Every Bone a Prayer

by Ashley Blooms

  “It isn’t fair!” Penny sobbed.

  “Enough!” their mother yelled.

  Everything stopped. There was no sound except Penny’s labored breathing and the whine in Misty’s throat that she couldn’t stop no matter how hard she tried. Across the yard, Earl dropped his head and the pastor turned toward the green glass man. Its watery light danced across his shoulders.

  “Into the house,” their mother said. “Right now.”

  Eighteen

  At first, Misty wasn’t sure what she was seeing when she walked into the trailer. She stopped in the doorway until Penny pushed past her, slamming the door behind them. They were both still crying, though the tears had slowed, and by the time they looked around the living room, all their anger and hurt turned to confusion.

  “What the Hell is this?” Penny said.

  Long strands of green yarn zigzagged across the ceiling.

  The first strand began in the center of the living room wall, the same spot that Misty’s mother had first noticed the green light. The string was attached to the wall with a piece of tape and it ran from there to a point on the ceiling, from the ceiling to the far corner of the living room, from there to another spot on the opposite wall. Back and forth, up and down, the yarn intersected and crossed in sharp angles. None of the strands had been cut. They were still connected to the original ball of yarn, which slumped against the couch like their mother had just dropped it there before she left to pick up the girls.

  “What did she do?” Penny asked. She stretched onto her tiptoes to touch the lowest hanging piece, but Misty reached out to stop her.

  “Don’t touch it,” she said.

  Penny jerked her arm away. “What’s she going to do? Whip me twice?” Her finger grazed the green string before she settled back onto her feet. She followed the strands back and forth until she reached the most recent. The green light was still there, shivering on the wall beneath the string.

  “She’s tracking the light,” Penny said.

  “Why, though?” Misty wiped a tear from her cheek. She’d been so angry before, but now all she felt was fear. Fear of the whipping she was about to get, fear of the mother who would deliver it.

  “I don’t know.” Penny sat down on the couch and put her head in her hands. “God, this is all so stupid.”

  “What do we do?” Misty asked.

  “How am I supposed to know?”

  The back door opened, drawing a gust of air through the house that swept through the green strings and sent them rocking slowly back and forth over Misty’s head.

  Their mother walked inside with a switch in her hand. The limb had been torn from one of the bushes in the backyard. It was thin and green and at least a foot long. The tip of the switch trembled as she stood with her eyes locked on the floor. Her mouth was a thin, tight line.

  “Sit,” she said, and Misty sat beside her sister on the couch.

  “I know I didn’t raise children like this. Children who would fight and scream at each other in front of strangers. In front of our pastor.” She stopped. She took a deep breath. “And that’s not the worst of it. The worst is what y’all did. Lying to me. Playing games. Putting your mouths God knows where for God knows what reason because I know”—she slapped the switch against the wall, and the girls flinched—“I know that I raised you with better sense than this.”

  Penny curled her knees to her chest.

  Their mother took a step toward them. “Do either of you have any idea what people say about girls who go around kissing boys at your age? Do you have any idea how hard it is to come back from something like that in a place like this? To find somebody to love you and treat you right when they think you’ve been out there giving yourself away to anybody with their hands out? Twelve and ten. Neither one of you should have any idea what a kiss even is, and here you sit with your eyes down.”

  “You lied to us, too,” Penny said.

  Misty raised her head just to see the look on their mother’s face as Penny’s words sank in.

  “What did you say?”

  Penny lifted her chin. “I said you lied to us, too. Daddy ain’t just working on the new excavator. He ain’t just training no new miners. He’s living with Uncle Danny down at them scummy little apartments. Y’all are separated. And we know it.”

  Penny’s voice wavered, but only a little. Misty loved her in that moment and regretted ever doing anything that might cause Penny any harm. If she could have spoken her sister’s true name then, Misty would have sent Penny every good feeling she knew, would wrap Penny in sunlight and dry grass and cool water on her ankles and Jem’s buttermilk biscuits and the first day of summer vacation and their mother’s laughter when she was really happy. She would have filled Penny so full of happiness that she would barely have felt the whipping that was to come.

  And if she had her mother’s true name, then Misty would have shown their mother what it felt like to be them, waiting to be hurt when they knew that they didn’t deserve it—not this—but that it was coming anyway, and maybe her mother would have stopped. Maybe she would have snapped the switch in half and hugged them instead.

  But all Misty had was her own small voice, and she was afraid that she might make it worse for both of them, so she sat there, quiet and alone, as their mother held out her hand and said, “Come here, Penny.”

  Their mother sat on the recliner. She still didn’t look at them, but somewhere in the middle of the room. Penny stood sideways between their mother’s knees so her back was to Misty.

  “Pull up your shorts,” their mother said. “You, too, Misty.”

  Penny rolled the hem of her shorts halfway up her thigh, making more skin for the switch to find. Their mother took hold of Penny’s wrist to keep her from running when the pain started. She rested the thinnest end of the switch against Penny’s shin and waited.

