She’s twelve and she thinks that she’s in love. He’s small, compared to her, worn and soft at the edges where she is still growing out of and into hard lines and sharpnesses. His eyes are hazel and he wears long black socks and the hair on his head is a lovely motley of copper and rust. His tail flicks idly, sometimes, when he’s got his head in her lap and she reads him stories from this thick volume of fairy tales that she inherited from her great-aunt Mabel. Every day, at some point, he’ll find her, and make her tell him again, of happy endings and ambiguous endings and bad endings. All endings. He just doesn’t like when there isn’t one. He’ll go to her. He always did, and she was always there. That was how this thing worked.
She sought him out only once, after she’s waited and waited and he never came. She wanders, and finds him sheltered under an abandoned tarp, nursing a leg wound—it wasn’t deep, no, but it was enough to mat the surrounding fur, and enough to make her nauseous. She wasn’t thinking, not really. She brings him home. Her father doesn’t own a gun. Instead, he yells and swats at him with a broom and sets a trap for the night. Late late late, still awake and a hopeless buzz thrumming through her ears, she hears the muffled snap followed by her father’s sleepy grumbles and shuffling. In the early morning she digs him out of the dumpster and takes him out to the field past the neighbors’ property, to the edge of it where the soil softens around the wild blackberry patch she frequents in the summer. It’s winter now, and her hands crack and bleed from the effort of scrabbling at the frozen earth. It doesn’t show. So, she leaves him, nestled in the rough indent streaked with mud and traces of blood, cushioned on a bouquet of blackened, dead wildflowers and scraps of baby blue satin that she stole from her mother’s sewing room. She doesn’t cry, because she knows that he deserves better, and that he has already forgiven her. She doesn’t cry, because it won’t help at that point and the salt will sting running down her swollen cheek and she doesn’t want anyone else to die. But she looks up, and the tears slip out anyways, and the lightning crackles down onto the edge of field, the one past her neighbors’ house where the wild blackberries grow in the summer and the wild foxes sleep in the winter before she can regret it.
There was a fire, they tell her when she finally wakes up, she’s incredibly lucky, they coo. The nice nurse lady gives her a stuffed animal-thing and a glass of apple juice. She drops them. The jagged shards pierce and tear through thin cotton, and the golden juice seeps into the fabric. The nice nurse lady doesn’t come back, just a tired old janitor that sighs when he sees the mess. He leaves the stuffie soaking in the sink across from the foot of her cot. She stares at it, and it doesn’t stare back, and she’s so so lonely, all of a sudden, or maybe she’s just realized it.
~
There are a lot of broken things in hospitals. She’s not sure whether she counts among them.
She decides.
She’ll take the broken pieces, the mangled and the desecrated, and shape them back together. Into something that maybe could love and be loved. She can only hope that that’s enough.
~
She’s 24 and finds that hope isn’t nearly enough. She still can’t bring herself to look at the sky.
There was a small boy that came by, once, to the quaint little doll shop where she worked. She found him studiously perusing the imported porcelain ones, with their smooth pale skin and silken dresses. She asked him where his parents were, and to kindly not touch the dolls without gloves on, to not touch them at all, in fact, after a stray elbow nearly knocks Persephone down. He keeps his head down, not meeting her eyes, and tells her, with carefully enunciated words, still affected by that lisp that plagues the especially young, that he’s actually a full grown adult and brought himself here and is perfectly capable of shopping on his own thankyouverymuch and Miss, could you do me a favor and bring down that lovely doll in the patterned blouse and schoolgirl skirt from the fourth shelf? Please? She takes him up to a stool by the cash register where he sulks. He sits there for a good six minutes before heaving himself down and ambling after her to where she’s gone to affix more lace onto the hem of Adelaide’s gown. He tugs at her pant leg. When she looks down at the smooth glow of his penny-shine hair, bends down to see what’s the matter, kid, he turns to tugging on her shirt sleeve instead, even more insistent. She crouches, now. And he whispers to her that she shouldn’t mind the storm. That nothing has ever been her fault and never will be and that it would be worse to leave than to stay. And before she can react, he sprints out of the store, leaving the bell tinkling in his wake, and the smear of tiny fingerprints three feet and a half from the bottom of the glass door. The others laugh about it in the backroom later. She can’t bring herself to. There’s a tingling in her fingertips, although the rest of her has gone numb. The following day, the region gets swept with a massive lightning storm. She’s gone in a week.
He doesn’t like this version of things. (He never does.) She left this time. (She always does.)
He’s been trying for a very long time now, in the space between ten years and twenty, the space between the fingertips of one hand and the other, over and over until the glass has been worn thin by the restless hands flickering over it, again and again until everthingisright.
He’s six. He’s been six for a very, very long time, and he’s very, very tired, and the string of sand threading the air between his palms and the empty hourglass by his socked feet from where he’s crouched in the dirt feel cold, burning, ice and fire and meant to hurt. He reaches back into the grit and tries again. (The constellations spin, and she’s in love again.)
He was a good kid, they told him. Studious, well-mannered, managed everyone’s complaints and worries with a soft smile, consoling pat on the shoulder, and offer of a small snack and place to talk. He was a good kid, they said, with soft, pitying, pained, painted smiles, petting his head, his quivering little body wrapped in blankets, cold blisters blooming on his legs after he dragged his sister’s bloated, waterlogged body from the remains of their house, in the heavy rain and hurricane. (He doesn’t remember what he was mad at her about. It doesn’t really matter now, though, does it?)
Sometimes. When he looks into water, puddles, sinks, lakes, rain droplets on a window pane, anything, he sees another version of himself. They’re never the same. And behind each image, there’s a set of wide, hopeful eyes. They dim with each passing, from bright spring to a dismal moss, nearing a murky brown. He’s grown old on the outside and ancient on the inside, but this boy, it’s unsettling, how while youth clings to his form, it grows more sunken and tired from the inside. Sometimes, he’ll lie awake and wonder who that is. (Sometimes, he’ll dream, and he’ll know.) Here is a constant: The eyes, and the rumble of thunder that accompanies them.
Storms will pass with time, wounds will heal, he thinks, screams, plastering it onto the inside of his skull, onto the rings of his irises. The constant rain scoffs at him, and cries a little harder over his bleeding heart.
~
He went to go see the ocean, today, or maybe yesterday, someday, anyday, really. Had to drive for seven hours, from the heart of the country to the edge of it.
He said that he was sorry for not visiting, for ignoring all the signs and urges, for not listening and learning when he had the chance. It was fine, it hadn’t really been too long, she replied. But it had been a while, to him, at least. He still apologizes, again, tells her that he loved, loves her.
She tells him not to be afraid anymore.
~
There are two paths: One steeped in mud, torrented and sunken, a victim of his own regrets and temperament; the other, plain, homely, well-trodden and familiar
But then again, there’s a third, turning back from the crossroad. And maybe that’s another, off the paths and wading through the reeds. Maybe he should just stay here. Maybe not. No, no he really shouldn’t.
There is one path. He steps delicately onto it, and lets the stardust settle around his ankles with each stride. He doesn’t bother looking back. There will be no footprints; there shouldn’t be. The ocean had promised. He makes a choice and counts to three, a prayer and a wish, each of them.
They don’t meet again, the two of them.
When Zeus swallowed Metis, did he tell her he loved her? Did he ever say sorry? (Did he ever mean it?)
It’s another day, and
all
of
them
are
Strangers.