When the Moon was Ours(22)
“It’s hard to breathe in there, isn’t it?” Peyton asked, crossing her arms so she cupped an elbow in each hand. “There’s the little holes to let you breathe but it’s still hard.”
The air in Miel’s throat turned hot and sour as the tea Aracely made her drink when she had a fever. Ivy said it was all rumor that the stained glass coffin made them beautiful. But maybe those walls of bright glass made them the Bonner sisters. Maybe they’d put Peyton in there when they realized she was leaving her lip gloss on other girls’ sweaters. Maybe they’d let her out when they realized she would always put them before anyone else, boy or girl, and that the girls she liked were as expendable to her as the boys.
Miel grabbed the edge of the stained grass, pulling herself up.
“They lock you in there?” she asked. “They can’t do that. You should tell your parents.”
“We all do it,” Peyton said. “It’s just about who needs it.”
Peyton’s look was calm but not cold, unafraid without being defiant.
She didn’t fear her sisters, even if they’d locked her in the stained glass coffin. Even if they had taught her to do the same to them.
“Do what we want,” Peyton said. “Do what we want or we always make you.”
Her tone, like she was both herself and one cell in that body that was the Bonner sisters, made Miel feel pressed back inside those glass walls.
“Is that a threat?” Miel asked.
“No. It’s advice.”
Peyton left, curls spinning like streamers, and Miel did not follow her. She looked for the way out of the woods, running so the trees turned to a blur of scarlet and rust and yellow. When she found a place where the trees thinned into open air, she took a full breath, a breath clipped when she heard the sound of glass cracking under her feet. Shards scratched her ankles.
She looked around, her stilled breath prickling the back of her throat. She was at a different corner of the Bonners’ farm. And her hurried steps had smashed a few of the glass pumpkins. The bigger ones had cracked open, leaning on their sides. The smaller ones had shattered into pieces that ringed where she stood.
Miel’s steps, breaking the glass of a few pumpkins, had released into the air everything they’d held, the little storm the Bonner girls had not been able to hide in their drawers. Now she could almost smell the eye shadow and blush palettes they passed back and forth, the shirts they borrowed from one another so often they forgot whose they were first. The scent landed bitter on her tongue, like wildfire smoke turning the sun red and the air to ash.
A few pumpkins shone like they were wet. Their colors were so deep that at first she thought they were the knobby, almost-black rinds of the kind sold in the grocery store as Marina di Chioggia or Musquée de Provence.
But they weren’t all deep green. Some were dark red, like the wide planet on the lid of the stained glass coffin. Others were violet and blue as the sky, or pure white as the star sprays.
And they were all glass, smooth and shining and cold.
No matter what Miel whispered or screamed, they were all glass.
lake of solitude
She could not move. In the woods, that stained glass coffin waited. And here, all these pumpkins, both made of jewel-colored glass and made of the same kind of flesh that held her years ago, pinned her in, keeping her from running. She could not cross these rows of glass.
Miel sank to the ground, settling onto a small patch of ground not flecked with broken glass. She pulled her knees in, clutching her ankles, trying to take up little enough space that she would not touch the vines or the pumpkins or the shards her own steps had made. But a few pieces of broken glass crushed under her feet, her heels grinding them down against the hard earth.
The world was made of everything that wanted to take her in, and make her disappear.
It was all noise. Her mother screaming. Her brother calling out for her. But the air was still and cold, no wind, and there was no trace of her mother’s whispering.
She set her fingers to her temples, pressing hard, hoping the spaces inside her would go silent.
“Miel?” She heard Sam’s voice, cutting through all those echoes.
His steps were so quiet she hadn’t even heard glass ground down under his shoes.
She looked up.
He was holding one of his moons, the features of palus somni and sinus iridum painted on an old glass globe. Over his shoulder was the thin wire that would go unseen once he cut it and hung the moon. She wondered where he’d set the wooden ladder. He hung his moons anywhere he got away with it, and this town let him get away with it almost everywhere. The light of these moons, they said, so much closer and steadier than the one in the sky, kept away their children’s nightmares. When children were sick, they called him, and he hooked moons onto boughs outside their weathered houses.
Sam crouched near her, tucking the moon under one arm, and now his weight crushed the glass under his feet. But he didn’t startle, or pull back. “What happened?”
She looked past him, shaking her head at the pumpkin fields and the trails of broken glass.
He gave them a quick look and then looked back at her, not taking them in. He must have thought this was her fear of everything those vines grew.
But the sheen of glass must have pulled him back. He looked again, his eyes settling. His stare moved over the cluster of glass pumpkins, the deep red and violet, and dark blue and green. He was reconsidering these things he’d had to work around while cutting fruit off the vines.