Every Bone a Prayer

by Ashley Blooms

  The preacher’s nephew stood near the front. He was a tall boy, thin with curly, blond hair. He interpreted what the preacher had said as, “The Lord our God, our Father, He protects us.”

  “Bless him, Jesus,” Misty’s mother said.

  “He is the Father,” the preacher repeated, smiling. “What a wonderful message from our Lord tonight. Isn’t it something the way He gives His gifts? One may speak with God while another is made to listen and understand. I can say the words, but I need young Joshua’s help to hear them. I think there’s a lesson to be learned in that, don’t you?”

  He walked from one end of the pulpit to the next, bouncing a little as he went. “The Lord knows how important community is. So he spreads his gifts across all His children to remind us that none of us can make it on our own. None of us can do it all alone. We need each other. And we’re going to help each other tonight. Praise Jesus.”

  “Amen,” Misty’s mother said, and the church murmured back.

  “Amen, amen,” Brother Baker said. “We’ve got three Brothers here who will be glad to pray with you and anoint you in His loving name. If you can’t come to the front, we’ll come to you, don’t worry. But we’ll get started now. Come on up,” he said. “Don’t be afraid to take what the Lord has promised to His children.”

  A line formed, and then another, and then a third—one for each of the preachers standing by the altar. The preachers anointed their fingers with oil and rubbed the oil against the forehead of the person in front of them. The preachers held on to the ill, the grieving, the tired—sometimes grabbing their arm, sometimes their shoulder, sometimes pressing three fingers to the slick stain of oil on their skin and pushing back to emphasize their words and press the healing into them.

  When the prayer was over, the healed sat by the altar or returned to their pews. Some cried. Some whispered different prayers beneath their breath and looked up at the ceiling with their eyes closed. Others stayed up front and lay their hands on new people with the preacher, multiplying the voices and the healing.

  Misty stood in the first line beside her mother. Across the church, Penny’s homeroom teacher, Miss Gail, was being prayed for in the third line. Her hands were clenched into tight little fists by her side. Her head tipped back and her eyes closed and the oil shone against her forehead. The overhead light glinted across the oil, and even though the light wasn’t green or etched on glass, there was still something about it that made Misty feel uneasy. There were people standing all around Gail, praying, crowding her. The preacher held Gail’s shoulder in his hand and another hand pressed against the small of her back and another rested along the nape of her neck.

  Misty took a long, slow breath. She tugged her mother’s hand. “Mom, I don’t feel so good.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t feel good.”

  Her mother put her palm against Misty’s forehead. “We’re almost there, baby. Just hang on a few more minutes. We’ll leave as soon as it’s done.”

  Misty was still watching Miss Gail when Brother Baker pressed the tips of his fingers to her forehead. Misty’s eyelashes fluttered. The oil on his fingers was cold and slick and heavy. She waited for it to drip into her eyes, but it didn’t. The oil dried quickly, solidifying, changing against her skin, changing her skin.

  “Lord bless this child,” Brother Baker said.

  Misty’s mother wrapped her hands around Misty’s shoulders, rooting her in place. Another woman moved to the right of Brother Baker, and Misty lost sight of Miss Gail. There was someone else on Misty’s left side, and Misty was somewhere in the middle of all those bodies who were taller than her and bigger than her and they were all touching her. The weight of their hands pressed against Misty’s forehead, her shoulders, her arms, the small of her back.

  The people who weren’t touching Misty held their hands up to God as they prayed for her. They prayed her peace and wellness; they prayed her out of temptation and suffering, for it was the smallest among them who would inherit the Kingdom of God. Her mother’s hands trembled against Misty’s shoulders, and Misty trembled with them. She tried to step back, but there was nowhere to go where someone else wasn’t already holding her in place.

  Misty closed her eyes, hoping it might be better if she couldn’t see the people. But it was worse in the dark. Those hands could have been anyone’s hands. They could have been William’s hands and they were, all of them. William now and William a year from now and William grown into the shape of Earl and the shape of her father and William green and glinting and they wouldn’t let go. They would never let go.

  Someone shouted in tongues. Someone said “Amen” over and over and over again.

  Misty started to cry.

  She was still crying when the prayer ended and the people backed away, but their touch followed her. They rubbed small circles against her back and shoulders as her mother turned toward the door. Misty’s breath hitched in her chest. She kept her eyes closed as her mother walked her through the church, as the car started and the floorboards shook. Outside, the trees were dark and slick with rain, and the headlights quivered through their branches.

  “It’s okay,” her mother said. “I cried the first time, too. Everybody does. Just let it all out, baby. Ain’t nothing to be ashamed of.”

  Misty cried harder, and harder still because maybe she couldn’t stop. Now that she’d started, there would be no end. She would go on and on until her body emptied and wilted and shriveled and a strong wind would blow through the bottom and carry her across the mountains. She’d never come back down again, would become a cloud one day, would lose herself one drop of rain at a time until she was gone forever.

  “Come on,” her mother said when they pulled into the driveway.