  They hadn’t been whipped often, but this was always the worst part. The moment before the impact came, the long, quiet seconds where the only sound was each other’s breathing. The green light trembled on the wall, pinned beneath the yarn, trapped, at least for a moment.

  Then their mother flicked her wrist back and forth so fast that her hand blurred.

  Misty flinched at the same time her sister did, but Penny didn’t lean to the side or bend her knees or pull away. She stood still and straight as the switch beat her calves, ankles, the backs of her thighs. It was the thinnest end that did the most damage, the slightest touch enough to burn as it tore away the top layer of skin. The switch made a mean sound, a quick little whistle of air, the dull smack of its body against Penny’s body again and again and again.

  When it was over, their mother opened her hand, and Penny walked to the kitchen to wait for Misty’s turn. Tears welled in Penny’s eyes and rolled down her cheeks, but she didn’t lift her hand to wipe them away.

  Misty took Penny’s place.

  She held out her arm, and her mother’s grip was strong against Misty’s wrist, was a kind of pain in itself. The garden knocked against Misty’s mind like a small fist against a small door. The sound was persistent and loud, and Misty almost answered. She had missed the garden, and it was nice to know that it was still there.

  But the garden sensed Misty’s fear, and it wanted to know what was happening. Other things reached out, too—the trailer and the blackbirds sitting on the telephone line outside—all the little things that knew something was wrong, and they tried to help. They tried to send her images of comfort and safety, but Misty turned them away. She pushed them back so they couldn’t sense her at all and she couldn’t sense them, either. Misty didn’t want them to see her like this. She didn’t want anyone to know how much this would hurt.

  And though she was ready, Misty still gasped when the switch hit her skin.

  She leaned to the side, letting her weight fall into her mother’s hand, but her mother didn�
�t slip or slow or stop. She held Misty up as she whipped the switch against her calves, the backs of her knees, the tip of the branch bending as it flew, wrapping long red welts along Misty’s thighs, its skinny tongue hungry for skin.

  And though she’d only had two or three whippings like this, there was always a moment when the switch caught the same piece of skin that it had caught before and the pain doubled, tripled. There was always a feeling, just before it was over, that it might never end.

  But it did.

  Misty opened her eyes and let out a long breath.

  “Go straight to bed. Don’t come out until I call for you.” Their mother didn’t lift her eyes as they passed, but Penny stared at her the whole time, her hands balled into fists at her sides.

  Misty propped her heels against the end of the bed frame so her calves and knees and thighs didn’t touch her quilt. The wounds rose out of the pale skin of her legs as if they had been hiding there all along and all their mother did was bring them to the surface. Like some part of Misty, always, was bleeding, some part of her always waiting to be shown to the light. The welts were bright red and almost as thick as Misty’s pinkie finger in some places. Each of them ended in a bright-red lash, a cut that welled slow, red blood.

  Penny didn’t check her wounds. She walked straight to their closet and pulled an old bedsheet from the back instead. She took the chair from under her desk and a handful of tacks from a jar. Penny hung the sheet from the ceiling. It wasn’t quite long enough to reach the floor, but it was close. Only a few inches of space were left at the very bottom, just enough to watch Penny’s bloody ankles walk back and forth as she checked the sheet for weak spots. The sheet stretched from one side of the wall all the way to the door, splitting their room in two.

  She said, “I don’t want you talking to me. Not never again.”

  Then she flicked the light off overhead and plunged Misty into darkness with not even the light from the corner of the window to shine through.

  Nineteen

  The strings on the ceiling had multiplied when the girls left their room to eat dinner that night. Before, the green light had been the size of a pencil eraser, but it was now the size of a dime and had moved from its place on the wall to a new point on the ceiling. The yarn followed. It traced a path through all the places the green light had touched, and the room was quickly filling with yarn. Misty had never thought about light that way—what it touched, how much, how often. But looking at the green strings made it seem like there was nothing that could hide from the light, no corner it couldn’t find.

  After dinner, the girls returned to their beds. William knocked on the door once, and his voice was small as he asked if Misty could come out and play, and their mother’s voice was even smaller as she told him no. When he was gone, the house fell back to silence except for the occasional thump from the living room as their mother did laundry. Misty imagined her pausing with a pink sock in her hand to eye the green light as it swept from the ceiling to the floor. Misty imagined her mother’s bare feet planted on the end table, her head tilted sharply to the side as the light zipped back and forth. Her mother prowling through the shadows with bruises under her eyes, her mother tangled in yarn, her mother made of yarn, so soft that the first time Misty tried to hug her, she would collapse in on herself, unspooling inch by inch until there was nothing left.

  Cars came and went on their narrow road. The headlights flashed along Penny’s window and the sheet hanging from the ceiling. Earl yelled at the cars from his backyard, threatening the people who lingered too long to steal glances of the statues from rear windows, until the sound of his voice blended together with the other night sounds—the crickets and bullfrogs and Penny’s faint snores.

  Misty opened her chest to the trailer, and then beyond. She found the crawdads beneath the front porch, the ones who had come to keep an eye on her, but they didn’t answer her calls. There were at least a dozen crawdads now, and all of them were building burrows of their own. But they didn’t stop when they reached the cool, dank water resting underground. They kept going, kept digging.

