Every Bone a Prayer

by Ashley Blooms

  Misty snaked her hand, still plump with skin, through the hollows beneath her jaw until she reached her eye sockets. She wiggled her fingers back and forth like worms wriggling from the earth. She hung her mother’s favorite pair of gold earrings along the shelf of her jaw, there where her ear should have been. She was tempted to slip her skin off entirely until Penny banged on the bathroom door and demanded to be let in.

  * * *

  The garden spoke to Misty that afternoon. It had overhead Earl talking about Revival and wanted to know if the church was really coming to see the statues. The garden seemed excited by the idea. It filled Misty’s body with a buzzing, jolting energy that made Misty’s head ache.

  “I’m sorry,” the garden said. “How are you feeling?”

  “Tired,” Misty said.

  “It takes a lot to do what you did. To separate yourself. I know.”

  “Will anything bad happen now?” Misty asked.

  The garden hesitated. “There are always consequences.” An image of Caroline staggered through Misty’s mind. She wore a dark dress that flashed in the moonlight, the hem covered in spiral stitches. Caroline ran between the trees and out of sight. “But I think the consequences are better than what you escape from. Don’t you?”

  All those hands on her skin. The feeling of never being alone, never being untouched. The weight of William on her chest, his face above hers. The images rifled one after the other and Misty couldn’t stop them from coming, couldn’t stop the garden from seeing what she saw. Misty shook her head and chased the images away.

  “I can’t go back,” she said.

  “I know.” The garden’s voice was sad. “Neither can I.”

  * * *

  After dinner, Misty and Penny sat on the floor on either side of the sheet. Misty took out a small blue knapsack that she’d gotten during her first week in Brownie Scouts. The Scouts had disbanded a month later when the only mother willing to hold meetings at her house filed for divorce and the school didn’t think she would be in the right frame of mind to lead a troop of young girls. Misty packed everything that she might need the next time she left the house, but everything she could think of would be useless without skin. She wouldn’t get hungry or thirsty in her bone body; she wouldn’t get cold no matter how cold the night became. She emptied the bag and hung it at the end of her bed.

  Penny asked, “Are you sick?”

  Misty leaned down and looked under the space beneath the sheet. Penny’s legs dangled over her bed, the heels bouncing back and forth against the bedspring. She bent forward, probably about to check the same gap, so Misty leaned back before their eyes could meet.

  “You’ve been acting funny,” Penny said. “You were making noises in your sleep.”

  “No, I wasn’t. When?”

  “Earlier. When you took a nap.”

  “No, I wasn’t.”

  “I heard you.”

  “Fine.”

  “Fine.” A book closed on the other side of the sheet and landed on the floor. “I saw William today.”

  “So?”

  “He was asking about you.”

  “What’d you tell him?”

  “Nothing. Are you mad at him?”

  “No,” Misty said.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Why’re you talking to me anyway? Ain’t you still mad at me?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Fine.”

  “Fine,” Penny said.

  Misty shoved to her feet and sat on the edge of her bed. The hem of her nightgown was frayed. It had been Penny’s once, and somewhere along the way a hole was worn into the hem, then patched, then worn away again, and Misty rubbed her finger along it, wearing it bigger so her mother would have no choice but to buy Misty some clothes of her own instead of forcing her to shuffle through life in Penny’s hand-me-downs.

  “Are you sure you’re not sick?” Penny asked.

  “No,” Misty said. “I’m just tired.”

  She waited until Penny was snoring before she slipped out of her skin and arranged her body on her bed. She pushed herself onto her right side so her back faced Penny. She slumped her body over a pillow and let her mouth dangle open a little. Not enough for anyone to notice that the teeth were missing, but enough to leave a small stain of drool on her pillow. She leaned back and looked at herself, still breathing. She pressed one bone finger to her own throat and felt her heart fluttering under her skin. Misty didn’t look deflated or emptied without her bones, and unless her mother tried to pick her up and saw how her body sagged and draped, nobody would ever notice that she was gone.

  She crept down the hallway and clicked through the kitchen to the back door. The green strings on the walls didn’t make her feel sad as she passed them. Nothing made her feel sad anymore, not in her bones, not her mother or father or Penny or Caroline or William or the barn. All of it, everything, was so far away.

  There were just her and her bones and all the places they could go. Everything would be different in this body—the creek, the yard, the road, her school. She wanted to take her bones to all her favorite places. They’d been concealed by her skin for so long, hidden away from light or air or water. It seemed only fair that they got a chance to see things now.

  Misty’s feet bones sank into the heavy sand at the bank of the creek as she walked toward the water. She left deep impressions behind, not of whole feet, not of girl feet, but of something else. Something strange and sharp, something that might have been bigger than Misty, with a dark beak and claws, and she walked back and forth leaving as many prints as she could.

  She clinked her way across the stones on the bottom of the creek to the very center, the deepest dip where the water ran the fastest. She sunk herself into this darkest water. She wedged her hip bones into the silt and stirred a wave of mud that settled and cleared until she could see the white shining bones of her body beneath the surface.

