Every Bone a Prayer

by Ashley Blooms

  “Sit with your knees like mine,” Penny said. “Yeah, just scoot back a little. Fine, then, sit right there if you want to be like that. Lord. I’ll make it work.”

  She dealt the cards in a half circle that joined Misty’s left knee to her right like the arc of the sun across the sky.

  “Okay,” Penny said. “This here is like your life, see. I’ll start over here at your birth and then we’ll finish on the other side with your death. So this first card is what you started with in life. Oh. A queen. And of spades, too, wow. I guess that means you, well, you was born with a lot. Or at least something. You’re not like a five of hearts, you know? You’re not just any old card. You never was, right from the start.”

  Penny’s cards didn’t look like Sam’s. They were just an ordinary deck of cards that had been shaded and colored. It was a practice set.

  “This next one is where you are right now. Three of spades. The spades is the most powerful suit, so that means you’ve got a powerful imbalance going on in your life somewhere. Something went wrong, I think. Something you probably didn’t expect. That’s not good, is it?”

  “I don’t know,” Misty said. “You’re the one reading the cards.”

  “Well, it’s not good. It means you’ve got some problem you’re holding on to. You should probably talk to somebody about that, you know. The cards can also help give you advice when you need it.”

  “I’m tired, Penny. Can’t you—”

  “You’re always tired.”

  “And you’re always bothering me. Just turn the next card, or I’m going to bed and you can read the sheet’s fortune.”

  “Fine. God, you’re raw. The next card is…another spade, really? Did you do something to these cards?”

  “How could I do anything to your stupid cards?” Misty asked.

  “I don’t know. It’s just strange is all. Well, this one is you in a couple years, you know, so in middle school. It’s a face card so that’s good. You’re out of the imbalance. You’re stronger than you are right now. You’ve got direction. You’ve got places to go.”

  “Like bed,” Misty said.

  “Like the orphanage if you keep it up with that attitude.”

  Misty smiled.

  “High school you is going to go through a dark phase. You’ll probably get into a lot of trouble. People will see that you ain’t as sweet as you pretend to be, which is about time, really.”

  “I’m still sweeter than your old vinegar butt,” Misty said.

  Penny flipped the next four cards all at once. “Let’s just get this over with if you’re going to be so rude to your… Wait. Are you sure you didn’t mess with my cards? I won’t be mad if you did. I just want to know.”

  The three of spades appeared again at the end of the deck—the same card that represented Misty’s present also represented her death. Misty picked up the card and flipped it over. The images had not been colored or shaded like the rest of the deck. It looked like it came from a separate set of cards altogether.

  “It must just be an extra,” Penny said, reaching beneath the sheet and taking the card from Misty’s hand. “I don’t know how that got in there. I’ve done this a hundred times and never drawn this one. Well, now the whole thing is ruined.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you can’t have the same card twice.”

  “Why not?”

  “You just… You can’t. It don’t make any sense. How would you even read it?” Penny laid the card back in place. “I mean, I guess I’d call it a bad omen. Like unless something changed you might never get the rest of your life, since these two match. Your now card and your end card is the same, see. So you might… Well…you might die soon.”

  Misty stood up.

  “Where are you going?” Penny asked.

  “To bed.”

  “You can’t just go to bed on that.”

  “Watch me.”

  “What happened in the garden?” Penny asked. “I saw you right before them bugs fell. I watched your face, and it looked like… It looked like you was talking to something. Your lips was moving.”

  “No they wasn’t.”

  “They were! And you’ve been acting weird all summer. I know something’s going on.” Penny moved toward the door. She wrapped her hand around the sheet and pulled it back an inch. “I’m coming over.”

  “No,” Misty said. She grabbed the sheet just above Penny’s hand. “You wanted this here and we’re keeping it here. You don’t just get to change the rules.”

  “Then tell me what happened.”

  “Nothing is happening.”

  “That’s a lie, Misty. Mom knows something’s wrong. Everybody does.”

  “I ain’t the only one. You kissed the green glass man. You want to tell me why you did that, huh? You want to talk about that?”

  Misty could hear her own voice yelling, the sound rising in her throat every time she spoke. Their mother would hear before long. She would come check on them and make everything worse. The thought of Penny knowing what was happening terrified her. Because then they would all know—her mom and dad and Shannon and Earl. They would know what William did in the barn. What Misty did. They would see her there on her back. They would see her that way forever, and none of them could look at her the same for as long as she lived.

  Misty yanked the sheet out of Penny’s hand. “Just go to bed, Penny Lee. Just leave me alone.”

  Penny’s hand dropped but she didn’t let go of the sheet. Her fingers toyed with a loose string. “I don’t know why I kissed him. I mean, I do, and I don’t. I just got so mad at Mom and at Dad and everybody. Nobody ever wants to listen to you when you’re twelve. They act like nothing that happens counts, but it does, and I just wanted to spite all of them. I wanted to prove them all wrong. And…”

  “And what?”

  “I don’t know. I thought the green man was kind of neat at first. Everybody was acting all dumb about it but he was different. Special. So I thought if I kissed him, then maybe I could be, too.”

