She didn’t even pause as she crossed the highway into a nearby yard, past a fence and a dog tied to a post with a heavy chain, who lifted its ears and tipped back its head and let go a single, mournful bellow as Misty crept past its owner’s window where the owner slept inside. She turned right, toward her school, and kept going.
It was after eleven and everything was shut down tight, everyone sleeping. Every now and then a car passed by. The glare from Misty’s bones was so sudden and bright that most people thought her a road sign and kept driving.
The trees were denser along the road, the kudzu thicker, and Misty plucked little leaves and boughs as she walked beside the main road. She stuck the green things in the gaps between her bones. She replaced the tendons with maple leaves and two long strands of supplejack that she wound around each knee, filled her ribs with wisteria and spread mud around the sockets of her eyes to catch the pollen and dust floating by. Lightning bugs drifted around her, blinking their sleepy lights. She caught them and brought them to rest in her body, let them climb over her bones and her blooms, giving off faint yellow light that pulsed like a heartbeat until she was almost whole again.
The road widened, forked, and turned. It opened into a hundred small hollers like her own that switchbacked through the mountains like veins. She passed her elementary school with the lights blacked out and the fence shut with a heavy padlock. She waved to an old woman sitting on her front porch in a rocking chair, smoking a cigar. The woman lifted her hand and waved back, the bright-red point burning in her other hand, smoke drifting lazy from her mouth. Misty passed a man hauling hay into the back of his truck, singing a church hymn that she remembered vaguely from somewhere before.
She didn’t think about where she was going. Her thoughts floated around her like a dandelion puff that had been blown to pieces, each individual idea drifting in a different direction. She followed whatever looked prettiest or the path that seemed easiest. She only wanted to get further from home, from the barn, from whatever it was that bothered her so much about that place. The further she walked, the harder it was to remember what had troubled her so, and the less trouble she felt at all. And she thought, This must be what it felt like to be William. To be skinless: bold and unafraid. To not worry all the time about what might hurt you or what your hurting might do to other people. This must be what it felt like to be a boy.
Fireworks lit up the sky over an old strip job and Misty followed the light to a ring of four-wheelers arranged around a wide-open space. Teenagers filled the middle, some dancing in the blare of the headlights, others drinking or laughing, their long-limbed bodies covered with skin and sweat and one another. Music came from somewhere, pared down to only the deepest sound to Misty’s missing ears, the bass line and the drums. Misty didn’t recognize the song, but her bones recognized the rhythm. They responded to anything that reminded them of a heartbeat. Even the pounding of her feet bones on the pavement was enough to please them, and whatever beating thing that they could feel, they yearned toward, wanting more.
Misty strummed her toe bones over the gravel, and the sound reverberated through her body until it came to rest in her jaw, buzzing. She bent her knees, first one way and then the other, letting her hips rotate in their dried sockets, and that was a vibration, too, a gentle grinding that shook the leaves from her ribs. Dried mud flaked from her eyes and fell like snow between her finger bones as she began to dance.
What her body did was something in between what the girls were doing in the light of the four-wheelers and what she’d seen her aunts do in church. Her bones bounced a two-step over the thinning grass, her arms loose at her sides. She lifted them to the air and let her fingers clink together until that vibrated down her arms. She let her bones drop toward the ground, catching them at the last moment and slowing them, bringing them back to stillness before they jerked, clacked, danced again. She made her own music as she moved toward the trees, a shaking, humming grind of bone on bone. It almost made sense why the women danced in church, why bodies moved at all—because they needed to. She needed to.
Just as she began to twirl in a slow circle, a voice called out, “What the hell is that?”
A boy walked to the edge of the four-wheelers. He crossed their line of light and entered the shadows, squinted in Misty’s direction. “There’s something over there,” he said. “I ain’t shitting you, Cody. Turn the damn Kodiak around so I can see. Point them lights over here.” He lifted his voice toward Misty, shouting, “Jesse Graves, if that’s you, I’m gonna stomp a mudhole in your ass, you hear me, little boy?”
The boy stalked across the field. Whatever part of Misty was left that understood the set of a boy’s shoulders when he meant to hurt someone told her to run, so she ran.
She jumped over a fallen tree and into the darkness of the woods, which made it even harder to distinguish between what was solid and what was not. Her vision had darkened even more since she left her body that night, and now everything was creeping toward black. A light flashed over the trees—the light of a four-wheeler arcing in her direction. A distant rumble followed her, and she felt the wheels crunching over the gravel more than she heard them.
An old mining service road ran along the woods, and two of the four-wheelers broke away from the pack to follow it. A girl clung to the back of the boy who’d spoken to Misty. She held a flashlight in her hands, but the beam was too weak to break through the trees. It only muddied the woods, making it even more impossible to tell one tree from another. The service road was almost as overgrown as the woods themselves, sinking with deep potholes and runnels as big as ditch lines from the summer rains. The four-wheelers bounced and squeaked, the boy shouting every now and then that he could still see her running, so Misty ran faster.