  The water made Misty a moving body filled with moving bodies—the sand sifted between all the small bones of her feet and the minnows congregated in her ribs, kissing their small, slick mouths to Misty’s bones. They never knew that she was there, that she wasn’t one of them. There were no crawdads that night. All of them had abandoned the creek for new water, deep water down under the earth of Misty’s yard. Misty tried to call out to them, to call them home again, but nothing happened.

  She tried for the minnows instead, but there was silence in her head, a kind of emptiness she’d never felt before. Her mind didn’t crowd with the memory of the minnows, all their sights and sounds, their strong, insistent weight. She pressed her hand bones to the silt beneath her and felt only pressure, the vague sense of an ending that she could not pass, but no memories, no heat, no long and winding history. She ran her finger bones through the water and picked up a heavy stone and tugged at a clump of submerged grass bleached almost white by the water, but nothing reached back to her.

  Had she been wearing her skin, she might have felt something like sadness. She might have wondered a little longer what it meant to be without her voice in this body, whether it was better or worse, but her bones didn’t mind the change. They barely noticed at all.

  A cottonmouth slithered out of the grassy hill behind her and onto the far bank of dark-gray shale. The snake didn’t slow when it reached the water’s edge. It didn’t recognize that anything had changed because it belonged to both the land and the creek. The snake swam with its head peering out of the water. It flicked its skinny tongue at Misty, tasting the air. The snake watched her with small, black eyes, but Misty wasn’t afraid.

  There was nothing that a snake could do to a girl’s bones.

  There was nothing left on her that anyone could harm.

  Misty pinched the snake’s head between her fingers when it swam too close. She didn’t let go even as it writhed and switched, not until she had see
n as much of its small snake face as she wanted. Its scales were all dark gray to Misty’s missing eyes, but when it opened its mouth, the snake’s throat was a bright, shining white. If she could leave her own body, maybe she could slip her way inside another. The snake’s mouth was not nearly big enough to fit her bones, but it might have been nice to slip into the snake’s skin and feel the long, taut length of scales, to think of nothing but the next small thing darting in front of her, jaw hinging wide, belly full and tight. Misty opened her finger bones and the snake splashed into the water. It jerked fast toward the shore, rustling the tall grass as it escaped onto the land.

  She didn’t feel cold when she left the creek, but she dripped clear water that left dark stains on the ground behind her. Her bones bobbed up and down as she walked past her trailer. The yard was becoming more and more uneven. There were dozens of crawdad chimneys and more were appearing every day. The crawdads carried the earth away and the yard sank lower, too heavy now to support itself, like a chest without its ribs. Water pooled in little dips and hollows and splashed against Misty’s anklebones, and she didn’t know whether it was warm or cold, whether it smelled fresh or stale, and she didn’t care, either.

  The green glass man glinted as she passed the garden, and Misty stopped.

  She noticed, for the first time, a thin crack running along the green glass man’s chest. It was so thin and spidery that she almost lost sight of it even as she stood right in front of it. The crack snaked up and around his shoulder and disappeared.

  Misty stepped back and looked up at the green glass man. His body reflected her body back to her like a strange mirror, and if she stood just so, their bodies almost matched—the white bones of her arms aligned with the green sweep of his arms, the curve of her hips slotted into the narrow green space above his legs, as if she completed him somehow, made him whole. Maybe he’d been waiting just for this, for Misty to step inside his body so he could take the bones she’d grown and use them as his own. All she had to do was slip through his glass like light through a window, and she’d never have to think or feel again. Everything would be gone. The green man would take care of it all.

  Misty shook her little bone head.

  She didn’t want to see the world from inside the statue’s chest, didn’t want green and murky. She wanted her own body, hard and smooth, so she turned and left the green man standing in the garden alone.

  Misty walked up the driveway and onto the single-lane road that ran the length of her holler. Already she was beginning to forget what was behind her, the glint of light off her bedroom window, the shape of the creek, the statues looming in the garden. Everything she might want lay ahead of her, not behind her, after all.

  Misty’s feet bones skittered across the pavement as she walked. The feeling reverberated through her shinbones and her hip bones until her jaw clattered up and down, shaking like a new tongue with a new song.

  Her holler was not very big. The road ran in a straight line past Misty’s trailer before it met a fork in the road. To the right, the road became a bridge that crossed the creek and joined the main road, which could take her almost anywhere if she walked it long enough. To the left, the road was unpaved, the dirt rutted with worn tire tracks. There was an oil well at the end of the road, and another further on, along a path that was so guttered and worn that it had to be reached by four-wheelers if at all.

  She took the right path out of habit more than anything else. She sat on the edge of the bridge and let her feet dangle over the side. The moonlight sifted through her ribs and cast a small, dark shadow on the creek below. Cars passed by on the road, their headlights illuminating Misty’s bones, making them glow temporarily. She wasn’t sure how long she sat there, watching the water trickle in the creek, but the sky was beginning to lighten when she stood and walked to the edge of the road.

  She’d never gone beyond this spot on her own. If she turned right, she would be walking toward her school. Left would take her to her aunts’ houses and toward town. She paused there, waiting for fear to find her and drive her back home. She was always afraid—of the dark, of being alone, of saying something wrong.

