When the Moon was Ours(66)
The closest he’d ever gotten to telling Miel what he could tell her in light was with his hands. His palms on her waist. When he flicked the pollination brush over her arm, and her eyes moved between his fingers and his mouth, and he touched her in a way he’d convinced himself he never could unless she moved toward him first.
But now she wouldn’t let him near her, so all he had was the moon, this light in the sky he knew as well as his own body. He knew where it glowed brightest. Where its reflected sunlight vanished into craters and seas. The starburst of lighter contouring. And the shadowing that children in this town were taught to see as a face, but that Aracely had taught Miel to see as a rabbit.
As a child, Sam had stared up at it, imagining the moon’s light spilling over him in a rush of cool air, the opposite of the sun’s warmth. But he had not truly learned it until he painted it, mixing the gradations of colors for mare cognitum and every other crater and valley, brushing on the darker shade of the vapor seas. He had done it so many times he could paint freehand now, no sketching, no outlining.
He’d start with the trees that shaded the wisteria-colored house. Outside his mother’s house, he’d hang a blood moon and a mead moon, to match the different-colored roof tiles. He’d light up the beech tree outside Miel’s room with a rose moon and a flower moon. A grain moon and a hay moon would light the way between here and the wisteria-colored house. He’d spread the light of every lunar sea and valley.
The shift away from the world he’d built with Miel, the knowledge that she now hated him, was so sharp, he could taste it on the air, like a salt crystal. The world they had between them was both brighter and softer than everything else, cast in deep blues and golds. It swept away the muddy haze that settled around all other things. It dulled the way Sam had to keep his eyes down if he wanted to be left alone at school but had to look up at the right time to scare off anyone who would not leave Miel alone.
A knock clicked against his bedroom door.
“Come in,” he said, expecting his mother, ready to show her what he’d finished so recently the paint hadn’t dried.
It wasn’t until the door hinge’s soft creak that he realized that hadn’t been his mother’s knock.
Aracely stood at the threshold.
“Have you seen Miel?” she asked.
Sam let out a curt laugh. “What do you think? She doesn’t want to see me.”
“She didn’t come home,” Aracely said. “I’m worried.”
He grabbed the edge of the drop cloth on the floor and rubbed paint off his hands. “She’s upset,” he said. “Did you think she wouldn’t avoid us for a few days? She’s probably not coming home until she’s sure you’re asleep.”
“I don’t think that’s what’s going on,” Aracely said.
He folded the drop cloth in on itself. “Why not?”
Aracely held out her wrist.
A trickle of blood striped the inside of her forearm. It came from an unseen wound; Sam could not find the cut. But that thin stripe, that cord of red, looked the same as when Miel bled from the place her roses grew.
lake of time
The moon came through the ceiling of cloud cover, the reds and golds brightening the woods like the trees were catching fire.
The rush of breaking the glass pumpkin and running had worn away, and the pain had forced her onto her hands and knees. She crawled deeper into the woods, her skin so hot with pain that the cold felt faint as the brush of a leaf. Her blood spilled on her jeans, the stains deep as the gems on one of Aracely’s necklaces.
She was losing the feeling in her fingers. She couldn’t have screamed if she wanted to. All that came was the wet sound of her breath against the back of her throat. She lost the feeling in her wrists and ankles, the numbness opening her.
Miel raised her head and spotted a glimmer of purple and red. The shapes of planets and constellations resolved, cut and engraved in panels.
The stained glass coffin.
She scrambled away from it, crawling under the ceiling of gold leaves. Under her breath, she whispered Aracely’s prayer of Santa Rita de Cascia, saint of impossible causes. But she did not know if the impossible cause was her life or her thorn-covered soul.
Pain anchored her, keeping her down. She clutched her arm close to her body, pressing her wrist against her chest to slow the bleeding. The knot of scar tissue in her forearm felt heavy as a metal bead. Crawling with both knees but one hand slowed her down, putting too little distance between her and the stained glass coffin.
The woods seemed endless, a whole world of green and gold. She didn’t know them like Sam. The fields of feather grasses were their place, but the woods were his. Branches offered places to hang his moons that fallow fields didn’t.
But she crawled. She dragged herself across the ground, understanding now that nightmares were weak, silly things that would scatter in the light. They were made of dyed glass and river water and lies that grew even sharper when the truth lit them up.
Dirt coated her clothes and her skin. She left a streak of blood on the ground, and was too weak to kick at it and cover it over.
They were too much entangled, Miel and her roses, like two trees that could not be pulled apart without killing both. Ivy had pulled a rose from her by its roots, and enough blood came with it to dye her clothes, to turn every breath into a gasp. She was bleeding out so much red her skin looked like countless petals, enough for a wide, endless garden of scarlet roses.