  They burrowed toward Earl’s trailer.

  Misty roamed between them, sharing limited access to their eyes, their bodies, and each of them saw the same thing in the dirt: a faint green glow. Watching it was like watching a flame curl and writhe and catch. It was never quite the same, no matter how long Misty looked.

  There was something else, too, in the dirt. Tree roots. Thick and white as bone, though there were no trees growing in that part of the yard. Old roots, then, remnants of the dogwood grove that used to grow there.

  Misty tried to call the crawdads again, but they didn’t answer. They kept following the green light toward Earl’s trailer, digging deeper and deeper.

  Twenty

  Two days passed.

  Misty and Penny woke early on Sunday morning, like always. Their mother was usually up by then, rousing them with the smell of eggs scrambling on the stove, but the house was silent. The last time they had missed church was nearly a year ago, last summer when all three of them had been sick with the stomach flu.

  They still hadn’t been given permission to leave their room so the girls stood side by side in their doorway, staring at their mother’s closed bedroom door. There was no light beneath it and no sounds stirred on that side of the house.

  “Should we go knock?” Misty asked.

  Penny shook her head. She hadn’t spoken to Misty for two days, but she still rolled her eyes, sighed, grunted, and, every now and then, nodded.

  They both returned to their beds. They stayed there until almost noon when someone knocked on the front door.

  “I bet it’s Aunt Jem,” Penny whispered from the other side of the sheet she’d tacked to the ceiling.

  “Really?” Misty wanted to ask another question, anything to keep Penny talking, but she didn’t want to try her luck.

  The knock came again, a little louder.

  Their mother’s bedroom door creaked open. Her footsteps barely made a sound. Misty slipped from her bed and crawled toward Penny until they sat together by the bedroom door.

  “Is Mom okay?” Misty whispered.

  Penny pressed her finger to her lips and glared at Misty.

  Their mother cleared her throat. The front door swung open. Misty couldn’t make out what her mother was saying, but she could hear how her mother said it. The low, slow drawl of her voice. The occasional cough. Misty could almost see her mother’s hand resting on her throat the way it did when she was nervous, like she wished she had something to clutch there, something to hold on to. The garden knocked at the back of Misty’s mind, the same way it had been knocking for the last two days. Misty wanted to speak to it, but that would mean sharing her name, and Misty knew what was waiting for her there. The green glass man, the fawn’s bloody hip, her whipping.

  Misty ran her fingers along the cuts on her calves. Most of them had already scabbed over and some had covered with a thin, shiny layer of new skin, but the marks were still tender to the touch. She didn’t want to face her new name yet. She didn’t want to feel all that hurt.

  “Who is it?” Misty asked.

  “Earl.” The disappointment in Penny’s voice matched the slump of Misty’s shoulders.

  “What does he want?” Misty asked.

  “He put a gate at the end of the road.”

  “Our road?”

  “Do you know any other road?”

  Misty frowned. “What would he do that for?”

  “To keep all them people out. He says if they try coming out here again that he’ll… Shoot, Mom laughed. I couldn’t hear him.”

  Misty shivered at the sound of her mother’s laughter. She didn’t like her laughing with Earl, or near Earl. Just the thought was enough to make anger flare in her chest, but this time the anger was Misty’s.

  “He gave her a key to
the gate,” Penny said. “There’s three of them. What kind of gate needs three… Shoot, shoot, go. She’s coming!”

  Penny shoved Misty out of the way, and they scrambled back to their beds. Misty had just enough time to sling her covers over her legs before their mother knocked once on the door and then swung it open. The light was so sudden and bright that Misty turned her head. When she looked back, her mother was standing in their room with the sheet that Penny had tacked to their ceiling caught between her hand.

  “What’s this?” she asked.

  She looked at Misty, but Misty just stared at the sheet, imagining Penny on the other side doing the same thing. Their mother looked at Penny and raised an eyebrow.

  “I wanted some privacy,” Penny said.

  “Dolly did the same thing to me once.” Their mother ran her finger along the sheet. “It didn’t last more than a few weeks, but it felt a lot longer than that. You girls can come out now. Earl put a gate at the end of the road so there won’t be any more people driving up and down here. Just don’t go any further than the front yard, all right?”

  She dropped the sheet and walked out of the room, leaving the door open behind her. The television turned on in the living room and the refrigerator door opened. Misty crept across her room and looked out the bedroom door. The green strings swayed gently on the ceiling. The strings’ path had grown in the last two days, creeping into the hallway, into the kitchen.

  Misty waited.

  She had been waiting for two days to leave her room, to go outside and be normal again, but now that she had permission, she felt almost stuck. Almost afraid to leave her bedroom. The world outside seemed suddenly larger. There was a second statue waiting in the garden. There was a gate at the end of the road. There was so much out there that for a moment she thought of staying in her bedroom forever. Curling the covers over her shoulders and falling into a deep and dreamless sleep. Misty went back to her bed and sat down again. She waited a little longer.