  Bone Misty wasn’t afraid of the road or the cars that might pass or who might see, but there was still enough of her old self there to keep her from taking that one last step.

  At least for now.

  Back in her room, Misty unfolded her body. It had slipped while she was gone, the neck bent at an unnatural angle, like she was trying to crawl into her own chest. She grasped either side of her mouth in her bone hands and let the rest of her body dangle between her knees. She was heavy and hard to hold. She kept sliding, wanting to puddle on the floor. Her eyelids fell open and stared, blank and brown, at the sheet hanging down the middle of her room.

  Misty stretched her mouth open and wiggled her feet inside.

  She let her skin swallow her bones a little at a time.

  The sensation was faintly warm and her bones slicked as they met her skin, things rearranged, brushing past each other, accommodating.

  She made it to the hips before she noticed something different.

  The skin was tighter than it was before. It didn’t slide the right way, swift and easy like pulling on a sock. Misty let the skin fall a couple of inches and tried again, pulling gently, and then pulling harder, but both ways gave the same result—no movement, no whole body, just her skin bunched and heavy in her hands.

  Somehow, in the few hours she’d been separated, her bones had grown but her skin had stayed the same.

  She didn’t match anymore.

  Misty leaned back on her bed and levered her hips toward the ceiling. Her mother had done this before when she tried to squeeze into a pair of old jeans from high school. The jeans looked almost as small as some of Penny’s, and it was hard to believe that their mother had ever had a shape different from the one she had now. Misty wiggled her hip bones back and forth as she pulled her skin, urging them together, begging them to remember each other.

  There was a faint pop as something gave. Her skin slid over hips.

  She finished the rest as quick as she could before her body decided that it liked itself better alone. It didn’t need bones after all. It liked the deep dark nothing that Misty left behind, and it didn’t care if she ever came back. Misty pushed her face over her skull and the pain came with it, throbbing in her hips, burning in her shoulders, all her joints filled with needles and knives, the fiery, persistent ache of being born.

  Twenty-Nine

  Misty could feel every inch of skin on her body the next morning, and every inch hurt. Every inch ached or burned or bruised every time that she moved so she lay very, very still on her bed.

  But it still didn’t help.

  The pain crept into her forehead. It settled between her eyes and spread behind her ears. Her knuckles hurt and the soles of her feet and the little place where her jaw connected beneath her ear. Acid bubbled in her stomach and soured her throat. She ran her tongue over her teeth, which were fuzzy and soft feeling, and her whole mouth tasted brittle and brown as dry leaves. The sheets on her bed smelled like earth and skin and sweat and fabric softener. Her pillow had a harder scent, an older, unwashed smell, like the nape of Misty’s neck after she’d spent the day outside. Her feet scratched against the sheets as she kicked the covers down so she could feel the air on her skin, something light and empty.

  But at least this pain was certain. At least this pain was clear. Gone, momentarily, was the dense fog of what had happened in the barn and the long days that followed. Gone the stomachache of what it all meant. At least for a little while.

  “You have to get up,” Penny said for the third time. “We’re leaving for Dolly’s in a few minutes.”

  Her shadow darted back and forth along her side of the room, picking things up and slamming them down again, and every sound throbbed behind Misty’s eyes.

  Pe
nny said, “If you don’t get up soon, Mom’s going to come in here herself. I told her you was playing, but I don’t think she believed me. I don’t know why I was lying for you anyway, except I think you might be sick or something. But if you’re sick, then I should tell Mom.”

  “I’m not sick,” Misty said.

  “Then what are you?”

  “Tired.”

  “You’re always tired.”

  “Well, leave me alone then and I won’t be so tired.”

  “Something ain’t right with you,” Penny said. “It ain’t been for a while now. You think I don’t notice things but I do.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Fine,” Penny said. “Be like that. But I’m not going to cover for you again, you hear me? I won’t do it. Now you can either get up and get dressed or lay there and rot for all I care but I’m going to Dolly’s.”

  The door clicked behind Penny, and the air rippled across the sheet.

  Misty rolled onto her side and covered her face with her pillow. She felt a tentative knock on the back of her mind, and she reached out to the garden.

  “I saw you last night,” it said, “in your little white bones.”

  Misty smiled. “I went out for a while.”

  “You should be careful. You might scare someone if they see you out.” An image of Earl drifted from the garden’s direction. “Some people might not be so understanding.”

  “I tried to be careful.”

  “How are you feeling today?”

  “Sore,” Misty said. She explained how her skin hadn’t fit when she tried to get back in, how she’d had to struggle to return to her body. “Why do you think that happened?”

  “I don’t know,” the garden said. “What we do isn’t… It isn’t normal. It’s not the way names usually work. So strange things can happen.”

  Caroline appeared in the garden’s thoughts. She stood in front of a tree and whispered something to it, her lips pressed tight to its bark until her skin scraped and bled. She dug her fingers into the tree’s trunk until it looked like the tree started to give, like her fingers were sinking underneath. The image fractured and disappeared.