  “What?”

  “Special, I guess. I wanted to feel special.”

  Penny’s hand crept back across the sheet, her four fingers clutching the fabric against her palm. It was hard to imagine Penny as something small or soft, something vulnerable. She seemed so much herself that there was no room for anyone else, no room for doubt.

  “I wish I hadn’t kissed him, though,” Penny said. “Now my lips will probably fall off. It’s probably killing me, too.”

  Misty almost laughed. She almost eased her hand back and let Penny pull the sheet to the side. Almost told her what she’d been wanting to tell someone since William first took her to the barn.

  But the telling.

  The saying.

  Just the thought made her throat close up and her bones slip away from her skin, her hand pulling back, her arm trying to escape her body until Misty had to clench her fist to keep her skin from slinking away.

  Penny pulled the sheet in one direction while Misty pulled in another.

  “I told you the truth,” Penny said. “Misty.”

  One of the tacks popped loose from the ceiling and skittered across the carpet. Penny’s face appeared in flashes—the corner of her head, her hair frizzed with sleep, one eye squinted almost shut. Misty pulled her arms back and pushed Penny away, aiming for the dark square of her chest. Penny fumbled back. The desk thumped as it scooted against the carpet. Everything atop it shifted. A cup of pencils upturned and rolled across the top, and then nothing. Silence.

  “I wanted to help.” There were tears in Penny’s voice. The words lifted and fell on little huffs of breath that she caught to keep from crying. “You don’t got to be like this. You don’t get to treat somebody that way.”

  “I’m fine,” Misty said. “Just leave me alone.” But her voice cracked, too.


  “Fine,” Penny said.

  Two small hands shot beneath the sheet and collected the cards. The mattress creaked as she climbed onto it, the quilt rustling hard as Penny kicked it into shape. Misty climbed into bed, too. She lay on top of her quilt, her hands straight by her sides. She stared at the ceiling and listened to the sound of her sister’s breathing. She tried to match them, tried to breathe as calm as Penny did, but her lungs wouldn’t listen, so she wheezed and she trembled until she cried.

  Thirty-Four

  By noon that Sunday, cars started to appear on the side of Misty’s road. Men from her church cut the tall grass on William’s side of the yard. They crushed the crawdad chimneys beneath their work boots and poured sawdust into the deepest pits until the ground was almost even again. The men stopped their work occasionally to stare at the statues in the garden, their faces lit with green and golden light, their hands hanging limp at their sides.

  Misty watched the men through a crack in her front door while nursing a glass of corn bread and milk. She pushed the corn bread to the bottom of the glass before spooning some into her mouth. The milk was sweet to the corn bread’s earthiness, the oil and the cream mixing together to make something that was the better half of both. There was still enough crunch to the crust, and little pieces of hard bread broke between her teeth and mixed with the milk to make something softer, something that slid smooth and effortless down her throat. Misty’s movements were gentle. Every time she so much as turned her head, she was punished for the long night she’d spent outside of her skin. Even the spaces between her toes and fingers felt like the skin had been flayed, her throat raw every time she swallowed.

  Yet, there were no bruises on her body. She’d checked that morning in the shower, searching for even the smallest discoloration to prove that something had happened to her, that something was happening to her. But there was nothing to show for any of the pain she felt, not now, not in the barn. Nothing that she could hold in her hands and say, Look, this is what I mean.

  Penny poked her head from their bedroom and looked down the narrow hallway at Misty. “Is Mom out yet?”

  “No,” Misty said.

  Penny shut the door without another word. After last night, Misty thought they might spend the rest of their lives that way, speaking a handful of words, only talking to ask each other directions or to pass the buttermilk, nothing more ever passing between them until Misty couldn’t even recognize Penny, their faces losing all their similarities until they didn’t share the same broad nose or freckled skin, until they weren’t sisters at all.

  Misty closed her eyes and leaned her head against the wall. The garden hadn’t spoken to her since the day she’d gone to Aunt Dolly’s house, the day she’d asked about Caroline. She still didn’t understand why the garden seemed to hate Caroline almost as much as it hated Earl. As far as Misty could see, Caroline hadn’t done anything wrong, nothing, at least, that deserved that kind of anger.

  And even though the garden scared her sometimes, she still missed the sound of its voice, its constant presence. Misty missed having someone around. Her sister ignored her. Her father hadn’t been home in days. Her mother seemed to be more lost inside herself than ever before. It was hard to be alone.

  Misty inched the door in her chest open. She thought of the crawdads clinging to her clothes, following her onto the bank of the creek; their slick backs and thick claws; their empty skins scattered across the front yard; her mother’s finger brushing her bangs over her face; the slick feeling of her skin sliding from her bones; Penny’s hand on the sheet, trying to pull it away, trying to find Misty on the other side; William’s hand against her hip—and then a familiar presence bubbled up in her head before she even finished her name. Its name was like silt running between her fingers, the hushed crinkle of a morning glory closing its petals for the day, the pop of a bone from its socket.

  She hadn’t spoken to the crawdads for so long that she almost broke the connection in her excitement. Instead she shared as many images and feelings as she could, all of them trying to express three little words: “I missed you.”

