wanted from her. The two of them fell into whispered negotiations of which Misty heard only a few words—paintball gun, kitchen floor, backyard. When it was over, Jamie sat up straight with his hands folded in his lap, a perfect gentleman with a slight smile tugging at the corners of his mouth.

  Misty’s family sat in the middle of her aunts so that Misty was wedged between her cousin Jerry and her mother.

  Jem sighed. “Beth, you look like how I feel right now. You ain’t getting sick, are you? I’ll get the preacher over here with his holy water if you are.”

  Misty’s mother swatted at her sister. “I’m not sick. I’m just tired.”

  “Well, you came to the right place then,” Dolly said. “Is that Claudette over there? Sitting with Phillip’s family?”

  “They got back together,” Misty’s mother said. “I saw them down at the gas station the other day.”

  “After she ripped her way up and down the county?” Dolly whispered.

  “This is the house of the Lord,” Jem said. “At least say ‘fornicated.’”

  The women went on talking about their week at home, about the coal mines and whether or not Earl was still drinking, the price of double-wides and laundry detergent, and how the beans were withering in the garden. It was Jem who finally asked about the green glass man.

  Misty’s mother shook her head. “I’d rather not talk about it.”

  “Oh, come on now. You know what I keep thinking? Earl’s been tending that land for years now and finally something grew. It’d be a real inspiration if he wasn’t such a creep.”

  “I don’t see why he cleared the land in the first place,” Dolly said. “It used to be covered in the prettiest dogwood grove you ever seen. And that old swinging bridge, you remember? I used to walk out there when Wayne and I was first married and we’d have a fight. That place always calmed me right down. Made everything feel all right.”

  “I never understood how he could afford it,” Jem said.

  “He got all the money from that settlement. Don’t you remember? Something happened to him in the mines. Broke his neck or something.”

  Jem huffed. “Nothing seems broke to me, except his head. You know, there always was something off about that place. You remember when Earl first set them trailers there? He couldn’t keep nobody in them for more than a month or two.”

  “People said they was haunted,” Dolly said. “Wayne’s cousin lived in one for a while, and he said that birds nested in the walls.”

  “Did they say anything about a light?” Misty’s mother asked, but Jem just shrugged.

  “Whatever it was, I reckon it was God’s way of punishing Earl for what he did to that wife of his. Lord knows he’s never gonna see any justice in this life.”

  “She always was a quare thing,” Dolly said, “but she never deserved him.”

  Misty felt her cousin Jerry stiffen at the word quare. She’d heard the word often, sometimes aimed at herself, sometimes at Jerry, sometimes at strangers. It was supposed to mean strange or different, but it meant something else, too, something that Misty hadn’t quite figured out yet. Jerry had, though, and it hurt him every time he heard it, so Misty laid her head against his shoulder and whispered, “I like that girl you’re drawing.”

  He huffed out a breath and his body loosened a little. “It’s supposed to be a bird.”

  “It will be,” Misty said.

  He pressed his forehead to hers for a brief moment—his skin cool and soft, the smell of cologne clinging to his shirt—then turned back to his drawing.

  “Can we talk about something else?” Misty’s mother asked.

  Jem picked up a tithing envelope and fanned her face with it. “I know you don’t like what’s happening, but not talking about it ain’t going to make that thing in the garden go away. You do know that?”

  Penny leaned forward and whispered, “That’s what I said,” but Misty’s mother didn’t answer. Jem took the silence as permission to keep talking.

  “It’s just like great-aunt Susie when the mountain behind her house started slipping. She didn’t pay it any mind, said the mountain had held for a thousand years, it could hold for a thousand more. Then she woke up one morning with her lap full of mud. Nearly buried her alive. Of course that’s how she made the Mud Man. He wasn’t much of a looker, but he sure helped out around the farm.”

  “Oh, will you hush with those stories,” Misty’s mother said. “Half the things you say never happened to anybody, let alone our family.”

  “Oh, ye of little faith,” Jem said. “If we don’t remember them, then it won’t matter what they went through and I for one think that—”

  “Jem,” Dolly said, loud enough to make a handful of people look over their shoulders. Misty’s mother and aunts smiled and adjusted their skirts until the people turned back around.

  Misty’s mother spoke quietly between her teeth. “I don’t know no more about that thing in Earl’s garden than the two of you do, except what it looks like, and I wished I didn’t know that. I’m praying. That’s all I know to do. Pray and ask God to take it away before…”

  Penny rolled her eyes, and Misty wrapped her finger in the hem of their mother’s shirt. “It’s okay, Mom.”

  “It’s not,” she said. “But Jem never could leave anything alone.”

  Dolly shot Jem a look until she took a deep breath and said, “I’m sorry, Beth. I didn’t know it was getting to you like that, or I wouldn’t have said a thing to begin with.”

  “It’s probably just some crackpot scheme of Earl’s,” Dolly said. “That man never was right. Who knows what he’s cooked up living alone in that trailer all these years. I bet it’ll all blow over in a week and we’ll be back to talking about Maxine’s low-cut blouses and school supplies. I have to buy Charlene new cleats for softball this year, and I reckon I’ll have to take a second mortgage out on the house just to swing it.”

  “Jamie has some that he grew out of a few years ago. I used to mow the yard in them but they’re still in good shape. Have Char walk down and see us tomorrow, and we’ll dig them out. You hear me
, Char?” Jem said.

  Charlene didn’t look up.

  “That’s good,” Jem said. “She’s probably over there reading how to dispose of bodies, plotting my murder. She’s got that look in her eye, you know? The one Delroy Baker’s boy had before he—”

  “See,” Dolly said. “Everything’s going to be just fine, Beth. Charlene will bury Jem out back with the Mud Man and we’ll all mourn her, of course, but we’ll move on. And the pastor’s going to speak on that—what did you call it—that statue in Earl’s garden. People have been asking him about it, too. He’ll tell us what do.”

  Misty’s mother stared straight ahead. The piano began to play and all conversation died as the preacher took the pulpit. He reminded the congregation that Revival was just a month away and he knew their church would receive a touch from the Lord. He saw them like so many hands outreached for a blessing. His words dimmed in Misty’s ears as her mother took out her Bible and turned to a verse, the pages bright with highlighter and littered with her fine, neat writing in the margins, the corners of the pages worn smooth by her fingers. Misty didn’t hear much else the preacher said, but she studied the wooden beams that crisscrossed the ceiling of the church instead. She imagined herself walking across them with her arms outspread, her toes clenched tight against the veneer, her panty hose slick and smooth beneath her, waiting for someone to look up and notice her, but no one ever did, not even in her fantasies.

  Sometimes she imagined that Penny was with her on the beams, but she knew deep down that Penny wouldn’t play with her like that, and the fantasy crumbled. So she imagined William instead. If anyone would stand barefoot above the cross and their preacher and half the county on a warm Sunday evening, it would be William. She smiled to herself as she imagined him doing a handstand as she cartwheeled back and forth over the beams. She wasn’t sure that either of them could really do those tricks, but in her mind they could do anything. The lights would shake with Misty’s footfalls as she tipped end over end, stirring dust that fell like soft snow on the heads of all the people who refused to look up and see them.