  Misty held her mother’s hand as they walked inside. The lights were off, and they fumbled through the dark together. The strings still hung limp and green from the walls, and her mother yanked a few out of her way. She came back from the kitchen with a snack cake in her hand, the kind she used to pack in Misty’s father’s work lunch.

  Misty clutched the plastic wrapper as they walked back to her bedroom. Her breath whistled through her nose as she breathed and she concentrated on that, on getting enough air to keep her moving. Penny’s side of the room was empty since she was spending the night with Dolly. Misty’s mother stroked her hair as she sniffled and trembled.

  “Did it help?” she asked. “I swear, I thought it would help.”

  Misty didn’t answer and her mother stayed with her until Misty closed her eyes and pretended to fall asleep. Her mother left the door cracked so a narrow beam of pale-yellow light fell from the kitchen onto the bedroom floor.

  When her mother was gone and the house was quiet, Misty kicked the covers from her legs. She tried to blow her nose on an old T-shirt she found under her bed, but nothing moved. She couldn’t breathe right, and she could still feel everybody’s hands on her body. There was a weight, small and precise, on her shoulder, and another on her back, and another on her neck.

  She rubbed her hand across her skin to chase the feeling away, but it persisted.

  She was hot, almost fevered, but cold, too. She was tired, but wide awake, and being torn between these extremes meant that she was nothing at all, and that would be nice. It would be nice to be nothing. It would be nice not to have all this skin around her bones, its heaviness, its sweat, its dampness behind the knees and dryness between her fingers, its invitation to other people to be near it, to touch it. William was there, too, among all those strange hands. William was the brightest, hottest touch in the places that she wanted to feel the least.

  It was all too much.

  Misty wanted to scream, but she didn’t. She couldn’t without waking her mother, and she would bring her own hands and her own worried face and Misty didn’t want to see her mother again right then.

  So she called out to
the garden instead, and the garden was there immediately, like it had been waiting for Misty to call.

  “What’s wrong?” it asked.

  “I—I…” Misty didn’t know how to finish the sentence.

  “It’s okay,” the garden said. “I can help. I can. You just have to tell me what you want. What is it?”

  A sob broke loose from her throat, and Misty bit down on her fist to keep the noise from growing. She stood up and her ankle caught on the box beneath her bed. The crawdad skins shuffled inside, the sound of them like sand falling between fingers. Misty bent down and opened the box. The skins were the pale color of early morning fog as it gathered at the tips of the trees. She ran her fingers over their ghostly skins.

  “I want to be like this,” Misty said. “Like the crawdads.”

  An image of a molting crawdad hovered between them.

  “You can do that,” the garden said. “It’s your skin for the making and unmaking. Are you sure you want it gone?”

  “I’m sure,” Misty said. “I’m sure, I’m sure.”

  “Okay,” the garden said. “There’s just one way I know to make things listen. You have to rename them, like I did with the crawdads. I learned that a long, long time ago.” An image of Caroline flashed between them and was gone. “So you take a little of your name and you mix it with your skin’s name. You put them together, so you can control it. Can you do that?”

  “I guess,” Misty said.

  “Go on and try. I’ll be right here.”

  Misty closed her eyes. If she could speak to her skin, she could tell it to leave. She could tell it the truth: that it was the problem here, it was what was wrong. If she could be free of it, just for a while, then she might be able to breathe again.

  And if her skin had a name, it would be a skillet pressed to a bare hand. It would be a knee on a throat, a hand on a mouth, the last strained breath escaping. It would be a boulder, her skin, would be the mountain and everything beneath it.

  Misty called out to her skin as she knew it—a knot tied in fraying rope, a skillet pressed to bare skin. Knee on throat, hand on mouth, a hiss of air between hot fingers. Boulder old and heavy, mountain old and heavier. Press and pressing.

  Knee on throat, the fawn’s bloody hip, fraying rope, a green light trembling on the wall.

  Knotted hip, bloody rope, a green light trembling on her throat.

  She spliced herself together until she could feel something beginning to change, a separation. She told her skin what she wanted. All the soft parts sifted from all the hard, because she didn’t want anything on her that could be kneaded or molded or changed. She wanted a slick body, rigid and edged. She wanted a clean body, light and simple.

  Her body resisted, at first. It knew what it was. It knew it belonged together and that together was all that it knew, but Misty insisted.

  “You’re doing it,” the garden said excitedly.

  She thought of her skin like a dress that didn’t fit anymore and all she needed to do was reach the zipper in the back and release herself from this, her body.

  “Almost there now,” the garden said.

  There was a looseness behind her ears every time she ran her fingers over her cheeks, so Misty pulled harder. She tugged at her skin. She kneaded her forehead. She pinched her earlobe between her fingers and yanked hard and thought of her skin’s name, the one she had given it. And there, among her touches, something happened.

  Misty pushed her fingers against her forehead, and her skin slid back and slipped away. She pressed her hand against her cheek, but this time she didn’t feel skin.

  She felt something hard and clean and cool.

  She felt bone.

  Misty walked to Penny’s desk. She dug through her sister’s black purse until she found a compact mirror. She flipped it open.

  Her skin hung around her neck like a hood.