If they cut through the woods, they might catch her, and if they caught her, then there was no way to know what they might do. Her bones might remind them of their own bones, their own bodies bare and quaking, their own self split, and seeing themselves that way might make them do strange or terrible things. She might be divided between them, a bone for every hand, a bone for every tooth in their heads. She might be broken apart and carried away until her body forgot it was a body and not just a rib or a finger or a spine.
Misty ran as fast as she could before she thought she might shake herself apart and do the boy’s work for him.
She ran past a ramshackle guard shack on the hill of a strip mine. The bare light bulb that hung from its ceiling flickered to life as she passed, illuminating a single metal chair tipped on its side, the wooden walls papered with blueprints of the mine, the inside of the mountain made real and whole and tacked to the walls outside itself. She ran along a hill covered with mining equipment. The backhoes and dozers and one dump truck as wide as the mountain itself thundered to life, their engines revving as Misty’s feet bones dug into the damp earth. She wound her way between them and down the other side of the hill. She ran straight through the middle of a trailer park, the lights flaring in each of the windows, flickering and stuttering. Televisions blinked off and on in rapid succession and blenders whirred in their cabinets and the wind chimes on all the porches rang with sound, like there was some great force surging along with Misty, something riding in the wake of her bone body. And everything near her felt it. Everything near her answered the call of whatever was left of Misty still clinging to her bones shouting help me help me help me.
She didn’t stop until she stumbled into the parking lot of a small convenience store. The lights blared so bright that even Misty’s failing eyes could see the reds and the golds of the tobacco signs hanging from the windows. Her bones jarred over the asphalt, shaking her back to herself, and she turned to look through the woods she’d left behind. Somewhere along the way, she’d lost the four-wheelers, and already, she was forgetting what it was that sent her running. There seemed to be nothing there that would ever harm her—just a few dark trees, their leaves shifting ge
ntly under the moonlight.
A door opened, and a beam of light fell on the asphalt in front of her. Misty walked toward it, only stopping when a woman came out, lugging four bags of garbage behind her, a cigarette clutched between her teeth. The woman mumbled something under her breath that Misty couldn’t make out, but she could see the cigarette bobbing in her mouth, forming words that shook the ashes onto the collar of her shirt.
The woman hauled the garbage to a dumpster near the trees, then stood shaking and smoking. Misty crouched behind a tall stack of pallets. From this close, she could barely smell the kerosene imbedded in the wood.
The woman by the dumpster looked familiar. She was lean and tall and felt the way a baby bird looked—fragile and flailing, like something just learning to fly, something that could be incredible, soon, if it caught the right wind. She finished two more cigarettes before she stubbed out their flames with the heel of her white Keds and walked back to the door. She leaned inside and shouted, “I’m going home, Sandy. I did my share of the work. Well. Come right on and try to stop me then. I’ll do to you what I did to your cousin in fifth grade. That’s what I thought. Goodnight, hon.”
She grabbed something from inside and came back with a purse slung over her shoulder. The bag punched her hip with every step and something inside it sounded like church bells ringing over and over.
Misty followed the woman to her truck. She crept into the bed as the woman coaxed the engine to life and forced the truck into gear, the whole frame jerking forward and back. Misty curled one hand around a bag of something that felt like oranges and held on as the truck rocked out of the parking lot and onto the road. The wind whistled by overhead. A few minutes passed before the woman wedged the sliding rear window open so a thin trail of gray smoke could emerge. The smoke held itself together long enough to reach the roof of the truck before the wind ripped it apart.
Sound blared through the open window—static and bits of gospel music, static and something upbeat, static and Dolly Parton. The woman inside sang along to “Jolene” with all her heart. The sound of her voice overpowered the thrumming and jarring of the truck until Misty could feel her vibration in her spine. Not the road and not the busted suspension and not the growl of the engine, but the woman’s voice pleading with Jolene.
Overhead, the stars whirred past between the thin, dark arms of trees. It was like God was pulling a curtain fast across the sky, and the world was going with it. What waited at the end, Misty wasn’t sure. She stretched her leg bones a little further apart, planting them on the metal sides of the truck so she might feel more of the road humming through her, pooling in her joints and ricocheting through her skull.
The woman turned and turned again and every road she chose was curvier than the last, and every song she sang was sadder. The sky lightened. The world became easier to recognize as the stars became harder to find until they were almost indistinguishable from the sky.
The truck stopped. Misty’s skull bumped against the back of the bed and a faint cloud of dust lifted from the back tires. The truck shuddered as the woman shouldered the door open and slammed it again. The top of her head was visible from Misty’s angle. She tapped a cigarette from its pack and stuck it between her lips. She stared in the direction of the garden for a moment before shaking her head and shoving the cigarette back into place. She walked away without a word.
Misty sat up. For a moment, she didn’t recognize the sight of her own trailer. She had rarely seen it from this direction. She was always looking at it from her own yard or from the woods behind her house, but rarely from here in William’s driveway. It looked different from this new angle—the roof was flat and gray, the front porch leaned a little where her mother had shored up a broken post with a stack of cement blocks.