  The crawdad filled her with the feeling of shallow water, the creek after it had gone without rain for days and days, the dry tops of the stones peeking through, a sense that there was nowhere to go, nowhere to run. The pain of molting, the deep, suffocating tightness of a shell before it was shed like a hand around her throat, closing tighter and tighter. Their bodies scattered across the grass, lifeless, the same ones that Misty had held in her bone body.

  The garden said that using the crawdads wouldn’t hurt them, but that wasn’t true. They were in trouble. They were hurt, dying, and they asked for Misty’s help.

  “What can I do?” she said.

  The crawdad shared a fragmented image of the garden, but the focus was on the soil below the statues. It shared an image of the ground beneath—pale white tree roots breaking through the dirt, grasping for purchase, a green light shimmering faintly underground, and a brief flash of Caroline’s face.

  Then the image was gone and the crawdad was gone with it.

  Misty reached out for the crawdad again, but another voice answered instead.

  “Misty?” the garden said. “I want to apologize. I shouldn’t have yelled at you before. I’m sorry. I’ve been working very hard for tonight and I took my worry out on you.”

  “What do you mean?” Misty asked.

  “All the people,” the garden said. “They’ll finally come. They’ll finally see the statues. They’ll see what Earl did, how he isn’t what they think he is.”

  “You mean about what he did to Caroline?”

  “Yes.”

  “I thought you didn’t like her.”

  The garden hesitated. “It’s not about liking. It’s about right and wrong. I need them to understand. Will you be there tonight? Will you come?”

  “Yeah,” Misty said, “I’ll be there. But I wanted to ask you about the crawdads. Did you let them go yet?”

  “Almost. We’re almost done. I have to go now. There’s still so much to do.”

  The garden’s voice disappeared before Misty could say another word, leaving her alone on her living room floor. She reached out for the crawdads but they didn’t answer. They had to be under the garden’s influence again, trapped under the earth where the green light shimmered and shone.

  * * *

  By five thirty, the little one-lane road that ran beside the bottom was already crowded with cars. People started to park along the main road, squeezing onto the grass sides of the hills with the thinnest of inches between their tires and the crumbling mountainside. One good gust of wind would be enough to tumble them down into the creek below. People walked across the highway, over the bridge and into the holler. They followed the light of the sodium lamp over the garden, which burned bright orange and buzzed like a hornet’s nest. The women’s heeled shoes clacked against the pavement and then grated over the gravel driveway before sinking into the worn grass of the yard.

  By six, the sun had started to set, and Earl stepped back and watched the crowd. He wore a collared shirt and a pair of dark slacks, his hair combed to the side and stiffened with gel.

  “He shined them shoes within an inch of their life,” Penny said. She pressed her forehead against the banister of their porch. From up high, she and Misty could see everything that happened. People waved or asked after their father at first, but after a while no one seemed to notice them. This was as close to the service as their mother would allow them—the porch and no further.

  There was only a handful of chairs near the garden where the elderly could sit with their oxygen tanks propped against their knees. Everyone else stood in the grass or by the driveway, some leaning against the mailboxes by the road. There were a hundred people there at least, though it was hard to count them when they were packed so close together. The crowd swelled like
a lung, inhaling and exhaling, shuffling then still.

  Sunset changed the bottom. Had Misty ever been able to believe that the statues were something good, holy even, she would have believed it at sunset as the light bounced between the metal and glass, the dying rays of red-orange burnishing the edges of the green glass man, tracing the arc of the bridge, coloring the hand and the spiral, the ax, the bird, the tree. It set them all ablaze, like they were burning with a sun-forged light hidden somewhere deep inside. For a moment, right before the sun sank behind the trees, the statues became a light of their own and the whole bottom glowed with firelight warmth.

  The men and women from the church noticed the change. Their voices slowed. Some people cut off midsentence and turned away from their friends or family, leaving them gape-mouthed and staring. The children quieted. Some pointed, some clung to their mothers’ skirts. One man fumbled with the side of his oxygen tank until he turned the dial up, forcing a blast of fresh air into his trembling lungs.

  William appeared beside Earl. He was dressed in an outfit almost identical except smaller in every way, and he had no dress shoes to wear so he wore his darkest tennis shoes instead. His eyes roamed over each of the faces in the crowd, his eyes shining with their own reflected light until they seemed like two fire-heated coins glowing.

  Misty gripped the porch banister and her skin slid over the small bones in her hand, tried to sink and fall away. The skin of her shoulders loosened, too, and her jaw sagged, peeling away from her teeth. She hadn’t meant to call her skin away. She didn’t want to leave her body, at least not right then, but it seemed like her body was deciding without her now. She shivered twice and her skin shuddered back into place.

  Their mother opened the screen door and stepped onto the porch at almost the exact time that William’s mother walked out of her trailer. Shannon wore a long, black dress with sleeves down to her elbows and the silver chain of a small bag slung across one shoulder. Her dirty-blond hair was pulled back from her face. She was dressed for a funeral more than for church, but she still looked pretty, and younger, somehow, without so much volume in her hair. She waved and started across the yard toward them.