  Her face wasn’t where it used to be, her face a folded pile of flesh behind her, and there, looking back at her in the mirror was her skull—her white-boned skull glowing, faintly, in the darkness. Her jaw was there, and the two dark divots where her nose should be. Her eye sockets were round and empty and darker than the dark.

  Misty pulled at her shoulder. Her skin slid down her neck, revealing more bone, more glistening whiteness.

  She kept tugging and pulling, bending her elbows, shimmying her hips, until her skin fell to her feet with a sound like her mother’s hands slicking through the meatloaf.

  Her clothes came away with her skin, and Misty stepped out of herself.

  The mirror revealed the joint of her shoulder and, when she turned, her spine.

  She could still see, though it was not the sight she knew before. The colors had been replaced with black and white, everything a duller version of the skinned world. She could still smell, too, but only faintly, and every sound was muffled and distant, like she was hearing the world through a heavy fog. Everything felt further away from her than it ever had been before.

  There was no pressure, either, not even when she put her thin-boned hand against the curve of her hip. She sat on the edge of her bed, but she couldn’t feel the familiar softness of the quilt beneath her. She bounced up and down once, and her heels clacked against the floor.

  She tried to laugh, but no sound came out. There was no tongue, no lungs to make the noise, so she was silent except for her bones clinking together. There was no garden in her head, either, no other voice, no voice at all.

  Misty was alone, truly.

  She bent and collected herself from the floor. Her skin was heavier than she ever expected it could be, but she lifted the weight easily. These bones had been holding it up for years, after all. They knew just how to hold her.

  Misty laid her skin on her bed. She pulled the covers back and arranged herself carefully. Without her bones to hold her up, her limbs folded over themselves. They bunched and pinched and crooked, but she didn’t deflate. She looked almost the same as she did before, full and round. What held her together now, she wasn’t sure, and she didn’t care, either, as long as she was outside herself. Still, she spent the longest time smoothing her body out until she was lying on her back with one arm slung over her head and one foot dangling off the edge of the bed.

  She was a small, freckled thing. She was bruised and she was breathing, still, boneless as she was. Her chest rose and fell with the beat of her heart. She pressed her skull to her belly and heard the faint rumble of her insides, the music of her body, still moving. Her eyes were open, staring blank and brown at the ceiling until Misty closed them one by one.

  She didn’t feel sad looking at herself. She didn’t feel lonely or angry. For the first time in a long time, she didn’t feel afraid, either. She didn’t feel anything at all.

  Twenty-Eight

  Misty slept until noon the next day, and when she woke her body felt sore and strange, as though when she’d pulled her skin back onto her bones she’d missed something. Her skin sat a little crooked on her frame and everything hurt—her knuckles puffy and tight, her heels pinching every time she took a step, and her eyes dry and gritty. She hadn’t gone anywhere in her bone body the night before. She’d only wandered around her bedroom, picking things up, sliding them between her ribs, testing her new body’s limitations. She’d thought about going outside, but Earl had taken to sleeping by the garden at night and Shannon usually came home after dark and there would be no way to explain herself if someone saw her. The worrying had been enough to keep her inside for one night, but the worry was wearing off in the light of day, and all she could think about was where she would go that night.

  Misty shuffled into the kitchen to scavenge some cold biscuits, but there was no plate on the stove. The dishes from yesterday’s dinner were still in the sink, their rims growing crusty. The clothes her mother had worn to the prayer meeting the night before lay in a pile by her bedroom
door, which was shut, and no light peeked through from underneath.

  “She didn’t make breakfast,” Penny said from the couch. “And we’re out of cereal, too.” She crunched loudly on her next bite of cereal to let Misty know that at least someone was eating that morning.

  “When’d you get home?”

  “Few minutes ago. Dolly dropped me off.”

  Misty squinted against the midday light pouring through the windows. The strings still hadn’t been cleared from the walls so they hung limp and green. Something about them looked sad now that they weren’t chasing the green light, like streamers the day after a birthday party.

  “Do you think Mom’s okay?” Misty asked.

  Penny shrugged. “Where’d you all go last night?”

  “Church.”

  “Why?”

  “She thought I needed praying for.”

  “Did they lay hands on you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “About time, honestly.”

  Misty rolled her eyes. “I’m going back to bed.”

  “Fine. You know, I think I’m finally going to ask Jem about staying with her. So I might be gone by the time you get up.”

  “About time, honestly,” Misty said.

  Later, in the bathroom, Misty peeled back her face and let it hang along her neck just to be sure that she could. It was her mouth that freed her, the lips stretched to a thin pink O around her skull, her mouth a dark cave from which she emerged, clean and white. From the side, it looked like she was trying to swallow herself whole.

  The skinned parts of her were still capable of sensation. Her fingers rubbed the cotton of her shirt and knew its threads, but her skull couldn’t hear the whispered rasp of her touch. When she skimmed her palm along the plate of her skull, her skin felt the cool smoothness of her bone and the little ridge where something joined her together, but the skull felt only pressure, only the weight of Misty’s hand. Her teeth were still set firmly in her jaw, and their clack echoed across the bathroom as she opened and closed her mouth, like she had twenty jaws, all of them clicking, all of them hungry.