On her other side the statues glinted in the pale morning light. The crack in the green glass man was clearer from this angle, and thicker than she remembered. There were other cracks, too—in the golden hand, in the spiral with its pointed tip, in the tree. All of them looked like they had been damaged somehow. Like they were falling apart.
Earl sat in a plastic folding chair in front of the fence he’d built, his body slumped to the side. The sunlight filtering through the green glass man’s chest turned to the color of seaweed as it rippled across Earl’s face. There were dark circles under his eyes and his skin was loose around his throat like he was slowly shrinking away from himself.
Misty descended the back of Shannon’s truck carefully. Her bones clanked and thudded on the metal until she jumped onto the grass. Earl’s trailer was even more sunken than before. It canted dangerously forward and two of the posts that held his front porch up had splintered from the pressure. White crawdad shells littered the ground—the kind the crawdads shed when they molted. Misty picked one up. It crumbled between her finger bones and drifted through the air. She followed another and another until she found a crawdad lying in the grass behind Earl. She nudged it gently with her finger but the crawdad didn’t move.
It was dead.
Misty cupped it between her hands. She could see no reason for the crawdad’s death—nothing injured, nothing missing. It was just gone, surrounded by the ghost of its former selves. She looked across the yard and spotted three more crawdads lying motionless in the grass.
Had she been in her skin body, Misty would have cried. She would have buried the crawdads under her porch and prayed for them to make it safely into the Ever, which is where crawdads went when they died.
But her bones didn’t feel anything at all except the faint tug of a memory, something about the garden, about names and consequences.
It was not desire that drove Misty inside. It was something much older than that, older even than need. It was something Misty didn’t know how to name, but if she could, it would have sounded like grease popping on the stove and the rumble of her mother’s voice through the wall of her bedroom when Misty wasn’t supposed to be listening and the roar of her father’s truck and Penny, too, the way she drummed her fingers against the walls when she was tired of waiting for dinner. It was the heartbeat of her family, the steady, familiar drum of them that called to Misty’s bones, and she answered.
Back in her room, Misty sat on the edge of her bed with her body gathered around her waist. She forced her skin over her hips until her dark mouth gaped toothless up at her, still hungry for the body that remained. The parts of her that were already joined throbbed a dull and distant pain that she didn’t have time to consider. Her body felt even smaller than last time, fighting every inch that she tried to rejoin. She knew that if she kept leaving, there would come a night when she couldn’t force the two back together. And on that night, she would have no choice but to leave her body behind.
Misty hadn’t thought much about what that meant. Where she would go, what her mother would do, what would become of her bed and her toys and her clothes. Her brain just kind of blinked off when she thought that far ahead, gave way to a gauzy kind of static until she turned away from it again and thought of other things.
Still, it was a risk she took every time she shed her skin now, and every time it got harder to return.
On the other side of the sheet, Penny stirred, coughed twice, and was silent again. Misty pushed her right arm bone through the right arm skin, but her hand slowed through her forearm. Her hand stopped before it reached the end, the skin tightening until she could push no further.
Misty craned her neck and braced her foot against the bed. She pulled hard with her left bone hand, the little knuckles clenched tight together, tugging the right arm into place until something stretched, almost broke. Her shoulder burned once the skin slotted into place and her hand tingled. Misty opened and closed her fist trying to chase the feeling away, but the pain lingered.
She forced the other arm inside the same way, struggling, pushing, before she finally fit inside herself. She peeled her skin over her face like a
mask. Her eyes were sore inside her head and when she opened her mouth to yawn, her jaw cracked. Misty sat on the edge of her bed with her bare feet on the floor, panting and shivering and aching, when a voice came from the other side of the room.
“Where’d you go?” Penny asked.
Thirty-Three
Misty froze. She hadn’t noticed the shadow standing on the other side of the room or the two small feet poking beneath the sheet. She couldn’t remember if she’d noticed Penny on her way back into their room, if she’d stopped to make sure she was sleeping. There was no way to know if Penny had seen her bones, and no way to ask without giving herself away.
“I can hear you breathing,” Penny said.
“How long have you been awake?” Misty asked.
“I heard your big feet clomping around over there. You sound like a herd of cattle, you know that?”
Misty exhaled slowly. Penny hadn’t seen her then, only heard her.
“Well,” Misty said, “go back to sleep.”
“I can’t. I’m awake now.”
“I’m not. I’m sleep-talking.”
Penny snorted. “You want me to read your future? I’ve been practicing. I’m not as good as Sam, but I’ve cast some cards. I did some for me. For Mom and Dad.”
“What did you see?”
Penny was quiet, and Misty took that as an answer. Whatever she saw must not have been different from what they saw—the distance, the separation. Misty clenched her fist into a hand, and her skin slid across her bones like it was ready to leave again.
Penny’s shadow slipped across the sheet like clouds across water as she retrieved something from her desk. She sat on her side of the room, her bony knees poking from her nightgown. “Come sit on your side.”
Misty slid from her bed. She tried hard not to groan as pain erupted in her knees and ankles, all her joints angry at the new weight they had to bear. They had been just bones before and they begrudged the heft of her body, all that flesh, the heart, the lungs. It was all too much.
Every Bone a Prayer Page 22
